Post by the Scribe on Jul 1, 2020 8:38:59 GMT
Jimmy Webb
Suspending Disbelief
Produced by Linda Ronstadt
and George Massenburg
1993
playlist:
1. Too Young to Die
2. I Don't Know How to Love You Anymore
3. Elvis and Me
4. It Won't Bring Her Back
5. Sandy Cove
6. Friends to Burn
7. What Does a Woman See In A Man
8. Postcards From Paris
9. Just Like Always
10. Adios
11. I Will Arise
RECORDINGS VIEW; For Jimmy Webb, The Loss of Youth Is Bittersweet
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: September 26, 1993
Mr. Webb, who is 47, has had as odd a career as any songwriter of his generation. A minister's son from Elk City, Okla., he became the hottest songwriter in Hollywood at the age of 21 through a succession of hits for Glen Campbell ("By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman," "Galveston"), the Fifth Dimension ("Up, Up and Away") and Richard Harris ("MacArthur Park," "Didn't We"). Since storm-tossed ballads were the farthest thing from hip in the heyday of the rock counterculture, Mr. Webb has always been viewed as a transitional figure between the old and new guards of pop songwriting. (He will appear tomorrow at Avery Fisher Hall for an evening of his songs with Nanci Griffith, Glen Campbell, David Crosby and Michael Feinstein.)
"MacArthur Park," with its symphonic bombast and its surreal image of a cake melting in the rain, remains the most notorious example of a late-60's song that tried to fuse two antithetical musical worlds.
Since his early fame, Mr. Webb has turned out a large body of work that blurs the line between traditional and contemporary. His songs have found especially ardent champions in Art Garfunkel and in Ms. Ronstadt, who included several Webb compositions on her 1989 pop album, "Cry Like a Rainstorm -- Howl Like the Wind."
Because Ms. Ronstadt shares Mr. Webb's romantic sensibility, his respect for traditional pop forms and his Los Angeles pop background, she is truly a kindred soul. And the album she and her producing collaborator, George Massenburg, have made with Mr. Webb finds a seemless blend of symphonic dreaminess and modern Hollywood cool. Mr. Webb's impassioned but quirky singing, which has never been smooth enough for pop radio, has a gritty rough-hewn authority
"Suspending Disbelief," which is Mr. Webb's first album in more than a decade, is one long bittersweet goodbye to old loves, family ghosts and Hollywood fantasies.
"Our dreams of endless summer were just too grandiose," he reflects in "Adios," a brooding farewell to southern California with its "blood red sunsets" and hours whiled away "drinking Margaritas all night in the old cantina."
The narrator of "Too Young to Die" looks back nostalgically on a reckless youth spent in a "sweet old racing car," tempting fate and emulating James Dean and Steve McQueen. "Elvis and Me" gives a fan's blow-by-blow account of an evening spent with Presley, who invites him backstage after a show and then to a celebrity-packed party in his Las Vegas penthouse suite. Many years later, the fan, as star-struck as ever, fantasizes that he could have saved Elvis's life if the star had only telephoned him.
In the beautiful but bleak song "Sandy Cove," a man standing on the beach beside a crumbling old tower, remembers some family artifacts that have vanished and feels an intense sorrow. "Where does all the love we lose go?" he wonders, as he is seized with a longing to have lived his life differently. In the song's final verse he compares himself to the weather-beaten edifice next to him, one with cracks in its mortar and holes in its bricks, and muses, "It's something I can't fix."
There is an astonishing consistency of tone between these mature ballads and Mr. Webb's earliest hits. From the beginning, a disproportionate number of Mr. Webb's songs have recognized the perfect moment and lamented its passing. In the old days, it could be a balloon disappearing into the sky ("Up, Up and Away") or a soggy cake ("MacArthur Park").
Now, it is youth itself that has gone. But in contemplating physical and emotional erosion, his music still keens with the old youthful longing. The contrast makes for an album that may very well be the songwriter's perfect moment.