Jimmy Webb peered into the back of the limo. It was 5am but his friend Harry Nilsson,"swacked on brandy and cocaine and popping amyl nitrates like party favours",had hammered on his door until he'd got out of bed.
Songwriter Jimmy Webb decries the death of melody.RockStars and Babies
Sure enough,there in his driveway sat John Lennon.
"Jim,"was all the ex-Beatle said.
The preceding night had etched an infamous scene in the big book of Hollywood scandal. The paparazzi snaps of Lennon and Nilsson getting thrown out of the Troubadour,where Lennon was alleged to have assaulted a female photographer,have been in circulation since 1973.
Less public until his recent memoir,The Cake and the Rain,was Webb's pivotal role in the fallout:a dangerous act of complicity that clearly broke the law and almost as certainly kept Lennon from being thrown out of America.
"They kidnapped me,"Webb says today."Look,I wasn't a child. I knew what I was doing,but there was a lot of pressure to go down there to the attorney's office and vindicate John's position."
So it was that the Oklahoma songwriter,a man whose face would always be less famous than his songs (Up,Up And Away,By the Time I Get to Phoenix,MacArthur Park,Wichita Lineman) swore a false witness deposition on behalf of a rock demigod so entitled that he never even said"thanks".
"So you might say,'Why the f--- did you do it then?"'Webb says,laughing."And the reason is becausethis was the Beatles. In a certain way,they were sacrosanct to us. They were at the centre of the movement,if you will. They were our political hope for the future. They were preaching a religion that we loved to hear."
Webb's jetsetting,name-dropping,drug-hoovering book is loaded with this kind of intoxication with'60s idealism. Frank Sinatra,Elvis Presley and (mostly) Glen Campbell sang his songs,but his creative life has been one long streak of yearning to jump the easy-listening fence and join the cool singer-songwriter revolution.
"I think that we always want what we don't have,"is his short answer to that."That's one of the basic building blocks of human nature,but I think also that I had a shot at it. I had the repertoire. And I had … people behind me saying,'Go ahead,you can do it. It's time for your breakthrough'.
"All of a sudden you realise you've made six or seven records and you never really had a hit,"he says."But somewhere along there,a kind of stubbornness sets in."And so he continued making solo albums throughout the'70s and beyond,with a voice he routinely concedes as limited,and"lyrics so personal that I think they sounded odd to other people".
Believe it or not,I have a cult following.
"But believe it or not,I have a cult following,"the 71-year-old adds with a laugh."I have really played in the last decade. I mean,I only play 400-seaters but they're almost always full. I go out after the show and I meet everybody and I sign their stuff … I even sell T-shirts! I pretend I'm a rock star."
In his book,Webb's distance from rock stardom provides fascinating perspective on a rare and often appalling tier of behaviour. Drugs,money,fast cars and very,very difficult women flow his way like honey,but the narrator casts himself as an eternal outsider. In various surreal scenes,Elvis,Sinatra and Satchmo all offer praise and encouragement before swanning off into the spotlight.
"I was getting quietly drunk on Christmas Eve when I heard someone knocking on the front door,"goes one vivid illustration of the loner at work."Joni Mitchell,Linda Ronstadt,JD Souther,James Taylor and Peter Asher,among others,stood in the chilly evening and sang three carols in four-part harmony.
"I stood there more than a little rumpled and probably needing a shave … They stayed only a short time,having many stops to make that night,and drove off like the very embodiment of Christmas."
On his upcoming Australian tour,visitors to the house of Webb include some of the biggest names in Australian pop. Jimmy Barnes,Kate Ceberano,Ian Moss and David Campbell will divvy up the smash hits. And as if to acknowledge Webb's underlying left-field sensibility,the line-up also includes one of our own maverick outsiders.
Ed Kuepper remembers hearing the Fifth Dimension doingUp,Up And Away while he was in primary school. But it was the second,underachieving album that Webb did with Richard Harris that led Kuepper to name his'80s band The Yard Goes On Forever.
"I really started to pay attention withThe Magic Garden album,"Kuepper says."To me,that moved away from a pop perspective into an area that I don't think anyone else touched on,seemingly drawing on modern classical and abstraction;tone poems almost. Imagine Frank Sinatra commissioning someone to do an art album. Something like that.
"When I stumbled acrossThe Yard Went on Forever,it was just a mind-blowing experience. It was like a film:multi-layered;very open to interpretation … I got a lot out of it.
"He has some of the most iconic non-rock'n'roll songs of the late'60s and into the'70s and to me,there wasn't anyone doing anything remotely like it. When you go across all the artists who covered him,you see a very strong artistic identity as a composer."
This is all doubtless music to Webb's ears,but even in these golden years of lifetime achievement awards,bean-spilling memoirs and the inevitable sampling by Kanye West,his big picture as a composer is not without grey clouds.
"I was talking with Paul Simon,sometime in the early'90s I think it was. I said to Paul,'You know,these melodies are really repetitious … There's no chords in country music;and in rock music,I don't hear a lot of melody'."
"Jimmy,"Simon replied,"there's not going to be any melody."
"It was a shocking,shocking thing to hear,"Webb says."I mean,I respect this guy. He's smarter than I am. I go away and I think,'Paul Simon said that melody is gonna disappear,'and I live and die by melody.
"It's very dangerous to criticise rap. Very dangerous. Because if you say anything bad about rap,you're probably a racist. But it is a genre that has done away with melody in a very,very short length of time."
Meanwhile,the music of the old revolution,the singer-songwriter era heralded and dominated by the Beatles –"it's becoming jazz",Webb says."It's becoming a dying genre. As our candles go out one by one,I think we have to face the fact that in the future,people will look back on us the way we look back on ragtime;the way we look back on Johann Strauss.
"Maybe that's what was wonderful about it. It just happened once. When you hearAbbey Road and you hear the Beatles sing,'In the end the love you take/ is equal to the love you make',that really was the end. And maybe that makes it all the more precious and beautiful."
Jimmy Webb and Friends are at Sydney's State Theatre on August 5 and Melbourne's Hamer Hall on August 9.