As concert tours were canceled or postponed indefinitely following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, artists have been forced to find new ways to connect with fans and maintain their audience.
Prior to the onset of COVID-19, legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb was already extremely active via social media, interacting with fans in the comment section of Facebook posts about songs highlighting his legacy within the pop and rock canon.
But today, Webb has taken all of that a step further, spotlighting excerpts from his 2017 autobiography The Cake and The Rain, curating Spotify playlists and experimenting with performances from his living room piano for streaming via Facebook Live.
“It’s a strange time. We seem to be getting by. I’m seeing a lot more of my immediate family because of Zoom. Zoom is my new weapon of choice. It kind of helps you keep things together,” said Webb over the phone recently of life during quarantine. “Maybe, in a way, family contact is up a few points. I think that we’ve done a lot better this year just because of the impetus of this epidemic.”
Webb is one of America’s great living songwriters, checking in at #44 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time. He’s best known for tracks like “MacArthur Park” (a hit for actor and singer Richard Harris in 1968) and collaborations with artists like Art Garfunkel, Linda Ronstadt and the 5th Dimension.
With two living room concerts under his belt totaling nearly 45,000 views, Webb, 73, sees vast potential for where he heads next with the streaming video performances.
“I’ve done a couple of tests where I sat down one afternoon with no promotion and no notice on Facebook – no advertisement of any kind – and just sat down and started talking and playing the piano. And within like ten minutes, we had 3,000 people. I just went, ‘Wow! This thing is powerful!’” said Webb of the Facebook Live broadcasts. “Now I’m going to bring in the pros – which is my wife. She is a full-time television producer at PBS. She’s going to organize a regular show for me – at least over the short haul – and I’m going to try and get some guests. I’m going to play a lot more music and maybe try to make it forty-five minutes. I’m excited about it. I won’t be shaking any hands afterwards!”
Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell during 44th Annual ASCAP Country Music Awards – Show at Ryman Theater … [+]
WIREIMAGE
Webb’s second Facebook Live video looked back upon his most famous partnership on what would’ve been country singer and songwriter Glen Campbell’s 84th birthday. During it, Webb performed “Wichita Lineman,” a song he penned for Campbell which provided unique depth to the country music genre upon its release in 1968.
Today, the track is widely looked upon as one of the greatest pop compositions ever written and was recently added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.
In the fifty-two years since its release, following countless covers by musicians ranging anywhere from crooners like Tom Jones to R&B artists like Smokey Robinson and Kool & The Gang, even rockers R.E.M. and Guns N’ Roses, the enduring legacy of the song has forced Webb to consider it anew.
“The inspiration doesn’t change. I wrote it for a young woman and so it’s still about her. But it has been such a long legged horse. It still gets recorded. It still makes these best ever lists. It’s like initials carved in a tree: Jimmy & Glen. Its individual importance has really outstripped the rest of the catalog by leaps and bounds. So I start paying more and more attention to it – like, ‘What did I do here?’” said Webb.
“Because I did it in a hurry. I did it one afternoon. And when I sent it over to Glen, I sent a note with it saying, ‘I don’t really think this song is finished yet. But let me know. If you like it, I’ll do more work on it.’ A couple of weeks went by and I didn’t hear from those guys and I thought, ‘Well, they didn’t like it.’ And that’s just the way it goes. You get a lot of that in my business,” Webb said. “So, I wandered into [producer/engineer] Armin Steiner’s [studio] one afternoon and Glen was finishing up. And I said, ‘Listen, no hard feelings about that ‘Wichita Lineman’ thing…’ And he said, ‘We cut that!’ And I said, ‘You did? I told you that that song was only partly done and that I would work on it some more…’ And he said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. Because it’s finished now!’” recalled the songwriter.
“It wasn’t really one of the songs that I thought that I’d put a lot of weight behind. It had been about three or four hours one afternoon messing around and working this idea of the guy who works up on the electric wires, inspired by people I saw when I was growing up in the panhandle of Oklahoma, high up on these telephone poles. And maybe there was nothing else there. But, really, there was – because there was intimate inner dialogue going on in this character and he knew he was just a simple guy,” said Webb. “Billy Joel said about it one time that he was an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts. And I broke down and cried – and I never cry. But he got me with that. Because that was pretty much on the nose.”
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