Jimmy Webb gets metaphysical ahead of Wednesday’s Liberty Hall appearance

Songwriter Jimmy Webb has written many, many songs you know: half a dozen of Glen Campbell’s greatest hits, Art Garfunkel’s “All I Know,” the eternal chestnut “MacArthur Park.” He tells the stories behind many of these in his recent autobiography, The Cake and the Rain, and he’ll probably touch on them when he appears as part of the Lawrence Public Library’s 780s Series Wednesday, July 19. Per the library’s press release, the 780s Series “brings prominent music storytellers to Lawrence to share the stories behind their music.” Per me, it’s a fantastic way to hear memorable stories in an intimate setting.

I spoke with Webb by phone about the nature of songwriting as storytelling.

The Pitch: You’ve written your autobiography, and now you’re coming to Lawrence to sit onstage and talk about your life and music. Do you see storytelling as coming naturally to you, as a songwriter?

Jimmy Webb: Well, I feel like one of the elements of a good song is kind of a story structure: a beginning, a middle, an end. Not everyone feels that way, but that’s the way I write. I’ve had a little experience as an author, and done a heck of a lot of reading in my life. I’ve probably got three or four thousand books in the house with me that my wife wishes that I would get rid of. [chuckles]

Out of the the music and out of live performance, I think that I’ve developed a kind of storytelling style, and I try and engage the audience. I try to get them to loosen up and laugh about this stuff a little bit. It’s not really that serious, writing songs. I try to make the mystery a little accessible, you know?

It’s interesting that you mention having such a large library. They always say that in order to write, you should read. Do you find that, being a voracious reader, that helps you in writing, be it songs or your memoir?

I think that, in my case, it’s obvious that I was a book fiend and that I was reading science fiction when I was 8 years old. I was reading Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and all that stuff, and then I kind of moved into fantasy and fiction, J.R.R Tolkien, started reading some of the big books, the Dune trilogy and Moby-Dick and some of the great books.

Recently, I’m more of a nonfiction guy. I read a lot about science and politics. I’m very interested in knowing what’s happening to the world right now. I think that my reading directly inseminates my writing songs. I will get an idea for a song in the middle of a book. Sometimes, it doesn’t go any further than that, but most of the time, I write those ideas down in a notebook.

I go back to Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is a good example to me of a guy who, you know, might not have made such a big splash in the world if it hadn’t been for his interest in poets like like Dylan Thomas and Patrick Cavanaugh and William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound and people like that.

There are all kinds of sometimes slightly odd literary references in Bob’s songs. sort of a Lewis Carroll quality. He got into surrealism very early on with his lyrics, which I think influenced the Beatles. I sort of know that it did, but I would know by listening that it did. Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan probably more because of literature than because of music.

That’s a very insightful analysis, given that he was so very involved with that Greenwich Village scene — and that was just as much about poetry as it was about folk music.

You’re to be congratulated for knowing that. He knew Allen Ginsberg and he had always worshiped Woody Guthrie — the reason I’m talking so much about Bob is because I just wrote a foreword to a folio called The Complete Bob Dylan that’s coming out with a music publisher. I did a lot of thinking about Bob Dylan, and I think he had a really big effect on me, and a lot of it was unconscious. I was really young when he first got hot, and songs like “Mr Tambourine Man” and “Boots of Spanish Leather” — that definitely had an influence on my songs.

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Hearing you talk about your interest in science fiction and fantasy and Dylan at an early age — I might not have made the connection otherwise, but now it seems rather obvious, looking at your songs. Something like “The Highwayman” is very much a fantasy novel in song form.

Well, thank you — that’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be this adventurer and it proposes the theory that maybe that life doesn’t end the way we think. Maybe there’s something to reincarnation. We don’t understand everything there is to know about energy and definitely about the end of life, because the end of life is the ultimate mystery. No one’s ever come back, definitively, and said, “This is the way it is,” or, “There’s nothing there.”

Yet, we seem to behave as if there’s a body of knowledge about what happens after death. Either the atheistic point of view, which is that there’s black and that’s that, to the thing that Einstein came right up to the edge of postulating, which is that consciousness might be independent of the physical body. That’s step two — step three is reincarnation, which is a very, very big pill to swallow, I’ll tell you. But we don’t know.

That’s interesting, because if you look at how physics works, the law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Absolutely. Very good point. And, there’s also the mystery of the 21 grams, which really freaks me out when I think about it. What actually is going on there, you know? When you die, you lose this weight, so does that mean that consciousness has some sort of mass? I don’t know, but I’m open to everything, and I intend to stay that way, as long as I’m here.

I think that one of the most fascinating topics in nonfiction is quantum physics. I do a lot of reading about quantum physics. One of the first books I ever read about it was The Dancing Wu Li Masters. It’s an oldie, but it’s one of the first books that’s like, “Here’s quantum physics for you guys who don’t understand quantum physics.” I can remember giving that book to Art Garfunkel.

They describe some insane experiments in there, where they would shoot light at a blank wall, and then they would postulate that some of the light from a nearby universe, because they couldn’t account for all the shadows on the wall. Some of the shadows had to be coming from somewhere else. So, that’s physics, but songwriting is songwriting. You’d probably prefer to talk about songwriting.

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Nope. I could keep going in this direction all day. This is fascinating. But, since you mentioned it — in addition to being a songwriter, you’re also a performing musician. There’s this rumor about you performing “MacArthur Park” with “Weird Al” Yankovic, and I’d love to hear the whole story.

Oh, it happened. There was a fundraiser at the Lee Strasberg Institute — the method-acting school — and Al had just cut a parody of “MacArthur Park,” called “Jurassic Park.” I don’t know how we got to talking, but I said, “I’m playing this benefit for Lee Strasberg. Would you like to come and perform with me?”

I had a good band. I had a really good band with me. Al said, “Sure,” and was a really likable guy, and came in. It wasn’t that heavy of a thing. His parody was, of course, very funny, and I always had fun with “MacArthur Park.” I signed off on Airplane 2, where they used it in a very, very funny scene with people scrambling to get off an elevator, and to me, it’s all in good fun.

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Don Novello — Father Guido Sarducci — he recorded it, and I loved his record. I thought they were all funny. “MacArthur Park” is just pompous enough that you can really make fun of it. In fact, I did it live one time at the Rainforest Concert — Sting asked me to come down and do it with Will Ferrell, so I did it with Will Ferrell, so there’s a whole history.

Al and I did “MacArthur Park” at the Strasberg Institute with all these bigwigs from CBS and stuff, and when we got to the instrumental part, Al just very calmly opens up one of those old metal lunch pails that we all used to take to school, and takes out a sandwich, and just eats a sandwich. It was very Dada-esque.

It was very weird. He ate the sandwich and just went right back to singing — and he can sing, man. He can hit those high notes. So, that happened. Because I was there.

Jimmy Webb appears at Liberty Hall in conversation, as part of the Lawrence Public Library’s 780s Series this Wednesday, July 19. Details on that show can be found here.