Jimmy Webb writes for the Rhinestone Cowboy and himself

Jimmy Webb never saw himself as a songwriter for hire. Even though scores of pop artists began recording his compositions beginning in the mid-1960s, many of which became massive hits, he didn’t favor the notion of sitting down and penning tunes specifically with the talents of a single artist in mind.

Then he met Glen Campbell.

“At least for me, that whole idea wasn’t a fruitful tree,” Webb says. “It wasn’t a place where I would put a lot of energy – you know, concocting elaborate demos for just one artist because once they turn a song down, where are you going to take it? If it’s truly a Glen Campbell song and nothing else, and it doesn’t have a broader appeal, then it’s a one-shot deal. I thought just in terms of conserving my own time and creative gift, I wanted to write for myself and let the chips fall where they may.”

But when Campbell, a country artist and guitarist by trade, scored a huge hit with Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix in 1967, that practice began to change as one of the era’s great artist-and-songwriter collaborations was solidified.

“When Glen came to me and said, ‘I need a song, I would write one,’” Webb recalls. “One time, I wrote a tune in an afternoon and sent it over to him at a recording session that was already in progress, albeit on the tape I had written, ‘This is not finished!’ But he recorded it the way it was.”

The song was Wichita Lineman. It became a worldwide hit in the fall of 1968. Campbell’s album of the same name reached the top of the Billboard 200 chart between No. 1 stretches by Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland and The Beatles’ self-titled “White Album.”

“It was so deceptively simple, really,” Webb says of Wichita Lineman. “The melodies were minimal. Glen didn’t like a lot of jazzed-up chords, even though he was better than most guitar players when it came to duplicating the voicings and stuff that were really characteristic of my piano playing.”

Campbell would go on to record over 85 Webb songs throughout his career, giving the songwriter both the impetus and material to stage The Glen Campbell Years, one of two different concert programs he will present in the region this week. The Campbell tribute, which Webb brings to the EKU Center for the Arts on Thursday, is a multi-media presentation colored by projections of photographs along with stories detailing the songs and the recording sessions that brought them to life.

“Glen was a believer,” Webb says. “If I played him one of my songs, there was intrinsic value to that. That kind of respect is something that songwriters don’t get from everybody. And I didn’t get it from everybody, but I did get it from him.”

The other program, slated for Cincinnati’s 20th Century Theater on Wednesday, is titled simply An Evening with Jimmy Webb. Featuring just the songwriter alone at the piano, it offers a full career retrospective from early career hits cut by other artists (The 5th Dimension’s Up, Up and Away, Richard Harris’ MacArthur Park) as well as works from Webb’s four decades worth of solo albums.

“I’ve been performing all my life, so that show travels a pretty well-worn trail,” Webb says. “There are a lot of things I can do by myself that I can’t do if other people are there. It enables me to freewheel a little bit. If you had asked me about doing something like this 10 or 15 years ago, I’d have said, ‘Well, it will just be a hits-only show.’ Lately, using that as a basic skeletal formation of the show, I have been doing actual requests because there is a fan base out there that is familiar with some of my own very, very obscure albums.

“Revealing something about yourself is the price you have to pay for that kind of intimacy with an audience. Maybe some personalities find that excruciating and uncomfortable. As a matter of fact, I know people who do and come right out and say to me, ‘How do you do that? How do you tell people things like that?’ The program is kind of what my wife likes to say is, ‘Going over to Jimmy’s house and sitting in the living room, listening to him play the piano.’ And she’s a pretty smart lady.”

This story was originally published February 20, 2016 at 10:48 AM with the headline "Jimmy Webb writes for the Rhinestone Cowboy and himself."