Pop: Up, Up & Away In 18 Months

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Other songwriters besides Jim Webb have reeled off a string of hit records, including two that won Grammy awards in the same year. Others have been asked to compose—and sometimes arrange and conduct—for such top singers as Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin and Glen Campbell. Others have formed their own publishing and production firms and boosted their annual income to $350,000. But for the others, such achievement has usually filled out a lifetime. Jim Webb has done it all in 18 months. Now one of the hot test talents in pop music, he is 21.

End & Beginning. Webb's early success is all the more striking because he was so recently at rock bottom, emotionally as well as economically. The son of a Baptist minister, he was raised in Oklahoma and Texas, started music studies at California's San Bernardino Valley College in 1966. Midway in his second semester, dispirited by his mother's death and struggling to sort out his life, Webb dropped out. He had learned the piano and organ well enough to play in his father's church at age eleven and had started composing at 13, so he decided to go to Hollywood and be a songwriter. He wangled a $50-a-week job with a recording studio and rented a cheap apartment, where he slept curled up in a blanket on the bare floor. When, on top of everything else, his romance with a San Bernardino coed broke up, it seemed like the end. But it was the beginning.

Webb wrote a wistful ballad about the affair called By the Time I Get to Phoenix. As recorded by Glen Campbell, it rose medium-high in the bestseller charts and won Campbell a Grammy award for the best male vocal performance of 1967. Meantime, Webb and a friend were planning a movie about a balloon trip. The only part of the venture that got off the ground was Webb's title song. It was recorded by The 5th Dimension, and it soared high in the charts, sold 875,000 copies and won some more Grammies. Trans World Airlines bought the rights to use it in its TV and radio commercials.

The song was Up, Up and Away—and so was Webb.

Icing & Crash Pad. These two hits—as well as more recent successes such as Paper Cup and Wichita Lineman—reveal Webb's gift for strong, varied rhythms, inventive structures, and rich, sometimes surprising harmonies. Threaded through them all are simple melodies that occasionally evoke country music or other sounds of his Southwest background (Wichita Lineman features the wow-wow-wow sound of the prairie wind whipping through electrical wires). "A pop song should have a lyric that's basically a poem," Webb says. "If people get the feeling, then the lyric is successful—whether they know what I'm talking about or not." Typical of his personal and provocative imagery is Mac Arthur Park, from a briskly selling album that he has composed for Actor Richard Harris:

Mac Arthur Park is melting in the

dark, All the sweet, green icing flowing

down. . .