Word: webbe
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...Webb spends most of his time these days in a 22-room Hollywood mansion that serves as his home, corporate headquarters, "crash pad" for friends in need, and raucous rehearsal hall for clients and colleagues. Self-possessed amidst the noise and confusion, he still manages to get to his Yamaha concert grand or his electric organ to work on new music, sometimes with incredible facility (he wrote Up, Up and Away in 35 minutes). In fact, in addition to a plethora of pop projects (including a score for an original film musical), he is branching out to tackle a rock...