Book Review: The Cake and the Rain, an Autobiography by Jimmy Webb
Hop on Spotify and you’ll find a playlist, The Jimmy Webb Songbook, lovingly created by one Motokuni Kiyomiya: it’s 697 songs strong, 43 hours and 57 minutes long.
How did a reverend’s son from Elk City, Oklahoma wind up standing among the most prolific and successful songwriters of modern pop music? Read his brilliant new autobiography, The Cake and the Rain (St. Martin’s Press), and you’ll find out exactly what happened.
As it turns out, Jimmy Webb’s trajectory—once underway—moved blindingly fast, starting with an epiphany on a tractor Oklahoma when he realized at age 15 that he should be a songwriter. Just four years later, he had hits on the charts with the 5th Dimension (“Up, Up and Away”) and Glen Campbell (“By the Time I Get to Phoenix”). It would take one more year for his eternal smash “MacArthur Park” to hit the airwaves.
Only Jimmy Webb has received GRAMMY Awards for music, lyrics and orchestration.
Webb’s career wasn’t the only thing that was a high-speed affair. He immediately mastered the art of living fast, soaking up every second of the high life that you’d expect in rock’s formative years, as experienced by a young prodigy who suddenly had tons of money to go along with his massive talents.
Cocaine, fast cars, and incredible encounters with the biggest stars of the era, from the Beatles and Frank Sinatra to Harry Nillson and Art Garfunkel, are all there. Perhaps these tales of excess are to be expected, but it’s the unique access provided by Webb’s perspective that makes The Cake and the Rain an absolutely amazing read.
Imagine the skills of this tremendously gifted songwriter spread across 295 pages of personal storytelling. In these memoirs, Webb never flinches from the truth about himself, or his real feelings about those who surround him in his humble beginnings, during his meteoric rise to fame, and the many hard crashes he suffers along the way.
Triumphs and humiliations are reported with the same level of intimate detail, often with the mastery that marks his lyrics (“My suddenly unstable continuum was seemingly turning sideways and unreeling on its edge. Like a toy gyroscope wavering on the edge of a glass, I was trying to walk it like an acrobat, striving not to fall into a worse mess.”)
And there are audio insights aplenty, as well. Webb’s exploits took him to scores of studios, including a crucial first date in LA conducting the famed Wrecking Crew musicians at age 17, visiting the Fab Four at Abbey Road, and building his own studio on a yacht – a gripping (mis)adventure spurred on by the craft of recording.
Whether you’re deeply knowledgeable about Webb’s discography or have simply absorbed it by osmosis, The Cake and the Rain is essential for anyone who’s fascinated by music, and by a life richly lived for that matter. It’s a book that’s almost impossible to put down, with rewards that ring on like a song.
- David Weiss
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