JIMMY WEBB
Jimmy Webb (born August 15, 1946) is an American songwriter, composer, and singer. He has written numerous platinum-selling songs, including "Up, Up and Away", "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman", "Galveston", "The Worst That Could Happen", "All I Know", and "MacArthur Park". Webb was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986 and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1990. According to BMI, his song "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" was the third most performed song in the fifty years between 1940 and 1990. Webb is the only artist ever to have received Grammy Awards for music, lyrics, and orchestration. (More from Wikipedia)
There is a strong feminist stance in women's music, however; and that was largely absent from the music scene in the mid-1970's, Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" (1972) notwithstanding. Jimmy Webb is not a songwriter where one would expect feminist sensibilities, but Meg Christian reworks his song "The Hive" as a tale of female oppression – not at all the way that Richard Harris performed the song several years earlier.
(January 2014)
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Although it took me a while to warm to Kill City, it has become one of my favorites among Iggy Pop’s albums – even with the truly wonderful first album by the Stooges, The Stooges (1969) that is in the same current album stack. Considering Iggy Pop’s state of mind at that time – he had checked himself into a mental institution in an attempt to clean himself up and become functional again – the demos that he and James Williamson put together at the home recording studio of Jimmy Webb (!) in 1975 that became Kill City are remarkably self-assured and remind me of the feel of his triumphant solo album, Brick by Brick (1990).
(December 2017)
