The Wrecking Crew (31 page)

*   *   *

A couple of months after the deflating turn of events in the studio with the Association, Jimmy Webb found himself playing the piano one evening at a fund-raiser he had agreed to attend in West LA. While the well-heeled crowd mingled and drank, Webb informally entertained them on the ivories with both his own repertoire and some personal favorites from the Great American Songbook. As the evening rolled along, Webb, out of the corner of his eye, happened to notice a looming figure approach. Someone who seemed like he had something on his mind.

“Do ya know any good Irish pub songs, lad?” came the booming brogue of an obviously inebriated man. “I'm lookin' to sing me some ‘Molly Malone' or ‘Rocky Road to Dublin.'”

Recognizing the rugged, party-worn face to be that of the well-known actor Richard Harris, he of King Arthur in
Camelot,
Webb obligingly launched into comping his way through a few tunes that he vaguely recalled. As the vodka flowed and the ditties rolled, the unlikely duo began taking a shine to each other. So much so that, with a twinkle in his eye, Harris remarked just before leaving, “Let's make a record, Jimmy Webb.”

Focused on his career, Webb subsequently shrugged off the evening's encounter, paying Harris's comment little heed. Following his recent release from contractual obligations with Johnny Rivers, Webb already had a busy existence as a freelancer, with songs to write and pitch. And Hollywood party talk was usually just that, anyway—talk. Then, several weeks later, a telegram arrived.

JIMMY WEBB, COME TO LONDON AND MAKE A RECORD. LOVE, RICHARD.

And so Webb did.

Or at least he flew to London with the actor footing the bill to see whether there was any suitable material
worth
recording. Harris, though he had sung a little here and there in the movies and onstage, was hardly known as a professional vocalist. But he had ambitions—and very selective tastes. Over pitchers of Pimm's Cup (a libation made in England from dry gin, liqueur, fruit juices, and spices), Webb played and sang every song he had to his name. But with nothing catching the fancy of the gregarious, high-octane Limerick, Ireland, native, Webb then looked one last time into the leather sheet music satchel he had brought with him. At the bottom sat
The Cantata.

With some dread, he pulled it out and began to play. It had already been rejected once by a big-time act. He was wary of getting his feelings bruised all over again. But it was all he had left. As Webb sang a particularly poignant and poetic section of the lengthy piece about, among other things, someone leaving a cake out in the rain, his host's eyes grew moist.

“I'll have that, Jimmy Webb.”

*   *   *

In the middle of the night, at his palatial Castilian Drive home high up in the Hollywood Hills, Hal Blaine heard his telephone ring. And ring and ring.

Jolted from a deep sleep, the thirty-nine-year-old drummer groggily guessed that it must be some kind of an emergency. If it were any kind of a regular recording-session call, it would have gone through his answering service. He fumbled for the receiver.

“Hello?” he mumbled.

“Hal Blaine?”

“Yeah?”

“It's Richard Harris.”

A couple of weeks before, Jimmy Webb had phoned Blaine from London, telling him that he had met an actor. They were going to do an album together and Webb wanted Blaine to fly over and play the drums on the project. By this time, having worked together on the 5th Dimension's first two albums, the two had become good friends. And Webb, like just about everybody else in town, wanted Blaine's skills on everything he did.

“Sure, I'd be glad to, Jimmy,” Blaine had said. “I just need some lead time. I'm booked solid around three or four months ahead right now.”

Webb agreed, Blaine went about his business, and suddenly, two weeks later, Richard Harris was on the line.

“We've got a seat reserved for you on a TWA flight out of LAX tomorrow,” the actor said.

“Oh, my God,” Blaine replied, sitting upright. “You know, I thought I was going to get some notice on this thing.”

After some fast-talking and adept schedule shifting by Blaine's trusty secretary, the next thing the drummer knew, he was sitting across the breakfast table from Harris inside the thespian's opulent London apartment. As they ate and chatted, Harris had an important question on his mind.

“Hal, you came highly recommended to me by Jimmy Webb. Do you know any other good musicians like yourself that we could get to come over here and play on this project?”

For Blaine, the surprises just kept on coming. He assumed that Harris or Webb or at least
somebody
had already booked all the players.

“Well, jeez, Richard, I do know a lot of guys, “ Blaine responded. “But they're like me, usually busy months in advance.”

Then Harris asked his other question.

“Uh, one more thing. Do you happen to know of any good studios over here?”

There obviously wasn't going to be any recording done in England. Nothing had even been scheduled. Webb had cooked up an elaborate plan with Harris to get Blaine to fly over for what essentially would be a ten-day vacation. Blaine never seemed to take time off and his friend Webb wanted him to start enjoying life for a change. For the next week and a half, the trio caroused about merry old London like their very lives depended on it.

But the threesome would also soon reconvene for real back in Los Angeles, along with several other members of the Wrecking Crew, where they would see about proving the Association wrong.

*   *   *

By the middle of 1968, popular music was changing once again. In fact it was getting downright heavy. In the aftermath of the recent Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., slayings, the bloody Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the ever-growing level of campus unrest at universities around the country, Top 40 AM radio gradually began to lose step with the times.

In response, so-called underground FM stations like KSAN in San Francisco, WNEW in New York, and both KMET and KLOS in Los Angeles began easing into the mix, clearly distinguishing their formats from the frenetic presentations and three-minute song limits favored by their mono brethren. Instead, this new kind of progressive, free-form radio specialized in playing many seldom-heard album cuts, along with longer versions of some of the hit songs that did make the regular singles charts from bands like Iron Butterfly (“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”), the Chambers Brothers (“Time Has Come Today”), and Creedence Clearwater Revival (“Suzie Q”). Pioneering disc jockeys like Tom Donahue, Scott Muni, Jim Ladd, Raechel Donahue (Tom's wife), and Dusty Street played whatever they wanted, when they wanted.

Gathering at the noted engineer Armin Steiner's Sound Recorders on Selma Avenue in Hollywood in mid-May of 1968, Hal Blaine, Mike Deasy, Larry Knechtel, Joe Osborn, Jimmy Webb, and the redoubtable Richard Harris set about making some music. With the entire album,
A Tramp Shining,
written, arranged, and produced by Jimmy Webb, it was the twenty-one-year-old's baby all the way. And with it finally came a home for
The Cantata.

As the recording progressed over several days, it all built toward a critical mass, to the one piece that had caught Harris's attention back in London. Called “MacArthur Park” (written as the final movement of
The Cantata
), it also put the Wrecking Crew's skills to the test like no song before it. A spectacular production with innumerable complex chords and polyrhythms, it was the furthest thing possible from a normal rock-and-roll date. And they simply loved it.

With Knechtel channeling the likes of Handel and Vivaldi on piano and with Webb sitting right next to him on harpsichord, they were joined by Blaine keeping rock-solid time in a variety of changing signatures and Osborn just staring at the charts, moving his fingers up and down the neck of his bass as fast as he could. It was the musical challenge of a professional lifetime; for once, the Wrecking Crew were able to
stretch
and really strut their stuff. After they ran through the lengthy song over and over until they could play everything perfectly from beginning to end without stopping, the tenth take proved to be the keeper. Webb wanted to avoid any after-the-fact editing at all costs. One slip of the razor blade on the cutting block and the delicate sixteen-track tape easily could be ruined.

After Harris added his dramatic vocal reading, where through either stubbornness or too much alcohol—with a pint next to him at all times—he incorrectly kept singing the lyrics as “
MacArthur's
Park,” the recording was almost complete. Webb then brought in a myriad of horns and strings to put the lush finishing touches on what had become his personal masterpiece. Now it would be a matter of getting some airplay.

By this time, with a passel of Grammys to his credit, Jimmy Webb had a name that could open doors in the music world. Taking advantage of this, Dunhill Records, Harris's label, did their best to talk KHJ into putting “MacArthur Park” into immediate rotation. The station had enjoyed great success with the Webb-penned “Up, Up and Away,” and Dunhill execs hoped KHJ would see the same promise in his latest composition. And they did, except for one thing: It was too long.
Way
too long. At well over seven minutes, it was positively colossal, clocking in at twice the length of almost any other song on their playlist.

Webb then received a phone call from Ron Jacobs at KHJ.

“Jimmy, we'll go on ‘MacArthur Park',” he said, “but you'll have to edit it down for us.”

When Jacobs had initially listened to the song, he found it hard to believe that it was really by Richard Harris. It was like nothing Jacobs had heard before, certainly not by some actor. And unlike his experience with “California Dreamin',” he immediately recognized that Webb's uniquely crafted production had all the earmarks of becoming an instant Top 40 smash. But first there was the little matter of trimming it all down to workable AM radio size.

A resolute Jimmy Webb, however, very much had other ideas about how “MacArthur Park” was to be treated.

“No, I'm not going to do that,” he replied.

Jacobs was taken aback. Turning down a guaranteed “add” on powerful KHJ was tantamount to heresy, at least by music business standards.
Nobody
did that.

“Do you realize what you're doing, then?” the gruff program director practically snorted through the receiver. “You're throwing away a hit record.”

Despite the rosy promise of commercial success that so tantalizingly lay before him, Webb's artistic integrity was now on the line, too. And that he could not compromise, hit or no hit. Being true to his songs meant everything to him.

“Well, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to edit it because it is what it is.”

But the promotions men at Dunhill were savvy. They knew ahead of time that the length might be a problem. So they also pitched “MacArthur Park” to a bunch of underground FM stations, who jumped all over it. The song then built such a buzz in such a short period that within a week KHJ broke its own rules and added all seven minutes and twenty-one seconds of it anyway.

From there, it would take barely a month for the epic recording to go all the way to number two in the country, sandwiched between a couple of other Wrecking Crew efforts: “This Guy's in Love with You” by Herb Alpert and “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon and Garfunkel. Webb also won the 1968 Grammy for best arrangement accompanying vocalist(s), beating out, among others, the Association.

Webb's creation additionally generated another unexpected consequence, one that would begin to subtly affect the Wrecking Crew's livelihood. Because the song had broken through the AM radio barrier, it had suddenly made it okay for lengthier songs to make the playlist. And the longer each song, the fewer minutes left during each hour for the station to play
other
songs. That was the unfair, mathematical irony of the whole equation; the Wrecking Crew had just played their hearts out on an all-time award-winning hit, yet its very success directly contributed toward a drop in the total number of songs making it on the air. And with fewer songs finding airtime, there gradually evolved a diminishing number of rock-and-roll recording dates for them to play on. The days of the three-minute (or less) single were fading. But for several in the Wrecking Crew, despite these changes in the business, arguably their greatest recording glory lay just around the corner.

17

Bridge Over Troubled Water

Let's do the Phil Spector production idea.

—A
RT
G
ARFUNKEL

By early 1969, Carol Kaye and Glen Campbell found themselves headed in opposite career directions. And both were moving on from the Wrecking Crew.

After playing on literally thousands of songs in the recording studios since her defection from the world of live jazz back in the Fifties, Kaye was just plain burned out. With so much of what she had been asked to play on standard rock-and-roll dates requiring little of her skills, particularly in regard to groups like the Monkees, the cumulative effect made her want to leave the business. So she did.

Always fond of teaching since her days with Horace Hatchett back in Long Beach during the late Forties, Kaye came up with the idea to start her own music book publishing company. With her first title,
How to Play the Electric Bass,
immediately becoming a strong seller, Kaye also went back into working directly with students, primarily focusing on those with more advanced skills. It also gave her a chance to rest her wrist, which had become arthritic from the intense, unrelenting use on the fret boards of her bass and guitar during her years of studio work. And, as an added bonus, with her no longer being away from home all day (and often much of the night) while playing on sessions, the newfound freedom allowed her to spend more time with her three growing children.