Campbell Glen - The Wichita lineman: searching in the sun for the worlds greatest unfinished song

When I play its mostly music, but theres a real demand for stories. I started doing it almost fearfully. I began playing maybe fifteen songs, and doing some stories. Over the last ten years, Ive got to remember to play ten songs, with more stories, and the audiences seem to love it.

JIMMY WEBB

Once upon a time, Long Island was a very particular musical laboratory, the place you came to witness the latest cell division of rock and roll. If you lived on Long Island in the seventies and someone said, Meet me tonight in dreamland, there was only one thing you were going to do, only one place you were going to go.

Back then, if you needed any litmus test as to who was about to cut through, wanted to find out which heavily touted newbie actually had real talent, you went to My Fathers Place, a 7,000-square-foot cabaret club in Roslyn, a historic village up in Nassau County. U2 made their American debut here; in 1976, it was where the Ramones performed their most important out-of-town dates; and back in 1973, an aspiring Bruce Springsteen performed here to just thirty people. He loved the place so much he came back four more times, even after he became more famous than the club ever would be. Here, twenty-two miles from Manhattan, up-and-coming comedians like Eddie Murphy, Andy Kaufman and Billy Crystal made their starts. In an era when comedy and rock went hand in hand, if you wanted to break into either industry, My Fathers Place was where you came.

In the fifteen years before the club closed in 1987, My Fathers Place hosted more than six thousand shows by over three thousand acts. The clubs owner, Michael Eppy Epstein, refused to book cover bands, and so the club became known as somewhere aspiring artists could perform. Billy Joel. Todd Rundgren. Madonna. Aerosmith. Along with CBGBs and Maxs Kansas City, the club became a nurturing ground for proto-punk and new-wave bands such as Iggy and the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Runaways, the Police, Blondie, Talking Heads and Television.

Early in 2018, Epstein reopened the club not far from the original venue, in the basement of the newly renovated Roslyn Hotel (formerly the Roslyn Claremont Hotel, but now reimagined as a boutique country inn), and six months later, in October, I came to have a look myself, or rather I came to see Jimmy Webb. Even though he lives not far from it, this was the first time hed played the new venue, and it was something of a big deal for him. Webb regularly plays in New York, in London, in Sydney, all over the world. But theres nothing like playing in your own backyard.

The Roslyn is a rather unprepossessing place that reminded me in part of one of those resort hotels in the Catskill mountains (albeit somewhat smaller). The surrounding area is generic middle-class America; not full of the Oklahoman homesteads of Jimmy Webbs childhood, but instead the kind of white clapboard homes that pepper this section of Long Island in the same way that swimming pools litter certain parts of Los Angeles. If you ever wanted to see the houses and hoses and sprinklers on the lawn that Richard Harris invoked in The Yard Went On Forever, one of the ferociously eccentric songs that Jimmy Webb wrote for the actor in 1968 the same year he wrote Wichita Lineman for Glen Campbell they are here, in this white-bread enclave of Oyster Bay.

The basement looked as though it had played host to a succession of wedding receptions, birthdays and hen parties, with its pink neon, wood panelling, turquoise ruched drapes and jellyfish chandeliers. Webbs performance was a brunch gig, and the menu in the club reflected this: mimosas, chicken paillard Caesar salad and eggs Benedict; popcorn dipped in truffle, black pepper and Parmesan; lollipop wings, pickles, candied nuts and kimchee. Plus, of course, the obligatory lemon ricotta pancakes with smoked salmon and Chardonnay a signature combo here.

Ashley, my server for the afternoon, having ascertained that I was from London told me enthusiastically that her father was originally from Sheffield, the unspoken assumption being that of course I had probably met him at some point. Such is the eternal optimism of the second-generation immigrant.

There were two hundred people in the club, all of whom had made a small pilgrimage to see the man known as Americas Songwriter, a man responsible for some of the greatest popular songs of the twentieth century, the Midwestern genius who wrote Wichita Lineman, By the Time I Get to Phoenix and MacArthur Park, the man who, in the space of a few months in the summer of 1968, became the most famous songwriter in America. All for $50 plus lunch.

I hadnt seen him perform since 1994, when, for three weeks in September, Webb, then a sprightly forty-eight, had given Londoners a chance to experience his voice in person for the first time in over a decade. The Caf Royals Green Room had been operating as a supper-club venue for just over a year, hosting small, personal concerts by the likes of Eartha Kitt, Michael Feinstein and Sacha Distel, where dinner and cabaret would set you back L48 per person. Even at this point in his career, Webb was obviously an old hand at cabaret, making a point of trying to build a Vegas-style rapport with the audience from the first song in. There were small jokes, polished witty asides and plenty of music-industry anecdotes. A tall man, he spent most of the concert crouched over his keyboards, his ponytail bouncing behind him, with his eyes shut and his head pointing heavenwards, as if leaning towards divine inspiration. He began with an uplifting version of Up, Up and Away, before leaving the sixties behind and addressing The Highwayman, Still Within the Sound of Your Voice and The Moons a Harsh Mistress. Rolling Stone once said that Webb has a voice like an old Mustang, but there were times during the evening at the Caf Royal when the car appeared to be running on empty. And yet he ploughed on: Didnt We, If These Walls Could Speak and MacArthur Park were followed by an obligatory medley of By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Galveston and the pearl of the evening, Wichita Lineman. Here, finally, was a moment of genuine beauty, when Webbs compassion and latent melancholia seemed to overshadow any inadequacies he may have had as a vocalist, causing ripples and fleeting epiphanies all over the Caf Royal.

In Roslyn, there was a low-level buzz in the audience; not feverish anticipation, but something altogether more nuanced. The people gathered here today had come to see a man theyd often read about, but whom most had never seen, making Webb something of an enigma. At the meet and greet afterwards he was (discreetly) mobbed by people saying how great it was to finally meet the man who wrote these wonderful songs and hear him sing them in person. The audience had come to hear the songs as much as theyd come to see Jimmy Webb. After all, in the sixties, these tunes helped build a new kind of America, tunes that for many defined a generation. I never got to hear Berlin or Gershwin perform in a club, however, I will be able to say I saw Jimmy Webb sitting at a Steinway performing his songs, said Stephen Sorokoff of the Times SquareChronicles. Words and Music that are embedded in the musical soul of our country, and will be played for generations to come. I hope its not too over the top to say, but for the non-music lovers out there, I can only compare it to hearing Thomas Jefferson reading the Declaration of Independence Webb has other fans, too. At an age when other singers are losing their voices, Mr Webb finds his mercurial, unguarded singing attaining the gritty authority of a soft-hearted country outlaws, wrote Stephen Holden in the