Inside Tracks #16: Jimmy Webb, "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" w/Covers by Johnny Rivers, Glen Campbell, Four Tops, Peggy Lee, Nancy Wilson

In the early days of a songwriting legend, Dad gave him $40 + this caution: "This songwriting thing is going to break your💖." Instead, the talent of Jimmy Webb broke records, & created musical magic.

This “Inside Tracks” Edition was suggested by fellow Substack scribe, Terry Freedman (who can bring you Eclecticism: Reflections on Literature and Life with a subscription)!

Terry, as an intro to this “Inside Tracks,” was kind enough to provide his appreciation of Jimmy Webb as a songwriter, and this song:

“The reason I chose Jimmy Webb’s ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ was that I wanted to choose a song that told a story in what, three minutes? I might also have chosen ‘Downriver’ and ‘The Road to Cairo,’ but I’d already written about them.

“Or perhaps ‘Year of the Cat’ or ‘Bus Stop’ by The Hollies. I had two aims: First, to demonstrate some craftsmanship, the skill it takes to tell a story in just a few minutes. It’s also what I like about the ads I’ve been featuring: mini film productions, telling a story in 30 seconds! My second aim, though, was to keep the word-count to exactly 100 words, excluding the title.

“Plus, of course, ‘Phoenix’ is such a great song. It strikes me as the pop equivalent of flash fiction: For sale, baby shoes. Never worn.”

Related: Another Webb song inspired by another Substack writer:

Inside Tracks #31: "Rosecrans Boulevard" by Jimmy Webb, 1967-5th Dimension, w/Covers by Johnny Rivers, Gordon Waller, Zumpano

“I was really just a kid who was kind of writing from the hip and the heart.”

Jimmy Webb (pictured here in the late ‘60s with his “Supersnake” high-performance Shelby Cobra sports car) is the youngest man, at 44, to ever be inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame (in 1990), plus he’s the only artist ever to win Grammy awards for music, lyrics and orchestration. His stellar career has, so far, lasted nearly 6 decades, and even includes a recent Kanye West rap and a new classical nocturne!

“The Greatest Torch Song Ever Written”- Sinatra

Frank Sinatra knew saloon songs; he also knew torch songs, and his crowning of Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” as “the greatest” is a tip of the felt fedora to the timelessness of the man’s craft….both of theirs, really.

The inspiration for this song originated with Webb’s breakup with Susie Horton (shown above), whom he met while they both were attending Colton High School, east of L.A. in San Bernardino County. In 1964, Jimmy and his family had moved to Southern California from their home in Elk City, in far western Oklahoma (on Route 66).

Following graduation at Colton, Jimmy attended San Bernardino Valley College, studying music.

He and Susie remained friends after she ran off to Lake Tahoe to become a casino showroom dancer, and even after her 1993 marriage to one of Linda Ronstadt’s cousins, Bobby (Linda made an appearance at 1975’s little-known “Rock’n’Roll BBQ,” also attended by FR&B’s singer/songwriter/guitarist, Stephen Michael Schwartz, at Hollywood’s Sunset Sound Studio. Read about it and its star-studded guest list, in Stephen’s own words, exclusively, here).

Following the death of his mother in 1965, Jimmy’s father (a minister) made plans to return to Oklahoma. Jimmy decided to stay in California to continue his music studies and to pursue a career as a songwriter in L.A.

Webb would later recall his father warning him about his musical aspirations, saying, “This songwriting thing is going to break your heart.” Seeing that his son was determined, however, he gave him $40, saying, “It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”

“This Song is Impossible”

Webb did not intend the song to be geographically literal. As Jimmy told NPR in 2010, “A guy approached me one night after a concert, and showed me how it was impossible for me to drive from L.A. to Phoenix [375 miles in roughly 6 hours], and then how far it was to Albuquerque [nearly 800 miles in 12 1/2 hours].

“In short, he told me, ‘This song is impossible.’ And so it is. It’s a kind of fantasy about something I wish I would have done, and it sort of takes place in a twilight zone of reality.”

Webb was working as a staff songwriter for Jobete Music Publishing at Motown’s new L.A. office. Marc Gordon (above) was president, and he went to Jimmy and, according to Songfacts, said, “We need a song for [The Donna Reed Show actor, and new teen idol singing star] Paul Petersen” (shown below, then and now).

“I wrote ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ and they didn’t like it for him. They didn't like it for anybody. They ended up cutting it with a couple of different people and not really being happy with it.

“And, when I left the company, they gave me the song and said, ‘You can take this one with you.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I will. I like it.’ They liked verses and choruses there. Verses and big choruses! And, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ is three verses, very simple, very direct storyline.

”The guy who hired me at Motown, Marc Gordon [was now managing] the Fifth Dimension; he was signing them over at Soul City Records, which was Johnny Rivers’ company [which he founded in 1966, with distribution through Liberty Records]. I ended up going over there. They bought my contract out, and I went over there.

“I took ‘Up, Up and Away,’ ‘By the Time I Get To Phoenix,’ ‘Worst That Could Happen’ [a #3 hit for The Brooklyn Bridge in February 1969] and a handful of hit songs that were there with me.”

Thus, Johnny Rivers was the first to record the 20-year-old Jimmy’s song, in November 1966, after signing the songwriter to a publishing deal. Appearing on his Changes album on Imperial Records, it was not released as a single:

“So after all that, Johnny Rivers cut ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix.’ Went in and did it with [noted veteran L.A. studio session players] the Wrecking Crew and Marty Paich [longtime composer/arranger/conductor for films and records, and father of Toto keyboardist, David Paich] doing the strings.

“And, then the story loops back to me from Glen Campbell. He was driving along the street one day, heard Johnny’s record and thought, ‘I could cut that record and make a hit out of it.’ I think they both cut them in the same room, in Western [Studio] 3.

“I remember working in there with [producer] Lou Adler [founder of Dunhill Records in ‘64 and Ode Records in ‘67, signing Carole King] on the first one, but I don’t remember working on Glen’s records. I wasn’t always around for Glen’s records. So there are these long, torturous stories for most of these songs that have not had easy lives.”

Al De Lory (a veteran arranger and a Wrecking Crew keyboardist) produced, and was likely the one who encouraged Glen to go up in pitch on the line Rivers went down, toward the end: “She just didn’t know, I would really go,” a turn replicated by virtually all who followed with covers; Glen’s De Lory-charged arrangement thus became the template:

Jimmy, candidly, on getting Glen from the #26 “Phoenix” in October 1967 to his next top-chart destination, “Wichita”: “It wasn’t so much my doing as it was deliberate manipulation on the part of A&R and the labels in their attempts to engineer what we called in those days a follow-up record.

“But, I remember particularly the day that they called me about ‘Wichita Lineman’ [the Webb song Campbell took to #3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in October ‘68], and said, ‘Glen’s looking for a follow-up for ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ but it’s got to be a place. And I thought, ‘Well, okay.’ I didn’t particularly like that idea. I’m not someone who thinks that way or creates that way.”

1968: Portrait of the songwriter as a young teen idol. Wonder if Dad ever got that $40 back.

A Little Bit o’ Soul

As can be guessed, now, after so much airplay and familiarity with the song itself, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” became an instant favorite to cover for the easy-listening/MOR artists. Names like Andy Williams, The Lettermen, Frankie Valli, Vikki Carr, Bobby Goldsboro, Robert Goulet, Frankie Laine, Johnny Mathis, Jim Nabors, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Jerry Vale all lined up to wrap their musical cardigans around Jimmy’s soft’n’gentle AAA TripTik-in-song!

“By the Time” even wandered onto fertile farmland, as country artists galloped their way onto not only the C/W charts, but crossed-over into the pop lane with their equally easy-listening arrangements! One of the first was Henson Cargill, and he was followed closely by Conway Twitty, Eddy Arnold, Marty Robbins, David Houston, Roger Miller, Charlie Rich, Roy Drusky, Ray Price, and others. Not an “outlaw country” artist or gravel-throated ruffian among them!

According to performance rights organization, BMI, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was the third most widely-performed song between 1940 and 1990.

No one really altered the arrangement noticeably…that is, until some soul was brought to the table. What Phoenix? All we had to do was point the car toward Motown in September 1968:

“…I Left That Man So Many Times Before”

What about the ladies? What if one of them left a note on his door? I couldn’t choose, so I selected two of my favorite all-time interpreters: Peggy Lee, live from the Copacabana in New York City, and her 2 Shows Nightly album on Capitol from December 1968 (listen for the sultry bass flute, and the mournful piano and harmonica accompaniment). You can almost smell the Parliament Lights and gin:

….and, Peggy’s Capitol Records label-mate, Nancy Wilson, with full studio treatment, including orchestra, from June 1969, and her Son of a Preacher Man album (curiously enough, both Lee and Wilson placed “Phoenix” as the second track on their respective albums):

Robert C. Gilbert, on his “Listening Sessions” Substack, recently did Ms. Wilson proud with his stellar post, “Nancy Wilson: Song Stylist Supreme,” accessible here.

Again, a musical tip o’ the hat to Terry Freedman, who suggested Jimmy & this song!

If you’re in the Los Angeles area (or planning to be, soon), make your reservations now to see FRONT ROW & BACKSTAGE’s singer/songwriter/guitarist, Stephen Michael Schwartz, in a special evening of original rock’n’pop music, Saturday, April 1!