What would you do if you were asked to sing a song with Jimmy Webb?

I got a call during 1997 to appear on Roy and HG's ABC tv show "Club Buggery". I'd appeared on the show before and had a lot of fun. Once I'd sung "Eve of destrucion" with the house band and another time, "walk a mile in my shoes" with the resident showbusiness lair, Ian Turpie. It was always good fun and the whole crew was in on the vibe. This time, however was a little different, I was being asked to sing a duet with the legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb. Of course, you don't get invitations like this every day so I was immediately on the bill. Jimmy Webb wrote songs like no other; "Macarthur Park","Witchita Lineman"," Where's the playground, Susie?", "By the time I get to Phoenix". (He'd also written all of these classics whilst in his early twenties!). He was to be performing these songs on a tour alone at the piano.
The show turned out to be a bit of an education in tv dumbness. The whole medium can't help but drag everybody involved down into a ditch of banality. I learned that I was to be there as somebody in television had decided that "no one knows who Jimmy Webb is". This was a bit of a blinding shock to me and it would have only taken an introduction along the lines of naming his hit songs he'd written for Glen Campbell alone to clue the audience in. Anyway, like I said, it would be a blast just to meet him so I was up for the gig. (I'm sure Roy and HG were hip to who he was and their whole audience has come to them because they have always trusted them "to know". It must have been a "corridor stroller" decision.
Jimmy turned up at the studio straight from the airport only to find that he'd have to appear with a band backing him as well as duet the song , "Galveston" with a local singer (me) and that the band had worked up an arrangement via Glen Campbells version which he'd apparently always detested. (Jimmy wrote "Galveston" as a slow anti Vietnam war ballad and Glen turned it into an upbeat pop hit)
Luckily "Club Buggery" was one of the few shows that let musicians have time to soundcheck and rehearse their material. It was great to play live on televison knowing the sound was together, (it was best to sing to a backing tape on most other shows). Jimmy really put that band (and me) through the paces right up until it was time to bring the audience in. He had an extemely serious demeanour and went through every nuance and dynamic of the song. (The drummer just couldn't hold back from tapping out a beat on the rim of his snare though, building an expectation that the song was going to open out into a cruising solid groove sooner or later. Jim wanted it to be langorous and dreamy, moving up ad down vertically as well as horizontally according to the chords rising and swelling.)
We went through the song once and then sat around for an hour until the show went to air. Jimmy was not into small talk of any kind. He was serious and quiet in the hospitality room as the show went live.

The show began (after Roy and HG's opening chat) with an interview with Sydney radio man Andrew Denton. Most of it ervolved around comments of his that "television turns people into arseholes". Fair enough.
The next segment was "star search" with Ian Turpie leading a space ship in search of Joh Farnham. It ended with the disgruntled character "Dogrooter" slipping a cock ring onto "Turps" while he was flaked out after a few too many drinks.
Jane Scali came out and did a furious piece of cabaret bullshit singing and dancing, accompanied by her two female dancers . Jimmy was then introduced by Roy, naming all the hits. The two singers "the Nissan Cedrics" sang his story over an awful big band pastiche of "Macarthur Park" as follows,
"in every memory across the earth
there's a melody that had it's birth in Jimmy Webb
songs stand like places
chordal locations
remember the tones
melody wanders down augmented yonders
don't go it alone
Galveston, Phoenix, Albequerque, genius
his songs stand like stones (Jimmy enters and walks the long way to centre stage at this point)
about the Wichita lineman still on a line
dressed in your silk
here for a short time (!) ...."

Jimmy sat and talked quite amicably. Obviously he was turning it on for the show. The situation couldn't have illustrated more keenly the distinctions between a writer and a performer.Writers are said to be introverts and performers extroverts. It's rare to find a person who can be both. One role takes a lot away from the other. Playing the affable, breezy talk show guest didn't come easy to him but he'd practiced it and could dole out a few stories.
Roy and HG drew him on songwriting and how he did it. He let fly early on that he'd written "galveston" ," Wichita Lineman" and "Macarthurs park" when he was 19 or 20 " so hopefully I've learned something by now. I mean I'm 50".
He talked of how Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter. How he could write a song on any subject you gave him. "Nowadays people are lauded for bearing their innermost feelings. Anybody can do that!" ( I couldn't hep but agree. Tell it to Limp Bizkit.)
Roy asked him which song earned the most royalties. He said that "By the time I get to Phoenix" had been played on radio about 4,000,000 times. His most covered song was "Macarthurs Park which had been done "several hundred times"
After the interview, two young female gymnasts came on to do routines with hoop and ribbon. Jimmy closed the show with me on second vocals doing "Galveston" his way. Slow and grand, leading to an emotional crescendo at the end.
I always feel relaxed after performing and Jimmy Webb had been nervous enough for ten people. I followed him back to the dressing room and, seeing as I had nothing to do, followed him into his room with a beer in my hand. ( I was also trying to avoid a Sydney journalist who was hanging around, doing a story). The rooms were last painted (sickly equatorial ocean green) in the 60's. It was the ABC after all. A chair and a light with a few crooked coathangers on a stand. Jimmy washed his face in cold water and looked at himself in the mirror like he was trying to come back to reality. After a few moments I got up and went to find somebody to talk to. A woman from Universal records (who we were with at the time) started bitching about nobody knowing who he was anyway and "why finish the show with such a "doomy bummer of a song?"
Showbusiness, the grinding of the gears never ends.