Two of
my favorite Jimmy Webb songs, sung by Jimmy Webb, from his 1996 album, Ten Easy
Pieces.
Galveston,
made famous by Glen Campbell’s 1969 version, is a great ballad about a man
preparing to go into battle. Jimmy Webb has said it’s anti-war, but Glen Campbell
sang it as a patriotic song. When I hear it, when it gets to the bridge, “I
still see her, standing by the water…”, Michael McDonald chimes in, and I
always see in my head that great SCTV sketch, from the 80’s, with Rick Moranis
as Mike McD, racing from studio to studio to chime in on several different recordings
by other artists.
Highwayman
is a song “about a soul with incarnations in four different places in time and
history: as a highwayman, a sailor, a dam builder on the Hoover Dam, and
finally as a captain of a starship.”(Wikipedia). Whenever I hear the line about
the dam builder who “slipped and fell into the wet concrete below, they buried
me in that great tomb that knows no sound,” it reminds me that I read somewhere,
or saw on some History Channel/PBS documentary that no bodies were left in the “wet
concrete”, because the decomposing body would create a cavity that would
structurally weaken the dam.
It’s
funny, the trivia that sticks in your head, no?
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