The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir

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Description

“Novelistic, perfectly plotted and slightly most likely the most productive pop-star autobiography yet written.” – The Wall Street Journal

Jimmy Webb’s words have been sung to his music by a rich and deep roster of pop artists, including Glen Campbell, Art Garfunkel, Frank Sinatra, Donna Summer and Linda Ronstadt. He’s the only artist ever to win Grammy Awards for music, lyrics, and orchestration, and his chart-topping career has, so far, lasted fifty years, most recently with a Kanye West rap hit and a new classical nocturne.

Now, in his first memoir, Webb delivers a snapshot of his life from 1955 to 1970, from simple and sere Oklahoma to fast and fantastical Los Angeles, from the crucible of his circle of relatives to the top of his longed-for profession.

Webb was once a preacher’s son whose father climbed off a tractor to receive his epiphany, and Jimmy, barely out of his teen age years, sank down into the driver’s seat of a Cobra to speed to Las Vegas to meet with Elvis. Classics such as “Up, Up and Away”, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Wichita Lineman”, “Galveston”, “The Worst that Could Happen”, “All I Know”, and “MacArthur Park” were all recorded by probably the most most important voices in pop before Webb’s twenty-fifth birthday: he thought it was once easy.

The sixties were a supernova, and Webb was once at their center, whipsawed from the proverbial humble beginnings into a moneyed and manic international world of beautiful women, drugs, cars and planes. That stew almost took him down―but Webb survived, his passion for music and work among his lifelines.

The Cake and The Rain is a surprising and bizarre book: Webb’s talent as a creator and storyteller is here on each page. His book is rich with a sense of time and place, and with the voices of characters, vanished and living, famous and not, but all intimately involved with him in his youth, when life appeared nothing more than a party and Webb the eternal guest of honor.

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