JIMMY WEBB

The Moon's A Harsh Mistress: Jimmy Webb In The Seventies

This title is no longer available from Rhino Handmade.

However, numbered copies from the original edition may be available at select retailers.

An individually numbered, limited edition of 2500 copies from Rhino Handmade.

"Webb's mix of melodic resplendence, arrangement sophistication and vocal vulnerability now permeates indie rock, even if the master remains nearly invisible." -- Rolling Stone

Raised in Oklahoma and west Texas, Jimmy Webb launched a celebrated songwriting career while still in his teens, his "Up, Up And Away" topping the charts for The Fifth Dimension in 1967. During the Flower Power era, his lush, romantic pop songs -- "MacArthur Park" for Richard Harris and "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" for Glen Campbell, to name a couple -- represented everything creatively vital about a Tin Pan Alley that was fast being overshadowed by songwriting performers like Dylan and The Beatles.

Success or no, Webb quickly saw the writing on the wall. "One thing I always knew was that once they know who you are, you're dead," he explains in Ben Edmonds' liner notes to this release. "I saw that I was rapidly pigeonholed, strapped into an electric chair called 'middle of the road songwriter.' I couldn't let that happen."

So in 1969 Webb embarked on a performance career noted for its studio innovation, large-scale ambition, and delicate song craft. While his 1970 debut, Words And Music, was tailored to the rock audience, Webb subsequently re-consolidated his orchestral gains, culminating in the back-to-back extravagance of Land's End (1974) and El Mirage (1977), the latter produced by George Martin.

Webb consistently impressed critics but sold few records. His peers have always recognized his genius, bestowing prestigious songwriting awards as well as Grammys for music, lyrics, and orchestration (Webb remains the only artist to be awarded in all three categories). And then there are the legions of loyalists. "It has been a somewhat strange career -- sometimes triumphant, sometimes bittersweet -- having this almost maniacal following of people who will travel anywhere to hear me perform, yet not ever having grasped the brass ring of major acceptance as a performer," he says in these liners.

This five-disc limited-edition boxed set contains the albums Words And Music (1970), And So: On (1971), Letters (1972), Land's End (1974), and El Mirage (1977), as well as previously unreleased 1972 live performances and a disc's worth of previously unreleased outtakes.

The Moon's A Harsh Mistress: Jimmy Webb In The Seventies is available in an individually numbered limited edition of 2,500 copies.

Selection # 7820