RECALCITRANT RADIO 0025
Jimmy Webb - Galveston (1972 version)
From Jimmy Webb - Letters (Warner Brothers 1972) First posted June 12, 2011
It has become the critical consensus that Wichita Lineman is Jimmy Webb's greatest song. It is increasingly the case that, when someone records a Webb song (and he's firmly entrenched in the great songwriters of the 60s pantheon), it's Wichita Lineman that is chosen. I've always favored Galveston and, when someone recently posted another paean to Wichita Lineman online, I commented with my usual grumbling but also listened to the Glenn Campbell versions of both songs. Wichita Lineman is a great song and Campbell does a great job on it but his version of Galveston is pretty lackluster. You see, I'd been listening to the Jimmy Webb version from his third Warner Brothers album, Letters (1972) (actually his fourth - his first was on Epic and is obscure). At the time, Webb took a lot of flack for his voice but this recording is a perfect example of why it's worth listening to songwriters sing their songs even if they don't have the greatest voices (or redefine what makes a voice great). I think that the music of Wichita Lineman is very strong and carries a somewhat dull lyric whereas Galveston's lyric is the stronger element in that song with the music reinforcing the words at key moments.
Galveston, oh Galveston
I still hear your sea winds blowing
I still see her dark eyes glowing
She was twenty-one
When I left Galveston
Galveston, oh Galveston
I still hear your sea waves crashing
While I watch the cannon flashing
And I clean my gun
And I dream of Galveston
I still see her standing by the water
Standing there, looking out to sea
And is she waiting there for me?
On the beach where we used to run
Galveston, oh Galveston
I am so afraid of dying
Before I dry the tears she's crying
Before I see your sea birds flying
In the sun, at Galveston
Campbell's version of Galveston is almost martial, it moves along at a good clip with a dramatic orchestral arrangement. In that version, you can miss the emotional thrust of the song and hear it as a sort of "support out boys in Viet Nam" kind of statement. At the time the song was on the radio, there was a huge propaganda effort of that sort going on. I was pretty much ignoring Glenn Campbell anyway and only later started paying close attention to Jimmy Webb as a writer (and even got to appreciate Glenn - the guy is a really good singer and a great guitarist). The pro-war propaganda in the mass media was omnipresent and I (and all my friends and most contemporaries and all right thinking people, damnit!) didn't want to hear it. But the actual words of Galveston are not about glorifying war. There's nothing in it about "freedom", the word "country" does not appear. This is a song about a young man who misses his love and is afraid that he'll never see her again.
In the Webb version, the first minute of the song is one acoustic guitar strumming the same chord in a staggered rhythm - sort of an irregular drone. Then it changes chords, another acoustic guitar comes in playing some figuration and the actual song begins. The first verse does not have anything that would suggest that this song is a wartime song. It is only in the middle of the second verse he sees cannon firing and the next line reveals that the singer is a soldier. Instead of mentioning war or saying anything about his part in it, he just says that he cleans his gun, a routine maintenance task. But the word, "gun", is sung with emphasis and is shocking in the context of the rest of the lyric, which is about Galveston and his love who is there. The word, "gun", sticks out in a way that "cannon" does not because it is his gun and it is what involves him personally in the war. The last verse has the two emotional climaxes. The first is the singer's statement that he is "so afraid of dying". Really, the whole song is an explanation of that statement. The second climax is the last two lines of the song. Galveston is a metaphor for his love as well as his home and he speaks of them as two aspects of the same thing. "Sea birds flying in the sun" is the final image he uses to represent Galveston. These two lines are sung with a different melody than the same lines in the previous verses. Instead of two short lines, as in the first two verses, the sentence that the fourth line begins, continues into the last line and the melody rises on the first half of the last line, which ends that sentence. The combination of the words, "sea birds flying in the sun" and the melody they are set to are the peak of the song for me. The repetition of the word, "Galveston", after this resolves the melodic shape and the harmonic structure of the song but only repeats the meaning that precedes it (actually, the chord change on the first sounding of the word, "Galveston", here is really satisfying).
You can find plenty of video clips of Jimmy Webb performing Galsveston on You Tube. In at least one of them, he even makes the critique of the hit version of the song I mention above (I would just add that this is obvious enough that I thought of this before hearing Webb talk about it). He performs the song on piano and it does come through better that way. But the version from the Letters album, with just the two acoustic guitars, strikes me as better than the piano versions. I've listened to some of the piano versions again and I think it might be because they sound like an older man singing about something in the past (which is what they are) - his voice is lower now and he sings in a more mannered style. The piano version has a long instrumental introduction but it's a more normal introduction using harmonic materials from the song. It's a good version but... In the guitar version, the introduction serves to distance the performance from a typical song performance. It's a sort of framing device that establishes a sense of foreboding and I feel like it says to the listener that this is not a typical song. It sets you up to hear something different. And then the performance sounds like someone who could be that soldier. Webb says that he had an anti-war message in mind but the song is effective because it doesn't explicitly state the message but instead sets up a human situation that implies it.
Hear it here:
That collection pictured above, The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress, contains the Letters album and everything else he recorded in the 70s including his studio albums, a live concert performance and a disk of out takes and demos. An extravagance, it’s out of print and was a limited edition. I resisted buying it because I already had all those albums and it wasn’t cheap. After I got it and heard it, I felt relieved. Like I felt after getting the Beatles Mono Box and the Bob Dylan Mono Recordings box (and I’m not a mono nut).