Daily News from New York, New York • 266

SUNDAY NEWS, MAY 5, 19G3 T3 SOS J5 Jrh 1 Out of the folk, rock, country and Western idioms of American music is emerging a new poetic form that is up-and-away, gentle on your mind and understandable M'V NEWS Photo by Mel Flnksisteln Jim Webb muses for a moment over his success (four million copies of "Up, Up and and the reasons for it. The new songwriters, he believes, have recovered from the rock craze and progressed to meaningful lyrics that still communicate with the young. By MICHAEL IACHETTA IF YOU THINK today's poets are starving, try tuning- in and turning; on to the jrroovy new world of records. The now sound is poetry, and the lyrics not only make dollars, they make sense. The words come on strong with a kind of roujrh poetry that makes hits of sonars like "Gentle on My Mind." "Ky the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Up.

Up and Away." The new poets laureate of Tin Pan Alley are Jim Webb and John Hartford, who write as they've never heard of Rob Dylan. John Lennon or Paul McCartney. The wanilerintr troubadour who puts their words across best is Glen Campbell, the seventh son of a seventh son. The names of the two pop poets kept coming up with amazing regularity at the recent Grammy awards dinner of 1 G)) music performance as well as for the best country and western song. Campbell took home still another Grammy a model of an old-fashioned gramophone for judged the best country and western recording.

The big winner in sales, however, was Webb's "Up. Up and Away." which has sold four million copies. Johnny Mathis and the Fifth Dimension were the big sellers among the 100 artists who have cut the record. Webb's other big song, "Phoenix," has sold more than two million copies. The instant millionaires behind the songs never figured to see their names on the top pop charts.

Webb, for example, is a college dropout with ulcers. He hails from Elk City. where his father, Robert, is a Baptist minister. Jim studied classical piano music and played the organ in his father's church from the moment his legs became long enough for him to reach the pedals. His father wanted him to follow him into the ministry, but Jim was already batting out songs by the time he was IS.

Just Decided "No bolt out of the blue or anything." Jim said during a brief stop in New York the other day. "I just decided classical music wasn't my trip, and I was going to become (i songwriter. There was a time in my life when, as a matter of body chemistry, I wrote three sonirs a week." But the magic ingredient -vas missing until he was IS and moved with his family to Southern California. His mother, Sylvia, died there, and his father decided to return to Oklahoma. Jim stayed to finish school at San Bernardino College.

But the minister' snuii discovered girls, dropped out oi school, bought a Yolksieagen and 11'uv to Hollywood to score ax a songwriter. He slept on a blanket on the floor of cheap, bare apartment and ear tied a week transcribing songs for recording artists and writing his own. He later joined a niusic publishing company. Madelon Music, and while there wrote "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." a simple ballad that cries about a love that has died. AFRIEN'D.

Mark Gord showed the song to Johnny Rivers, who liked it enough to record it. but nothing happened. Still. Rivers thought enough of Webb to buy his contract and put him to work on an album being cut by Mark's group, the Versatile. During a weekend break in the recording session, Webb drifted back to San Bernardino, where a disc jockey-buddy, Willie Williams, was doing a promotional stunt at a taco stand called Uncle Charley's.

Willie was hyping sales by going up in a balloon shaped like a small dirigible. He talked Jim into taking a trip with him. Inspiration They really dug the way the world looked from that balloon, and Willie said what they saw would make a groovy song. "I'll even give vou the title," said Willie. "Up, Up and Away." "It's frightening.

It almost makes you feel superstitious when you think about what makes a hit," recalled Jim. "You're plugging away, thinking you're never going to make it, and then you sit down at a piano like you've been doing ever since you were a kid and 'Up, Up and Away' comes out of you in 35 minutes." It was going to be the title song for a movie Jim was going to make with Willie, but the Versatile3 liked it so much they made it the title of their Soul City album. They changed their name to the Fifth Dimension, and they were on their way up with their beautiful balloon. "Why did it take off?" mused Webb. "Maybe it's because the kids writing the songs today are the same pimply-faced adolescents who bought the first Elvis Presley records when the rock craze began.

Only we're smarter than we were then and want more from our music. Which is why we give so much more in the lyrics. And we're still young and haven't forgotten what it's like so we can talk to the young." About the time Webb was writing "Phoenix" and "Up," John Hartford was cutting his first record for RCA-Victor and writing: "Had I not made this record, I still would have made these songs. I would have sung them to my family, my friends, and softly to myself, I reckon." Hartford had been a deckhand on the Mississippi River, a sign painter, a commercial artist and a radio announcer. When he decided to become a songwriter, he lit out from his native Missouri with his wife.

Betty, and their l'i-year-old son. Jamie, and landed in Nashville in August, VMh. He was down but not out when he wrote "Gentle," the song that gave him the big lift. One night. Hartford went to see the movie, "Dr.

Zhivago," and he walked out with "Gentle on My Mind." "It was a conglomeration of past experiences," he recalls. "There was something in that movie that just brought everything to the surface and I went home and started writing. The Tune Came "I wrote for a couple of hours and didn't realize what I had written until I went back and reread it. Then it started taking lyric form and the tune started coming. Pretty soon, the song was there, and when I got it to the point I wanted, I just quit and left it alone." But not before he had written words that have the free caress of a warm, summer wind loving words that say: "And it's knowing I'm tint shackled by forgotten words and bonds And the ink stains that have dried upon some line That keeps yon on the back roads by the rieers of my memory That keeps ymi ever gentle on my mind." Nowadays, John tries to explain why his lyrics are going over.

"I really think that there's a vast I won't say middle ground but common ground between folk music and pop music and country music. People who dig pop niusic are starting to get hip to the folk music and country niusic, and vice versa, and they're meshing together." Oddly, it was Glen Campbell who had the big hit record on both Hartford's "Gentle" and Webb's "'Phoenix." Campbell, a former cotton picker from Delight, Ark. (pop. 450), was earning better than $50,000 a year as a sideman in Hollywood recording studios. He backed up vocalists lika Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra on the guitar, the five-string banjo, the mandolin and even the bass fiddle.

"I think that my singing style is a To composer John Hartfordv the meaning of it all in American music is that appreciators of the various popular styles are expanding their interests into a common ground of understanding. result of the years in the studio," explains Campbell. "You have to stay loose, play blues in the morning, jazl in the afternoon and rock at night." He had come a long way already from his beginnings as one of 12 children who picked cotton "foi $1.25 a hundred pounds." "If you worked your tail off," he remembers, "you could pick 80 or 90 pounds a day except my pa who could pick 400 pounds a day." Glen quit school when "I saw they weren't teaching, me how to play and sing," and by the time he was 14, he was playing guitar around Texas and New Mexico. The trail led to the big money in Hollywood. Singinq Did It But Campbell wanted to be more than a sideman.

so he wrapped his big, silky baritone around some lyrics he across lyrics that hadn't sold big despite the beautiful treatment given them by Johnny Rivers. The song was "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," and he later turned the same trick with "Gentle on My Mind." Today. "Phoenix" writer Jim "Webb is writing songs fr Barbra Streisand and maybe Dusty Springfield and Frank Sinatra and working on the words and music for a top-budgeted Universal Pictures flick. John Hartford is working on his next album and writing songs and music for the Smothers Brothers summer replacement show, which will star Glen Campbell. "It sure beats pickin' cotton," says Campbell.

Copyri9hr JW7 by Glaser Publications, Inc. The young old pro who put across the works of both Webb and Hartford is Olen Campbell, who worked his way up from Arkansas cotton picker to musician. the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. The Grammy is the record industry's equivalent of Hollywood's Oscar. Webb.

21. saw his songs win eight ransring from record of the year for Up and Away" to best country music male solo performance for Glen Campbell's singing of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (which also won Campbell the year's best male vocal performance award. Hartford, 31. has proved today's youngsters can trust someone over SO. His haunting "Gentle on My Mind" sold more than 600.000 copies as a single and 250.000 copies as an album, counting oniy the sales racked up by the Glen Campbell rendition.

That's not bad. considering that has been recorded by more than 30 other major artist, including Eddie Arnold and Patti Page. Ironically. Hartford's own singing version of his song didn't sell big but it won him a Grammy for best folk.