‘People think songwriters go around crying all the time’: Jimmy Webb on his epic hits – and wild drinking days

From Wichita Lineman to MacArthur Park, he penned masterpieces. As Jimmy Webb resurrects his unheard numbers, he recalls writing for Dolly, Frank and Glen – and the night Richard Harris stripped off and disappeared‘Flat for 50 miles,” recalls Jimmy Webb, remembering the desolate stretch of Oklahoma that inspired his classic song, Wichita Lineman. “Nothing out there except endless railroad tracks and telephone poles. Then suddenly there’s a guy at the top of one of the poles. He’s got his phone, he’s talking to somebody and then … whoosh! He goes by. I never saw him again, but I never forgot him.”Webb immortalised the unknown telephone worker’s solitude (and imagined conversation with a distant lover) with a 1968 smash hit for Glen Campbell. “But you wouldn’t believe what some people thought it was about,” chuckles the songwriter, now a chatty, self-effacing 80-year-old, video-calling from his kitchen in Long Island. “One guy who wrote to me thought it was ab