Jimmy Webb: The Cake and the Rain

Jimmy Webb is ‘America’s Songwriter’. His deep, complex songs have been recorded by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to Carly Simon to R.E.M to Art Garfunkel to Donna Summer. He is the youngest man ever inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, 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 including a Kanye West rap and a new classical nocturne.

In 1969, Webb was a ‘heavy pot smoker, sexual adventurer, and hopelessly liberal Democrat who hated the war in Vietnam’. Four years later, he was living in his gated mansion, lying for John Lennon and stashing hundred dollar bills and cocaine in his house-safe. During this whirlwind of hedonism, in 1973, Webb accidentally over-dosed on what proved to be street-level PCP. When he awoke from his coma, he wasn’t even able to recognise a piano...

In The Cake And The Rain, Webb takes the reader through his life and his choices which led him to this tragic moment. Rich with a sense of time and place, with the voices of characters both lost and celebrated, and with the same youthful spirit which catapulted him into a moneyed and manic world of stardom, this is the sunning memoir of one of the greatest songwriters of all time: a man with unfathomable talent – and luck.