Love's Labour's Cost

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: JIMMY WEBB

ALBUM: SUSPENDING DISBELIEF

LABEL: ELEKTRA

THE BOTTOM LINE: One of pop's enigmatic figures blazes a trail into the '90s with a pack of glorious love songs.

Could there be any figure in pop harder to type, tougher to place and more impossible to pigeonhole than Jimmy Webb? It shouldn't be so difficult. He writes great love songs; that should serve as a proper introduction. They are full of rich melody, lyrical longing and melancholy -- the kind of songs that need a great musical play and, as often as not, a big orchestra to go along with them.

Great musicals are in notably short supply these days, but the producers of this exquisite album, Linda Ronstadt and George Massenburg, have given Webb an orchestra and helped him find focus. Suspending Disbelief is part songbook, part memory pageant, part diary. It has the immediacy of a memoir, the resonance of a waking dream and a lush romanticism that seems to defy the times even as it transcends them.

Still, Webb writes from so deep inside a private world of broken hearts and thirsty spirituality that he continues to defy categorization. There are aching, eldritch love songs here: Postcard from Paris, for instance, a renewal of devotion via long distance, and Sandy Cove, about family and memory, chances lost and fate unbidden. But Webb, 47, is now writing with a wider compass. A tune like Too Young to Die billows along on the wind-in-your-hair defiance of all of rock's best open-road anthems, but its swagger ("There is peace in losing' control, oh yes there is") is cut by the chill perspective of age and the knowledge that there are dark ends to every street.

Elvis and Me plays a shrewd narrative trick -- Webb is one of a small company of rockers, from Chuck Berry to Bruce Springsteen, who can really write stories in song -- as it flirts with, then trammels expectations. The beginning of the song sounds like autobiography: the singer meeting the King in Vegas, getting an invitation backstage and partying with him after, "rock-'n'-roll royalty just sittin' at his feet." But as the narrative progresses and the singer asks, "Do you see that empty stool/ Well, he's sittin' there right now," what at first seemed reminiscence becomes a poignant fantasia of a dead-end life and a desperate dream.

Webb had his first hits in 1967 with the Fifth Dimension's version of Up, Up and Away and Glen Campbell's of By the Time I Get to Phoenix and quickly got squeezed into a deep pop groove that overlaid his openhearted lyricism with an oil slick of show-biz sentimentality. His MacArthur Park, declaimed by Richard Harris, sounded weird, forced and silly even in 1968 ("Someone left the cake out in the rain"), a bleary bit of psychedelic overindulgence. Webb began to make his own albums in the early '70s, but by then he was already too successful and too out of musical lockstep to be taken with the seriousness he deserved.

Through and past all the misunderstanding and inattention, Webb kept writing, and some people, like Ronstadt, kept listening. Faith and persistence may not cash out in Webb's best songs -- he is better writing about dreams lost and remembered than dreams come true -- but real life, for once, is a little more favorably inclined. Suspending Disbelief is an important record of an important American tale teller, our best raveler of the blind spots of the heart.