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Glen Campbell - By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Glen Campbell - By the Time I Get to Phoenix Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: By the Time I Get to Phoenix
Released: 1967

By the Time I Get to Phoenix Lyrics

By the Time I Get to Phoenix she'll be rising
She'll find the note I left hangin' on her door
She'll laugh when she reads the part that says I'm leavin'
'Cause I've left that girl so many times before.

By the time I make Albuquerque she'll be working
She'll probably stop at lunch and give me a call
But she'll just hear that phone keep on ringin'
Off the wall, that's all.

By the time I make Oklahoma she'll be sleepin'
She'll turn softly and call my name out low
And she'll cry just to think I'd really leave her
Tho' time and time I try to tell her so
She just didn't know I would really go.

Writer/s: Webb, Jimmy
Publisher: EMI Music Publishing
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

By the Time I Get to Phoenix Song Chart

Like "MacArthur Park" and "The Worst That Could Happen," this was written by Jimmy Webb about a love affair that he had with Susan Ronstadt, who is Linda Ronstadt's cousin. Their relationship didn't work out, and Susan married another guy.

This was originally recorded by Johnny Rivers in 1965, who had a hit with "Memphis" the year before. The story of how the song was recorded starts with Jimmy Webb's first job - staff songwriter at Motown Records. Webb told us: "I worked for Motown when I was about 17, 18 years old. I was a white face. There were a lot of black faces and mine was a white face. But they always treated me very kindly, treated me like family there and really taught me a lot. And they had another kid there who had been on The Donna Reed Show, his name was Paul Petersen, and he had a couple of records. They're almost novelty records. One of them was called 'My Dad.' Kind of a ballad called (singing), 'My dad, now he is a man.' And it was a hit. And then he had another one called 'She Can't Find Her Keys.' He went out on a date with this girl and I don't know, she can't find her keys.

And they came to me and said, 'We need a song for Paul Petersen.' And I wrote 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix.' And they didn't like it for him. They didn't like it for anybody. They ended up cutting it with a couple of different people and not really being happy with it. And when I left the company they gave me the song and said, 'You can take this one with you.' And I said, 'Okay, I will. I like it.' They liked verses and choruses there. Verses and big choruses. And 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix' is three verses, very simple, very direct storyline.

The guy who hired me at Motown, Mark Gordon, who managed the Fifth Dimension, he was signing them over at Soul City, which was Johnny Rivers' company. I ended up going over there. They bought my contract out, I went over there. And I took 'Up, Up and Away,' 'By the Time I Get To Phoenix,' 'Worst that Could Happen, and a handful of hit songs that were there with me.

So after all that, Johnny Rivers cut 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix.' Went in and did it with the Wrecking Crew and Marty Paich doing the strings. And then the story loops back to me from Glen Campbell. He was driving along the street one day, heard Johnny's record and thought, 'I could cut that record and make a hit out of it.' I think they both cut them in the same room, in Western 3. I remember working in there with Lou Adler on the first one, but I don't remember working on Glen's records. I wasn't always around for Glen's records. So there are these long, torturous stories for most of these songs that have not had easy lives." (See our full interview with Jimmy Webb .)

This was Campbell's first Top 40 hit after filling in on tour for Brian Wilson with The Beach Boys. When Webb heard Campbell's version of this, he wrote him a followup song, "Wichita Lineman," which reached #3 in early 1969. Webb said in our interview: "I think that Glen's voice is perfectly suited to early JW - 'Wichita Lineman' and 'By the Time I Get To Phoenix' - there was some kind of a surreal fit between his voice and those songs. It's very hard for me to look back and say, "Oh, a-ha, now I see why we were successful." Because at the time it certainly wasn't anything that I was in control of."

Before Campbell recorded this, he played guitar on a version by Pat Boone. Webb was 21 when he wrote this song, which became his second songwriting hit after Up-Up and Away.

This was Campbell's first hit as a solo artist. Through his session work, he was well known in the industry, and Brian Wilson tried to make him a star by writing and producing a song called "Guess I'm Dumb," which Campbell recorded in 1965 but failed to dent the charts. Once Campbell recorded "Phoenix," his career as not just a singer but as an all-around entertainer took off: In 1969, he got his own TV show that ran for 3 years.

Campbell thought about changing the line at the end, "By the time I get to Oklahoma" to "By the time I get to Arkansas," because that's where he's from. He decided not to because he wasn't sure Jimmy Webb would like it.

This won 1967 Grammys for Best Contemporary Male Solo Vocal Performance and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male.

Isaac Hayes recorded a 19-minute version of this song, including an eight-minute spoken introduction, on his 1969 million selling Hot Buttered Soul album. Like the other songs on the album, it was recorded in one take. Hayes explained to Rolling Stone magazine: "You know, I don't plan it, I just rap, man. Cause if you go over it too many times it just gets mechanical."

Hayes explained to National Public Radio: "The rap came out of the necessity to communicate. There's a local club in Memphis, primarily black, called The Tiki Club. One day there I heard this song by Glen Campbell - 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix.' I thought, 'Wow, this song is great, this man must really love this woman.' I ran down to the studio and told them about the song, and they said 'yeah, yeah.' They didn't feel what I felt, I thought maybe they weren't getting it. The Bar-Kays were playing the Tiki Club a few days later, so I told them to learn the song and that I would sit in. I told them to keep cycling the first chord, and I started talking, just telling the story about what could have happened to cause this man to leave. Halfway through the song, conversations started to subside, and by the time I finished the song, there wasn't a dry eye in the house."

What did Jimi Webb think of Isaac Hayes' version? He recalled to Uncut magazine June 2014: "When it came out, I thought, 'Wow, that's unusual!' It took up virtually the whole side of an album, but I really liked it."

"The whole talking blues thing at the beginning was like a novel - a major opus," he continued. "It was to do with the Delta blues tradition, that way of telling a story, although people sometimes forget he did a great job at singing the song too, I'd produced The Supremes, I understood R 'n' B and soul artists, so it wasn't so far-fetched to me. Isaac was a precursor to rap and hip-hop, he was trying to create something new."

"We later became friends, and I thanked him for doing a song," he concluded, "I told him it was a blessing for me."