When Jimmy Webb arrived at Johnny Rivers Music in the mid-1960s, he had unrecorded songs in his pocket, including a ballad that Frank Sinatra would call the “best torch song ever written.”
Rivers immediately recognized “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” as a stone cold hit. But with a song of his own, “Poor Side of Town,” topping the charts, Rivers made “Phoenix” available to rising star Glen Campbell and his producer, Al De Lory, at Capitol Records.
