Webb grew up in a religiously conservative family, and his father was a pastor. Interviewed for "Rolling Stone" magazine in 1982, he has said of his experiences in the 1960s: "In a way, I don’t think I did survive... Certainly, that farm kid who showed up in Hollywood with a pack of songs under his arm didn’t survive. I think I lived quite a few years in a kind of haze, because as my manager once put it, I took to marijuana like a fish takes to water. And though my strong Baptist background broke down to a certain degree, it was always inside me. For a while I really did believe I was a genius. When you read it in the press a hundred times a year, you tend to believe it. But eventually all the hype caught up with me."