June 22, 1968—A 7 1/2-minute epic that far exceeded the usual three-minute length of Top 40 radio singles, "MacArthur Park" vaulted to #2 on the Billboard 100 pop chart. Equally unusual for its pedigree as for its ambition, the song was a collaboration between Richard Harris, a colorful Irish actor whose only prior notable singing accomplishment was in the movie Camelot, and songwriter Jimmy Webb, a 21-year-old wunderkind who had written 250 songs in the past four years.
How the song came into Harris' hands is a tale in itself. Did you know that it was originally offered to The Association—and that they turned it down?
The folk-rock sextet were golden at the moment when Webb came into their studio, in the midst of a three-year run that included hits such as "Along Comes Mary," "Cherish," "Never My Love," "Windy," and (among the songs they were recording for their current project) "Everything That Touches You."
The young composer from Oklahoma had already attracted some notice—Glen Campbell had covered "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and The Fifth Dimension had turned "Up, Up and Away" into a huge hit as well. While working on an album for the latter, he'd gotten the idea for a song that would surpass anything that group had done previously—something that would take up the whole side of an album. In it, he had poured all his inchoate feelings over the breakup of his love affair with Susan Ronstadt, the cousin of an up-and-coming singer on the L.A. music scene, Linda Ronstadt. He decided to shop the piece around.
Webb, brought into The Association's studio by producer Bones Howe for their upcoming album, Birthday, must have liked his prospects for pitching this latest composition. True, it was a bit long and did feature some lyrics that could be considered slightly out there—something about "love's hot, fevered iron," and especially "someone left a cake out in the rain."
But The Association liked to try daring things in the studio, and as "Along Comes Mary," with loopy lyrics usually construed as drug-influenced ("Mary Jane" being a nickname for marijuana and all that) demonstrated, they certainly didn't mind psychedelic influences. The last track on their third album, "Requiem for the Masses," even included a Gregorian chant opening—something that would surely test the patience of any DJ or teenybopper.
And this was late 1967, remember—the concept album, courtesy of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (not to mention Frank Sinatra's September of My Years, if you wanted to consider the older generation, which nobody under 30 did) was stretching the idea of the song cycle. And, with The Beatles' "A Day in the Life," even a single song could stretch longer than the usual pop single, and even feature several parts.
Now, put yourself into the shoes of The Association, as they listened to this Webb kid at the piano. Yeah, he had got a nice melody, and there were parts of this they really like—and, considering their vocal harmonies, they'd sure do a better job than the songwriter himself, who was really no great shakes in the pipes department.
But he and Bones Howe wanted them to commit to the whole thing – a freakin' four-part, 22-minute pop cantata, with fanfares and orchestral break, for God's sake! Yeah, Webb thought several parts could be split off as singles, but how did you cut and slice that so DJs will pick it up? Besides, what about their creativity? Outside composers had gotten a lot of space on their last album, Insight Out. Since the Beatles and Bob Dylan, credibility lay in songwriting.
So the answer came back: No thanks. As a matter of fact, one musician even said, "Any two guys in this group could write a better piece of music than that."
Well, what they could do and what they did were two separate things. "Everything That Touches You" ended up being The Association's last big hit. Though they had performed a set at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 that was tight and harder-rocking than their radio-friendly hits, they were now caught up in one of those tsunamis in pop-music taste changes that give record industry professionals gray hair before they think they have a right to. By 1969, they were giving film audiences the soundtrack to Goodbye, Columbus at just the moment when Woodstock was exploding. Goodbye, Columbus, and Goodbye, The Association, too.
Enter Harris. My Pittsburgh nephews revere the late thespian as the first Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies. My generation, however, knows him for this song, or for his numerous talk show appearances over the years in which he regaled audiences with rollicking tales of his drinking misadventures with the likes of Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Oliver Reed, and other wildmen of stage and screen. Film buffs know him as one of the leading lights of the "Angry Young Man" cinema of the early 1960s with his appearance in the rugby film This Sporting Life.
(Speaking of this last movie: It was his first major success, and it won him Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. The fallout from the award might also have contributed to one of his most quoted lines: “If I win an award for something I do, the London papers describe me as 'the British actor, Richard Harris.' If I am found drunk in a public place, they always refer to me as 'the Irish actor, Richard Harris.'”)
His King Arthur role in Camelot led Harris to believe that he possessed singing talent—a thought that perhaps stretched the limits of reality, given that Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote the songs for original Broadway lead Richard Burton in the same way that they had for Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, another nonsinging leading man in a musical.
A drinking pal (admittedly, not in the older man's league in consuming vodka) of the actor's, Webb, fresh from his rejection by The Association, responded to Harris' telegram urging him to come to London and make a record. Perhaps not as high on his project as before, he groaned but acceded when the actor reached the bottom of his satchel of sheet music and expressed enthusiasm for the last song left in it: "MacArthur Park."
The pop symphony that Webb originally envisioned—an entire LP side—was trimmed back in the version he produced for Harris to one-third its original length. To everyone's surprise—except, perhaps, the actor-singer’s—the song shot to #2 on the pop charts.
In the years since, Webb has become the Thomas Wolfe of pop music—a wildly prolific writer whose headlong romanticism has won almost as many detractors as enthusiasts. Case in point for both groups: “MacArthur Park.” There are many, many people out there who can’t get their head around that image of the cake left out in the rain.
Yes, it is a metaphor for wasted happiness and lost love. But, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Webb pointed out that the image was inspired by direct observation of an actual occurrence in the Los Angeles park in which the song is set:
"Those lyrics were all very real to me; there was nothing psychedelic about it to me. The cake, it was an available object. It was what I saw in the park at the birthday parties. But people have very strong reactions to the song. There's been a lot of intellectual venom."
How the song came into Harris' hands is a tale in itself. Did you know that it was originally offered to The Association—and that they turned it down?
The folk-rock sextet were golden at the moment when Webb came into their studio, in the midst of a three-year run that included hits such as "Along Comes Mary," "Cherish," "Never My Love," "Windy," and (among the songs they were recording for their current project) "Everything That Touches You."
The young composer from Oklahoma had already attracted some notice—Glen Campbell had covered "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and The Fifth Dimension had turned "Up, Up and Away" into a huge hit as well. While working on an album for the latter, he'd gotten the idea for a song that would surpass anything that group had done previously—something that would take up the whole side of an album. In it, he had poured all his inchoate feelings over the breakup of his love affair with Susan Ronstadt, the cousin of an up-and-coming singer on the L.A. music scene, Linda Ronstadt. He decided to shop the piece around.
Webb, brought into The Association's studio by producer Bones Howe for their upcoming album, Birthday, must have liked his prospects for pitching this latest composition. True, it was a bit long and did feature some lyrics that could be considered slightly out there—something about "love's hot, fevered iron," and especially "someone left a cake out in the rain."
But The Association liked to try daring things in the studio, and as "Along Comes Mary," with loopy lyrics usually construed as drug-influenced ("Mary Jane" being a nickname for marijuana and all that) demonstrated, they certainly didn't mind psychedelic influences. The last track on their third album, "Requiem for the Masses," even included a Gregorian chant opening—something that would surely test the patience of any DJ or teenybopper.
And this was late 1967, remember—the concept album, courtesy of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (not to mention Frank Sinatra's September of My Years, if you wanted to consider the older generation, which nobody under 30 did) was stretching the idea of the song cycle. And, with The Beatles' "A Day in the Life," even a single song could stretch longer than the usual pop single, and even feature several parts.
Now, put yourself into the shoes of The Association, as they listened to this Webb kid at the piano. Yeah, he had got a nice melody, and there were parts of this they really like—and, considering their vocal harmonies, they'd sure do a better job than the songwriter himself, who was really no great shakes in the pipes department.
But he and Bones Howe wanted them to commit to the whole thing – a freakin' four-part, 22-minute pop cantata, with fanfares and orchestral break, for God's sake! Yeah, Webb thought several parts could be split off as singles, but how did you cut and slice that so DJs will pick it up? Besides, what about their creativity? Outside composers had gotten a lot of space on their last album, Insight Out. Since the Beatles and Bob Dylan, credibility lay in songwriting.
So the answer came back: No thanks. As a matter of fact, one musician even said, "Any two guys in this group could write a better piece of music than that."
Well, what they could do and what they did were two separate things. "Everything That Touches You" ended up being The Association's last big hit. Though they had performed a set at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 that was tight and harder-rocking than their radio-friendly hits, they were now caught up in one of those tsunamis in pop-music taste changes that give record industry professionals gray hair before they think they have a right to. By 1969, they were giving film audiences the soundtrack to Goodbye, Columbus at just the moment when Woodstock was exploding. Goodbye, Columbus, and Goodbye, The Association, too.
Enter Harris. My Pittsburgh nephews revere the late thespian as the first Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies. My generation, however, knows him for this song, or for his numerous talk show appearances over the years in which he regaled audiences with rollicking tales of his drinking misadventures with the likes of Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Oliver Reed, and other wildmen of stage and screen. Film buffs know him as one of the leading lights of the "Angry Young Man" cinema of the early 1960s with his appearance in the rugby film This Sporting Life.
(Speaking of this last movie: It was his first major success, and it won him Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. The fallout from the award might also have contributed to one of his most quoted lines: “If I win an award for something I do, the London papers describe me as 'the British actor, Richard Harris.' If I am found drunk in a public place, they always refer to me as 'the Irish actor, Richard Harris.'”)
His King Arthur role in Camelot led Harris to believe that he possessed singing talent—a thought that perhaps stretched the limits of reality, given that Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote the songs for original Broadway lead Richard Burton in the same way that they had for Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, another nonsinging leading man in a musical.
A drinking pal (admittedly, not in the older man's league in consuming vodka) of the actor's, Webb, fresh from his rejection by The Association, responded to Harris' telegram urging him to come to London and make a record. Perhaps not as high on his project as before, he groaned but acceded when the actor reached the bottom of his satchel of sheet music and expressed enthusiasm for the last song left in it: "MacArthur Park."
The pop symphony that Webb originally envisioned—an entire LP side—was trimmed back in the version he produced for Harris to one-third its original length. To everyone's surprise—except, perhaps, the actor-singer’s—the song shot to #2 on the pop charts.
In the years since, Webb has become the Thomas Wolfe of pop music—a wildly prolific writer whose headlong romanticism has won almost as many detractors as enthusiasts. Case in point for both groups: “MacArthur Park.” There are many, many people out there who can’t get their head around that image of the cake left out in the rain.
Yes, it is a metaphor for wasted happiness and lost love. But, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Webb pointed out that the image was inspired by direct observation of an actual occurrence in the Los Angeles park in which the song is set:
"Those lyrics were all very real to me; there was nothing psychedelic about it to me. The cake, it was an available object. It was what I saw in the park at the birthday parties. But people have very strong reactions to the song. There's been a lot of intellectual venom."
There sure has. Readers of Dave Barry’s column voted it the worst song of all time. While disagreeing with that assessment, Joe Queenan wrote a hilarious piece in which he called it “among the most baffling hits in the history of pop music. It has no antecedent, and it has no sequel.”
If you want to know my attitude toward the song, think again about that comparison with Thomas Wolfe. I prefer the far more controlled lyricism of his near-contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I think William Faulkner was not entirely wrong when he named Wolfe the greatest American writer. “We all fail," he observed, "but Wolfe made the best failure because he tried the hardest to say the most."
Like Wolfe, Webb has stretched the most to come up with a vocabulary—in his case, a musical as well as lyrical one—to encompass the nature of experience. Despite the derision of people like Dave Barry, I suspect that many musicians share my affection for the song, since it’s been covered by, among others, Frank Sinatra, Michael Feinstein, Maynard Ferguson, The Four Tops, and Waylon Jennings. Like Burt Bacharach, whose "This Guy's in Love With You" blocked Webb's path to #1 on the pop charts, Webb looks as if he's among the few composers of his generation who'll join Rodgers, Hammerstein, Hart, Mercer, Porter and Berlin among the creators of the Great American Songbook.
Several years ago, on the radio, I heard a live version of "MacArthur Park" featuring none other than Glen Campbell, using his guitar as a substitute for the massive orchestral break in the middle of the song. Like so much of the history behind this song, it surprised, stunned and moved me.
"Someone left the cupcakes in the car.........!"
ReplyDelete(Sorry Mike and Nora)