Remembering Richard Harris, born on this day in 1930. —Ed.
In which a Man Called Horse sings a Song Called Horseshit, and turns it into a megahit. If macho thespian Richard Harris seemed an unlikely singing star, Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” was an unlikely success, clocking in at around 7:30 minutes at a time when songs played on the radio rarely reached 4 minutes. But that’s not what really makes “MacArthur Park” such an oddity. It’s the bizarre lyrics, which raise questions galore, and the histrionic manner in which Harris sings them that make “MacArthur Park” a piece of kitsch so bad it’s great. Which is to say I may mock it, but I never tire of listening to it. It’s too fucking weird.
Famed songwriter Jimmy Webb has written hundreds of hits for dozens upon dozens of famous musicians, Glen Campbell being a prime recipient of Webb’s largesse. But the songs Webb wrote for Campbell were, well, songs, and not “MacArthur Park,” that fantastical overflow of deep thoughts expressed in the form of surrealistic imagery and incoherent similes. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Webb was on acid when he wrote it. Hell, maybe he was.
As I said before, the song raises questions, enormous existential questions, questions that call into doubt the very dichotomy between being and nothingness, the most important of which is who is the idiot that left the cake out in the rain in the first place? I mean, who leaves a cake sitting uncovered in a public park? If it hadn’t rained, the rats and squirrels would have gotten it.
And who bakes a green cake? And why can’t the cook find the recipe again? Women’s magazines, the Internet—recipes for green cake must be a dime a dozen. And why exactly did it take him so long to bake it? Was he using a children’s E.Z. Bake oven or something? And then there’s the line, “I recall the yellow cotton dress/Foaming like a wave/On the ground around your knees.” What, her legs stop at her knees?
And when it comes to similes, you will have to look very hard to find one more ungainly and incoherent than the one about how Harris and his lost love will be “pressed in love’s hot, fevered iron/Like a striped pair of pants.” I have studied these lines a thousand times, and they never fail to leave me slack-jawed with admiration. Love is a hot and fevered iron? And why a striped pair of pants? Why not a nice pair of beige pants? Who wears striped pants to begin with?
No, when it comes hot and fevered, we must turn our ears towards Harris’ Schlager-friendly approach to singing. He is breathless with emotion, and puts enough of it into lines as innocuous as “And the old men playing checkers/By the trees” to make you think he’s a guy on the brink of a nervous breakdown reciting Shakespeare. And all the while the strings soar and the brass crashes down, until the song reaches its “hip” portion and speeds up, making you think you’ve suddenly been marooned on a nightmare island populated only by Blood, Sweat & Tears. And then comes the magnificent crescendo, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love it right down to the female singers who warble in closing, “Oh no! Oh noooooo!”
And all I can say is that MacArthur Park must be one sticky place, what with all that melted sweet green icing all over the grass and statues and benches and whatnot. And don’t even get me started on Spring, which in “MacArthur Park” has grown legs and is always one step ahead of you. My ears studied painting at the Sorbonne, and while that hardly makes them music experts they did hear a lot of French pop while they were there, and they have concluded, as I said before, that “MacArthur Park” is so bad it’s brilliant, a tale told by an idiot signifying one very guilty musical pleasure.
Webb would never again even come close to reaching the Himalayan heights of hilarious hysteria that “MacArthur Park” represents, and the world would be a poorer place had he never written it. “MacArthur Park” makes Bernie Taupin look like T.S. Eliot, and that’s no small accomplishment. Hearing it never fails to make my day, and I dare say I don’t think I can take it, ‘cause it took so long to overbake it, and we’ll never have that recipe again. Oh, no.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A+
