Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)
RICHARD HARRIS – MacArthur Park b/w The Yard Went On Forever (ABc Records, 1968)
“Like a pizza in the rain – nobody wants to take you home”, sang David Byrne on Rei Momo’s “Loco de Amor” (Crazy for Love). What is true of pizzas is doubly true of cakes, particularly those with sweet green icing that take a long time to bake.
Jimmy Webb’s bonkers lyrics to MacArthur park had no takers until drinking buddy Richard Harris, in the days before Dumbledore, took a shine to them. The fact that he couldn’t really sing was not seen as a hindrance.
An unprecedented seven minute recording resulted with a string arrangement that makes Neil Young’s A Man Needs A maid sound understated. Bizarrely it became a huge hit largely, I think, because the melodrama is so over the top you get the idea that it is actually trying to communicate the distraught emotional state of a guy who has lost the love of his life (“I’ll never find that recipe again”).
Harris pours his heart into it as it builds to a climax with the following lines:
I will take my life into my hands and I will use it
I will win the worship in their eyes and I will lose it
I will have the things that I desire
And my passion flow like rivers through the sky.
And after all the loves of my life
After all the loves of my life
I’ll be thinking of you
And wondering why.
MacArthur Park is a track off the album A Tramp Shining while the b-side, The Yard Went on Forever, was the title track of its follow up. If you think MacArthur Park has the craziest lyrics and arrangement ever, this song gives it a run for its money. Take this doggerel as an example:
“Hear them singing
All the women of Pompeii
Standing with the Nagasaki housewives in doorways
In eruptions and destructions on doomsday”.
I can only think there was some strong liquor or powerful drugs circulating in the studio when these gems were recorded.
