What About All The Dreams That You Said Were Yours And Mine?: “MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris

The story begins with Bones Howe, a producer who, along with Jimmy Webb, worked on the first two albums by The Fifth Dimension – Up, Up And Away and The Magic Garden. This work was a happy affair, and while putting these records together Webb regularly confided in Howe about how he would like to expand the vocabulary and structure of the popular song. Spellbound, as with so many others, by Pet Sounds and Pepper, he was looking to do something similarly (if amiably) disorientating.

Upon completion of The Magic Garden, Howe urged Webb to be as good as his word and compose the epic song that was in his head. Webb responded with a twenty-minute, multi-movement cantata – i.e. one whole side of an album – which he called “MacArthur Park.” Howe instantly thought of another of his production clients, The Association, who in late 1967 were looking towards the experimental and adventurous.

Webb and Howe duly approached the group with this great notion. Figuring that The Association accepting it would be a mere formality, Webb performed the song in its entirety, and both he and Howe were rather taken aback to discover that the group didn’t particularly care for it and, indeed, turned it down (there are tales of tapes of The Association recording the full-length work sitting in a Warners archive somewhere, but such tales are strictly apocryphal). Irked, Howe told the group that when the song went top ten – by whoever would finally record it - that would be the day they would receive his letter of resignation as their producer.

Webb did some more work on the song, editing it down somewhat. Then at a fundraising event in East Los Angeles in late 1967 he met Richard Harris; indeed, he was providing the music for the event. Fresh from his stage success in the musical Camelot, Harris fancied the idea of making a record and asked Webb to write something for him. Webb initially thought the actor was kidding but a little while later received a telegram from Harris asking him to come to London to work on songs that he could sing and record.

Webb duly took himself off to Harris’ apartment in Belgravia, and played him some songs. Harris liked them but wasn’t sure that they fit with his idea of what a record made by him should be about. As a last resort – virtually as an afterthought – Webb pulled out a seven-page lead sheet and informed Harris that somebody else had recently turned this song down; would he be interested? Intrigued by its length, Harris asked Webb to play it. He sang and performed “MacArthur Park” in its entirety – this may give an idea of what Harris might have heard that afternoon. Once the song had ended, Harris – by then in a rapture – immediately told Webb, “Well, we must do it!”

Webb returned to L.A. mildly elated but still slightly baffled. After all, Harris was known as an actor – he did his best with Camelot but anyone could tell that he wasn’t the world’s greatest singer. A singing actor? Webb thought it over and grew to like the idea. The melodrama, the projecting of it all – it is very likely that The Association’s cool reaction to the song was based on the improbability of six voices singing what was, essentially, a soliloquy.

He came up with some more songs – some of which may have evolved out of the original twenty-minute cantata – to build a concept album centring on “MacArthur Park.” In L.A. he recorded the instrumental tracks with The Wrecking Crew’s finest. The next move was to cross the Atlantic again and meet Harris with a view to recording the vocals. On this occasion they met, not in London, but in Dublin. Delighted to see him, Harris took the young songwriter under his wing and gave him a guided tour of the great city and its environs, pointing out his old childhood haunts and showing him the best pubs. When it came to laying down the vocal tracks, Harris opted to use the small Lansdowne Road Studios. The vocals were recorded pretty quickly and professionally; a bottle of Pimms was always to hand, but Harris insisted that this was simply to help lubricate his vocal cords. Certainly Webb has confirmed that the songs were too complex for Harris to get through while drunk; there was no funny business in that respect.

Harris was not even fazed by the fact that the backing track for “MacArthur Park” was pitched a little too high for his vocal comfort range; indeed, it is the yearning, perhaps even the straining, in his voice which gives the song the drama it demands. He begins it as though already halfway through the song – “Spring was never waiting for us, girl” as if the listener had stumbled into the midst, or at least within earshot, of a private conversation. He then mourns what has happened – all in a very low-key fashion – before reminiscing about the times he had known in that park with that lover, remembering details and people because he is afraid that they might otherwise be forgotten, or have never existed.

Then the song’s clouds break to allow in minor sunshine. This is the second section; the first was subtitled “In The Park” and the second “All The Loves Of My Life.” The music relaxes back into a cautious major key as he thinks about his life, about love, how they intertwine, what might happen to him and how, in the end, he goes back to thinking about her – and, crucially (and radically for a sixties love song, even one this late in the decade) cannot understand why.

The music then charges up into the third “Allegro” section, where the spotlight switches to the backing musicians, including Mike Deasy’s lead guitar and Webb himself at the harpsichord, expressing the tumultuous urgency and pain running around inside the singer’s head. Then the orchestra rises up again towards a piteous climax in which Harris returns for a reprise and extension of the chorus, knowing he has lost something that can never be replaced or reproduced, until he is finally overcome by his despair, so much so that the backing singers take over the final high notes prior to the song’s resolution – of sorts.

The subsequent story was almost a rerun of “Like A Rolling Stone.” Columbia turned the record down, and it was eventually released on the Dunhill-ABC label. FM disc jockeys played it and AM disc jockeys were initially reluctant to play it in its entirety because of its length, but were ultimately forced to do so because that was what was happening on FM radio. It became a hit, peaked at number two and sold a million, and The Association had notice of Bones Howe’s resignation.

Webb has always stated that the song was inspired by the relationship he had with Susie Horton, slightly earlier in the sixties. They would regularly meet at MacArthur Park. But there was no angst to draw on here; the couple parted, but amicably, and even after Horton married another man – Linda Ronstadt’s cousin – they remained great friends. After that relationship ended, Webb stayed for a while at the L.A. house of the singer Buddy Greco, and indeed composed “MacArthur Park” on Greco’s piano (returning the favour, Greco would conclude his own stage act with the song for the next four decades).

It is said that Webb’s break-up with Horton was the initial inspiration behind his writing “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” but that was no more than a catalyst; the song was first (and quite fittingly) recorded by Johnny Rivers for an album, then Glen Campbell heard the record and was taken by it – hence it unwittingly became the first chapter in the Webb/Campbell Pentateuch (also including “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” the self-referential “Where’s The Playground, Susie?” and the coolly cathartic “Honey Come Back”). Harris’ album was entitled A Tramp Shining, which summed up its concept fairly neatly – the old man down on his luck, looking back on his life and loves (“Didn’t We?”) but not leaving himself bereft of hope. Beyond its cynosure of “MacArthur Park,” the album is surprisingly quiet and reflective, which provides an excellent counterpoint to its centrepiece.

But what of the song’s wider impact? In 1968 one of the major trends in pop was what I would call orchestral maximalism – in the slipstream of Pepper and Pet Sounds, the objective was to express something as ornately and (preferably) loudly as possible, to re-examine and re-constitute what was then perceived as the model for the popular song. This musical and lyrical tendency would eventually develop, or retreat (depending on your viewpoint), into progressive rock. But in 1968 the boundaries between what one might still term “easy listening” and progressive music were by no means clearcut.

In Britain, the expatriate American Scott Walker led the way, patiently pushing out the MoR envelope with Scott 2, the emotional canvas of which ranged from Brel to psychotropic disorientation. On a more basic level, the likes of Keith Mansfield and Johnny Arthey were hired to provide expansive backdrops for pop groups like Love Affair and Marmalade, but even at this level there was some chafing – Arthey’s work in particular was notable in helping shift the boundaries; in America, “Yesterday Has Gone” was perhaps too subtle a production for Little Anthony and The Imperials, but Cupid’s Inspiration, and particularly their lead singer Terry Rice-Milton, shoved out all the song’s implications into plain sight – their “Yesterday Has Gone” is purposely over the top, but it’s exactly what the song needs (with Rice-Milton’s hysterical interjections – “LIVE FOREVER!,” “FORGET THE PAST!”). And there were always the Bee Gees in the middleground, getting Odessa together. Even Billy Fury punctuated that year with his incredible orchestral take on "Wondrous Place."

In the States, Song Cycle by Van Dyke Parks got close to dismantling the popular song completely. The Four Seasons released the remarkable, and misunderstood, Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. Even Sinatra was drawn into the game with Watertown, which was a sequel of sorts to the Four Seasons record (also written and produced by Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes). Meanwhile, many “MacArthur Park” disciples of records appeared on the market, notably Gene Pitney’s “Billy, You’re My Friend” and Roy Orbison’s “Southbound Jericho Parkway,” which latter is somewhere just beyond extraordinary (and actually quite terrifying in its trembling narrative patience). Indeed, Orbison’s performance reminds us that there has been nothing quite like “MacArthur Park” in this story so far since the time the Big O appeared in it. Even if it were nothing else, Harris makes it clear in his delivery that this is an aria.

There was, of course, a shortlived craze for “long” pop singles, one of which will appear in this list the week after next. But perhaps the two people in Britain who took “MacArthur Park”’s challenge most seriously were the Ryan twins from Leeds, former pin-ups Paul and Barry – at a party in London hosted by Harris, Paul Ryan announced that he was writing songs in the same vein. The two agreed that Paul would write the songs and Barry sing them, and the initial and most explosive result was “Eloise,” a record which helped to inspire, amongst many other things, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” By the end of 1968 it seemed that any notion of The Pop Song, as one’s parents might have known it, was hanging on by the scantiest of threads.

But what did the song mean, and I don’t necessarily confine that to what Webb has told us that it means, since I think it meant a whole lot more than a love affair ending. The metaphorical cake dissolving in the rain was only too real to a lot of people in the America of 1968; note that the record peaked at number two a fortnight after Bobby Kennedy was shot. What had happened to all the promises 1967 had made, not just with music, but to the world? In 1968 it felt that it was all coming apart, from King’s assassination to the Chicago Democratic convention (the latter unforgettably restaged as “Circus ‘68/’69” by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra the following April), via LBJ’s decision not to run again, all set against the seemingly unending backdrop of Vietnam and an older, more conservative constituency intent on sidelining the young forever. In this context it is hard not to view “MacArthur Park” as a requiem for a world that nearly was. It hit hard to those with ears generous enough to receive it. In that sense it is not too dissimilar from “Surf’s Up” (the phrase “Are you sleeping, brother John?” spells out what the song is really about), but where Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks allow that song to end with a ray of hope and optimism (the child being father to the man, etc.) – was there ever a pop record that ended with such a powerful, unambiguous, decisive and frightening expression of “NO!”?

The world turned, and later in 1968 Webb and Harris made a second album, the exceptional The Yard Went On Forever, which – again, depending on which way you look at it – is a seamless half-hour meditation on life after a divorce, or the end of a love affair, or the world after a nuclear war. Apart from the suitably bleak 1969 non-album single “One Of The Nicer Things,” Harris would not release another album until 1971’s My Boy, which was swiftly followed by 1972’s Slides – both excellent records with significant (though not sole) input from Webb. But there is no getting away from the central “NO” of “MacArthur Park,” splitting its environment as surely as Westlake Avenue divides the real MacArthur Park. A decade later, Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder realised that the only way to deal with the song’s challenge was to laugh right in its face and escort it to the last disco in town. And yet an underlying hope doesn't fade. Not just yet.

Date Record Made Number Two: 22 June 1968

Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 1

Record At Number One: “This Guy’s In Love With You” by Herb Alpert

UK Chart Position: 4