By RICHARD WOLFE*
Reviews of the career of the late actor Richard Harris have noted his many roles on stage and screen, most recently as Dumbledore, Harry Potter's headmaster at Hogworts. But, perhaps intentionally, all have kindly overlooked one of Harris' more sizeable contributions to the world of entertainment.
In the late
1960s, in between being harassed by Sioux in A Man Called Horse and swinging King Arthur's Excalibur in Camelot, he moved from in front of the camera to behind the microphone to record what has been described as one of the worst songs ever, a rambling epic entitled MacArthur Park.
The title of Harris' song refers to one of Los Angeles' first public parks, 13ha of lake and gardens on Wilshire Boulevard, between downtown and Santa Monica. It was renamed in 1942 after the famous World War II general, and the Official Guidebook to the so-called City of the Angels advises that it is "not recommended for night-time strolls".
Perhaps it should have added that for those seeking musical inspiration, MacArthur Park is also a place to stay well away from.
Harris didn't actually write MacArthur Park, but that is no defence. Words and music were provided by tunesmith Jimmy Webb, whose earlier subjects were comforting slices of Americana, including a telegraph worker at Wichita, getting to Phoenix and escaping in beautiful balloons.
These well-crafted and infectious numbers sustained careers and filled albums by such artists as Glenn Campbell, Johnny Rivers and the Fifth Dimension. But by 1968 an extra dimension had crept into tin-pan alley. Pop lyrics had diversified and songs needed to get longer just to keep up with them.
Bob Dylan had shown the way by bringing mystery tramps, Siamese cats and other unlikely individuals into the top 10, and Webb decided that he, too, would tap the spirit of the times. He turned to the kitchen for his inspiration and cooked up a song of symphonic proportions, seven minutes and 20 seconds of inflated lyrics urged on by hyperactive orchestration.
If for no other reason, MacArthur Park deserves to be remembered for the line, "Someone left the cake out in the rain". Building on this surreal and soggy image, with mounting anxiety, Harris revealed that the cake in question had taken a long time to bake and, what's more, there would be no seconds for he had mislaid the recipe.
But there was a lot more going down at the park that day. The song was about to unleash a string of shocking similes in which a yellow cotton dress foamed "like a wave on the ground" and birds were "like tender babies in your hands". Meanwhile, old men sat playing checkers by the trees.
Gently upping the tempo, Harris then sang of "another song", which we can only hope would not be as long or as unfathomable as this one. But the end was near, for after all the loves of his life he would be "thinking of you" and, just like his listeners, "wondering why".
Fortunately, there was a chorus to bring the whole experience back to Earth. But there was also a very sticky problem, for "MacArthur's Park" was "melting in the dark, all the sweet green icing flowing down ... " Perhaps this explains Harris' final utterances, an extended "Oh, no" in painfully mounting falsetto.
The singer delivers the whole sad saga in a breathless and - it is to be hoped - mock serious manner. Three-quarters of the way through, he takes a well-earned break to compose himself, allowing a lengthy instrumental interlude to take over and maintain the pretence.
Richard Harris made 72 movies, but to his credit only one song like MacArthur Park. In terms of his life's work, it can best be described as hogwash rather than Hogwort. If nothing else, it is a magnificent tribute to excess, simultaneously half-baked and overdone and, at a guess, dealing with the universal themes of unrequited love and failed baking.
In its support, perhaps it was less a bad piece of late 1960s music than a warning of things to come, as witnessed by the next decade's flared trousers and clinging crimplene.
Some would say the song got its just deserts in 1978 when it was turned into a disco anthem by Donna Summer. Others with a better grip on history might recall General Douglas MacArthur's famous promise to return, and worry that we haven't yet heard the last of the song he inadvertently inspired.
* Richard Wolfe is an Auckland writer of children's and Kiwi-culture books. Rudman's City will return next Wednesday.
By RICHARD WOLFE*
Reviews of the career of the late actor Richard Harris have noted his many roles on stage and screen, most recently as Dumbledore, Harry Potter's headmaster at Hogworts. But, perhaps intentionally, all have kindly overlooked one of Harris' more sizeable contributions to the world of entertainment.
In the late
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