16

MacArthur Park

I’ll have that, Jimmy Webb.

—RICHARD HARRIS

As thirty-four-year-old Bones Howe zipped his way through morning Hollywood traffic one day during the fall of 1967 in his red Alpha Romeo convertible—an unexpected, middle-of-the-night Christmas gift from the four members of the Mamas & the Papas—the tall, rail-thin onetime Georgia Tech engineering grad had a lot on his mind. Having recently ventured out on his own as an independent producer, after years of being one of the best studio soundboard men in the business, Howe had just started work on the all-important second album by the 5th Dimension, The Magic Garden. Not wanting any kind of sophomore jinx to happen on his watch after their breakout success with the Up, Up and Away LP, Howe had been mentally mapping out each song, and he was eager to get to Western Recorders to continue cutting all the basic tracks with the Wrecking Crew.

Stopping off en route to pick up the songwriter Jimmy Webb, who had composed all of the music for the project, Howe saw Webb motioning for him to come inside.

“Bones, I’ve got the greatest idea for the Association,” Webb said excitedly, sitting down at the piano in his living room. Howe’s first solo production effort had been for that very band several months before, and the resulting album, Insight Out, had gone gold, with two Top 5 singles leading the charge (“Windy” and “Never My Love”). Juggling several projects at once, he was now in preproduction on their next LP, to be called Birthday.

“Listen to this,” Webb enthused as he began to play. “It’s written to be the entire side of an album. I’m calling it The Cantata.”

As Howe followed along, he found himself knocked out by the beauty and intricacy of the piece. Compositions like this just didn’t come along every day. Not in a pop context, anyway.

“That is fantastic, Jimmy.” Howe said as Webb finished. “I have a meeting later this week with the guys in the band at the studio. I’ll take you over there and I want you to play it for them.”

With the talented tandem of Webb and Howe firmly behind the song, it seemed as though the Association’s next hit record was all but assured. Now the band members just needed to give it their approval.

*   *   *

As Jimmy Webb sat down at the Steinway Grand in Western 3 to demo The Cantata for the Association, expectations were running high. Earlier that day, Bones Howe had told the band about Webb’s marvelous new composition, that it would perfectly match his vision for their voices. And they were looking forward to hearing it. But they were also leery.

By this, their fourth album, the six members of the Association were becoming ever more restive and resentful; they wanted to record as many of their own songs as possible. They also wanted to play their own instruments as a band in the studio, something they were never permitted to do. Howe considered them to be excellent singers, specifically in terms of their vocal blend. He did not, however, consider them to be excellent instrumentalists. They were capable enough for playing live gigs but not for the exacting demands of cutting a record. “I have to run the sessions my way, with my musicians,” Howe had made clear to the Association’s manager when they all started working together.

When the red light went on and the tape started rolling, Howe wanted his favorite Wrecking Crew rhythm section of Hal Blaine, Joe Osborn, and Larry Knechtel laying down the groove, no substitutions allowed. He also wanted some combination of Dennis Budimir, Al Casey, Mike Deasy, and Tommy Tedesco on the guitars. Howe’s job, as he saw it, was to create a hit record. And to that end, only the best would do.

While Webb played the roughly twenty-minute musical arrangement on the battered and scarred yet exquisite-sounding old piano that had been in the studio for years (the same one Webb had so nervously sat behind two years before on Johnny Rivers’s version of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”), he carefully explained along the way where the instrumental interludes and the vocals should be inserted. Howe, for one, was enthralled. This is going to be great, he thought. It’s the ideal vehicle to showcase the Association’s unique harmony-singing abilities.

But the boys in the band had other ideas. At the conclusion of Webb’s mini-concert, one of the guys politely said, “Okay, Jimmy, thanks very much. Could you wait outside? We’d like to talk it over as a group.”

With Webb safely out of earshot, Terry Kirkman, the group’s leader and the talented songwriter behind “Cherish,” their number-one hit from the year before, along with the rhythm guitarist, Russ Giguere, were the first to offer their opinions.

“Man, any two guys in this band could write something better than that,” Giguere said, with Kirkman adding that it was “too long.”

Howe was stunned. He was sure the suite of interconnected songs would be an automatic. Looking at the half-dozen faces in front of him, however, he could see that they were all in assent. The producer’s standing agreement with the band was that if either he or they didn’t like a piece of material, then it wouldn’t be recorded. And for reasons that he couldn’t fully comprehend, the Association had just voted him down, six thumbs to one.

Breaking the news to the anxious Webb waiting outside in the hall, Howe tried to soften the blow as much as possible.

“Well, you know,” he offered, “the group just doesn’t want to give up a whole side of an album.”

A dejected Webb said he understood, though his eyes indicated otherwise. Sensitive by nature, most songwriters can’t help but take rejection personally. Especially when the work is so heartfelt and autobiographical, as with The Cantata. Still pining for his ex-girlfriend Susan—the one who had inspired him to write “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”—Webb had created this Baroque-style song cycle about her, too. And it needed to somehow find a good home.

“Thanks anyway, Bones,” he said. “At least you tried.”

*   *   *

A couple of months after the deflating turn of events in the studio with the Association, Jimmy Webb found himself playing the piano one evening at a fund-raiser he had agreed to attend in West LA. While the well-heeled crowd mingled and drank, Webb informally entertained them on the ivories with both his own repertoire and some personal favorites from the Great American Songbook. As the evening rolled along, Webb, out of the corner of his eye, happened to notice a looming figure approach. Someone who seemed like he had something on his mind.

“Do ya know any good Irish pub songs, lad?” came the booming brogue of an obviously inebriated man. “I’m lookin’ to sing me some ‘Molly Malone’ or ‘Rocky Road to Dublin.’”

Recognizing the rugged, party-worn face to be that of the well-known actor Richard Harris, he of King Arthur in Camelot, Webb obligingly launched into comping his way through a few tunes that he vaguely recalled. As the vodka flowed and the ditties rolled, the unlikely duo began taking a shine to each other. So much so that, with a twinkle in his eye, Harris remarked just before leaving, “Let’s make a record, Jimmy Webb.”

Focused on his career, Webb subsequently shrugged off the evening’s encounter, paying Harris’s comment little heed. Following his recent release from contractual obligations with Johnny Rivers, Webb already had a busy existence as a freelancer, with songs to write and pitch. And Hollywood party talk was usually just that, anyway—talk. Then, several weeks later, a telegram arrived.

JIMMY WEBB, COME TO LONDON AND MAKE A RECORD. LOVE, RICHARD.

And so Webb did.

Or at least he flew to London with the actor footing the bill to see whether there was any suitable material worth recording. Harris, though he had sung a little here and there in the movies and onstage, was hardly known as a professional vocalist. But he had ambitions—and very selective tastes. Over pitchers of Pimm’s Cup (a libation made in England from dry gin, liqueur, fruit juices, and spices), Webb played and sang every song he had to his name. But with nothing catching the fancy of the gregarious, high-octane Limerick, Ireland, native, Webb then looked one last time into the leather sheet music satchel he had brought with him. At the bottom sat The Cantata.

With some dread, he pulled it out and began to play. It had already been rejected once by a big-time act. He was wary of getting his feelings bruised all over again. But it was all he had left. As Webb sang a particularly poignant and poetic section of the lengthy piece about, among other things, someone leaving a cake out in the rain, his host’s eyes grew moist.

“I’ll have that, Jimmy Webb.”

*   *   *

In the middle of the night, at his palatial Castilian Drive home high up in the Hollywood Hills, Hal Blaine heard his telephone ring. And ring and ring.

Jolted from a deep sleep, the thirty-nine-year-old drummer groggily guessed that it must be some kind of an emergency. If it were any kind of a regular recording-session call, it would have gone through his answering service. He fumbled for the receiver.

“Hello?” he mumbled.

“Hal Blaine?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Richard Harris.”

A couple of weeks before, Jimmy Webb had phoned Blaine from London, telling him that he had met an actor. They were going to do an album together and Webb wanted Blaine to fly over and play the drums on the project. By this time, having worked together on the 5th Dimension’s first two albums, the two had become good friends. And Webb, like just about everybody else in town, wanted Blaine’s skills on everything he did.

“Sure, I’d be glad to, Jimmy,” Blaine had said. “I just need some lead time. I’m booked solid around three or four months ahead right now.”

Webb agreed, Blaine went about his business, and suddenly, two weeks later, Richard Harris was on the line.

“We’ve got a seat reserved for you on a TWA flight out of LAX tomorrow,” the actor said.

“Oh, my God,” Blaine replied, sitting upright. “You know, I thought I was going to get some notice on this thing.”

After some fast-talking and adept schedule shifting by Blaine’s trusty secretary, the next thing the drummer knew, he was sitting across the breakfast table from Harris inside the thespian’s opulent London apartment. As they ate and chatted, Harris had an important question on his mind.

“Hal, you came highly recommended to me by Jimmy Webb. Do you know any other good musicians like yourself that we could get to come over here and play on this project?”

For Blaine, the surprises just kept on coming. He assumed that Harris or Webb or at least somebody had already booked all the players.

“Well, jeez, Richard, I do know a lot of guys, “ Blaine responded. “But they’re like me, usually busy months in advance.”

Then Harris asked his other question.

“Uh, one more thing. Do you happen to know of any good studios over here?”

There obviously wasn’t going to be any recording done in England. Nothing had even been scheduled. Webb had cooked up an elaborate plan with Harris to get Blaine to fly over for what essentially would be a ten-day vacation. Blaine never seemed to take time off and his friend Webb wanted him to start enjoying life for a change. For the next week and a half, the trio caroused about merry old London like their very lives depended on it.

But the threesome would also soon reconvene for real back in Los Angeles, along with several other members of the Wrecking Crew, where they would see about proving the Association wrong.

*   *   *

By the middle of 1968, popular music was changing once again. In fact it was getting downright heavy. In the aftermath of the recent Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., slayings, the bloody Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the ever-growing level of campus unrest at universities around the country, Top 40 AM radio gradually began to lose step with the times.

In response, so-called underground FM stations like KSAN in San Francisco, WNEW in New York, and both KMET and KLOS in Los Angeles began easing into the mix, clearly distinguishing their formats from the frenetic presentations and three-minute song limits favored by their mono brethren. Instead, this new kind of progressive, free-form radio specialized in playing many seldom-heard album cuts, along with longer versions of some of the hit songs that did make the regular singles charts from bands like Iron Butterfly (“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”), the Chambers Brothers (“Time Has Come Today”), and Creedence Clearwater Revival (“Suzie Q”). Pioneering disc jockeys like Tom Donahue, Scott Muni, Jim Ladd, Raechel Donahue (Tom’s wife), and Dusty Street played whatever they wanted, when they wanted.

Gathering at the noted engineer Armin Steiner’s Sound Recorders on Selma Avenue in Hollywood in mid-May of 1968, Hal Blaine, Mike Deasy, Larry Knechtel, Joe Osborn, Jimmy Webb, and the redoubtable Richard Harris set about making some music. With the entire album, A Tramp Shining, written, arranged, and produced by Jimmy Webb, it was the twenty-one-year-old’s baby all the way. And with it finally came a home for The Cantata.

As the recording progressed over several days, it all built toward a critical mass, to the one piece that had caught Harris’s attention back in London. Called “MacArthur Park” (written as the final movement of The Cantata), it also put the Wrecking Crew’s skills to the test like no song before it. A spectacular production with innumerable complex chords and polyrhythms, it was the furthest thing possible from a normal rock-and-roll date. And they simply loved it.

With Knechtel channeling the likes of Handel and Vivaldi on piano and with Webb sitting right next to him on harpsichord, they were joined by Blaine keeping rock-solid time in a variety of changing signatures and Osborn just staring at the charts, moving his fingers up and down the neck of his bass as fast as he could. It was the musical challenge of a professional lifetime; for once, the Wrecking Crew were able to stretch and really strut their stuff. After they ran through the lengthy song over and over until they could play everything perfectly from beginning to end without stopping, the tenth take proved to be the keeper. Webb wanted to avoid any after-the-fact editing at all costs. One slip of the razor blade on the cutting block and the delicate sixteen-track tape easily could be ruined.

After Harris added his dramatic vocal reading, where through either stubbornness or too much alcohol—with a pint next to him at all times—he incorrectly kept singing the lyrics as “MacArthur’s Park,” the recording was almost complete. Webb then brought in a myriad of horns and strings to put the lush finishing touches on what had become his personal masterpiece. Now it would be a matter of getting some airplay.

By this time, with a passel of Grammys to his credit, Jimmy Webb had a name that could open doors in the music world. Taking advantage of this, Dunhill Records, Harris’s label, did their best to talk KHJ into putting “MacArthur Park” into immediate rotation. The station had enjoyed great success with the Webb-penned “Up, Up and Away,” and Dunhill execs hoped KHJ would see the same promise in his latest composition. And they did, except for one thing: It was too long. Way too long. At well over seven minutes, it was positively colossal, clocking in at twice the length of almost any other song on their playlist.

Webb then received a phone call from Ron Jacobs at KHJ.

“Jimmy, we’ll go on ‘MacArthur Park’,” he said, “but you’ll have to edit it down for us.”

When Jacobs had initially listened to the song, he found it hard to believe that it was really by Richard Harris. It was like nothing Jacobs had heard before, certainly not by some actor. And unlike his experience with “California Dreamin’,” he immediately recognized that Webb’s uniquely crafted production had all the earmarks of becoming an instant Top 40 smash. But first there was the little matter of trimming it all down to workable AM radio size.

A resolute Jimmy Webb, however, very much had other ideas about how “MacArthur Park” was to be treated.

“No, I’m not going to do that,” he replied.

Jacobs was taken aback. Turning down a guaranteed “add” on powerful KHJ was tantamount to heresy, at least by music business standards. Nobody did that.

“Do you realize what you’re doing, then?” the gruff program director practically snorted through the receiver. “You’re throwing away a hit record.”

Despite the rosy promise of commercial success that so tantalizingly lay before him, Webb’s artistic integrity was now on the line, too. And that he could not compromise, hit or no hit. Being true to his songs meant everything to him.

“Well, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to edit it because it is what it is.”

But the promotions men at Dunhill were savvy. They knew ahead of time that the length might be a problem. So they also pitched “MacArthur Park” to a bunch of underground FM stations, who jumped all over it. The song then built such a buzz in such a short period that within a week KHJ broke its own rules and added all seven minutes and twenty-one seconds of it anyway.

From there, it would take barely a month for the epic recording to go all the way to number two in the country, sandwiched between a couple of other Wrecking Crew efforts: “This Guy’s in Love with You” by Herb Alpert and “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon and Garfunkel. Webb also won the 1968 Grammy for best arrangement accompanying vocalist(s), beating out, among others, the Association.

Webb’s creation additionally generated another unexpected consequence, one that would begin to subtly affect the Wrecking Crew’s livelihood. Because the song had broken through the AM radio barrier, it had suddenly made it okay for lengthier songs to make the playlist. And the longer each song, the fewer minutes left during each hour for the station to play other songs. That was the unfair, mathematical irony of the whole equation; the Wrecking Crew had just played their hearts out on an all-time award-winning hit, yet its very success directly contributed toward a drop in the total number of songs making it on the air. And with fewer songs finding airtime, there gradually evolved a diminishing number of rock-and-roll recording dates for them to play on. The days of the three-minute (or less) single were fading. But for several in the Wrecking Crew, despite these changes in the business, arguably their greatest recording glory lay just around the corner.