With his rich, deep, gravelly voice, Richard Harris took the poetic words of songwriter Jimmy Webb and turned ‘Macarthur Park’ into an unlikely worldwide hit.
Jimmy Webb was born in 1946 in Elk City, Oklahoma, the son of a Baptist minister. He learned to play the piano and organ at a very young age and played in the choir of his father’s churches, accompanied by his father on guitar and his mother on accordion. His home life was conservative and religious, and radio play was restricted to country and gospel music. During the 1960s he started writing songs that were influenced by church music on the one hand and Elvis Presley on the other.
In 1964, the family moved to Southern California where he attended San Bernadino Valley College. He studied music after which he decided to pursue a career as a songwriter. His father warned him that ‘this songwriting thing is going to break your heart’, but gave him $40 and told him that it was all he had. Little did his father realise it would be the best investment he would ever make.
In 1966 Jimmy met singer and producer Johnny Rivers, who signed him to a publishing deal and recorded Webb’s song ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ on his album Changes. The following year, Rivers asked the young writer for songs for a new group, The 5th Dimension, and he came up with five songs for the album entitled Up, Up and Away.
The title song was released as a single in May 1967 and reached the top ten, and the group’s follow-up album the same year contained eleven of Webb’s songs. In November, Glen Campbell released his version of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, which reached number twenty-six in the Billboard Chart and became a pop standard. Webb’s songs landed eight Grammies at the awards ceremony that year.
The following year, Time magazine recognised the songwriter’s range and proficiency and ‘a gift for varied rhythms, inventive structures and rich, sometimes surprising harmonies’. That year there was further success with 5th Dimension, and Glen Campbell’s single written by Webb, ‘Wichita Linesman’, sold over a million copies. That $40 had gone a long way and Webb decided to form his own production and publishing company.
His first project would come in the shape of the most unlikely musical source, an actor from Limerick by the name of Richard Harris. Webb had written a song called ‘MacArthur Park’, inspired by his break-up with his girlfriend Susan Ronstadt, a cousin of the singer Linda Ronstadt. In the first flush of love they used to meet in the park in the Westlake district of Los Angeles, named after the famous American general Douglas MacArthur. At the time, Ronstadt worked for an insurance company, the offices of which were located in a street just opposite the park.
In the summer of 1967 Webb had written a twenty-two-minute cantata that ended with a seven-minute coda called MacArthur Park. It was a song redolent of the good memories of a love affair in the abiding image of the place of meetings and the bittersweet aftermath of the loss. Nothing new, perhaps, in the arena of love songs, but Webb departed from the normal structure and convention of the three-minute, radio-friendly pop song. The song began as a poem about love and then progressed into a lover’s lament. The lyrics were pitched to be symbolic. His musical influence, quite apart from the emotion involved, or maybe because of it, was cantata - a vocal composition with instrumental composition, typically in several movements, often involving a choir. Radically different was the length - over seven minutes: radio-play friendly it was not.
There was also the matter of the lyrics, which could have been seen as somewhat cheesy and sentimental - leaving the cake out in the rain and it took so long to bake it, a case in point. Webb would say later: ‘The lyrics were very real to me, there was nothing psychedelic to me. The cake was an available object. I saw it at the park on birthday parties. But people have strong reactions to the song. There has been a lot of intellectual venom.’
At the time, Webb probably did not have a chance of getting any singer to record it, but sometimes an artist has to follow his instinct and forget the challenges to his expression, and this is the path Webb followed. He offered it to Bones Howe, the producer of a band called The Association, for possible inclusion in their fourth album. He loved it but the band rejected it on account of its length. It appeared that the song would not get an airing.
Richard Harris met Webb at a fundraiser in East Lost Angeles in late 1967. The songwriter had been invited to provide a musical backdrop on the piano. He explained the genesis of the collaboration:
I met Richard on the stage of the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles where we were doing an anti-war pageant involving Walter Pidgeon, Edward G. Robinson, Mia Farrow and some other people, and I was doing the music. In our off-time, we used to play the piano backstage, sing and have a few beers.
Richard and I got to be really good friends and we were tossing the idea about that wow one of these days we ought to make a record. I used to say that to everybody. One day I got a telegram over at my house on Camino Palermo. ‘Dear Jimmy Webb, come to London, make a record, Love, Richard.’ It was the first time I was ever out of the country. I got on a 707 and flew to London and started to do this record with Richard. MacArthur Park was in the pile but we had a lot of songs we were interested in doing.
The album was A Tramp Shining and some people wondered why would you get an actor who was a singer. He was a singer. He had just done a very successful top grossing movie, a musical version of Camelot. He had sung all the Lerner and Loewe stuff. He wasn’t perfect but he had sung it. He had gotten through the score and it was considered successful. I thought I could make a record with him.
He knew every Irish song that I had ever heard, he could and did sing all of them. His favourite drink was Black Velvet, champagne and Guinness, and after a couple of them he would start singing Irish songs. I still know a lot of them he taught me. We ended up making a very successful album, it would be hard to find a more successful album. He brought a great sense of theatrical dignity to ‘MacArthur Park’. If he missed a note or he didn’t carry it off particularly well as a singer, he had the actor’s ability to step his way through the lyric, speak some of the lines and carry it off.
He did carry it off and met his match in terms of not giving a damn about convention.
Webb found Harris a very positive energetic presence, driven to do everything in the present as if there was some imaginary sword of Damocles hanging over him. And that he needed the involvement and focus of work to avoid getting into trouble, as Harris put it to a Daily Mail reporter: ‘It’s boredom, frustration, not drink that makes me aggressive … I felt so ashamed after the last fight, I swore it would be the last time. The worst thing I do in life was nothing. There must always be a new challenge.’
After listening to all Webb’s compositions Harris selected ‘MacArthur Park’ as his pop-music debut, as part of an album of all Webb songs entitled A Tramp Shining. ‘MacArthur Park’ would prove the most challenging.
Webb, possibly influenced by ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ by The Beatles, envisaged big sweeping arrangements, combining a full thirty-five-member orchestra as well as a range of top session musicians. The cost for a debut album by an unrecognised singer was prohibitive for a record company and Columbia passed. Webb’s ABC Dunhill came in with a funding deal and the songwriter returned to Los Angeles to start the project at Sound Recorders. The Harris recording of the song was planned and executed in four sections or movements: a mid-tempo arrangement, called ‘In the Park’, in original session notes built around piano and harpsichord and with horns and orchestra coming in; at about two and a half minutes into the song, it shifts to a slow tempo and quiet arrangement, parted with an alternative lyric ‘After the loves of my life’; at about five minutes in there is a sudden switch to an up-tempo instrumental section, allegro, led by drums and percussion and punctuated by horn riffs, building up to an orchestral climax; at about six and a half minutes, a reprise of the first section’s arrangement accompanying final choruses and another climax.
The recording was made on 21 December 1967 at Armin Steiner Recorders in Hollywood, with more work done on 29 and 30 December. Musicians in the original studio recording included members of the famous Wrecking Crew of LA-based musicians who played on many hits of the 1960s and 1970s including Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on keyboards, Joe Osborne on bass guitar and Mike Deasey on guitar, with Webb on harpsichord.
If ever a song could have been written by or for Harris, this was it. It summed up a lot of the sentiments of his romantic life, by coincidence perhaps as opposed to design. He sang it with the required passion but also the distance that underlines its emotion and thus its effect. Little wonder it was a big hit.
As the songwriter observed, the song had been long in his own experience when Harris got to it, but Harris put so much into it that he made it seem like his own. Webb saw that this suited the project and the synchronicity was to both their advantage. He watched his own songs delivered with, as he put it, ‘incredible vocal sensitivity’.
Webb had put down the backing tracks in a studio in Los Angeles and immediately afterwards came to Ireland with them to record the vocals. First he was brought to Limerick and Kilkee and then back to stay with Harris in a rented house in Dublin. The songs for the album A Tramp Shining were recorded in Lansdowne Studios.
Webb found it a very pleasant task working with the actor. Though Harris brought a bottle of Pimm’s to the studio every day, it was only to wet his whistle and he was totally focused on delivering a top-class performance, which he did. ‘MacArthur Park’ stood out amongst the tracks, with its sweeping and dramatic orchestral arrangements, but it was very long. This made the record label nervous that it would not get airplay. Efforts were made to reduce the time but Harris and Webb stood their ground and won the battle.
It is quite possible that the song might never have been recorded if not for the actor’s passion and commitment. That is not to suggest any weakness on Webb’s part, but he was sixteen years younger than Harris and was taking the first step with his own production and publishing company in an industry notorious for exploitation and control. Harris’s uncompromising nature in an equally exploitative industry provided great comfort to the young songwriter in what was, and would prove to be, a very fruitful creative relationship. Both were highly accomplished in their respective professions, but it could have been viewed that Harris was not a recognised singer - as other interpreters of Webb’s songs had been. Both would confound any critical doubts with their passion, which can upset the predictions of the most hardened doubters. Webb and Harris were not lacking in that department. Though coming from entirely different directions and disciplines, in their collaboration they were personal and musical soul brothers and uncompromising in their vision.
Whatever doubts that might arise about the album would rest with the single release of ‘MacArthur Park’. Webb recalls:
I was fortunate. If it wasn’t for FM ‘underground’ radio ‘MacArthur Park’ would never have been broken as a single because the Top 40 was not going to play it. It was seven minutes twenty seconds long. I remember Ron Jacobs calling me from KHJ in Los Angeles and saying they would go with ‘MacArthur Park’ but you have to edit it for us and I said that I’m not going to do that. He told me that you realise what you are doing - you are throwing away a hit record. I replied that I was not going to do it because that was what the song was.
A week later they were on it. As soon as a station like KHJ started playing ‘MacArthur Park’ in its entirety, forget it - it rolled across the country - it was inescapable.
‘MacArthur Park’ as a single proved to be a massive success, topping the charts in Europe and Australia and reaching number two in the US Billboard Chart, while A Tramp Shining would remain in the same chart for a year. Another collaboration followed with the album The Yard Went On Forever, which peaked at number twenty-seven in the Billboard Chart but was considered by many critics to be superior to A Tramp Shining.
The obvious question is if either album was of its period or somehow stands the test of time. Thirty-five years on, Bruce Eder of AllMusic gave his considered opinion as an entirely credible critic with no axe to grind and entirely objectively. Giving A Tramp Shining four out of five stars, this was his assessment: ‘A great record, even 35 years later, encompassing pop, rock, elements of classical music and even pop-soul in a body of bitter-sweet romantic songs by Webb, all preserved in a consistently affecting and powerful vocal performance by Harris marked by its sheer bravado.’ Assessing the singer’s rendition of ‘Didn’t We’:
Harris treaded into Frank Sinatra territory here and he did it with a voice not remotely as good or well-trained as his, yet he pulled it off by sheer bravado and his ability as an actor, coupled with his vocal talents - his performance was manly and vulnerable enough to make women swoon but powerful and manly enough to allow their husbands and boyfriends to feel okay listening to a man’s man like Harris singing on such matters.
Eder also was impressed by Webb’s arrangements: ‘some of the lushest ever heard on a pop album of the period.’ He concluded: ‘Strangely enough, MacArthur Park - the massive hit of the album – is not that representative of the rest of the record, which relies more on strings than base or drums than brass or horns and has a somewhat lower-key feel but also a great deal more subtlety.’
Eder was even more effusive about The Yard Went On Forever, assessing it as other critics did as a stronger album:
Recorded a year after the hit record, it was conceived by Webb as a Harris project from the beginning, so the register is right and his singing voice slips perfectly into each song - the lyrics are dazzling in their cascading imagery and the music is richer and more vividly conceived and recorded, and the entire album works magnificently, juxtaposing grandeur of expression and intimacy of feeling at different moments, all most effectively.
The Billboard review of the time confirmed this assessment: ‘Webb’s material is treated with class and finesse by Harris. The track Lucky Me was “a shimmering gem”.’
There was a symbiotic relationship between singer and songwriter that would not become parallel into their respective experience until the next decade after their brilliant success. Webb puts it this way: ‘In the ’70s I lost it pretty badly, but unlike some others, I never wanted to die - not really.’ He said that he had never performed on stage even ‘remotely sober’.
Webb and Harris had met at a time when neither of their personal demons were in the ascendancy, but both had similar inclinations in that regard. Webb recalls his own: ‘When you are in your early twenties, nobody can tell you anything, you’re burning through this money and you think you are going to always be able to write hit songs and the world is always going to be the way you want it to be.’
He went to say he hadn’t a smidgeon of co-operation in him and he made life difficult for everybody. As it transpired that was not the case with Richard Harris; their collaboration was fruitful in every sense, and that probably had to do with the fact that they were two free spirits working in tandem with similar personality traits - ‘us’ against the world. In addition, there was the circumstance that Harris was hugely successful in his own right at the time, but not at all proprietorial towards his young and successful collaborator. Both were cognisant and admiring of each other’s individual talents. A perfect match, as it transpired, brought about by the instinct of the actor to think about and grasp the moment.
The unfortunate thing in relation to Harris was that the media, particularly the print hounds, were not interested in anything about him but his private life or his partying image. As he put it to writer Robert Ottaway in an interview for the TV Times: ‘Acting is not enough. Singing, especially if you have written the songs yourself, is a great form of expression.’ But he complained that only his acting or brawling made the headlines: ‘I was in New York recently to read some of my poems to the city’s Poetry Society. It gave me the greatest creative satisfaction I’ve ever had. A few days later I went on a pub crawl, and that’s what the papers covered. Not a mention of my poetry reading.’
The endurance of ‘MacArthur Park’ in spite of critical attention on the lyrics was more than proved by the fact that it was covered more than fifty times by high-profile artists (among others) such as Frank Sinatra, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Liza Minnelli, Andy Willliams, Sammy Davis Jnr, Justin Hayward, Waylon Jennings and Donna Summer, whose version hit number one in the Billboard Chart.