The Story Behind The Song: ‘MacArthur Park’, the worst song ever or a success unrivalled?
Over the years, plenty of actors have made the jump to recording for a career as musicians. While there are some notable examples of where this has gone catastrophically badly, with stars of the screen such as Corey Feldman and Steven Seagal having had dire outputs in the music business, there are others who seem to effortlessly float between the two professions in a way that makes audiences wonder where their talents truly end.
One more unusual example of the latter kind is Richard Harris, a noted stage and screen performer, who had roles in This Sporting Life, The Guns of Navarone, and the first two entries in the Harry Potter series. While one might remember him more for his acting prowess, the Irish actor’s most notable impression on the charts was with the bizarre seven-minute epic, ‘MacArthur Park’.
Written by Jimmy Webb, an illustrious songwriter best known for his work alongside artists such as Glen Campbell, Linda Ronstadt and Carly Simon, the song is a sprawling and surreal trip through symphonic pop and folk music. But the question that most ask is why he ended up offering such a complex and unusual song to an unproven talent in the music world? Harris may have had extraordinary acting chops, but as a vocalist, he was an unknown entity when he released the song in 1968.
The track had been floating around without any takers for several years prior to Harris’ recording. Webb had offered it to pop group The Association, best known for their hits ‘Windy’ and ‘Cherish’, who rejected it due to its unconventional nature. They claimed that the surreal lyrical content and its unwieldiness in terms of structure weren’t suited to them as a group.
Webb was still determined to record the song with someone, and when he met Harris at a theatre production in Los Angeles in the summer of 1967, he probably didn’t immediately think he’d found the perfect candidate. However, the two bonded over their love of music and, in their downtime, would tinker around with the piano.
Harris would later send a telegram to Webb once he had returned home, inviting him to London to jump on a record with him. Webb had never left the States at this point and immediately took him up on the offer. They actually ended up recording two albums’ worth of material, which formed Harris’ first two studio albums, A Tramp Shining and The Yard Went on Forever, and among the songs on the first of the two was ‘MacArthur Park’.
What many people don’t realise about Harris is that he was a trained singer as well as an actor with prior experience singing in a musical adaptation of Camelot in 1966. Webb didn’t consider working alongside him to be any different to working with a more notable musician and, therefore, never called into question the reaction that the song would receive.
It was far from being a vanity project for Harris, and while his vocals occasionally stray off-key or feel strained, his rendition of the song is full of heart and passion. The unusual aspects of the song, most notably the absurd lyrics about heartbreak that use metaphors of cakes being left out in the rain and the titular park “melting in the dark, all the sweet green icing flowing down”, are often the stumbling blocks that listeners struggle to get beyond. However, the ambitious nature of the track, with its multiple movements and mood shifts, is what makes it an underappreciated masterpiece.
The track performed well on the charts, both sides of the Atlantic, and while many think of it as an oddity of sorts, it’s actually a masterpiece that was way ahead of its time. The fact that the song lives on in the form of countless covers from the likes of Donna Summer, and has also featured in films such as 2024’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice suggests that there’s still a faction of people who think it’s an incredible track worthy of reappraisal. The collaboration between Webb and Harris was a match made in heaven, and in an interview with Songfacts after Harris’ passing, Webb praised his ability as a vocalist for how it was never perfect, but was always full of character.
“He brought a great kind of theatrical dignity to ‘MacArthur Park’ and to those songs,” Webb professed. “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 and to speak some of the lines and basically to carry it off.” As peculiar as it might seem to listeners, it’s a true hidden gem and a prime example of an actor expertly stepping into the music industry without embarrassing themself.
