How Richard Harris’ huge 1960s hit became known as “the worst song of all time”
Lord knows what the worst song of all time sounds like or what misery it wreaks, but Richard Harris’ ‘MacArthur Park’ isn’t it. It is far too odd to be traditionally bad. Granted, it is sung by a man who previously hadn’t even chirped much of a tune in the shower (and that shows), and its largely incomprehensible, but it reached number four in the UK charts and was narrowly pipped to the top spot in the US by Herb Alpert’s ‘This Guy’s in Love With You’, so surely – even in a world where there mightn’t be much correlation between art and chart – that saves it from being burnt at the stake and sent to the ash heap of history as the worst song to ever befall us?
This begs the question: why in the trickle-down of cultural history, has it found itself being called “the worst song of all time” so often? Well, as is often the case, the first stone thrown came with a political angle. The track was released in 1968 when the counterculture movement was at boiling point. The summer of love had cast everything in a tie-dye hue of psychedelics, and middle America was at its wit’s end with runaway kids. Then came a drunken thespian who wasn’t even a singer blabbering on about some cake in yet another coded message promoting insanity, and suddenly, the slings and arrows were shot by conservatives who had had enough of the nonsense.
It was high tide that music got back to wholesome basics. Only five years earlier, the mumblings of some teenagers in a cheap recording studio resulted in the barely intelligible volley of ‘Louie, Louie’. Bizarrely, because it was hard to understand, it was banned for fear that it contained communist messages, and the CIA investigated it for a whopping two-year period. Bearing in mind that the lyrics were readily available, this gives you a picture of the sort of divide between the kids and the older conservatives that we’re dealing with. Fast forward a few years, and another oddball song nearly reaching number one amid mounting political tensions meant the hammer had to be brought down somewhere. It landed on Harris and the previously esteemed songwriter, Jimmy Webb, the bastard behind it all.
So how does Webb – the master behind anthems like ‘Wichita Lineman’, a track that encapsulated the everyday struggles of a working-class hero, no less – explain his way out of this sudden druggy sullying of the good people of America? “It’s clearly about a love affair ending,” he said of the song once dubbed “impossible” to understand. “The person singing it is using the cake and the rain as a metaphor for that. OK, it may be far out there, and a bit incomprehensible, but I wrote the song at a time in the late 1960s when surrealistic lyrics were the order of the day.”
As it happens, in another tangible tie to ‘Louie, Louie’, all the answers were in the real MacArthur Park all along. “Everything mentioned in the song was visible,” Webb explains. It was there that he used to meet his girlfriend Susie Horton for lunches as she worked across the street, and it was there that his mind returned when she suddenly ended the relationship. “There’s nothing in it that was fabricated! The old men playing checkers by the trees. The cake that was left out in the rain. All of the things in the song are things I actually saw. It’s a musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park.”
Even the mad image of the cake is real. “Those lyrics were all very real to me – there was nothing psychedelic about it to me,” he adds. “The cake, it was an available object. It was what I saw in the park at the birthday parties. But people have very strong reactions to the song. There’s been a lot of intellectual venom.” Although it is admittedly jarring and uncouth, the metaphor also kind of works. A cake in the rain is ruined, implying that the differences in the relationship are irreparable. A cake was also once sweet and something to savour. And finally, he’s lost the recipe, so he can’t get it back and worries that he’ll never be able to bake up a serving of love ever again. It might be, well, as mad as baiting a mouse trap with cider to snaffle picnic-plaguing wasps, but it does work.
However, this tortuous metaphor went amiss amid the sense of panic that even wholesome songwriters like Webb were now being polluted by LSD and sex party food orgies. This time, the conservative side of America had an easy point to make too. The orchestral production is so highfalutin you imagine the credits might include the names of turtle doves, it’s a pop song that pretentiously refutes concision, Harris belts out notes that he can’t hit, and the words are, well, we’ve already been over them. In short, it wasn’t cool enough for the counterculture kids to support, and it was an easy success oddity for everyone else to bash as a bad sign of the times.
When this happens, it is a universal truth that the derision enters common parlance and everyone piles in on it. It’s even more common now when opinions can be cast with a click. Once something has been tarred by the brush for long enough, it suddenly gets set in stone as a true stinker. Provided there is a single grain of truth to it then nobody jumps to its defence—and I’m certainly not prepared to do it for ‘MacArthur Park’ either (not least because I’ve always thought it should be called MacArthur’s Park). It’s a difficult song to handle. But I do quite admire how mad it is, I love the fact it was a hit, and there are some bits that I do find pleasing.
However, when kids of the centralists who first condemned it were called upon to crown the worst song ever in 1992 by humour columnist of the Miami Herald, Dave Berry, Harris’ effort came out on top. The publication was just the right sort of level for such an assertion to slip into society’s collective conscience, and now that is how it is still seen by many.
