The “A-bomb” song that inspired a Beatles classic
There aren’t really any rules for where artists can take their inspiration from. Even if what they are listening to isn’t to the same taste as their audience, no one is morally obligated to listen to exclusively material that will one day help them write a classic. While The Beatles did have a habit of absorbing almost anything around them, hearing this abhorrent folk song during the making of one of their masterpieces is the definition of the phrase ‘turning shit into gold’.
Granted, not every member of the Fab Four was meant to listen to the same things. George Harrison was knee-deep in Indian music by the time of Sgt Peppers, and when working on The White Album, John Lennon had immersed himself in the avant-garde scene, even if his experimental albums with Yoko Ono were some of the most grating noises ever to be made by a Beatle.
While Ringo Starr was down for listening to anything, the one with the most questionable music taste tended to be Paul McCartney. Regardless of how many chipper tunes he made on his own, his interest in the cutesy ditties from the 1920s is what makes people either love or hate his jovial material like ‘You Gave Me the Answer’ or ‘Hello Goodbye’.
And ‘MacArthur Park’ tends to fall into the company of being too grating for its own good. Despite the novelty of having this kind of folk tune on the charts in the 1960s, there was no way that this would be given the same time of day as a Bob Dylan track, especially considering most of the record sounded like it was made for some particularly corny TV show.
Even the author, Jimmy Webb, admitted that the tune ranked among the absolute worst things that he had heard, telling The Guardian, “At first, we felt like the guys who’d created the A-bomb: we were a bit afraid of what we’d done. I didn’t know I could write something like that.” While the idea of rambling on like this for minutes on end feels downright torturous, it worked out by serving as the inspiration for ‘Hey Jude’.
As Webb explains, he heard that the tune became the catalyst for McCartney dragging out ‘Hey Jude’ for as long as he did, saying, “We had doubts about releasing it as a single. Eventually, they put out the full seven minutes 20 seconds. George Martin once told me The Beatles let ‘Hey Jude’ run to over seven minutes because of ‘MacArthur Park.’”
Whereas ‘MacArthur Park’ keeps plodding away and gets to the point where it seems like it will never end, ‘Hey Jude’ does the exact opposite. The entire outro feels like one long crescendo towards the final few minutes, with Macca putting as much swagger into his screams as the folksy ditty has in its entire runtime.
Inspiration isn’t exclusive to one style of music, and given that ‘Hey Jude’ was the by-product, ‘MacArthur Park’ does end up having a tiny bit more sheen put on it by association. It probably wasn’t meant to be one of the finest songs ever composed, but a tune that inspired McCartney for one of his best anthems is at least doing one thing right.
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