"MacArthur Park"

The title of this very occasional column, "Guilty Pleasures," should really be in quotes - because why should anyone feel guilty about their pleasures? All that does is make it harder for people to communicate, it stagnates art, and it generally puts up a bunch of barriers that ought to be pointless in anyone older than their teens - and pretty pointless even for them. (For more on this idea, you should go to The War Against Silence: its author, Glenn McDonald (he prefers "glenn mcdonald" - whatever), writes the best freelance online reviewing I know of - sometimes frustrating in its self-involvement, but more often revelatory and brilliant for that very reason, and impressive in range, expression, and sheer consistency.) Sometimes I'll talk about an entire album, or a particular artist, but more usually, I'll focus on one song...like this time. Anyone who listens to a lot of music surely listens to much more than just what's new, or even than what's cited as influences by new acts. If your music collection is of any size, you probably go back and listen to stuff that you liked years ago (this is more true the further away you get from MTV's demographic...). Sometimes, you find that it really sucked, and you're incredibly embarrassed to have ever liked it. But other times - and really, if you're honest, more often than you'd be willing to admit to that trés hot guy or gal who works at your favorite record store - you're incredibly embarrassed to note that you still like it, a lot - and not just because of mere nostalgia. I have a long history with "MacArthur Park." I was fascinated by it as a kid, when it was initially popular (note: I'm talking about the Richard Harris version: the Donna Summer version is a pointless abomination for many reasons, which I will make clear later). Even then, there was something about the song for me that was both attractive and repellant: I liked (and still do) the harpsichord intro, the odd, hesitant rhythmic shifts, and the lurching, brass-accented modulations at the end of each verse - but what the hell was Harris singing about, and why did he deliver it like Charlton Heston's Moses bringing the Ten Commandments down from the mountaintop? I bought the 45 in the early '70s, probably from money from my paper route - but a few years later, finally leaving my prog-rock teens for a punk and new wave early twenties, it became a full-fledged guilty pleasure. (Incidentally, I love how so many people in early punk bands claimed to have liked only the Velvet Underground, or Iggy, or the MC5: yeah right - you probably had singles of "In the Year 2525" just like every other music-loving kid of that age. And that was the most hip thing in your collection. At least the Sex Pistols were slightly honest, covering the Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone.") In college, at Ann Arbor in the early '80s, I remember doing up a series of flashcards, one for each line of the lyric, the point of which was to show up the absurd incongruity of its piled metaphors. (Alas, my dorm cohorts and I missed the surrealist eroticism by which "love's hot fevered iron" told us what he meant by those "striped pants.") And yet the song still fascinated me, probably because even though Harris's singing is pictured in the dictionary next to "over the top," at the same time its actorly conviction translated: he meant something, and it meant something to him. So, at some point, I found myself trying to figure out how this song worked, and why. First, it helps to go back to an earlier Jimmy Webb-penned hit, "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (made famous by Glen Campbell). Probably most people, if asked what this song is about, would say something like: it's this guy who's left his girlfriend, and as he's driving along he's thinking of her and her reactions. No - it's way sicker than that. He hasn't left her; he's only thinking about doing so...and he's imagining, in near-pornographically precise detail, exactly how broken up she'll be as he drives his truck back to Phoenix. (It's gotta be a truck he drives, I'm tellin' ya.) The more upset he imagines her as being, the more involved he gets in his own narrative. All of this, of course, serves to amp up the emotion of the song, and make this great doomed love affair all the grander for him. As the notes to a compilation of Jimmy Webb's hits point out, this is the kind of guy who'd fake his own funeral just to find out what everyone says about him. And "MacArthur Park"? It's that song's sequel. The narrator never did actually leave her - but she wised up, and left him. But the self-aggrandizement of the narrator, his need to make himself a larger-than-life protagonist in (what he wishes were) a Shakespearean-level tragedy, remains. (And now the brilliance of finding Harris to sing this - a cured ham of the highest order, but also a genuine Shakespearean - begins to come clear.) Right from the start, the narrator's enormous, Sting-like ego bursts forth: it's not that he, or she, or anyone, was impatient about Spring - no, Spring Itself was an actor in their romance, refusing to wait for them. But the real key is in the bridge (not the instrumental, faux-hip, white go-go boots dance section, but the vocal bridge). Here the narrator whingingly claims that he'll go on, he'll love again...but never as richly, truly, or strongly as in his great lost love. Obligingly, he'll sacrifice when necessary, drinking piss-temperature wine and blinding himself without benefit of the proper solar viewing apparatus, but mostly in settling for second-best. (Wonder what those putative other lovers would think if they knew?) Here we have a sort of false humility, a purely gestural attempt at not being a martyr, which is, of course, exactly what he imagines himself to be. Okay, you're wondering: what about that damned cake? What the hell is it doing in the rain, and why can't he just make another one? And what kind of insane cake decorator uses green icing? If you insist, I could claim that, literally, the cake was in the rain because it was his wedding cake, she left him at the altar, and it rained, and everyone was too upset to do anything about the stupid cake. Or maybe same scenario, it didn't rain, but he's crying (awww...). Or more likely, the wedding cake, the rain, the park, and other things (oops - 'nother G.P.) are all in his mind: he's dreaming of the wedding that's never to be, imagining the break-up as disappointing meteorological phenomena (and inadvertently providing Alanis Morissette with another opportunity to misunderstand the concept of irony). He'll "never have that recipe again" because, you see, Their Love was just so special he's doomed to life of warm wine and self-administered blindness. But I'll bet he thinks being drunk and wandering around in Ray Charles' glasses will help him pick up chicks as he trolls the sad pick-up joints of his town's abandoned warehouse district. And finally, the song becomes a triumph - because all of its excesses, therefore, are narrative: they're part of what the song's about, not incidental details of arrangement or poor choices in interpretation. Alright, I'll acknowledge they may be those, too - but as a record, as a sound object, the whole thing hangs together, regardless of what Webb, Harris, or anyone else wanted. (And Summer's version doesn't work because she doesn't understand that, because she sings the whole thing in a monotone - just like its arrangement - and she misunderstands the nature of Webb's weird metaphors and so pointlessly changes "checkers" to "Chinese checkers" in an apparent attempt at lily-gilding.) But even without this rather weighty interpretation (and yeah, I'm aware that it is itself nearly as overblown and pretentious as the narrator I describe - but really, I'm just trying to put words around an idea of how the song works for me), I still like the song's basics: its chord structure, melody, and some of its subtler instrumental ideas. But I still don't know why anyone would ever use green cake icing.