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Jimmy Webb (left) and
Richard Harris (right), 1968
By John Schauer
Do you remember where you were
when you rst heard Jimmy Webb’s
song “MacArthur Park”? I do.
I was in college, and like all Amer-
ican adolescents, I had a terrible time
waking up each morning. I couldn’t
trust a simple snooze button. Instead,
a er silencing my alarm, I would
turn on a small transistor radio tuned
to a rock station and put it by my ear
as I lay semiconscious on my bed.
One morning in
a new song
penetrated the residual fog of the
slumber I was ghting with some of
the most outrageous lyrics I had ever
heard: “Someone le the cake out in
the rain. I don’t think that I can take
it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, and
I’ll never have that recipe again.” So
surreal did that sound to me that for
the rest of the day I almost doubted
I had actually heard it; maybe my
brain, angry at being aroused, played
a trick on me.
But as Richard Harris’s recording of
the song climbed to the number-two
position on
Billboard
’s Hot
, it became
clear: those were the actual lyrics. ey
would be the butt of many jokes over the
years, most notoriously in
, when hu-
mor columnist Dave Barry ran a contest
for his readers to nominate the worst song
of all time, and “MacArthur Park” earned
the top spot, in no small part because of
that cake metaphor. But the music itself
was so darn catchy, a whole slew of re-
cording artists hopped aboard the train to
that titular park. One website has tallied
cover recordings by everyone from
e Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain to
Wagnerian tenor Peter Hofmann.
Donna Summer’s multimillion-sell-
ing disco version actually beat Harris’s
original and made it to the top spot on
the Hot
for three weeks. ere were
countri ed arrangements for Waylon
Jennings, Glen Campbell, and Chet
Atkins; harmonizations for vocal groups
like e Lettermen and e Four Tops;
brass band performances by the Vienna
Brass Connection and Capital City Brass
Band; jazzy takes by Maynard Ferguson,
Carmen McRae, and Michael Feinstein.
Liza Minnelli, Dione Warwick, Diana
Ross, and Carrie Underwood have all
had a crack at it. “Weird Al” Yankovic did
a parody called “Jurassic Park,” and the
song was smoothed over with easy listen-
ing arrangements by Mantovani, Percy
Faith,
Strings, and Ray Conni , as well
as a long list of Vegas-style crooners that
include Frank Sinatra, Vic Damone, Andy
Williams, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tony
Bennett.
ose last-mentioned versions
underline one of the unique features
of the song because they recorded
only the second portion (“ ere
will be another song for me”) of an
ambitious composition patterned
a er the four-movement structure
of a classical symphony. e lengthy
instrumental “third movement” was
the basis of a clever satire by
SCTV
,
in which Dave omas’s brilliant
impersonation of Richard Harris
appears on “Mel’s Rock Pile” (itself a
parody of
Don Kirshner’s Rock Con-
cert
). It was that sprawling form that
prompted the group for which it was
originally written, e Association, to
turn it down. at—and those lyrics.
Webb eventually explained the lyr-
ics to
Newsday
: “It’s just a song about
a girlfriend of mine, Susie Horton,
and this place on Wilshire Boulevard
where we used to have lunch, which
is called MacArthur Park. And the
truth is that everything in the song
was visible. ere’s nothing in it
that’s fabricated. e old men playing
checkers by the trees, the cake that was
le out in the rain, all of the things that
are talked about in the song are things I
actually saw.”
So that damp cake wasn’t some
contrived poetic metaphor a er all, but
merely part of Webb’s detailed recollec-
tions of a failed relationship. And he has
a de ant message to those who have been
ribbing him all these years: setting aside
the industry honors heaped upon him,
the stellar artistic collaborations, and the
many mega-hits that distinguish Webb’s
career, he’s boldly titled his recently pub-
lished memoir
e Cake and the Rain
.
Respect.
John Schauer is a freelance writer and amateur
harpsichordist who gives Jimmy Webb special
kudos for playing that instrument on the original
Richard Harris recording.
Let em Eat Soggy Cake
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 3, 2018 – MAY 11, 2019
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