Jimmy Webb Recounts Song’s History

Here’s one cake that didn’t get left out too long in the rain: the eternal pop pastry that is “MacArthur Park.” The song’s epic length and unusual structure haven’t kept it from turning into a decades-spanning perennial, one that is just finding yet another new life as a result of its extensive use in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which scores a full-on movie-musical climax with actor-singer Richard Harris‘ original 1968 version before switching to Donna Summer’s disco remake for the end credits.

Jimmy Webb is one of the indisputably greatest songwriters of all time, known for undying classics like “Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Galveston” and “Highwayman.” “MacArthur Park” is undoubtedly a more polarizing song than those others, but more music fans than not will break into a grin upon hearing the start of a seven-minute, suite-like epic that likens a failed romance to “a cake left out in the rain.” Its iconic status led it to be parodied by “Weird Al” Yankovic and “SNL,” embraced by Webb super-fan David Letterman, and covered by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Waylon Jennings to Wayne Kramer — even though, on the face of it, the nearly prog-rock-like structure makes it seem like one of the least intuitively adaptable tunes ever.

Webb got on the phone with Variety to discuss the 56-year history of the tune, which people are much more eager to revisit than the actual MacArthur Park in L.A., a sketchier place now than it was when the songwriter used to enjoy romantic lunches there in the 1960s with the then-love of his life.

What do you think of how the song was used in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”?

I have to be very frank with you, I have not seen the film, because I have been in the deep woods of Maine for a month. It’s a miracle that we’re talking. But I’ve watched all this happen from a distance, and of course am delighted that people enjoy the film and enjoy the music. I’ve seen a couple of clips, and I was laughing myself silly. One of ’em was Willem Dafoe running through the graveyard like James Bond, and then it would cut to this fabulous love scene where Beetlejuice and his lover are ballroom dancing in midair — very typically Tim Burton, in the most positive way.

I don’t know Tim Burton, though I’d like to know him. I’m sending that message out there loud and clear. But it is my understanding that he has a jukebox at home and he had “MacArthur Park” on it, which in itself is astounding. I mean, everything about “MacArthur Park” is quirky. It has its own idiosyncratic path through the world, and as the father of it, I am enjoying all the hijinks — that my creation is capable of making people laugh or cry, and that it can go dancing in the disco or be done by symphony orchestras, or be in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” It goes out into the world and it creates chaos of a kind, and I think that’s very good in the world of music.  I’m really enjoying it. You know, man, I’m 78 years old, and it puts the fun back into the music business for me.

It’s such an idiosyncratic song, it’s amazing, in a way, that it gets licensed or covered as much as it does.

I don’t know how to account for it. It was originally written for the Association, as you know. The version we did with Richard Harris was a rather unusual recording; its its heyday, there were some raised eyebrows, like, “Why is this on the radio?” And no one could have been any more surprised than Richard Harris and myself because, frankly, we were just a couple of mates having a hell of a good time in London. He was introducing me to the joys of professional drinking, and I was following him around. I worshipped him. He was like my big brother, and we occasionally went to the studio and would cut something. And when we finally had enough songs for the album, “MacArthur Park” probably would’ve been our last choice for a single. But it happened all by itself and it continues to happen all by itself.

There have been some interesting covers. Don Novello, who played Father Guido Sarducci, the Vatican correspondent on “Saturday Night Live,” did a full-length version of it on “SNL,” and at the end he’s overcome by a tidal wave of green icing that swept across the stage; I don’t know how they did that. It appeared in the Bette Midler-produced Broadway show, “Priscilla Queen of the Desert,” which ran forever, and it was a huge number in that show, with giant tomatoes and carrots and cabbages and what have you dancing around on stage, and a huge cake and everything. So everyone seems to have had a whack at it. And you know, I have always given my permission. Another time it was recorded by “Weird Al” Yankovic, under the title of “Jurassic Park,” and at the end of it, a T-rex ate Barney, a popular dinosaur among the preschoolers and the kindergartners. “Weird Al” and I played it together one time at the Stanislofsky School in New York for a bunch of journalists and actors. (Parodies) just didn’t bother me like sometimes it seems to bother some people.

I would say it’s been recorded probably in excess of a couple of hundred times. It was recorded by Maynard Ferguson and Stan Kenton. Waylon Jennings won his first Grammy award with it, and he went on to record it twice more, once with Willie Nelson. So it defies any attempt to categorize or pigeonhole or tag it as any particular kind of song. It’s a versatile piece of music, and it’s very popular with arrangers, because it presents all kinds of opportunities for fireworks of different kinds.

The film opens and ends with Donna Summer’s 1978 remake, which sends everyone out with a spring in their step, after hearing the more melodramatic Harris version at length earlier.

Talk about a strange life for a song, to have such radically different arrangements be hits. I didn’t particularly care for disco music, even though I wasn’t one of those album-burner types (who protested disco with record-destroying rallies). I just preferred… I was never much of a dancer. Let’s just leave it at that. So “MacArthur Park” as a disco song piqued my interest, but not necessarily my excitement.

I’ll tell you something that I was crazy about. I loved Donna Summer’s vocal; she really sang the heck out of it. And then I kind of thought, “Well, you know, disco’s not so bad,” because the song went to No. 1. It’s the only No. 1 I ever had in the United States. People think “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” well, that must have been No. 1. No, it wasn’t. And Richard’s “MacArthur Park” went to No. 2, and you know, you’re biting your nails and you’re going, “Oh man, next week we’re going to No. 1.” Nope. Next week, we went to No. 3 because a couple of new Beatles singles came out, and they always would come in right at the top of the chart and everybody would move down.

I don’t hear such an outcry as I used to hear about… well, I’m not gonna go into the more negative aspects of people who didn’t like it. I’m not gonna deal with that because they’re out there and they can speak for themselves.

There was a poll I looked up in a music aficionado forum (the Hoffman Music Forums) that let people vote on their opinion of the Richard Harris version, and it was more positive than you might expect, given that it is notoriously your most polarizing song. In the survey, 71% said it was brilliant, 11% said it was just okay, 10% said they preferred Donna Summer’s version, and 8%…

Hate it.

Pretty much. There was some publicity many years back when it was named the worst song of all time…

By Dave Barry [in the humor columnist’s 1997 book “Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs”]. I appreciate the fact he apologized for that.

Did he? That did seem unfair, or knee-jerk, of him.

But you know, I understand that was his job, to have fun with things. I’m glad he apologized, anyway. Well, if I was gonna be in that book, you know what I would want? I would want to be number one.

Even though I question his experience, because it seems to me that if he heard “96 Tears” by Question Mark and the Mysterians, “96 Tears” might have edged out “MacArthur Park” for worst song, but that’s just my opinion.

We can talk about the lyrics in a moment, but the length is one thing “MacArthur Park” is famous for, at 7 minutes and 21 seconds, which was historic for a radio single at the time. And you’ve said it inspired the Beatles to make “Hey Jude” around that length.

What first made “MacArthur Park” a hit was FM radio, our underground radio, which was rampant in this country in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and they would play some of the longer cuts, like the long version of the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” Of course everybody thinks of Don McLean (and “American Pie”), but Don McLean was after. Not to knock him, because that’s a great record too; I think it’s equally kind of labyrynthine in its lyrical construction.

“MacArthur Park” surfaced on FM radio and then crossed over to Top 40. I remember the day that Ron Jacobs, who was program director at 93 KHJ, called me up and said, “We want to go on ‘MacArthur Park,’ but we want you to do an edited version.” I said, “Ron, I love you. I used to listen to you when I was a kid in school, but I’m not sure. I’m don’t know that I’m gonna edit ‘MacArthur Park.’ But I’ll get back to you.” I hung up and it was kind of a seminal moment for me, really, because I thought, “Wow, if I edit it, it’ll be on KHJ. All I have to do is just snip, snip, snip.” But after I thought about it for a while, I thought, “This record is so different and has fought its way onto the pop chart.” It wasn’t the promotion man; it wasn’t cocaine and dancing girls that got this record on the air. This record wanted to live, and I got kind of sentimental about it. I called him back and said, “Ron, I can’t edit it. I wouldn’t feel right about doing that.” And he said, “All right, I hear you.” The next day, KHJ went on the full version. So all over all over the country, program directors were changing their playlists and their commercial breaks. And it caused quite a chaotic moment for them, really, because you know as well as I do that in those days, as in these days, they’re terrified that if they change the format some, they might lose a listener or two. And so here is this thing growing in the middle of a playlist.

I made a record with George Martin, and George Martin told me that after the Beatles heard “MacArthur Park,” they went back into the studio and put the long fade on “Hey Jude.” [The Beatles’ song was recorded in July and August of 1968, a little over a month after “MacArthur” peaked on the Hot 100.]

It has a suite-like structure, and part of what makes it fun is a section that actually sounds like it could be suspenseful film music from the period, which works well in the context of adding some action to that “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” musical sequence.

Are you talking about the fast part? Yeah. And you know, there’s another section, one that you can excise, called (informally) “All the Loves of My Life.” Mr. Sinatra took that out and did it as a separate song, which made me very happy, because it was sort of like him putting it up on a blackboard and saying, “Now, observe. This is a different song here, buried in the middle of this piece.” [Sinatra’s adaptation, released on his 1980 album “Trilogy,” includes only the middle two verses of the song, leaving out the more obvious framing portions.]

Lyrically it has proven to be a puzzle for people, although the way you have explained it over the years, it’s not actually that esoteric.

Of course that became a kind of a stumbling block for a lot of people. Many people thought that I was playing some kind of a joke on them or something, or that there was some secret meaning behind it. But the fact is that I saw everything I wrote about in the song for a fact. I saw it in the real world, in MacArthur Park on Wilshire Blvd., which is where I used to go to have lunch with my girlfriend, Susie Horton.

People think it’s psychedelic, but you really were thinking of cakes you had seen in the park. And she devastated you by breaking up with you in MacArthur Park, right? So it’s a flat-out personal breakup song, although people don’t always understand that.

It was the cataclysmic breakup song of all time. It was “my world is coming to an end,” because I had made that dreadful mistake of investing everything in one person. And she and I are still good friends. She eventually married one of the Ronstadts, so we were technically related for a while, I guess, because Linda Ronstadt’s my adopted sister — not literally, but whimsically. Linda and I are very close, and Linda’s cousin ended up marrying Susie Horton, so she became Susie Ronstadt. We’re good friends. I’m sure she is bouncing off the walls right now, because she knows the song’s about her.

You got some great material out of that relationship. I mean, “The Worst That Could Happen” is a song I’ve sung to myself after some breakups.

Listen, I’m touched by the fact that you would admit something like that to me. I might repeat that to someone! Well, you know, the song’s job is to say the things that we can’t say — and that we really can’t say because we’re humans and we’re tongue-tied, and we’re full of all these insecurities and these codes of conduct, and what it is to be cool is is emphasized over what it is to be not cool. Unfortunately, most of the serious things in life that really happen to us are not that cool. They’re just bad.

I love songs. I love other people’s songs — I cry over other people’s songs. “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” (co-written by) Mike Reid, the Bonnie Raitt song, I cried the first time I heard that song. Songs let us express the things we can’t really just come out and say to someone else.

Can you talk about working with Richard Harris? He was said to have been deeply in his cups, as they say, when you were recording this album with him. But as you alluded to earlier, maybe so were you. Were you happy with the vocals you got from him?

He started every every session with a pitcher of Pimms [the English liqueur], and it was not just a drinking can, but a full a pitcher, like an old-fashioned English thing that seemed to stand about a foot and a half tall. And we would start the session and the session didn’t end until the Pimm’s was gone, and when it was gone, usually Richard was gone too, and it was time to go out and get in his gorgeous Phantom 5 limousine. You know, I’m sober 25 years, but I have to say that some of the most fun projects that I did were alcohol-fueled in those days. And, of course, that was his trademark. You wouldn’t even know who it was if he was sober. And he was funny, and a great guy, very creative. It was his idea [to do this particular song, which had been rejected for an Association album]. He said, “I’ll make a hit out of it and I’ll be a pop star.” And from then on he was driving “MacArthur Park.” It was his baby.

It was very hard to cut the vocals because we didn’t have ProTools. Today, you can do a half-assed version of a song and twist a little knob and everything is magically in tune all of a sudden. But we would work with him to make sure that we had as good a vocal as… well, I tell you, he was not a novice singer. He had just sung the lead in “Camelot” opposite Vanessa Redgrave, and the beautiful Alan Jay Lerner score was quite challenging in his own way. He ended up buying the publishing for that at kind of a low moment in his career, by the way. He toured every villa and hamlet in London and America and all around the world. He had a bus and a truck and he could offload “Camelot” in two hours and put it in any theater, and he ended up making a lot of money with it. I think there were six cast members. He was very proud of that, because Hollywood had kind of, at least temporarily, turned its back on him. I don’t know whether it was his shenanigans or whether it was “MacArthur Park” or what, but they had kind of cooled on him as an actor, and so he went out and was making his living as a singer.

But that’s only to say that it wasn’t that easy to get a performance without blemish, from a guy who’s got all the enthusiasm in the world, but not a lot of experience, and he’s half-whacked on Pimm’s — or Guinness. Guinness was his other favorite. But when I hear it now, I’m very proud of him. I think I was very critical at the time. Well, I know I was. You know, I produced Cher, and her nickname for me was “Captain Ice Water,” because I was so difficult about vocals. I had the same thing with Carly Simon; the two of us butted heads on vocals quite a bit, but she ended up getting nominated for best female vocalist. I get good vocals if I have the time, and that’s without the technology of today; we didn’t have those gimmicks, we had to edit the tape abd sometimes pick from dozens of different takes to assemble one version, going through them with the fine-tooth comb to pick off the best lines that we could find and combine them. And so we were faking a little bit.

But you know what? I’ve seen Richard do it live. I’ve seen him do it live on the Johnny Carson show without missing a note. As time went by, he came to sing it better and better and better in person. And it was just a very, very sad day when he left us, because he was the great character of Irish actors. Well, him and (Peter) O’Toole; they were like Frick and Frack. They were kind of inseparable.

Speaking of live versions… didn’t you do it on “The Late Show” near the end of David Letterman’s tenure?

David Letterman and I used to be… I wouldn’t go so far as to say we were friends, because that would be an exaggeration, but I think that we were acquaintances, which is a very unusual thing for a guest on David’s show. To even become an acquaintance was noteworthy. I knew all the guys in the band, including Will Lee and Paul Shaffer, who’s a dear friend. His last week on the air, Letterman brought a whole orchestra into the studio, including the most beautiful female string section I’ve ever seen, these lovely girls. And we did a full-length “MacArthur Park” on “The Late Show” with Will Lee singing the lead.

David did it ostensibly for his son Harry, because his son kept asking questions about “what’s MacArthur Park?” —  I don’t know, some interest that he had — and so as a part of educating his son, I think, into the world of orchestration and classical music, possibly, David really wanted Harry to see this. And so there it is in place on the last week of the David Letterman show. I was always very grateful to David because he had me on the show many times and it was kind of a goodbye. I saw him recently and I had an opportunity just to shake his hand. It’s like, man, we miss you on late night.

This is quite a third act for the song, being in the “Beetlejuice” movie. Or a fourth or fifth or sixth act.

Man, what can I say? It’s been an adventure and a heck of a lot of fun. I really want to thank Tim for including me in the movie, because it’s coming along at the right time. I think we’re all exhausted with murder and crime and massacre and crooked politics and just a world that seems somehow a little bit insane. Maybe it is that every generation feels that way because this fighting, this killing, has been going on for thousands of years now. It’s not like a recent habit that we picked up like a flu or something. This is something that’s built in, hardwired, this vile and violentstreak that human beings have. And I think that in the arts we tend to dwell on it, because it’s something that I think we would all like to fix if we could. But to have a funny movie come along that’s just fun to watch is such a relief. It’s nice to have a fun piece to just rear back and have a laugh.