Spring was never waiting for us, girl

My oldie-moldie reflections last week started a small conversation about the worst song lyrics of all time, and Wally Conger submitted for our consideration "Someone left 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."

That got me thinking, because taken alone, with just those lyrics, it's easy to dismiss "MacArthur Park," the bombastic rock-classical hybrid in which Richard Harris immortalized Jimmy Webb's bakery imagery. But there's more to that recording than melting in the dark.

Imagine a world where popular songs enter, make their point and close or fade away within 2-4 minutes. It's the spring of 1968, and every so often a song on the radio may go on a little past four minutes. You had your "album versions" of songs, like the legendary six-minute version of "Light My Fire," but those were basically the song you heard on the radio with longer solos. And anyway, everybody knew you couldn't fit much more than four minutes of music on one side of a 45.

Into this world comes a seven-minute opus. The thing really seems to be three songs melded into one, or three movements of a mini-symphony - the main "cake breakup" song, a reflective middle part ("And after all the loves of my life ...") a funky-for-its-time orchestral prance, and a return to the cake for an operatic big finish. I was blown away.

I was thrilled to get seven minutes of music for my 79 cents, and also gained one of my first insights about The World - They lied when they said only two or three minutes of content can fit on a seven-inch record! More was possible than they had let on. Limits were made to be stretched and even shattered.

"MacArthur Park" was a groundbreaker, not just a ditty about melting cake. An argument could be made that the structure of Webb's little opus set the example, for better or worse, for such exercises as Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," Crosby Stills & Nash's "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Peaking at No. 2, the song not only smashed the four-minute barrier on the radio, it took the barrier by the throat, thrashed it to pieces and trampled the body into dust. A few weeks later "Hey Jude" would take it all a step further, but for once The Beatles didn't set the radio trend. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, "Strawberry Fields" took us to 4:24, but "MacArthur Park" at 7:20 sneered at your steenking 4:24.)

Therefore, I come this morning to sing praises of "MacArthur Park." It ran one step ahead of the rest of pop music, as we followed in the dance, between the parted pages, and were pressed in love's hot fevered iron like a striped pair of pants. Hmmm ... well, I suppose it does leave a little something to be desired lyrically.

P.S. The site where I found the free clip art asked me to post a link.