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We went shopping for stuff for the new house today. As we left the car park, MacArthur Park by Richard Harris came on the radio and I told the kids to listen as I knew they'd find it funny. "Someone left the cake out in the rain and I don't think that I can take it, because it took so long to bake it and I'll never have that recipe again," all sung in pompous earnest. Also I was able to tell the kids that the person singing this weird song was also Dumbledore. And the DJ told us that Harris also won a Grammy for this strange performance.
It may be metaphorical, but it fails on several levels - party because people don't often leave cakes out in the rain, but the bit that actual rankles most for me is the plaintive "I'll never have that recipe again." Why not? What happened to the cook book and if sounds like he personally baked the cake and it was a laborious affair and so he must have some memory of what he did.
Silly old Richard Harris. He was probably on drugs or something.
I think it's safe to say that the song was of its time and musically it is pretty amazing and I can see why the foolish people of 1968 took it to their hearts and felt like it was a bit deeper than it really was. And it's a thin line between portentous and profound and ridiculous.
Most profound things turn out to be nonsense eventually.
Hmmm that's pretty profound,
I knew the kids would find it funny (and they sang it for the rest of the day, slightly getting the words wrong), because I could remember the first time I'd heard it and how blown away I was by it.
Given the importance of the song it's surprising that I didn't hear it (at least consciously) until 1987 when I was on tour with the Oxford Revue. It was an exciting and silly time and we were at the start of the tour, before we'd got to the Fringe to be roasted alive. We were being driven around together, full of excitement and hope. I had gone to the University dreaming of doing comedy like some of my heroes and not daring to dream that I might actually get in the Revue. It actually nearly happened in our first year, but in the second year it was pretty much nailed on that Stew and I would write the Revue and I would be in it.
So having had one impossible thing happen, I was of course swirling with possibilities of what this tour might mean and what might happen. We were playing professional theatres and staying in weird bed and breakfasts and giddy with it all and full of ourselves, totally unaware of the kicking that was coming to us and which in some ways we deserved, just simply for our enthusiasm.
We joked and laughed about everything. We'd pass through country villages with weird names and laugh, I came up with a song about having an electric vagina which we sang a lot. We were surely unsufferable, but we were basically children. And then MacArthur Park came on the radio and we practically died. None of us could believe anyone had written a song about a melting cake and it not being a comedy song. It would be like a sincere rendition of the electric vagina song, expecting no one to laugh at it. "ooo ooo oooo I've got a lectric vagina, ooo ooo put your plug in my socket."
So that song signifies self-indulgent joy and reminds me of a time of hope an excitement and dreams that were going to be crushed, but not beyond redemption.
That tour turned into a nightmare for us and as I've said many times bent me out of shape and fucked me up and I am still dealing with the ripples of trauma that it caused, but MacArthur Park doesn't really make me think of the bad stuff, just the thrill of driving through the West Country in the sunshine (no idea where we were or what the weather was like, but that's what my memory has put together), laughing and being full or ourselves and being young and stupid and superior and vulnerable.
