Some spoilers follow.
It’s the climactic moment in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
Our title trickster has Lydia right where he wants her, in a red gown standing beside him before a priest at the altar. She has agreed to marry him in order to save the life of her daughter. A towering cake is rolled out, topped with slimy green icing and Lydia and Beetlejuice figures.
And then … the cake starts to run.
“MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark / All the sweet, green icing flowing down,” a male voice intones (“sings” would be too generous) as the possessed wedding party — including Lydia’s stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara) — flap around the cake, taking turns lip-syncing verses.
The nonsensical sequence, which the film’s director, Tim Burton, has said was largely improvised, sets the tone for a wedding from hell. The song seems as odd a choice as the use of Harry Belafonte’s version of the Jamaican folk tune “Day-O” to score the dinner-table possession scene in Burton’s original 1988 film.
What is that song? Why did Burton tap it as the new “Day-O”? What do the lyrics mean? Here’s a guide.
What is that song?
It’s “MacArthur Park,” a folk-pop ballad the singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb wrote in 1967. It was inspired by scenes he had observed while occasionally meeting his high school sweetheart, Susie Horton, for lunch in the real-life MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.
Who ‘sings’ it?
If you are a Harry Potter fan who said it almost sounds like … no, it can’t be … well, it is.
New flash: Richard Harris, who played the Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films, was also a musical artist.
Fresh off starring as King Arthur in the big-screen adaptation of Broadway’s “Camelot,” the Irish actor, who had performed several musical numbers in the film, got a hankering to release a record. He just needed material.
In a stroke of luck, he met just the guy at an antiwar fund-raiser in Los Angeles in 1967. Webb, a rising songwriter — the Supremes had recorded a song of his in 1965 — had recently written an unconventional tune for the sunshine pop group the Association. That band’s producer, Bones Howe, had requested a pop song with classical elements, different movements and changing time signatures.
Well, Webb delivered exactly what he wanted: a song more than seven minutes long, with an ambitious arrangement and offbeat lyrics. But the Association got cold feet, leaving Webb with a song more than twice the typical length for radio and no one to sing it.
Back to Harris. Webb didn’t take him seriously at first, but Harris sent a telegram telling Webb, “Come to London. Make this record.” A two-day brainstorming session followed, fueled by copious amounts of brandy. Webb played Harris more than 30 potential hits, but none resonated with him for his pop music debut. Then Webb pulled “MacArthur Park” from “the bottom of my pile,” as he wrote in a 2013 Guardian essay, and Harris loved it.
In another booze-fueled session in December 1967, the inexperienced Harris recorded the vocals at a London studio, doing more acting than singing. He was “making up in chutzpah what he lacked in technical ability,” The Financial Times noted in a 2020 retrospective. Whether because of the alcohol or Harris’s characteristic stubbornness, he consistently misnamed the park as “MacArthur’s” rather than “MacArthur.”
“I never could get him to sing the title correctly,” Webb wrote.
Did people like it?
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
It turned out that neither the confounding lyrics nor the running time of seven minutes and 20 seconds were a barrier to chart success. The song, released in April 1968, reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States and No. 4 on the British singles chart.
D.J.s liked it because it provided a chance for a bathroom or a smoke break, and Webb later said that the Beatles producer George Martin told him that the group let “Hey Jude” run more than seven minutes because of “MacArthur Park.” David Letterman is also an admirer: In 2014 he devoted an entire episode of “The Late Show” to it, complete with a 23-piece orchestra and Webb on harpsichord.
In the end, the Grammys came down on the side of artistic ambition, awarding Webb the 1969 award for best arrangement accompanying a vocalist.
What did music critics think?
Some bemoaned Harris’s vocals and the “pretentiously incomprehensible” lyrics, as the humorist Dave Barry put it in “Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs” (1997). Others, like Mark Deming of AllMusic.com, praised the song’s ambition, noting that the lyrics “were as rich and ornate as anything the Beatles or the Beach Boys had created.”
As for the girl who inspired it? Though Horton broke Webb’s heart at MacArthur Park in 1965 and went on to marry someone else, the relationship was short-lived. She and Webb later lived together for three years.
Who else has recorded it?
The other version that appears in the film is Donna Summer’s 1978 disco cover, which plays during the credits. That recording, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned Summer her first Grammy nomination, is the one most people are probably familiar with. It’s also about half as long as Harris’s original.
From the beginning, Burton knew he wanted to use the Harris version, said Tommy Harper, a producer of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
“He just felt like that was more of the vibe,” Harper said in a phone interview. “He wanted to go old school, and that was the one he remembered hearing.”
Summer wasn’t the only famous singer who covered the song. It has been recorded by more than 150 artists, including Frank Sinatra; Waylon Jennings, who won a Grammy for it in 1970; the Four Tops; Liza Minnelli; Dionne Warwick; and Tony Bennett. It has even been parodied by Weird Al Yankovic, who released a spoof in 1993, “Jurassic Park.”
What do the lyrics mean?
Webb has said they aren’t complicated.
“I see it as a relatively simple love song with some very sad imagery and about things passing away and never being the same again,” he said in the liner notes for “The Webb Sessions: 1968-1969,” adding, “I’ve always been amazed that people find that such a mystery.”
The imagery, Webb told Newsday in 2014, reflects people, objects and events he really saw at the park while meeting up with his girlfriend.
“The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw,” he said. “And so it’s a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park.”
Was there actually a melting cake?
“It’s something I saw — we would eat cake and leave it in the rain,” he wrote in the Guardian essay.
But the cake in the rain is also a metaphor for “losing a chapter of your life,” he has said, explaining that the eclectic imagery — the yellow cotton dress, a striped pair of pants, the melting dessert — alludes to the heartbreak of watching his ex get married in the park. The lost recipe is a metaphor for lost love.
He sees your raised eyebrow.
“OK, it may be far out there, and a bit incomprehensible, but I wrote the song at a time in the late 1960s when surrealistic lyrics were the order of the day,” he explained in Q Magazine.
Why did Burton choose the song?
According to Harper, the producer, they needed music for the church sequence, and Burton’s first question was: Has anyone heard “MacArthur Park”?
Some of the writers weren’t familiar with it, so Burton held a listening session.
“We were like, ‘That’s perfect,’” Harper said.
It was long enough to play during the entire scene. It fit the sonic vibe of the rest of the film, which includes Beetlejuice’s soul-sucking ex-wife, Delores — an unhinged Monica Bellucci — gathering her body parts from crates and stapling herself back together to the Bee Gees disco anthem “Tragedy,” and a lovestruck Beetlejuice serenading Lydia to Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting.”
And, like the movie as a whole, it was just plain weird.
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