... all the sweet green icing flowing down ---
Someone left the cake out in the rain ---
I don't think that I can take it,
Because it took so long to bake it,
And I'll never have that recipe agaaaaaaain ....
[ahem]
Yes, I know it should be MacArthur Park, but who am I to argue with the original Richard Harris recording? All seven-and-a-half minutes of it?
The song is forty years old this month*. It is cheeseball, overblown, sentimental, and preposterous: and still, there's a part of me that loves it. Harris was not exactly the best singer in the world, but he was an excellent performer, and this recording is a great performance. If the song is an epic: go epic.
UPDATE (28th May): It appears that Chris Noth, a.k.a. Big a.k.a. Mike Logan, is a big fan of Harris' recording.
* [I've had trouble establishing a date for the album, A Tramp Shining, looking around in the web. April 1968 is the best I've managed, based on this website on the Dunhill label.]
2 comments:
I just couldn't get through all 7-1/2 minutes. I'm sorry. It just kept going and going. As for Richard Harris's great performances, what do you think of Wrestling Ernest Hemingway?
Yes, I was thinking when I posted it, that it is a bit hard to take on YouTube. You really have to be pottering around doing something undemanding, with it going on the radio, to hear the song to advantage. Or maybe you just have to have been born in 1968 ...
I haven't seen WEH. I would watch Robert Duvall in anything whatsoever, although something that requires him to use a Cuban accent is pushing it a little.
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