Songwriter Jimmy Webb discusses his massive '70s hit 'MacArthur Park'

There aren't many songs that have been recorded by a more varied group of artists than Jimmy Webb's seven-minute opus "MacArthur Park." Originally recorded by Irish actor Richard Harris in the late 1960s, the song was also covered by Waylon Jennings, Donna Summer, Tony Bennett and The Four Tops.

Originally written at the request of producer Bones Howe, who asked Webb for a pop song that consisted of different movements, Howe ended up ultimately passing on the song.

Webb sat down with Nashville Songwriters Association International Executive Director Bart Herbison to talk through the urban legends behind the song, the cake melting references and why Howe asked for it and then passed on it. There's even a Beatles connection you won't want to miss.

Herbison: "So there really is a MacArthur Park. Take us back to the writing of this song."

Webb: "When I first moved up to LA and started my career at the tender age of 16, I was living in a kind of, at that time, run down part of town called Silver Lake. Now, of course, it's gentrified and all the apartments are worth a million dollars apiece, but then it was just hanging on. And I would walk over to several blocks and there was a huge civic park there called MacArthur Park. It's where I would meet my girlfriend Susie Horton over there and she would come down at lunch and we'd have our lunch in the park."

It was MacArthur Park, Webb says, that became a symbol for his relationship with Horton.

JW: "Everything you hear in the song is something I saw in the park, so I wasn't just making it up, which I have sort of been accused of making stuff up and throwing it in there just to make people angry which apparently it did make a few people angry. But it didn't make Waylon Jennings angry, he recorded it four times."

If you aren't familiar with the song, here's an important lyric:

MacArthur's Park is melting in the darkAll the sweet, green icing flowing downSomeone left the cake out in the rainI don't think that I can take it'Cause it took so long to bake itAnd I'll never have that recipe againOh, no

That lyric stemmed from Webb learning that his love was marrying someone else.

JW: "I mean, adults think that they've got broken hearts, but they just don't remember how they felt when they were 15 years old. It's raw. It hurts and as I walked away, in my mind's eye, the park was just melting."

BH: "Was there actually a cake?"

JW: "It wasn't so much even though she and I many, many times had lunch there and bought cake many times but it wasn't so much a specific cake. It was just like the kind of like, 'oh, wow, look, somebody left the cake out in the rain' because the, the whole thing was melting and crumbling. It was emotionally experiential."

Although the song was originally recorded by Harris, it was Summer's disco version that would take the song to No. 1.

BH: "I think I read this somewhere that shortly after that, the Beatles put out the long version of 'Hey Jude.' Is that true?"

JW: "I worked with George Martin and he said when the boys heard the song in the discos in London... and he said when they heard it and realized it went on and on and on, the Beatles went to Abbey Road with George and I'm sure it was John and Paul. And they put up 'Hey Jude' and they create a tape loop, so that it repeats and repeats and repeats, because (the song) was like about three minutes. This is actually a fact; they stood there and they created a new ending, a long fade ending. They measured it out until it was roughly in the same length as MacArthur Park, and then they put it out."

You can see Jimmy Webb in person in Nashville June 23 at 7:30 p.m. at the Country Music Hall of Fame. Tickets and more information can be found at countrymusichalloffame.org.

About the series

In partnership with Nashville Songwriters Association International, the "Story Behind the Song" video interview series features Nashville-connected songwriters discussing one of their compositions. For full video interviews with all our subjects, visit www.tennessean.com/music.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Story behind Donna Summer's disco classic cover of 'MacArthur Park'