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Fact #166081

When:

Short story:

Hell-raising Irish actor Richard Harris enters the Billboard Singles Chart in the USA with MacArthur Park, a Jimmy Webb composition which will peak at No1.

Full article:

Jimmy Webb (songwriter) : I wrote it about meeting a girlfriend in her lunchbreaks in LA. I can't account for its phenomenal success. It's been recorded by everyone from The Four Tops to Waylon Jennings … just everybody.

Richard Harris is an incredibly seductive man, a complete charmer, so full of life, so full of energy, so full of humour and so full of warmth. He completely overwhelmed a young guy like myself. I was just 19 or 20 at the time.

MacArthur Park was his choice. I was in England, and I'd gone to his apartment in Belgravia. It was a lovely apartment with a grand piano and we would sit in front of the fireplace and I would play him all the songs that I knew. I had a briefcase full of them and, down towards the bottom, was MacArthur Park. I had written it for The Association, but they had passed on it. I remember sitting it on the piano and saying, 'Well, there's this one.' I played it through a couple of times and he said, 'We'll do it.'

It was never meant to be a single. As far as I was concerned, it was an experiment. It was meant to be a hallucinogenic image in the same style of many songs that were being written around the same time, like Nights In White Satin, Strawberry Fields Forever and I Am The Walrus. They are all songs that defy precise explanation.

Richard grumbled a couple of times, and said that the orchestra was too loud. I was impressed by having all this amazing technology to hand. We had multiple tracks and the ability to punch in, so we could lift certain lines and combine them with others. We could have done that three years before but it would have been immensely more difficult. We had these wonderful eight track recorders with self-synch and the ability to punch in and punch out and combine tracks and do all these wonderful things that we had only dreamed of a scant two or three years before.

It was single that the broadcasters picked themselves. FM radio started playing it and then, slowly but surely, the Top 40 stations had to play it.
(Source : not known)