MacArthur Park

Now is the sound of today and tomorrow.

Jimmy Webb, composer of MacArthur Park, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, and Up, Up and Away.

Jimmy Webb is now.

Would you like to ride in my beautiful world? Would you like to ride?

This is Roscoe.

Now is the sound of today and tomorrow.

Jimmy Webb, composer of MacArthur Park, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, and Up, Up and Away.

Jimmy Webb is now.

I even think if you go back to when he talks, when he's like, when he's trying to get Charlie Sheen in the club and the dude's asking for the password, he's like, what are you shooting? Shot him in the ass.

He's like, what do you mean? He's like, shot him in the ass in MacArthur Park.

I feel like there's always...

Yeah, where'd he shot him? In MacArthur

However, in terms of where this part of his career falls relative to his acting career, I think it meets the criteria of midlife crisis because it was a mid-career pivot that didn't quite take off.

But Richard Harris basically collaborated with Jimmy Webb, one of the greatest pop songwriters ever, to put out incredible versions of songs like MacArthur Park.

and Where's the Playground Susie, a number of other songs.

A lot of songs that Glen Campbell also performed, who was also eligible for this draft.

And it's incredible.

And Richard Harris has an incredible singing voice.

And I would really encourage anybody who only knows him from his acting to go and listen to his version of MacArthur Park, because he's from Limerick, and he's got this incredible... incredibly distinctive Irish voice and singing these beautiful Jimmy Webb songs.

It is haunting stuff.

There is something so incredibly magical.

I was watching the doco and seeing you sing in your final performance on even Young Talent Time, MacArthur Park.

That was phenomenal at 15.

Like, I had not seen that, Tina.

Yeah.

And, and you said in the documentary you don't wanna cover songs that don't mean anything to you, those songs that others wrote that didn't mean anything.

MacArthur Park is one of the most complex lyrically of all songs, and yet you were singing it at 15, and something in you got that song.

You knew it.

I hope you can.

And that song, of course, is MacArthur Park.

So for you, everybody around Australia, here's Tina Arena for the last time as a team member of MacArthur Park.

Thank you.

Thank you.

MacArthur's Park, yeah.

Yeah, MacArthur's Park.

MacArthur Park.

backed by the Wrecking Crew on Galveston, a song by Jimmy Webb.

Jimmy Webb wrote MacArthur Park, amongst many other things, including Up, Up and Away.

Followed by Billy Joe Royal.

This was the song that launched his career.

Galveston, Wichita, Lehman.

By the time I get to Phoenix, MacArthur Park.

He's turning 80 in February in Palm Springs.

And we're going to go down.

Oh, jeez

... as its centerpiece, MacArthur Park.

[laughs]

[laughs] They passed.

Yeah.

Side note about MacArthur Park, by the way, one thing I learned is that, uh, J- Jimmy Webb, like, uh, the reason he collaborated with Richard Harris on that song is that he just, like, ran into him at a bar and Richard Harris said, "Hey, we should record a song together."

[laughs]

And Jimmy Webb thought that he was joking, and then Richard Harris, like, called him up a few months later and said, "So about that song, we're gonna do it, right?"