I'll just quote the second verse of this thing, in hopes that no one recognizes this absurdity until I quote the title line. The shame of it is, well, it's just such a
shameful song.
I was maybe ten years old at the time, and the lyrics didn't mean anything to me back then, and I didn't pay much attention to lyrics anyway - which was good, because this song reads like a bad acid trip. Indeed, I just looked, it came out in 1968, the year after the "Summer of Love" and still within the Psychedelic Era. It might have been a result of the brown acid that people were warned away from in some 1969 concert.
Okay, here we go:
"I recall the yellow cotton dress
Foaming like a wave
On the ground around your knees
The birds, like tender babies in your hands
And the old men playing checkers by the trees"
But I remember it musically very well, I can hear it playing in my head ("playing in my head" could be another line from the song!) - it's orchestrated, it has both fast parts like Classical Gas (a great '60's instrumental), and slow parts like a ballad, thus lots of musical variety, especially for a pop song.
Okay, here's one of the title lines:
"MacArthur Park is melting in the dark..."
even though the original singer sang it "MacArthur's Park."
And to add to the shame, it didn't help that Donna Summer made a disco cover of it, either...
Things you really don't want to click on:
The Wikipedia page on the song:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Park_(song)
Full lyrics (
WARNING: This page has an autoplay MIDI file of the song):
http://www.geocities.com/bjaes.geo/lyrics/mcarthur.htm
ETA: This page actually has TWO widgets playing that song. Turn the volume down on the second one to about 2/3rds, and you get a nice echo effect.
