In his book "Rocking America", legendary WABC Program Director Rick Sklar tells the story of how WABC was responsible for making this record into a huge hit. This is a classic example of the popularity and power of WABC in those days.
Rick wrote:
Our first April WABC weekly music meeting began like many others. Disc jockeys Ron Lundy and Dan Ingram, a production assistant, our music librarian, my secretary, and I gathered in my office.
On this particular day we had an ABC dub under consideration. I glanced at the handwritten label. The reason why ABC had been afraid to start pressing the discs in quantity was obvious. At a time when most records ran two and a half or three minutes, this daring effort ran seven minutes.
I put "MacArthur Park" on the turntable, cued it up, and hit the start button. We sat back and listened. This record was not only long, it was different.
The lyrics were full of poetic imagery. The composition was broken into contrasting movements like a miniature symphony. A second melody line was introduced for a lengthy instrumental portion of the record. As it played, a silence fell over the meeting. Because the door was open, secretaries passing by stopped, slipped into the room, and sat down on the floor entranced. By the end of the song, there were half a dozen extra people at the music meeting. No one wanted to leave. They wanted to hear it again. I played the song once more. Some of the young women began to sing along with it. The music had reached some special place in all of them. I decided to add "MacArthur Park" to the WABC playlist.
After the meeting ended, my telephone lines were jammed with the usual deluge of calls from record companies and music publishers eager for the results of our deliberations. When I told ABC's local promotion director, Mickey Wallach the news, he panicked.
He asked that we at least give them a week to get the record out to the stores on a rush basis, and I agreed.
The following Tuesday, "MacArthur Park" was played on WABC. Within five weeks, by mid May, it had sold over a half million copies and was headed for the top of the charts. Virtually every other Top Forty station in the country had added it.
Effs and Ees, the most improbable hit song of the pop era, the complex, weirdly affecting, incomparable original MacArthur Park by Richard Harris, a man who couldn’t sing (1968):
Rick wrote:
Our first April WABC weekly music meeting began like many others. Disc jockeys Ron Lundy and Dan Ingram, a production assistant, our music librarian, my secretary, and I gathered in my office.
On this particular day we had an ABC dub under consideration. I glanced at the handwritten label. The reason why ABC had been afraid to start pressing the discs in quantity was obvious. At a time when most records ran two and a half or three minutes, this daring effort ran seven minutes.
I put "MacArthur Park" on the turntable, cued it up, and hit the start button. We sat back and listened. This record was not only long, it was different.
The lyrics were full of poetic imagery. The composition was broken into contrasting movements like a miniature symphony. A second melody line was introduced for a lengthy instrumental portion of the record. As it played, a silence fell over the meeting. Because the door was open, secretaries passing by stopped, slipped into the room, and sat down on the floor entranced. By the end of the song, there were half a dozen extra people at the music meeting. No one wanted to leave. They wanted to hear it again. I played the song once more. Some of the young women began to sing along with it. The music had reached some special place in all of them. I decided to add "MacArthur Park" to the WABC playlist.
After the meeting ended, my telephone lines were jammed with the usual deluge of calls from record companies and music publishers eager for the results of our deliberations. When I told ABC's local promotion director, Mickey Wallach the news, he panicked.
He asked that we at least give them a week to get the record out to the stores on a rush basis, and I agreed.
The following Tuesday, "MacArthur Park" was played on WABC. Within five weeks, by mid May, it had sold over a half million copies and was headed for the top of the charts. Virtually every other Top Forty station in the country had added it.
Effs and Ees, the most improbable hit song of the pop era, the complex, weirdly affecting, incomparable original MacArthur Park by Richard Harris, a man who couldn’t sing (1968):
