or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

It’s my friends I felt bad for this Memorial Day weekend. What started as a jaunt to the grocery store for the three of us became nothing less than my full-fledged introductory course to the wonders of the two Richard Harris albums that Jimmy Webb wrote, arranged and produced for Harris in the late sixties. For those familiar with the thespian’s recordings, it will come as no surprise that, Harris was permanently banned from the CD player by the time we began our subsequent trip to Annapolis later in the afternoon.

Of course, as I look back on it, my expecting their full attention was asking a lot. The two albums, 1968’s A Tramp Shining and the following year’s The Yard Goes On Forever are hardly the stuff easy listening is made of: multi-part song suites, massive, baroque orchestrations delivered by Harris’s trembly warble. In truth, absent that peculiar instrument of Webb’s poesy, both of the records would have likely been far more listenable to the untrained ear. As my friend used to say to me, “The only thing I don’t like about those Richard Harris albums is...Richard Harris.”

I don’t blame my friends for their ghastly responses- how could I actually find enjoyment from listening to his man croak- but I did have to respectfully disagree; each album (available on import as The Webb Sessions: 1968-69, Raven) has a scope, ambition, and charm that the most 35mm of modern records lack today. It’s a cliché to say the sixties were full of wild abandon, that it was somehow “better” then, but the simple fact that Harris could even secure a top-ten hit from the wonderfully ridiculous and epochal “MacArthur Park” is a testament to not only its author, but also the swagger of its era.

“We must do it” were Harris’s words when new-kid-on-the-block Webb played the actor “MacArthur Park” for the first time. Despite the fact that the Association (of “Windy” and “Along Comes Mary” fame) had turned the song down, Harris, who had only sung a few times in cinematic musicals, was so certain that he and Webb needed to collaborate, that he invited Webb to his parents’ house in Ireland to motivate, insisting that the young songwriter sleep in the bed in which the actor “was conceived.” Unsure of the proper response, Webb acceded to his host’s demands, creepy though they were.

The tracks for A Tramp Shining, including “MacArthur Park,” were already completed by the time Harris and Webb went into the studio to record. The actor kept a pint on a nearby stool to “lubricate” the vocal cords during the sessions. As the tracks had not initially been conceived for Harris’s voice, they were in a much higher key than he was really able to sing; the result was that the music and its medieval boho-hobo lyrics ended up even more dramatically and intensely delivered - exactly the effect Webb was after.

Webb himself was in the midst of tremendous success, both commercially and artistically; he now, quite literally, slept under the piano the royalties from his first song bought him. The young Oklahoman had struck gold with his first hit, “Up, Up and Away,” a breezy jaunt for the Fifth Dimension in 1967 before writing and arranging the entirety of the vocalists’ sophomore effort, The Magic Garden, a psychedelic gospel song-cycle suite that Nick Drake reputedly counted among his favorite records. Fast becoming a Burt Bacharach for the darker hue of the late sixties, Webb, at the same time, was also writing lonely, heartwrenching hits for Glen Campbell like the classic “Wichita Lineman” and “By the Time I Get To Phoenix,” the latter of which dealt with Webb’s deteriorating back-and-forth relationship with his girlfriend and muse, a woman by the name of Susan.

Susan wouldn’t make an appearance by name on A Tramp Shining, but one of Webb’s finest songs about their relationship would, “Didn’t We,” which, like “Phoenix,” earned the attention and favor of one Frank Sinatra. The record’s leadoff track, it sets much of Tramp’s tone: melancholy, romantic, lyrical, and, above all, epic. Musically stuffed with interludes and towering, maximalist orchestrations, the songs liberally interspersed pseudo-romantic literature with nonsensical imagery typical of the late sixties, best exemplified by “MacArthur’s” “Someone left the cake out in the rain...” stanza.

Still, what separates Tramp from, say, Rod McKuen’s contemporaneous (and awful) recordings is certainly not their respective singers’ talents; indeed, at times, Webb’s angular melodies prove an iceberg to the Titanic that was Harris’s shaky warble, with its mountainous vibrato making the most egregious of Elvis Costello’s forays into art song sound like Placido Domingo by comparison.

The difference is Webb himself, brazenly attempting to pull off a massive Artistic Statement, with all the pitfalls that accompany such an endeavor, not to mention a set of songs no other artist wanted for an actor who was better known for his prodigious alcohol intake than his vocal talents. With each song’s arrangement seemingly more ornate than the last, its lyric further into the realm of the pretentious, Jimmy Webb had everything to lose and seemingly little to gain making these records.

But gain he did. As mentioned, “MacArthur Park” became a top-ten single in 1968 (and again for Donna Summer a decade later), revitalizing Harris’s career and further sending Webb’s stock into the stratosphere. The record became a massive hit and, in retrospect, a defining statement of its era, exemplified by the suitably ridiculous album sleeve featuring a pensive Harris donning a bandana whilst chewing a blade of grass. But a mere tramp shining, he.

This all, of course, mattered little to my poor suffering friends, who merely wanted me to shut it off. They didn’t seem to care that The Yard Goes On Forever was actually a better album, with nuclear holocaust imagery added to the mix and augmented by a particularly Morriconian tilt to the orchestrations, which more regularly featured fuzz bass, pedal steel and child choirs. They didn’t hear much of that. Though I’d succeeded in planting “MacArthur’s” chorus— one of the most infamous and reviled in popular music— in their heads for the day, they mostly heard a man who couldn’t really carry a tune. Pity.

So we traveled to Annapolis, I driving, as they seemed to sleep most of the way. As I drove, I was thinking beyond the emotional decay of O.K. Computer playing on my car stereo: is that restless spirit really gone?

I didn’t answer that question, but I did find it living tonight as I left my girlfriend’s place, free to indulge my admittedly peculiar fascination on the rainy drive home with this washed-up lush, his boy genius writer-arranger, and a cake mysteriously left out in the rain, all its sweet green icing flowing down. At that moment, I thought, what a tragedy. What a tragedy. Don’t ask me why. I know it probably doesn’t mean anything. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it.