Donna Summer “MacArthur Park” / “Once Upon a Time”
/This live version of “Once Upon a Time” is a fast-paced popsong narrative, a mini-movie, contemporary noir told in hyper disco nightclub style—it’s over before I can type this sentence. Maybe it’s supposed to be 33 1/3 RPM, not 45 (doesn’t actually say on the record). There’s 1978 live audience noise at the beginning, but now it sounds quite ominous. It sounds really cool and weird, actually, the only thing is that now Donna Summer sounds like a slightly off, male crooner. It’s weird that it’s a B-Side, since the studio version of this was the title song of a double album from the year before. I only know that because I happened to be looking at a list of those “33 1/3” books, and there’s one about that album. It’s weird how once you open yourself up to something, the connections start to happen. I was never a disco fan, so this is my sole record by the Queen of Disco. Donna Summer was, to some degree, the just-offscreen soundtrack to the crucial years of my life. No doubt I picked up this one because the A-Side is “MacArthur Park,” one of my favorite songs—and I always love to hear what various artists have done with it. Here, she starts out with a few quiet dramatic lines, and then there’s that annoying disco sound effect (I never did know what that was, it sounds like a clown prop noise) and then it launches into a full disco version of the rest of the song. I’m not crazy about it—still haven’t come around to disco. Give me a few more years. It’s still the song, though, very catchy. No matter what presentation you go with, the line, “someone left the cake out in the rain” is no less weird. It’s a perfect expression of something, though no one knows what it means. (Still haven’t read that Jimmy Webb memoir.) Anyway, it’s a pleasure to hear Donna Summer sing that line, and that song—it just adds to the meaning and the mystique.
2.13.23