Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Plastic Penny – "MacArthur Park" (1969)


Pressed in love’s hot, fevered iron

Like a striped pair of pants


(They sure don’t write song lyrics like those any more!)


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Serendipity is a very underrated force in our world.  To wit:


I was scrolling down the list of the zillion obscure records that I’ve heard in my car and made note of over the past few years, intending to feature them on 2 or 3 lines someday.  (There’s no way I will live long enough to get to more than a small fraction of those records, but that doesn’t stop me from continuing to add to the list.)


When I stumbled across a record titled “Mrs. Grundy” by a group called Plastic Penny, I immediately went to YouTube to give it a listen.  While I listened to it, I opened a second browser window and did a Google search for Plastic Penny – who I knew absolutely nothing about.  I was particularly curious about the group’s keyboard player, Paul Raymond, because I thought his playing was the most interesting thing about “Mrs. Grundy.” 


While I was reading about Plastic Penny in general (they were a British psychedelic pop/prog rock band that formed in 1967 and broke up two years later) and Paul Raymond in particular (after Plastic Penny’s demise, he replaced Christine McVie in Chicken Shack, and later joined Savoy Brown and UFO), “Mrs. Grundy” came to an end and YouTube automatically moved on to another recording.


Imagine my surprise when that other recording turned out to be a cover of the record that one critic* has called “perhaps the greatest achievement of Western civilization since the Renaissance” – Richard Harris’s recording Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park.”  Talk about your serendipity!


[Note: that critic is none other than yours truly.]


Plastic Penny’s cover isn’t quite as mad as the Richard Harris original, but it’s mad enough for government work.  (FYI, the SecondHandSongs database lists no fewer than 218 cover recordings of the song.  I have half a notion to spend the next two years featuring each and every one of those covers on 2 or 3 lines.)


I’m not sure what keyboard Paul Raymond plays on “MacArthur Park,” but I’m guessing it’s a Hammond B-3.


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Click here to listen to Plastic Penny’s recording of “MacArthur Park,” which was released in 1969 on their second studio album, Currency:


Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.


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