Richard Harris Albums (4)
What The Critics Say
What do you do after recording your debut album and landing a hit with "Macarthur Park," one of the longest, strangest (and in some circles, most loathed) songs to hit the Top-40 charts? If you're Richard Harris, you follow it up with The Yard Went On Forever, a dense, nearly incomprehensible Jimmy Webb concept album, then you follow it up with My Boy, another difficult (and depressing) concept album. Harris himself came up with the story line for this one. It involves a man who, in the first song, meets and falls in love with a girl, and by the end of the first side has married and impregnated her and begun marveling in the wonders of childbirth and fatherhood. However, the marriage falls apart early on in side two, leaving the protagonist to not only wonder what went wrong, but to bemoan the cruelty of divorce and offer a lament for the broken children of the world as he sinks back into a state of disillusionment and depression by the album's conclusion. Is it any wonder that this album wasn't a hit? If not, take a quick listen to side one and its complex, dramatic ballads, which Harris delivers with trademark overstatement. For an album that gets filed in the vocal pop section of most record stores, this is not easy listening, yet at the same time, it's also bound to bewilder (if not downright offend) most rock listeners. If you're curious, you're better off starting with side two, which includes a couple of strong Jimmy Webb ballads -- (&"Requiem"} (which also shows up on the Fifth Dimension's Webb-authored song-cycle the Magic Garden) and "This Is Where I Came In." Side two also includes the subtly bizarre "All the Broken Children," a Harris-penned original that combines a lilting 12/8 beat, a gospel-ish organ part, and choir backing vocals with lyrics such as "Playpens in wards of court / Some kind of adult sport / Law letters used daily as toys." It all culminates with the climactic "My Boy,") in which Harris declares, "If I stay, I stay for you my boy" -- as if having a depressed, sulking dad hanging around the house with his estranged wife will do the child a lot of good. Another point worth mentioning is that despite being a concept album, there are four different songwriting teams involved --Webb working alone, Harris working alone and with a collaborator, and the duos of "J. Harris-J. Bromley" and "B. Martin/P. Coulter" -- and the songwriting credits span a period of four years (1967-1971). In any case, this is an unusual album, one that is probably best tackled by listeners who've already made it through a couple of other Harris albums, preferably {^A Tramp Shining or one of the greatest hits compilations. ~ William York, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
The artist's first collaboration with composer/producer Jimmy Webb is a great record, even 35 years later, encompassing pop, rock, elements of classical music, and even pop-soul in a body of brilliant, bittersweet romantic songs by Webb, all presented in a consistently affecting and powerful vocal performance by Harris. Harris treaded onto Frank Sinatra territory here, and he did it with a voice not remotely as good or well trained as his, yet he pulled it off by sheer bravado and his ability as an actor, coupled with his vocal talents -- his performance was manly and vulnerable enough to make women swoon, but powerful and manly enough to allow their husbands and boyfriends to feel okay listening to a man's man like Harris singing on such matters. The production and arrangements by Webb were some of the lushest ever heard on a pop album of the period, with a 35-piece orchestra whose presence was more influenced by the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album than it was by any of Nelson Riddle's work with Sinatra. Strangely enough, "MacArthur Park" -- the massive hit off the album -- isn't all that representative of the rest of the record, which relies much more on strings than brass and horns, and has a somewhat lower-key feel but also a great deal more subtlety. One can also hear the influence of Webb's then-recent work with the Fifth Dimension in the presence of the muted female chorus on "In the Final Hours" and, much more so, on "If You Must Leave My Life" (perhaps the best song on the album, and the most complex, with heavy rhythm guitar, a great beat, and lush orchestrations), which almost sounds like a lost Fifth Dimension cut. None of the support musicians are credited, though it's a safe bet that Larry Knechtel, Hal Blaine, and Joe Osborn are among those present. The domestic CD sounds amazingly good, considering that it was mastered in the 1980s, but serious fans may want to opt for Raven Records' The Webb Sessions, which contains this album plus its follow-up, The Yard Went on Forever. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
