the first round
(6) donna summer, “macarthur park”
ended the dream of
(11) gary wright, “dream weaver”
162-142
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 8.

moira mcavoy on “macarthur park”

A car ride to or from school has to be where I first heard “MacArthur Park,” the first song of Donna Summer’s to hit number one in the US. That fact alone seems improbable; Summer’s “I Feel Love” helped to popularize disco as we know it, igniting the airwaves and encompassing clubs across the country in 1977. The song is maximalism perfected; innumerable manufactured layers coalesce in precise harmony, precariously walking the line between cacophony and synthetic symphony, sticking the landing to the latter. Synths and drum machines swirl around Summer’s melodious voice, the one that made her famous on the German theater scene, as she repeats a handful of lines over and over, the final product a hypnotic ride that, when listened to at a high enough volume or on good enough headphones, feels all-consuming: body, mind, emotions.
Yet, this song did not hit number one, nor did her first breakout single “Love To Love You Baby,” a track which introduced the disco sound to a wider audience. No, instead the song that finally made the Queen of Disco the Queen of the Airwaves was “MacArthur Park,” her seven minute long cover of a Richard Harris (yes, that Richard Harris) folk ballad from years prior. The Harris original is frequently cited as one of the worst songs of all time, what with its lyrics both maudlin and confusing, non-linear melody, and a lacking vocal performance from the actor-attempting-turned-singer. That version, to be clear, is an absolute train wreck, and rightfully deserves the slander it has received for decades. It has too many elements melded with too little artistry. It takes a concept built of excess and tries to fit it into a genre of restraint, doomed from the start.
Pulling off maximalism in folk may have been the high sell which sank Harris, but I would argue the song’s excess—in lyrics, melodic movements, concepts—is what makes it such a successful target for someone like Donna Summer, a broadway actress working to invent a genre defined by toomuchedness. Here we have a landscape where horns and vocals and drums and a synth line can all work to complement each other. There’s no one player vying for the spotlight like in Harris’ folk rendition, but instead many working to be a seamless unit. Here we have a place where an extended instrumental interlude can not only work but seems necessary, a break between narrative acts, lending a sense of artistic credence to the otherwise semi-nonsensical lyrics. Here we have an environment where the most basic part of the song—a deep sadness, a desperate longing—can be elevated past its own mawkishness into something transcendent without being self-indulgent. This song, as written, is not perfect, but it is certainly perfect for disco, for someone with such a command for the maximalist as Donna Summer.
I listen to music constantly and voraciously: while lying in bed procrastinating getting ready for work, on the commute to work, at work, on the way home, while shopping, while cooking, while cleaning, while falling asleep and beyond, the algorithm dictating a playlist unheard until I awaken bleary-eyed and confused hours later. I love music for a multitude of reasons—it’s fun; it’s heartbreaking; it allows me to better communicate my emotions to others; it allows me to better communicate my emotions to myself.—but as much as i love music, I hate silence. The openness and possibility makes me uncomfortable, eager, awkward and anxious. I will talk when I have nothing to say just to fill the air with something. When living alone for years, I blasted my iPhone and tv simultaneously in a desperate attempt to fill every lonely corner with even the possibility of meaning or connection. I want something else everywhere, all the time.
This, of course, is not unique to me in the slightest; it’s not even unique to me in my family. My love of music and fear of silence was inherited from both of my parents, and the majority of my prominent early childhood memories are built around music: my father braving the crowds of young children to take me to an Aaron Carter concert; my mother teaching me to do the Hustle in my grandmother’s kitchen; my father making up songs to sing my brother & i to sleep, the same melody every time until eventually deciding to sing us to sleep with “Silent Night”. Music was everywhere, and no place more obviously than the car radio on the way to school, or Mass, or a Girl Scouts meeting, or a road trip to New Jersey. I grew up on the border of the boondocks, so there was ample opportunity to hear my parents’ choices of music while growing up and going literally anywhere. My father liked country, Twisted Sister, and ABBA whereas my mother was pure oldies, particularly the girl groups of the sixties and the divas of disco a decade later.
As she worked as a librarian at my elementary school, she drove my brother & I to school more days than not—and still often dictated the music when she did not—which practically guaranteed us a steady flow of disco for the nearly two hours we’d spend commuting each day. When the radio stations were playing too many commercials (often) or not enough of the Good Stuff (also often), my mother would opt to delve into the overstuffed metallic silver CD case she kept in the front seat, fishing for a suitable substitute. One of her favorites was a Donna Summer greatest hits collection which prominently featured the seventeen minute long mix of the “MacArthur Park” suite, a sequence of four songs played live together as one movement. There were other incredible tracks included (including her 1978 classic “Heaven Knows,” a pop song so poised in its desperate lyrics and uptempo musicality that the likes of Robyn and Janelle Monae should bow to it), but the one that always stuck out to my brother and I was “MacArthur Park.” We mostly requested it as either the cake song, after the prominent image of a cake being destroyed by rain in the eponymous park, or the Dumbledore song, as we were young children in the early 2000s wherein Harry Potter was our only frame of reference for most things. Of course, my mother complied, thrilled to have an opportunity to play the music she loved without judgment or whining from her children.
That’s how I remember it, at least. While fact checking a detail for this piece with my mother, she reminded me that we saw Donna perform MacArthur Park on the Today Show when we were five, an event I completely forgot. The only thing I remember from that trip to New York is eating hot dogs for any and every meal possible and seeing dinosaurs at a museum. Further, she mentioned that we almost never asked for the song on car rides, and that we only began to tolerate it after she told us about the Dumbledore connection. More gallingly to me, she said that we preferred the Richard Harris version, which I choose to believe was because we were children; we liked things that were familiar instead of things that were good.
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the music in my life as a child as I’ve gotten older. There’s the shining memories, to be sure, but there’s more: the pop music I played on my walkman to drown out my parents arguing, the everpresent static over the Radio Disney station that hummed in the background of my childhood insomnia. Music has continued to be a means of escape in my adult life, so it makes sense that it developed as one as a child. Our family car rides were not always pleasant; more often than not they were mired with at least one fight, if not more, and I was frequently the antagonist. The music was occasionally an annoyance but it was more frequently a mediator, a distraction. Disco played over our discord, absorbing it and amplifying it until it dissipated.
The most interesting aspect of the Donna Summer rendition of “MacArthur Park” is not just its leaning into maximalism, but its total reimagination of what was already widely known. The best covers are those which either strictly adhere to the original or which wildly re-envision it: anything less and the weakness shows. Here, we see an artist take something abhorrent and make it endearing, a dirge into a dance. Memory is what we make of it, and here, she made it into a hit. It’s easy to romanticize the past, but it’s another thing entirely to reconstruct it.
I love it now, but maybe I didn’t like “MacArthur Park” at the time, or if I only liked the connection to Dumbledore, or maybe I reveled in the absurdity of a song I, as a child, thought to be literally about cake. The why mattered less then, and the specifics matter less now. As an essayist, I feel compelled to be driven by the facts, but I’m hesitant to place weight on them compared to what I feel in response to these memories, altered or otherwise. What matters was that we together embarked on all seventeen minutes of the song (before tiring after three or four), and would listen as my mother lip synced over the steering wheel, making jokes about cake and characters, bonded by this sound all around us. 

Moira McAvoy genuinely loves many bad songs and appreciates the opportunity to defend their virtue in writing. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Financial Diet, Storyscape, and others. You can find her destroying her hearing at a show, or more immediately tweeting at @moyruhjo.  

Sex, Drugs, and Spirituality in Junior High: donna vorreyer on “Dreamweaver”

A hundred or so kids milling around a semi-dark gymnasium. Chips and cups of soda on some folding tables, maybe pizza for a special treat. A record player hooked up to a speaker on the stage where kids drop off albums and 45s and a chaperone organizes which songs to play with the help of student council members. A few parent chaperones lurking around the perimeter trying to be as inconspicuous as possible so as not to mortify their children. This was a junior high dance in 1976, dance being a broad definition of what happened on these monthly Friday night occasions. A lot of standing in clumps, boys together, posturing and shoving and doing what junior high boys do. Some girls dancing to the best fast songs, belting out the words, jumping up and down, others trying to keep their feathered hair perfect, turning their best angles toward the herd of boys that was near but not near enough. Until a slow song came on.
Established couples drifted together, and brave souls without the benefit of that condition approached one another with trepidation. Everyone wanted to slow dance. Everyone wanted to be held, to be touched, all of the newly-awakened nerves and synapses of puberty exploding. And, with the exception of “Hey Jude” and its 7 minutes of never-ending chorus (which teachers would never play if they were paying attention, especially as a last song), Gary Wright’s “Dreamweaver,” clocking in at roughly four and a half minutes, was the equivalent of a lifetime for a slow dance and therefore an anticipated selection. Slow dancing in the seventies had no actual moves or finesse, no “put one hand on his shoulder, then hold the other one straight out” formality. Boy’s hands wrapped around girls’ waists or hips. Girls’ arms twined around boys’ necks, faces tucked over shoulders or into chests, depending on height, breathing in musk, sweat, looking up into faces if brave enough. Feet shuffled slowly in a circle in one spot on the floor. And the song, already ubiquitous on the radio, not only was long enough for those exploratory embraces that passed for dancing, it was full of innuendo that inspired much speculation and debate.
“I heard it’s about sex,” was the most popular theory, as one might expect. As inexperienced as most twelve and thirteen year olds were with actual intercourse (I won’t say all as that would probably be a lie), everyone was hormonal enough to understand that closing one’s eyes and taking yourself to a fantasy world could certainly be referring to masturbation or possibly to the intense make-out sessions that occurred at parties or behind closed doors. Those slow dances encouraged that interpretation, to be sure, but that wasn’t the only connection to be made.
“I heard it’s about getting high,” others would say. And this also made sense. Getting high was a pretty popular pastime in the mid-seventies, even in junior high. Students at my school in the suburbs of Chicago would often gift nickel or dime bags of pot as birthday gifts to friends, and pot was everywhere at concerts and at parties. Climbing aboard a train where worries melt away and troubles are left far behind seemed an apt description for getting high, even if some of us had not yet done so (for fear of our parents and the terrifying consequences that may occur), and the weird synthesizer opening was “trippy” and strange enough to help promote this idea.
Another popular theory was that the song was about sleep, and the similarity between being asleep and being high is not to be overlooked. A 2018 Argentinian study compared language from dream journals and language from descriptions of drug experiences and found that both reported losing a sense of self and reality and feeling “at one with the world.” Climbing aboard the Dreamweaver train, crossing the astral plane, could be equated to lucid dreaming, which could then be associated with the experiences of those on hallucinogens. But whether sex or drugs or simply sleep are present in the song, there is one more interpretation that seems to be confirmed by Gary Wright himself: “I heard it’s about God.”
According to SongFacts and information on the archived version of Gary Wright’s official website, he explains the origin of the song this way:

In 1972, my friend George Harrison invited me to accompany him on a trip to India. A few days before we left, he gave me a copy of the book Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. Needless to say the book inspired me deeply, and I became totally fascinated with Indian culture and philosophy. My trip was an experience I will never forget. During the early 70s, while reading more of the writings of Paramahansa Yogananda, I came across a poem called “God! God! God!” One of the lines of the poem referred to the idea of the mind weaving dreams and the thought immediately occurred to me, weaver of dreams...Dream Weaver.

He goes on to explain that, after years of interpreting the song for others as simply a fantasy experience, he came to realize that it was, for him, a song about God, or god, or whatever spiritual being one believes in and asks for guidance. About a being with infinite love and compassion ferrying us through the night of human suffering.
Any song that can not only promote a belief that there is relief from suffering but also inspire so much speculation cannot possibly be considered a “bad” song. And its resurgence after its use in the Wayne’s World films in the 90s would also suggest that it has been recognized and enjoyed by at least two generations of music listeners. And even if it hadn’t done any of those things? Those four and a half minutes at a junior high dance with my arms around the neck of a boy, maybe even the boy, those two hundred seventy seconds? They were pure dreams, woven of hope and fear and self-doubt, dreams of a future that somehow, someday, despite all of my awkward and ugly teenage faults and frailties, someone would be there to take away my worries, to get me through the night.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), both from Sundress Publications. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in Rhino, Tinderbox Poetry, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, Waxwing, Whale Road Review, and many other journals. Her third full-length collection of poetry is forthcoming from Sundress in 2020.  She would argue that every "bad" song has a person somewhere in the world who loves it, so musically, there should be no "guilty" pleasures, just pleasures.