Mystery Songs of a Bygone Era
I know I mentioned this a few days ago, alluded to it in passing, dropped the name. No, I’m not talking about Brett Easton Ellis. Yeah, he’s an interesting writer. So is Charo and she’s making a comeback. I was talking about the late Richard Harris and his cake song, to wit: someone left the cake out in the rain. First of all it was back in the Sixties or Seventies when the cake song was released out of the blue. Between Led Zeppelin albums, there came the cake song. Between footage of the fall of Saigon came detergent commercials. Someone left the joint chiefs of staff out in the rain.
It took so long to bake it. This was a warbly crescendo line as though the writer banged the gong just moments before Dick Nixon threw two fingers in the air on the steps of Marine One. I’m leaving town. That’s what two fingers meant. In another context, out of context, well, a fella might have gotten his nose broken throwing those fingers in the air. You needed to be boarding an impressive looking aircraft to get away with that. No one does it now, and that’s too bad. Hippies have vanished too.
Back to the song. You want just grab the guy by the lapels and demand a timeline. How long? What was the cake doing outside? This was before the Weather Channel, so no one could predict rain. It came out of nowhere, and women everywhere rushed outside to bring their cakes into the house. Hippies were all like ‘hey mom, where you going?’ and mom’s all like ‘cake…outside…rain.’ Actually that sentence structure had not yet found currency. Adlai Stevenson was never all like anything, lived over eighty years, never was all like anything at all. He liked music though and enjoyed cake.
I’ll never find that recipe again. It’s a lost recipe song. Charo could cover it. Maybe the Stones when they had Ronnie Wood. So, it’s an organizational thing, but suggestive of something more sinister, something permanent. It was poetry of the times. Rod McKuen was popular. Some of the Beats had washed ashore in North Beach, a scant few miles from Stanyon Street. Italian coffee was gaining a following. There were Barry Manilow sightings here and there, but Patti Smith was doing Schaefer in the Park. I remember that concert…outdoors, Central Park, big pieces of cake in Bethesda Fountain, yeah, it’s beginning to make sense now that I think about it.