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Burt Bacharach
Something Big: The Complete A&M Years...And More!
***Preliminary liner notes, subject to change. ***
Confections of a Dangerous Mind
Pop culture inspires geekdom, and most serious music geeks collect. Some partition whole rooms to display music collections, and worse: a room for compact discs, a room to house vinyl, stacks of magazine archives that clutter kitchens, shoeboxes of cassettes rising like soviet apartment blocks in the corners of bedrooms, bookshelves of music-related titles clogging hallways.
Bob Stanley, of Britain's Saint Etienne, walking music encyclopedia and Bacharach acolyte, once owned a house that started leaning Pisa-style because his vast record collection crushed the foundation.
The singular output and influence of Burt Bacharach, if collected and compacted, could generate such gravity as to warp space and time – if only measured in 5-, 7- and 12-inch slices, let alone a ticker tape parade of published sheet music followed by lorry-loads of yellow pages-sized fake books (the musician's equivalent to file sharing). Manipulating time: one of music’s many superpowers, and not just in the act of imploding scattered careers into densely-packed, multi-disc box sets. Music can transport you instantly to the past, offer a glimpse of the future, suck you in, shoot you forward, and sometimes stop time altogether. Burt Bacharach’s music does all that, and more.
Music critics invariably invoke Bacharach's name to describe songwriting that is deliberately pretty, deliberately good. Bacharach-like, Bacharach-type, Bacharach-esque – the name is shorthand for pop melodies that transcend the holy trinity of chords. As a general rule, imitators ride in limos, and innovators take the subway. But not always. By 1960, he had been schooled in the French impressionist classical, be-bop, avant-garde, post-war charters, European chanteuserie, Brazilian bossa nova, and teenage popera, unlike many of his Tin Pan Alley predecessors. A songwriter who is also conductor, orchestrator, arranger, and producer considered every trick in his little red book to push each song beyond its immediate value. He deconstructed the whiplash sass of a hip in a short skirt with the precision of a Disney animator, deciphered the body language of the clinging heart and expanding American consciousness. He expressed the abstract and unexpected melancholy of a generation new to leisure, a disposable income and the transport of mobility. The accessible complexities of his tunes matched in step the progression of social freedoms and companion complications of the era, and the Eisenhower crowd had no idea what hit them. When the sides came out through the Brill baleen, they were as fresh as bleached sheets. By the end of the decade, a new vocabulary of polarization had become colloquial, but so had Bacharach. "The wild thing about my songs," he told The New Yorker in 1968, "is that they cross two age gaps. They're hits with people my parents' age and they're hits with the kids, too."
The iconic snapshot of Bacharach back in the day is a television commercial circa 1970 propounding imported Italian apéritif over ice. Tailored-slacks-relaxed and sporting a Malibu tan, with wife Angie Dickinson draped over his piano, he softly sings: "Martini & Rossi, on the rocks, oh yeaaah." It was the American counter to "vodka martini, shaken not stirred." (In a parallel of logic, Martini & Rossi more recently drafted George Clooney for a series of commercials for Italian audiences.) Planted in the footprints of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Richard Rodgers, Bacharach did not follow the trail of bong smoke into Laurel Canyon.
Burt Bacharach was the only composer, mused lyricist Sammy Cahn, who didn't look like a dentist. "Burt has turned out to be a sex symbol," said Promises, Promises producer David Merrick, as though surprised.
Writing in The New Yorker at the time, Lillian Ross repeatedly reports on Bacharach's ensemble: Italian black-rimmed sunglasses pushed up on top of his head. A green jacket, rust-colored slacks, brown and yellow striped tie, dark blue shirt. Another day: navy-blue shirt, white slacks with dotted blue stripes, white socks, and very clean Topsiders. At yet another meeting: a tartan cap, a single-breasted navy cashmere coat, oversized French sunglasses, and a scarf that was 12 feet long, a gift from Marlene Dietrich. “He had a ruggedly handsome face,” she wrote, “with an aquiline nose and what seemed to be a chronic expression of remote thoughtfulness, or puzzlement.” (Students of contemporary celebrity will recognize this as the game face adopted by every professional ingenue since.) But the vermouth wasn't the only thing soon to find itself on the rocks. Suave, erudite, Burt Bacharach was perhaps the last American sophisticate with mass appeal.
Burt Bacharach's early years were characterized by a series of style decisions, subtle and sometimes accidental choices which would come to mean much more later in life. His father went by Bert, but someone in the family pictures recognized the potential social limitations of the spelling. Would Berts Lancaster or Reynolds have advanced such macho careers? The familiar variation of Bertram would not do for the son of a men's fashion arbiter and a portrait painter, even in Kansas City, Missouri, even back in 1929. Soon, the family would relocate to New York by way of Queens, as the senior Bacharach's career as a syndicated columnist took off. Too diminutive to compete effectively on his field of choice, the gridiron, young Burt was relegated to hated piano lessons. He tried drumming, he tried cello, to no effect. The shortest kid in his class, copping to his Jewish roots was also out of the question.
Bacharach's interest in music was rescued by French modernists. He took a shine to the delicate, ambient melodies of Ravel, Debussy and Satie, who had collectively rejected the pancake pomp hawked by Teutonic composers immortalized as miniature busts adorning every teacher’s piano. Proximity to Manhattan's jazz scene provided a booster shot. A fake ID granted entrance to a Dizzy Gillespie set one night and the teenager got a taste for the basement revolution that would come to be known as bebop. Less than spectacular grades excluded him from the music schools of generic prestige, despite his enthusiasm. He instead headed up to Montreal and did his best to train as a straight-laced classical pianist at McGill. What a difference an “A” might have made; it could have doomed him to a career in classical music. An apparent lack of satisfaction found him seeking musical instruction beyond the boundaries of the curriculum. At the Mannes School of Music, he studied the avant-garde under French composer Darius Milhaud. In 1996, Bacharach told Q: "I liked Berg and I liked Webern. I hung out in New York watching Cage and Lou Harrison. I was aware of the angular side of music, but I liked tunes too. There were five of us in Milhaud's class and for an exam we had to write a piece, and I wrote a sonatina for oboe, violin and piano which had one particular movement that was highly melodic and quite different from what everyone was writing. And I felt ashamed – or should I say self-conscious – at having written something that wore its heart on its sleeve so obviously. But Milhaud said, 'Never be ashamed to write something that people can whistle.'”
Drafted in 1950, the graduate was put to use entertaining the troops. Mistakenly presented as a concert pianist, he was nevertheless called on to play the cocktail-hour hits du jour in officers' clubs and army hospitals. He was shipped to Germany where he met Vic Damone, who had already launched a career in entertainment. Upon demob, Bacharach toured with Damone, earning his stripes as conductor, arranger, and accompanist. He worked the nightclub and cabaret circuit, in the company of Polly Bergen, the Ames Brothers, Imogene Coca, and Paula Stewart, whom he started dating – and even as half-time act for the Harlem Globetrotters. Bacharach got an office in the storied Brill Building. He got married to Ms. Stewart. He tried to settle down.
An introduction of the neophyte songwriter to a veteran lyricist named Hal David (who did look a lot like a dentist) yielded a couple songs for films. David's brother Mack, with whom Bacharach co-wrote a cute little hit for the drive-in classic (and oldest title in the Steve McQueen canon) The Blob, was getting steady paychecks from Hollywood. An exploratory trip to the left coast became bait for a switch to emergency fill-in for Marlene Dietrich's conductor. They toured together, on and off, for the next six years. She introduced him as "everybody's composer." She introduced him to the world.
"She'd just scare me," he told CBS Sunday Morning in 2002, "when she went, 'Mr. Burt Bacharach!' I used to be looking at my shoes when she did that." She dressed him. She washed his shirts. She once demanded Frank Sinatra use one of Bacharach's early songs (Sinatra declined). "You'll be sorry," she warned. "You'll ask him to write for you some day." (Years later, in fact, Sinatra did.) Dietrich often used to say, "Nobody marry you, Burt, over my dead body."
In short, Marlene Dietrich adored him. "No matter how many curtains open and close between me and the audience," she wrote in the liner notes for his first record, "his approval is what I'm seeking." In return, Bacharach turned her act into a first class one-woman show, while developing his talent for orchestration.
Songwriting was the obvious next step in his progression.
1619 Broadway was a study in utilitarianism, a sweatshop that mass-produced the soundtrack for the era, an Oort cloud of producers, A&R men, arrangers, singers, DJ's, musicians, and music publishers. An office consisted of a capsule big enough to accommodate a crappy piano, two chairs and an ashtray. The windows were sealed shut. Fueled by a caffeine/nicotine concentrate, the songwriters in turn wrote furiously, then trolled the eleven-floor building for music publishers who might bite. "You'd start at the top and work your way down," Hal David told Bill DeMain in Mojo. "You'd write with one composer in the morning and another in the afternoon." Records were spit out of the grinder to meet the rising demand from America's new indolent youth. Bacharach and David would share that address with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Rhythm and blues was the standard currency, meted out by process-straight multiples like the Shirelles, Ronettes, Drifters, Crystals, and Coasters, plus bouffant-and-pompadour singles like Lesley Gore, Little Eva, Bobby Darin, and Gene Pitney.
Popular teen idols were also trotted out from Hollywood to feed Gen-Wonderbread. Before he was known to viewers of the Lifetime Channel as the stormy-eyed miniseries maven, Richard Chamberlain was Dr. Kildare, pop star. (This extravaganza of blatant inauthenticity probably doomed all actors who have ever aspired to become rock stars.) In any case, few artists wrote their own hits, and it was a boon for songwriters. But everyone was expendable, especially the songs.
"I mean, they were really ordinary," Bacharach told CBS Sunday Morning. "And I thought, 'this could be a snap,' you know? And I was wrong. I did really, really bad."
Between tours with Marlene Dietrich, however, Bacharach/David were beginning to knock out songs from their Brill cubicle and some of them hits. By the end of the '50s, their conglomerate title appeared on records by Perry Como, Marty Robbins, Johnny Mathis, and Tony Bennett.
Burt Bacharach had somehow passed through the decade without getting his hands dirty with greasy kid stuff. Rock and roll just wasn't that interesting.
Viewed from a distance, figures in pivot often appear to come full stop. As the Sixties kicked off, the country seemed to be taking a collective cigarette break, as though prescient of the impending polar flip. Bacharach, however, had his ear to the grindstone. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, with a nose for talent, took Bacharach under their wing. They imparted their knowledge of record production to him in exchange for an agreement to publish Burt's songs. Bacharach had already impressed many a vocalist as an accompanist with synaptic intuition; in Polly Bergen's words, "he knew when I was going to breathe before I did." His background in performing, arranging, and orchestrating was becoming extremely useful as he increasingly insinuated himself into recording sessions. Despite the you stab 'em, we slab 'em production ethic surrounding him, pride of ownership began to infiltrate Bacharach's work. Soon musicians were clamoring to work with him, because of his reputation for intensity.
"He has a calisthenically emotional style of conducting," observed Hubert Saal in Newsweek, "that involves doing simultaneous knee bends at the pianos, swiveling to fire musical directions at the different sections of the band, using his hands like karate choppers."
"His command was electrifying," teen heartthrob Gene Pitney told writer Robin Platts, years later. "The musicians had so much respect that they would be absolutely quiet and do his every bidding ... the air was crackling with emotion and creativity." Bacharach was absolutely unconcerned when takes turned double-digit. Instead of piecing out the instruments, he liked the sensation in the room of all the musicians playing at once.
"He's possessed," testified Russ Savakus, a bassist who became part of Bacharach's inner circle of session musicians, as well as working for such artists as Bob Dylan, Chet Baker, and The Free Design. "And a little of each man's flesh is left in the session."
Phil Ramone, Bacharach's preferred partner in the recording process, shared a fascination with the latest developments in technology. Soon the musicians no longer sounded like a firing squad. On record, a sense of depth began to spiral out, placing the listener at the center. "Very often when I'm writing, I'm hearing when things all come in and go out," he told Musician magazine. "It's the advantage of being able to orchestrate as a composer." The ability to manipulate focus seemed to give a Bacharach a new dimension to the writing process, and in particular, rhythm.
Life rarely obeys the metronome. Time passes, time flies, time drags. The big moments evaporate almost before they’ve even happened, and memory is like a drunk in the editing room. Bacharach has repeatedly explained his songwriting approach as attempting to make an entire movie in three minutes: all the highs, all the lows, jammed together on one platter. As his little cinematic compositions reflected the growing social complexities surrounding him, they also began to rebel against the tyranny of 4/4. "I don't think Burt Bacharach would have been possible in the '30s," Richard Rodgers told Newsweek in 1970. "He's not interested in the 32-bar form or in 8-bar phrases. And I think it's healthy."
"I never did a 7/8 bar to consciously break the rules," Bacharach told Musician. Some of his biggest hits shift tempo from bar to bar, imparting no sense of discombobulation to the listener – just the vocalist. "Promises, Promises' is a very difficult song for a singer," he told Q magazine. "They used to hate me. Dionne can do it, but Dionne could make anything sound easy."
"You've practically got to be a music major to sing Bacharach," is how Dionne Warwick put it. And in 1962, cutting her first demo in pigtails and sneakers for the songwriting team, Dionne, in fact, was – at Hartt College in Connecticut. Before the year was out, all three had signed to Scepter Records, an indie label launched by a New Jersey housewife named Florence Greenberg in a moment of divine madness upon seeing the Shirelles perform. One day, Bacharach and David had brought her a demo tape of "Make It Easy On Yourself."
"To hell with song," she told them – "who's the girl?" It took six months to track her down. Marie Dionne Warrick had started her career at the New Hope Baptist Choir in Newark, as did her cousin, Whitney Houston. In her teens, she formed the Gospelaires with her sister Dee Dee. A misspelling on a Scepter release forever designated her as Miss Warwick. With the refinement of Mabel Mercer, the precision of Mae Barnes and an utterly impossible range, Dionne Warwick gave Burt Bacharach's extravagance and perfectionism room to flourish.
"Even back then, she had elegance, grace and the ability to sing just about anything," Bacharach told Mojo magazine. "And as she grew, we were able to take more chances as writers." Warwick's breathtaking ability to handle intervals a lesser composer would never ask a lesser vocalist to sing gave Bacharach a new kama sutra of melody. "The more that she could do musically, the more chances we could take. And she did it almost effortlessly," he recalled to the LA Times. "The range didn't matter, the difficulty didn't matter." Three is very often a crowd, but Dionne Warwick was the hat trick.
By New Year's Eve 1963, the songwriters were celebrating a daisy chain of chart-toppers at either pop or R&B, or both. Gene McDaniels had a Top 5 with "Tower of Strength." Gene Pitney made it to No. 2 with "Only Love Can Break A Heart." Jerry Butler had a Top 10 with "Make It Easy On Yourself." Chuck Jackson had a Top 10 with "Any Day Now." And Dionne came out swinging in the Top 5 with "Don't Make Me Over."
Then the Beatles covered a little Shirelles number called "Baby, It's You," that Bacharach had written with Hal's brother Mack. Bacharach found himself something of a star on the flip side of the Atlantic as the Brits started prospecting for potential hits in the back catalog and B-sides of American R&B artists. Soon it was a Bacharach/David free-for-all. Cilla Black cut a Xerox of Dionne's "Anyone Who Had A Heart" and scored the hit, ditto Sandie Shaw with Lou Johnson's "There's Always Something There To Remind Me." Along the fine line between cover and copy, homage and rip, something of a transatlantic catfight ensued. To make matters worse, Scepter's UK distribution proved to be less than a well-oiled machine. Dionne kept getting scooped by the English roses. Then Dusty Springfield turned "Wishin' and Hopin'," the B-side of "This Empty Place," into a Top 10 in America. The turf war had come home, but the playing field wasn’t equal here, either.
The Brill bubble was a time capsule from the future; the rest of the country was mired in the past. Scepter label-mate Chuck Jackson recalls that touring down south provided an instant reality check: "Nobody felt the brunt of segregation like my generation of performers ... in spite of all the money we were making and all the glory that was being given to us, we couldn't really enjoy it, and feel like we were somebody."
During the epic hours spent crammed in rehearsal rooms, it would have been impossible for Bacharach not to absorb a sense of the subtle – and not so subtle – racial cruelties Warwick faced outside her protective circle. When she became Bacharach and David’s voice, the language of heartbreak had found a fresh cadence. The tunes really started to hurt. No good song ever has a happy ending, but Warwick never sounds miserable. The songs Bacharach and David wrote for her all made a striking declaration of self-value. They never felt sorry for themselves.
Warwick kept knocking them out of the park: "Don't Make Me Over," "Anyone Who Had A Heart," "You'll Never Get To Heaven," "Reach Out For Me," and the international 1964 smash "Walk On By." She was one of the first black performers of the '60s to tour Europe. "I would've done anything to make her a movie star," lamented Florence Greenberg. "But there were no movies for black people. If she were white, she'd be the biggest star in the world." Nevertheless, now the white kids' heroes had black faces, and no riot squad could hold back the clock.
In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown took over as editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. The Sex And The Single Girl author and Hefner foil raised the profile of the magazine as synonymous with the new sexual liberation. The Bacharach/David songbook became anthems for a generation of tortured housewives and swingles alike, digging through their handbags for some semblance of identity as the lights kept changing. Phil Spector had a monopoly on acne grandeur, but Bacharach and David were speaking to even more confused audience: adults.
Back in London, Bacharach was recording his first solo album "Hit Maker!" for Kapp. It became a Top 10 hit in the UK. Two of London's sharpest session men were drafted to the studio: Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. "Trains And Boats And Planes," the B-side to "Don't Go Breaking My Heart," got an airing on BBC radio and spent 11 weeks on the charts. An S.O.S. call came in from What's New Pussycat? producer Charles K. Feldman. An update on the classic screwball form, the film starred Peters Sellers and O'Toole, was written by Woody Allen, and capitalized on the zany new '60s ethos. It hit theatres in June and was the top comedy of the year. Tom Jones, one of the few white guys in history who could swivel his hips and strut across a stage at the same time, unleashed a rambunctious and insidiously iconic reading of the title single. It was a smash that established a pattern of Bacharach film efforts outliving their original purpose.
Bacharach followed Sellers into his next movie, 1966’s After The Fox, an Italian romp directed by Vittorio De Sica, and based on a Neil Simon play. That same year, Burt Bacharach married actress Angie Dickinson, not long after a blind-set up by his parents. He bade goodbye to London and all the fetes and accolades. Hollywood was on the phone.
Driving past Sunset Strip on a traffic-free Sunday morning, one begins to grasp the splendor of adolescent Los Angeles. The psychedelic fuschia of the bougainvillea spreads wild over terracotta Mediterranean estates, palm trees stout and spindly dot the boulevards, and fat succulents droop over balconies as though in an opium stupor. All under sunlight cast with an ocean air effervescence, making everything seem overexposed, as though someone left a fluorescent light on all night. Everywhere, new construction and the sound of birds.
Entertainment money had set up in the Hollywood Hills and marched to the sea, unwelcome in the Protestant manors surrounding downtown. The only natural wonder in the region is the La Brea tar pits, which offers a perfect metaphor for the deadly allure of the town. In Malibu, the beautiful blonde children of the actors and actresses who came west to peddle their good looks frolic and procreate, leading a French philosopher to observe that Hitler's Aryan experiment had found unexpected purchase. In this setting, it's both easy and impossible to imagine the rewards and demands of a golden boy in LA's golden era.
Alfie, the film starring Michael Caine, came out in 1966. Charged with setting to music the truest words ever written, "without true love we just exist," Bacharach calls “Alfie” the song he's most proud of from his entire career. He produced the track with George Martin for Cilla Black at Abbey Road. It was rejected for the American release in favor of a version by Cher. Not until Dionne Warwick reluctantly recorded it a year later did it became a hit, a standard and classic, a song on which any songwriter would hang their hat.
That same year, Bacharach and David also pioneered rock opera with On The Flip Side, a TV special appropriately featuring Rick Nelson as teen idol with the first flush of his success behind him.
Bacharach teamed up with Herb Alpert for '67s Casino Royale. The two hour and eleven minute shambling spy-spoof turned fakedelic farce started as a stray Fleming property. The seven uncredited writers – Woody Allen, Val Guest, Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, Billy Wilder, and Peter Sellers – made a much more interesting dinner party than the four credited. The five directors divvied up segments, and hired Peter Sellers, David Niven, Ursula Andress, Orson Welles, William Holden, John Huston, and more – many more.
It was as though producer Charles K. Feldman had launched his own space program, and there was universal agreement that he’d screwed the pooch. However, the soundtrack shot through the roof, giving Dusty Springfield a signature hit single with "The Look of Love." Bacharach/David lost the Oscar for best song to "Talk To The Animals," from Doctor Doolittle. The title theme and soundtrack was added to Herb Alpert’s Himalayan pile of hit LP’s. And as the years distanced the film from its original context, it became revered as a priceless artifact from the Swinging Sixties.
In 1967, Burt Bacharach released Reach Out, his first album for Alpert's A&M Records, and the relationship would last through eight albums, ending with Woman in 1979.
By 1968, the nationwide culture clash had turned deadly, but AM radio was still lined up at the counter of the Bacharach/David confectionary. Herb Alpert hit No. 1 with the wedding band champ "This Guy's In Love With You." Dionne Warwick popped a Top 10 with the breezy "Do You Know The Way To San Jose." Legendary Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler walked in on Aretha Franklin and her sister Carolyn messing around in the studio with "I Say A Little Prayer." He insisted she record it, and she made it her own. Nevertheless, as the decade headed into the homestretch, more and more Bacharach/David numbers were being written over long distance telephone lines, or recycled from the catalog.
"Promises, Promises," a musical based on Billy Wilder's The Apartment," hit Broadway, a first for Bacharach and David. Despite a moderate hit for Dionne Warwick, a Grammy, and eight Tony nominations, with trophies going to then fresh-faced lead Jerry Orbach (the now-retired Detective Briscoe of Law & Order) and supporting actress Marian Mercer, reviews were mixed – from critics, and Bacharach himself. "More than any other writer or pair, this team has succeeded in drawing popular song away from the dreary old 32-bar format and away from the verse-and-chorus tradition," noted jazz critic Leonard Feather. "For example, 'Promises, Promises' bulges around the midsection with one bar each successfully in 5/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/4, 3/8, 4/8, and 4/4. Stop already!"
Dionne Warwick had severely spoiled Bacharach. The singers were struggling with the shifting tempo, and behind them a rabble of musicians, choreographers, and dancers. Songs were shuffled and modified, rejected and replaced. The nightly game of musical chairs in the orchestra pit left the composer accustomed to the luxury of 25 studio take-perfection exhausted, and he was hospitalized for pneumonia.
The call back to Hollywood to work on a new soundtrack must have been welcome. "I remember going into the director George Roy Hill's office before I got the job on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," he told Musician, "and you know that directors can be impossible. They have blind spots, or no spots at all, when it comes to perceiving where the music might go or what they want it to be. I walked into his office and he's sitting at the piano playing Bach."
The 1969 Paul Newman/Robert Redford match-up was a much-needed hit. Although wildly anachronistic, the music for the period piece fell right in line with the decade's perceived right of domain over recorded history. Both the song "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," with B.J. Thomas, and the soundtrack would put Oscars on Bacharach's mantle the following spring.
The ten-year period that sparked a pandemonium of vicissitudes ended on a wistful note as Dionne sang "I'll Never Fall In Love Again." And as Jackie DeShannon singing "What The World Needs Now" came up over the title credits of "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," Paul Mazursky's long arm examination of "free" love, the audience was left to consider how the decade that had somehow gotten ahead of itself, was now past.
If the Sixties was an era of change, it would take the Seventies to process it. American culture was ripe for hostile takeover, and all the victors shared one thing: they were losers. John Wayne couldn't rescue the country from the post-Nam blamestorming session. He was replaced by Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Woody Allen, all refining a new archetype: the anti-hero. Under new management, feeling nearly faded as our jeans, no one got the girl; the Wichita Lineman was still on the line. On the FM dial, there were many choices – pop rock, acid rock, cock rock, country rock, and soft rock – and funk followed afros in a 360-degree explosion. Saccharine became a low calorie substitute for mellow. The country had let itself go to pot, then coke, ‘ludes, and smack.
Burt Bacharach of the blue-eyed charm, intelligence, and drive had no place in this palace of rejection. Like a classic Fitzgerald character, he was all dressed up, and nowhere to a-go-go. In the post-party depression, that bachelor pad shit was a stone cliché. The martini crowd symbolized failed Cold War policy. Nice became a four-letter word, and "never trust anyone over 30" went the popular song. The era of the loser became the era of disco and eventually the era that launched the fiercest anti-Bacharach movement: punk. The most self-conscious decade in history kept redefining itself, always hungry but never full.
In 1970, Bacharach was already feeling the pressure. "You have to pay a price for being what you are," he told Newsweek. "If I could put my head down at night, go to sleep like everyone else, I wouldn't write the music I do... Maybe work is a private little torture chamber you inflict on yourself to shut out the world... A man's a fool if success is more than trying to forget the day that just passed. Happiness is a question of percentages. You're lucky to get a 50/50 split."
Still, the up escalator seemed in forward motion with "Everybody's Out Of Town" by B.J. Thomas and "One Less Bell To Answer" by the 5th Dimension. The Carpenters saturated the airwaves with "Close To You," originally recorded by Richard Chamberlain in 1963.
The soundtrack to the 1972 box office bomb Lost Horizon, however, became only a find for collectors.
It wasn’t lost on Dionne Warwick that a fresh crop of singers got dibs on Bacharach’s best work. As the years had progressed, fewer and fewer Bacharach/David songs were appearing on her albums. Her spectacular signing to Warner Bros. Records launched a series of dominoes crashing down on the once-solid team. In the wake of the perceived magnitude of the Lost Horizon denouement, Burt Bacharach and Hal David had called it quits. Unfortunately, they were contracted to write and produce Dionne's records for Warners. She was forced to sue them, and soon they were suing each other. For the rest of the decade, they communicated only through teams of lawyers.
The champagne toast of the epic break-up party was Angie Dickinson assuming the role of Sgt. Pepper Anderson, policewoman in the public fancy, instead of Mrs. Burt Bacharach.
Before Las Vegas was a wholesome family-oriented playground where what happens, stays there, it was a haven for superstars who studiously avoided the harsh glare of the disco ball. If one happened to catch Bacharach performing there in the late '70s, one would have heard music from his last two solo albums for A&M: Futures and Woman. Otherwise, he focused on the fortunes of his stable of racehorses.
He would probably have had no idea that a geeky British kid calling himself Elvis Costello was risking a rain of beer bottles in 1977 by performing a straight-up version of "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" on the "Live Stiffs" British punk invasion tour.
The Eighties were decidedly more serendipitous. Before all that crying and punching and praying that defines today's syndicated afternoon television, Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin were hosting affable weekday chat shows. Burt Bacharach met songwriter Carole Bayer Sager on the set of the Mike Douglas show, and immediately started dating – and writing. The pair got an assignment to write the theme song for a film starring Dudley Moore called Arthur. A sleeper smash, the single was recorded by Christopher Cross, an unlikely superstar (who looked like a plumber) on the heels of a smash debut. It was 1981. and another trip to the Academy Awards added statuettes to the mantle of the new Mr. and Mrs. Bacharach.
Bacharach/Sager teamed up with Neil Diamond for the 1982 Top 5 "Heartlight." Naked Eyes covered "(There's) Always Something There To Remind Me" for a Top 10 in '83. And with their legal conflicts behind them in 1985, Dionne (and Friends) recorded Bacharach and Sager's "That's What Friends Are For," donating proceeds to AmFAR (American Foundation for AIDS Research). The song went No. 1, sold gold, and won the 1986 Grammy for Song of the Year. Another gold No. 1 followed for Patti Labelle and Michael McDonald with "On My Own." Bacharach was back in business.
By the '90s, thirty-something artists who had been toddlers in the Sixties were suddenly able to re-create a complete panorama of their impressionistic childhood memories. The lounge lizard lifestyle was in full swing, a post-punk rejection of hippie boomer bloated materialism. Flea markets were being scoured for rogue Eames chairs, vintage cocktail recipe books and novelty vinyl. On the turntable: Les Baxter, Julie London, Esquivel, Serge Gainsbourg, The Rat Pack, Nancy and Lee, and anything from Brazil. Club decor was assembled from multiple viewings of "The Tenth Victim." Wallpaper magazine chronicled retro-futurism as an all-encompassing lifestyle. In America, it was Combustible Edison. In London, Stereolab and Saint Etienne. In Paris, Bertrand Burgalat. In Italy, Nicola Conte. In Japan, Pizzicato Five. They thought Casino Royale was genius.
Harking back to Susan Sontag's 1965 essay, "On Culture and the New Sensibility," which ascribed equivalent gravity to a Dionne Warwick record and a Rauschenberg painting, film academic Robert von Dassanowsky subjects Casino Royale to the full post-modern spectranalysis: "The failure of modernity and a celebration of what Umberto Eco would call the post-modern 'crisis of reason' permeates nearly ever scene ... Casino Royale is a film of momentary vision, collaboration, adaptation, pastiche, and accident. It is the anti-auteur work of all time."
The grown-up children for whom the music of Burt Bacharach had been as ubiquitous as Gerber’s baby food could catch him with Dionne Warwick at Caesar's Palace. Accordingly, Bacharach saw a swooning resurgence. Noel Gallagher of Oasis wore his adoration on his sleeve when Bacharach made an appearance on the album cover of 1994's Definitely Maybe.
Alison Anders had written a script about the Brill heyday called Grace of My Heart, and was organizing musicians to participate. In what has to be the most documented songwriting event ever, Bacharach teamed up with Elvis Costello for 1996's stunning "God Give Me Strength," and later, a full album, Painted From Memory.
Playing the Royal Festival Hall, Bacharach was greeted with a standing ovation. "Part of me is thinking, 'you're not dead'," he told Vanity Fair's David Kamp. "You don't have some incurable disease – or do you? Does the audience know something about me that I don't?" Gallagher joined him on stage and did "This Guy's In Love With You," later telling a British reporter he was more nervous singing in front of one Burt Bacharach than Oasis' typical crowds of 150,000.
In 1997 Bacharach and David received the Trustees Award from NARAS at the Grammy's. The next year, TNT broadcast "One Amazing Night," a musical tribute featuring Costello, plus Sheryl Crow, Chrissie Hynde, Luther Vandross, Dionne Warwick, and more.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Burt Bacharach," proclaimed Mike Myers in 1999 as Austin Powers, to an audience of millions, in "The Spy Who Shagged Me." (Coincidence alert: Carole Bayer Sager had written the lyrics for "The Spy Who Loved Me" theme.)
It was the turn of the century, the millennium even, and Bacharach was again a mainstream mainstay. The tributes flowed, a concert at Royal Albert Hall in 2000; "What The World Needs Now," a musical in Sydney in 2002; a third Austin Powers movie; "The Look of Love," on Broadway in 2003. The year closed out with a NBC television holiday special, “Tribute on Ice,” as skaters performed axels, flips and lutzes to music provided by Bacharach, James Ingram and Michael McDonald.
Ultimately, Burt Bacharach's most enduring fans are, and always will be, other musicians. From the Average White Band to Isaac Hayes, from Arthur Fiedler to Frankie Goes To Hollywood, from Zappa to Zorn, musicians are the ultimate suckers for a hook. In his exhaustive book, Maestro! The Life of a Pop Genius, Michael Brocken points out that Bacharach was the lone white songwriter who retained loyalty from black artists during the turbulent late Sixties and early Seventies, even as white artists abandoned him one by one. Promoting his American debut in 1993 at a party in Los Angeles, Konishi Yasuharu of the Pizzicato Five could barely speak English but could sing the Bacharach catalog. King Coffey, of the Butthole Surfers, possibly the loudest band of all time, declared in Space Age Bachelor Pad magazine, in a piece called "Hell Is Other Rock Stars": "I have to say that the entire Burt Bacharach songbook plays in my head. And that's a nice thing."
Bacharach's most recent effort is Ronald Isley's Here I Am: Isley Meets Bacharach. Reviewing the Isley show at Manhattan's Supper Club where Bacharach conducted a 40-piece orchestra, Stephen Holden of the New York Times wrote: "The concert proved a point about Mr. Bacharach. His songs must be taken seriously or they mean nothing."
Burt Bacharach’s songs prove that hard writing makes easy listening. The term became genre, and epithet. "When I think of easy listening, I think of Muzak," Bacharach told Q magazine. "I don't think my music is that easy to listen to. But I understand the tag. I don't mind. At home, I have an original cartoon on my wall. It has a guy waiting for an elevator and there are three in front of him and above them it says Mancini, Manilow, and Bacharach."
The curse of genius is making the impossible look easy. The songs of Burt Bacharach sound deceptively smooth – until one tries to replicate them. Bacharach will prevail as long as music itself prevails, standards by which all songwriters will judge themselves.
Scientists are forever theorizing to quantify the relationship between music, memory, and the brain. Their studies mostly confirm what we already know intuitively: music records and plays back memories intact, despite years and miles. Music can also conjure emotions we didn’t even know we had. As the years accumulate, the weight of all those songs, the sum tonnage of all that blind devotion and unfulfilled longing, is enough to crush a civilization. Oddly the effect is opposite. In the case of Bacharach, the most startling observation is how his saddest tunes make you feel good. The great leveler that paradoxically elevates us from all else – in the words of the poet Costello, "love and unhappiness go on and on" – an ever-replenished supply of broken hearts will keep musicians employed in perpetuity. People will always need music, if only to remember the world. And somehow music always makes everything seem new again.
Lauren Quellette
August 2004
When the music is right and speaks to you, it inevitably finds its way into your life. This composer has fulfilled his mission, his dream. Burt walks, breathes and lives music. I’ve spent many hours in the studio and on the road with Burt watching the wheels turn when his gift flows. In the loudest restaurant or in a room filled with music he suddenly asks, “Have you got a pen?” A napkin or a scrap of paper turns into five hand drawn lines and notes appear on top of them. His pursuit of perfection is driven by what he hears. His gift demands that the music be played as he hears it. I have shared his emotions from the control room and from the concert stage. It’s an experience I treasure.
Musicians love him. He smiles and implores them to play up to the standards that are set only when great music is accompanied by great conducting. I wish cameras were backstage, in the studio and at sound checks. The musicians and staff at the venue stop to watch and listen to him. I’ve seen him show a singer, a group, a section how the phrasing should be. They are always amazed at his teachings.
The lessons that Burt taught me in creative precision have guided me throughout my life. Burt’s music, coupled with the warm and spacious acoustics of Harry McCune’s sound designs, resulted in his live concerts sounding as exquisite as they did in the studio.
He is a very special man and I love him for jump starting my career and letting me be a part of his musical life.
Phil Ramone
August 2004
Burt Bacharach, without doubt, is one of the most gifted composers who ever drew a breath. Even though his melodies are considered by some to be unorthodox, in Bacharach’s case, unorthodox never sounded lovelier or more clever. While his melodies sound like no others and, at times, possess a flavor that leans toward R&B, he definitely is in the same league as Kern, Berlin, Rodgers, Porter, Carmichael, et al. No two of Burt’s songs sound the same – which is quite an accomplishment in itself – but all are instantly recognizable as his own. I believe that this cannot be said about any other composer.
In addition, where most of the great popular composers were not arrangers, Bacharach is, with the arrangements being as instantly identifiable, brilliant and innovative as the songs themselves. Virtually 100% of the time Burt crafted the perfect arrangement for each of his songs.
At times Bacharach incorporates instruments, such as the ukulele on “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” that aren’t used very often in modern popular music, as well as fashioning little musical “answers” to some choruses that are as catchy as the songs themselves. One particularly inspired arrangemental bit is the instrumental tag at the end of “Raindrops”; the record just would not have been the same, or in my opinion, as successful without it.
The long and short of all this (due to space constrictions, I’m regretfully leaving out my thoughts of Burt’s considerable record production talents) is that there has never been a multifarious musical talent quite like Burt Bacharach, and I believe in all probability there never again will be.
Richard Carpenter
August 2004
When we first started kicking around the idea of a Burt Bacharach box set in the capacious Hip-O Select luxury suites, our initial idea was to present a tight, triple-disc collection focusing on his years at A&M Records. We had a healthy knowledge of this source material, the classic “hit” versions by Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, the Carpenters, etc., having been the soundtracks to all our lives. Of course, we reasoned, it would be a pretty simple project to assemble and would crystallize fairly quickly.
Uh, that would be wrong and wrong on both counts. This project began expanding, soufflé-like, from the moment those masters hit the Studer two-track tape machines.
We pulled tapes and listened with the mastering engineer; each new track tantalized with possibilities. Group them thematically? Alphabetically? By chart position? The seven original vinyl albums, plus a concert recording previously unreleased in the U.S., pushed us from three discs to four. We decided on a chronological format, keeping the albums together as whole entities, providing a natural flow from one musical statement to the next. But the four discs weren't completely packed out, and we had just a little extra Burt hiding in another corner of the vault, so...
The project became Burt Bacharach: The Universal Years (briefly, anyway). After all, he recorded on Kapp in the 1960s, we owned those records, and his Kapp recordings blended with his A&M material quite naturally. Perfect. Except for the tiny nagging feeling that there was this fairly ephemeral “middle” period, between Kapp and A&M, when Burt released the classic single "Nikki" (you might recognize it as the old ABC Movie Of The Week theme) on Liberty Records. Had to have that.
Then there was the matter of “Arthur's Theme (The Best That You Can Do)” from the classic Dudley Moore-Liza Minnelli film. Need that. Oh, and how about “That's What Friends Are For” from Night Shift and the quirky theme to After The Fox? Or the United Artists single “The Fox Trot,” that was really “Gold, Gold, Who's Got The Gold?” under an alias?
Four discs grew to five. But they didn't flow right. The breaks came in the wrong places. And Bacharach, ever the master of phrasing, couldn't be subjected to a cadence so flawed. Then the miracle occurred. (Cue FX: heavenly voices.) Burt's music spoke up. As if by an occult hand, the music ordered itself, not by chronology or theme or chart position, but by vibe. Bacharach's immaculate sense of tempo was bestowed upon the project like a gift.
Add to that insightful and caring liner notes by the likes of Lauren Oliver, Phil Ramone and Richard Carpenter, who are colleagues and fans. An impeccable mastering job (despite some sources that were, well, in varying states of array). Elegant packaging that rivals the maestro's vaunted panache. And perhaps most importantly, the benediction from Burt and his manager, Bob Fead.
We're grateful for all of it.
This is not by any stretch The Complete Burt Bacharach. Numerous film songs and scores, for instance, were not included here, but can be found elsewhere. As can the man himself. Bacharach continues to record and tour and push outward on musical boundaries well into his 75th year. What we always envisioned this set to be, and what we hope you'll agree it has become, is a celebration of Mr. B., not just as the genius writer, producer and arranger, but also as a brilliant performer.
Mike Ragogna and Jim Pierson, co-producers
August 2004
“This music represents my career not only as a songwriter; but also as a performer and producer-arranger. I am honored with your recognition of my musical accomplishments."
Burt Bacharach (insert signature from scan)
August 2004
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