Burt Bacharach: an astonishing creator of
impermeable classics and supersmooth pop
Alexis
Petridis
He was dubbed ‘easy listening’ but this was nonsense.
His dazzling music, a result of classical tuition and nights in bebop clubs,
defied categories – and made stars of soul singers, rock bands and mum-friendly
crooners
Thu 9 Feb
2023 16.19 EST
With the
arrival of rock’n’roll, pop music divided, broadly speaking, into two
categories. There was music aimed squarely at the recently discovered teenager
that frequently seemed to have the specific intention of alienating their
forebears. And then there was the music that carried on much as it had in the
years between the end of the second world war and the appearance of Bill Haley,
Elvis Presley, Little Richard et al. Look at the charts from 1952 or 1953, and
they’re packed with songs that seem to target an older demographic, who didn’t
want shock or rebellion or white-hot excitement, but something to soothe or
buoy them along, what eventually became known as easy listening.
The twain
very seldom met: if anything, the divide became more pronounced as the 1960s
wore on and a cocktail of new technology and new drugs meant the music aimed at
teenagers became more adventurous, strange and innovative. Look at the charts
from 1966 or 1967 and you’ll find a stark split: Strawberry Fields Forever and
Purple Haze v Engelbert Humperdinck and Ken Dodd’s Tears.
Dionne
Warwick sued both Bacharach and Hal David for damaging her career by splitting
up
But Burt
Bacharach’s music existed somewhere in the middle. He often got lumbered with
the term easy listening. You could see why – his own albums, such as 1965’s Hit
Maker! or 1967’s Reach Out, tended towards syrupy arrangements and cooing vocal
choruses. Usually compilations of songs other performers had already made
successful, they seldom showed off his compositions to their best effect. But
in reality, the easy listening label was lazy to the point of being
nonsensical, not least because – as any musician will tell you – Bacharach’s
songs were seldom easy.
No matter
how mellifluous the melody, he dealt in changing meters, odd harmonic shifts,
umpteen idiosyncrasies that were perhaps the result of Bacharach’s eclectic
musical education, which variously took in studying classical music under the
French composer Darius Milhaud, listening to bebop musicians in the jazz clubs
of New York’s 52nd Street and hanging out with avant-gardist John Cage.
The truth
was that no obvious label or category could contain what Bacharach did: his
style was once memorably summed up by Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen as Ravel-like
harmonies wedded to street soul. He could come up with Magic Moments for Perry
Como, but he could also write for the Drifters, Gene Vincent, Chuck Jackson and
the Shirelles.
Listen to
Herb Alpert’s version of This Guy’s in Love With You. An unbelievably
beautiful, lushly orchestrated ballad, introduced to the world via a light
entertainment TV special on which Alpert sang it to his wife, it’s the epitome
of grownup, sophisticated 60s pop: you can imagine it floating around in the
background of a cocktail party entirely populated by people who agreed with
James Bond’s assessment that the Beatles were best listened to wearing
earmuffs.
Then listen
to Love’s 1966 version of My Little Red Book, a song originally recorded by
Manfred Mann: it’s raw, distinctly strange garage rock, complete with a
pounding, descending riff that inspired Pink Floyd’s even stranger psychedelic
opus Interstellar Overdrive. Bacharach wrote them both. He made music that was
genuinely sui generis: rock bands could record his songs, so could mum-friendly
crooners, so could soul singers and jazz musicians.
He
occasionally seemed to have an affinity with artists that similarly resisted
categorisation. How would you label Dionne Warwick, perhaps the most celebrated
Bacharach interpreter, who recorded the definitive versions of Walk on By, Do
You Know the Way to San Jose?, A House Is Not a Home, and – with all respect to
the late Cilla Black – Anyone Who Had a Heart, and who described her
relationship with Bacharach and the lyricist Hal David as “a triangle marriage
that worked”? Was her music and her approach soul, or pop, or easy listening or
something else?
He first
had hits in the 1950s, Magic Moments among them, but it was as the 1960s
dawned, and his partnership with David blossomed that his career ignited. They
started writing one impermeable classic after another – to the songs already
mentioned you can add The Look of Love, I Just Don’t Know What to Do With
Myself, Wives and Lovers, I Say a Little Prayer, (There’s) Always Something
There to Remind Me, Make It Easy on Yourself and I’ll Never Fall in Love Again
among umpteen others. The songs came in such profusion, and were of such an
astonishing quality, Bacharach and David made amassing a catalogue the equal to
anything written in that decade look weirdly effortless.
Perhaps
after that, anything would seem anticlimactic, but the 1970s proved trickier.
The hits started to dry up, and the increasingly fractious Bacharach and David
partnership ended in a flurry of lawsuits in 1973.
For good
measure, Dionne Warwick sued them both for damaging her career by splitting up.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s, and a new partnership with Carole Bayer Sager
– later to become Bacharach’s third wife – that his career was reinvigorated,
although this time around, his writing seemed to fit more easily into a niche
of supersmooth, sophisticated adult pop: Christopher Cross’s Oscar-winning
Arthur’s Theme (The Best That You Can Do), Neil Diamond’s ET-inspired
Heartlight, Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald’s 1985 duet On My Own.
At the
other extreme, his 1960s oeuvre was attracting lavish praise from some unlikely
sources: at the height of their early riot-provoking notoriety, the Jesus and
Mary Chain announced that if they ever wrote a song as good as This Guy’s in
Love With You, they would immediately split up, perfection having been
achieved.
One school
of thought had it that interest in Bacharach had been boosted by the 1990s’
interest in 1960s kitsch, of which the Austin Powers films formed a part, but
the truth was that the oeuvre of Bacharach and David had never really needed
reviving. Even in the years when Bacharach’s latest songs had failed to make
the charts, you were never too far away from hearing something the pair had
written in their imperial phase: either someone was covering them or the radio
was playing the vintage versions, or they were appearing on TV or film
soundtracks. It’s a state of affairs that’s true today, and a state of affairs
that seems unlikely ever to change.
Obituary
Burt Bacharach obituary
Songwriter whose hits, including I Say a Little Prayer
and Walk on By, became classics of easy-listening pop
Adam
Sweeting
Thu 9 Feb
2023 11.03 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/feb/09/burt-bacharach-obituary
Few
songwriters have been able to enjoy hits across six decades, as well as the
bonus of a dramatic revival of interest in their work during the later years of
their careers. Burt Bacharach, who has died aged 94, could claim both.
With his
writing partner Hal David, Bacharach launched himself into the front rank of
pop songwriters with a brilliant streak of hits for Dionne Warwick during the
1960s, beginning in 1962 with Don’t Make Me Over and proceeding through (among
others) Walk on By, Anyone Who Had a Heart, I Say a Little Prayer, Trains and
Boats and Planes, and Do You Know the Way to San Jose. All became standards in
Bacharach’s chosen pop-easy-listening genre, their apparent simplicity
concealing his mastery of different rhythms and metres.
He had
soaked up the music of the jazz big bands and bebop, and also studied with the
French composer Darius Milhaud, who urged his pupil to “never ever feel
embarrassed or discomforted by a melody that people can remember or whistle”.
Bacharach’s melodies were not only memorable but also frequently suffused with
melancholy and regret. His gifts as an arranger allowed him to exploit all the
resources of an orchestra with precision, and his use of plaintive “Bacharach
trumpets” became a distinctive trademark. Meanwhile he was turning out
imperishable classics for a string of different artists. Tom Jones never
particularly liked What’s New, Pussycat?, the Oscar-nominated theme from the
1965 film of the same name, but acknowledged its enduring popularity.
Herb Alpert
topped the US chart with the winsome ballad This Guy’s in Love With You, Jackie
DeShannon did likewise with What the World Needs Now Is Love, and BJ Thomas was
the lucky recipient of Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, from the film Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which brought Bacharach and David Oscars for best
theme song and best original score). Bacharach was an Oscar-winner for a third
time in 1982, with Arthur’s Theme from the film Arthur.
The son of
Bert Bacharach, a sports star turned nationally syndicated newspaper columnist,
and Irma Freeman, an artist and songwriter, Burt was born in Kansas City,
Missouri. The family moved to Kew Gardens in Queens, New York, when he was a
child. At the insistence of his mother, Burt studied the cello, drums and
piano. His ears were opened by the innovative harmonies and melodies of jazz
musicians of the day such as Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, and he played
with several jazz combos before enrolling in music courses at the Mannes School
of Music, New York, and at McGill University in Montreal.
He served
in the US army (1950-52), and while acting as a dance band arranger in Germany
he met the singer Vic Damone. Back in the US after his discharge, Bacharach
worked as piano accompanist to Damone and to numerous other artists on the club
circuit. One of them was the actor and singer Paula Stewart, whom he married in
1953.
He was
fortunate to fall into one of the all-time great songwriting partnerships with
David, whom he first met at the New York songwriting beehive, the Brill
Building (also to be the home of other renowned songwriting duos including
Leiber & Stoller, Goffin & King and Pomus & Shuman). David had been
writing hits for such luminaries as Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra since the
late 40s. Bacharach and David scored their first big commercial coup when the
country singer Marty Robbins took their song The Story of My Life into the US
Top 20 in 1957. A cover version by Michael Holliday reached No 1 in the UK the
following year, and Perry Como brought them another smash with his recording of
Magic Moments, which spent eight weeks at No 1 in Britain.
After the
breakdown of his marriage (he and Stewart divorced in 1958), Bacharach
travelled to Europe to become pianist and bandleader for Marlene Dietrich, a
role he would sustain until 1964. By 1961 he was back in New York, and wrote
some material for the Drifters, as well as the Chuck Jackson hit Any Day Now
before resuming his partnership with David. Their song (The Man Who Shot)
Liberty Valance, inspired by the John Wayne/James Stewart western, became a US
No 4 hit for Gene Pitney in 1962. Pitney did better still with the duo’s
composition Only Love Can Break a Heart, which reached No 2 later that year.
Then came
Bacharach and David’s historic hook-up with Warwick. She was a member of the
Drifters’ backing group, the Gospelaires, and the songwriters invited her to
make some demo recordings at their office at the publishers Famous Music, in
the Brill Building. One of them was for Make It Easy on Yourself, which became
a big hit for Jerry Butler. David recalled: “She said, ‘I thought that was my
song!’ We said, ‘No, you just made a demo’. She was really very hurt and angry.
Then we realised here’s this wonderful singer and we’re using her to make demos
– she could be a star!”
So it
proved, and the hits with Warwick became their calling card. They wrote and
produced 20 American Top 40 hits for her over the ensuing decade, including
seven that reached the Top 10. One of these songs, I Say a Little Prayer, also
gave Aretha Franklin a US Top 10 hit and her biggest solo hit in Britain, where
it reached No 4. Throughout the 60s anything Bacharach and David touched became
commercial gold dust. They wrote film scores for What’s New, Pussycat?, Alfie
and Casino Royale, and scored the successful Broadway musical Promises,
Promises, whose title song provided another hit for Warwick and spun off a
chartbuster for Bacharach himself with I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.
The writers
always had a soft spot for the UK, probably because so many British-based
artists had No 1 hits with their material, including Cilla Black – whose
version of Anyone Who Had a Heart was her breakthrough hit – Sandie Shaw, the
Walker Brothers and Frankie Vaughan.
The
Carpenters ushered in the 70s with (They Long to Be) Close to You, a US No 1
which also reached No 6 in the UK, but although Bacharach’s 1971 album (called
just Burt Bacharach) became a sought-after collector’s item, the decade would
prove disappointing. In 1973 Bacharach and David collaborated on a new musical
version of the 1937 film Lost Horizon, but it was a commercial disaster that
prompted angry splits between Bacharach, David and Warwick, and involved them
in a spate of lawsuits. The writers parted company after a disagreement over
royalties. Bacharach’s second marriage, to the actor Angie Dickinson, whom he
had married in 1965, began to come apart, although they did not divorce until
1980.
It was not
until the early 80s that Bacharach’s magic touch returned, when he won the
Oscar for best original song for the chart-topping theme from the film Arthur,
which he had also scored. One of its co-writers was the lyricist Carole Bayer
Sager, whom Bacharach married the following year. The couple went on to write
Making Love for Roberta Flack and Heartlight for Neil Diamond. In 1986,
Bacharach enjoyed one of his best ever years, achieving two US No 1s with
That’s What Friends Are for, recorded by Warwick with Elton John, Gladys Knight
and Stevie Wonder as a charitable fundraiser for Aids, and the Patti
LaBelle/Michael McDonald recording of the lachrymose On My Own.
In 1991 his
marriage to Bayer Sager ended, and two years later he married Jane Hansen. In a
2015 interview, Bacharach – who was nicknamed “the playboy of the western
world” during the 60s – admitted: “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody, but when you
wind up being married four times, there are a lot of bodies strewn in your
wake.”
During the
90s, Bacharach and David reunited with Warwick for Sunny Weather Lover, from
her album Friends Can Be Lovers, and Bacharach wrote songs for James Ingram and
Earth, Wind & Fire. In 1995 he co-wrote God Give Me Strength with Elvis
Costello for Allison Anders’ film about the Brill Building era, Grace of My
Heart, and this resulted in the Costello-Bacharach album Painted from Memory
(1998).
Bacharach’s
contribution to pop history was acknowledged in a 1996 BBC documentary, Burt
Bacharach – This Is Now, and he would find himself being hailed as an icon of
cool by bands as varied as Oasis, REM, Massive Attack and the White Stripes. In
1997, an all-star cast including Costello, Warwick, Chrissie Hynde, Sheryl Crow
and Luther Vandross banded together at the Hammerstein Ballroom, New York, for
a serenade of Bacharach’s songs called One Amazing Night, and the Rhino label
issued The Look of Love, a three-disc compilation of his music.
Bacharach’s
profile received a huge boost from his appearances in all three of Mike Myers’s
60s-spoofing Austin Powers films. He earned an Oscar nomination for the song
Walking Tall, his first collaboration with the lyricist Tim Rice, which was
performed by Lyle Lovett on the soundtrack of Stuart Little (1999).
His 2005
album At This Time unusually found Bacharach writing lyrics as well as music
and even provoking some controversy by touching on political themes. “All my
life I’ve written love songs, and I’ve been non-political,” he said. “So it
must be pretty significant that I suddenly have strong feelings of discomfort
with the state of the world, and what our [US] administration is doing.” This
did not prevent the album from winning the 2006 Grammy award for best pop
instrumental album.
In 2008 he
opened the BBC Electric Proms at the Roundhouse, in London, with Adele and
Jamie Cullum among his supporting musicians. His autobiography, Anyone Who Had
a Heart: My Life and Music, was published in 2013, and in 2015 he performed at
the Glastonbury festival. He continued to tour past his 90th birthday, with
concerts in the UK, US and Europe in 2018 and 2019.
He returned
to movie soundtrack composing with his score for A Boy Called Po (2016), featuring
the theme song Dancing With Your Shadow. The film concerned a child with
autism, and inspired Bacharach to write the music in memory of Nikki, his
daughter from his second marriage, who took her own life in 2007 having been
affected by Asperger syndrome. In 2018 his song Live to See Another Day was
released, its proceeds donated to families affected by the shootings at Sandy
Hook Elementary School in 2012.
In addition
to his Oscars and six Grammy awards (plus a lifetime achievement award in
2008), he was awarded the Polar music prize in Stockholm in 2001. In 2011, the
Library of Congress awarded Bacharach and David the Gershwin prize for popular
song.
He is
survived by Jane, their son, Oliver, and daughter, Raleigh, and another son,
Cristopher, from his third marriage.
Burt Freeman Bacharach, songwriter, singer and
musician, born 12 May 1928; died 8 February 2023
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