The golden age of the Great American Songbook has come to a final close
Dominic Green
Pianist and songwriter Burt Bacharach, who died on Feb. 9 at the age of 94, wrote the last chapter in the Great American Songbook. His 26-year partnership with the lyricist Hal David, who died in 2012, made them the heirs to earlier double acts such as George and Ira Gershwin, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Bacharach came from the golden age, and it ends with him.
Bacharach and David’s popularity was in a way the most remarkable in the pantheon. Unlike their predecessors, they swam against the tide of commercial taste. Like Paul McCartney, his only peer in the 1960s, Bacharach combined the cerebral and the sensual, romantic melodies and complex harmonies, in an age of simplification and crudity. Popular music had become more energetic with the rise of Elvis and the teenage horde, but also simpler in melody, harmony, and sentiment. Bacharach wrote songs, not blues licks. His melodies were so strong, and his chording so suave, that his chromatic changes and odd time signatures pass unnoticed (1963’s “Anyone Who Had A Heart” or 1968’s “Promises, Promises,” for instance). His orchestrations were classically rich. Like David’s lyrics, his harmonic complexity brought out the adult ambiguities of love, a field in which Bacharach, who married four times, accumulated considerable experience.
Burt Bacharach was born in Kansas City in 1928. His father, a fashion journalist, moved the family to Queens, New York. His mother encouraged him to learn the piano rather than play football. He studied musical theory at McGill University in Montreal and then under the French composer Darius Milhaud at the New School in New York City. Milhaud combined European modernism with jazz and Brazilian influences. Apart from Bacharach, his pupils include Philip Glass and Steve Reich, each in a different way expert at breaking out of traditional structures.
Bacharach served a triple apprenticeship in the late 1950s. He learned how to arrange and control and orchestra as an accompanist, including for Marlene Dietrich. In the Brill Building in New York City, he studied pop songwriting as a would-be hit-maker and learned how to record and produce records by watching Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. He met David, who had sold his first lyrics in the 1940s, in the Brill Building in 1957. Their first Top 10 hit was Perry Como’s “Magic Moments” (1958).
The interlude between Elvis’s entry into the Army in 1958 and the Beatles’s arrival in 1964 was defined by novelties such as surf rock instrumentals and the improbable sophistication of the bossa nova sound. Bacharach, with his training under Milhaud and Dietrich, knew how to blend Latin rhythms and pop melodies, scoring hits such as the Shirelles’s “Baby It’s You” (1961) and the Drifters’s “Mexican Divorce” (1962).
One of the backing singers on that Drifters track was Dionne Warwick. Bacharach realized at once that she had the technical and emotional range his songs required. Bacharach and David’s first hit with Warwick, “Don’t Make Me Over,” was released in October 1962. David took the title from Warwick’s protest at Bacharach’s perfectionist insistence that she keep retaking the vocal until it could be no better. That year, he and David had hits with “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by Gene Pitney, “Make It Easy On Yourself” by Jerry Butler, and “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” by Tommy Hunt. The next year, “(They Long To Be) Close To You” by Richard Chamberlain, “Reach Out For Me” by Lou Johnson, and “Wives and Lovers” by Jack Jones. But the definitive versions of all these songs are Warwick’s versions.
Bacharach and David were at their best as a trio with Warwick, and Warwick was their ideal interpreter, but the racialized structure of the music business meant that their best songs usually went first to inferior white artists. True, some of them were more suited to male singers anyway, such as “What’s New, Pussycat?” (the Welsh belter Tom Jones, 1965) and the garage band stomp of “My Little Red Book” (English fops Manfred Mann, also 1965, but much better by Love, 1966), or “This Guy’s In Love With You” (mumbled by Herb Alpert, 1968). And true, Warwick got first bite at “Anyone Who Had A Heart” and “Wishin’ and Hopin’” (both 1963) and “Walk On By,” “A House Is Not A Home,” and “You’ll Never Get To Heaven (If You Break My Heart” (all 1964). But it frequently fell to Warwick to cover songs that she should have been the first to record.
When Bacharach and David recommended Warwick for the theme song for the Michael Caine vehicle Alfie (1965), Paramount Pictures insisted on an English singer. The hapless screecher Cilla Black recorded the soundtrack version under Bacharach’s exasperated supervision at Abbey Road, though Warwick’s version became a hit in America. The only white singer whose interpretations matched Warwick’s was Dusty Springfield, especially on “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” and “The Look Of Love” from the Bond film Casino Royale (1967). In a further irony, Warwick’s biggest hit, “I Say A Little Prayer” (1967) is overshadowed by Aretha Franklin’s 1968 version.
Bacharach’s success disproves the legend of hairy ’60s rock. Did any English rocker write a better or more traditional song in 1967 than “The Look Of Love,” “The Windows Of The World,” or “I Say A Little Prayer”? “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” a global, Oscar-winning hit in 1969, could have been written in 1959.
In 1973, Bacharach and David split after the usual argument about how to divide the royalties (Bacharach, not unreasonably, argued that he did most of the work). Bacharach married Angie Dickinson, worked on his tennis game, divorced Dickinson, and married songwriter Carole Bayer Sager. He had more hits, writing “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” with Christopher Cross, “Heartlight” with Neil Diamond and Bayer Sager (both 1981), and “On My Own” with Bayer Sager in 1982.
Bacharach was out of musical fashion in many ways by 1962, so it was not surprising that he was often dismissed in the 1970s and 1980s as a nylon-clad cheesemonger. He toured as a solo act, divorced Bayer Sager, worked on his tennis game some more, and married twice more. Then, in the mid-1990s, a new generation rediscovered Bacharach’s music. Rather than disappearing into the eternal sunshine of Pacific Palisades, Bacharach was not just alive but very well due to all that tennis.
In 1999, my brother Leo organized a charity tribute to Bacharach, David, and Warwick at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Bacharach, a mere 71, bounded into the rehearsals in his tennis casuals, flashed some teeth as white as his sneakers, greeted the orchestra like old friends, then sat down at the piano and called out “Anyone Who Had A Heart” in no uncertain terms. As we ran through it, Bacharach playing the melody and singing the words to himself, he kept stopping us — to explain where we need to slow down, where the crescendo should begin, how we should drop down to reset the emotional pitch at the start of the next verse. We all knew Warwick’s recording, and we all knew what we were meant to play, but Bacharach knew how to pull out the song’s full potential. He was patient and polite about it, too.
As the rhythm guitarist, I was sitting at his right elbow. Only then did I realize that the secret of those classic Warwick recordings is Bacharach’s piano playing. His left hand was locked, perfectly anchoring the space for the guitar’s Latin cross-strokes. Before he played right-hand phrases such as the famous lick in “I Say A Little Prayer,” he breathed in, curved his body over his hand, and put his entire exhalation into the phrase, filling it with feeling and letting it slip behind the beat in a long tail of emotion. If he served a tennis ball like that, he must have been a serious player.
On the night, Bacharach ambled onstage to join Warwick for the last segment of the show. He could feel our exhilaration, she was beaming, and he knew the fun was about to get serious. As he reached the piano, he turned to me and said, “Enjoying yourself?” Then he closed his eyes, raised his right hand, and, still half-standing, counted off “Anyone Who Had A Heart.”
Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.