FAREWELL TO THE HITMAKER
Burt Bacharach’s collaborations with the lyricist Hal David — The Look of Love, Walk On By, Alfie and many more hits — evoked a sleek era of airy romance
Adie-hard romantic whose mature style might be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Burt Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the resulting mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive.
His effervescent compositions epitomised sophisticated hedonism to a generation of young adults only a few years older than the Beatles.
The debonair pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer and occasional singer died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles at 94.
Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Bacharach wrote with his most frequent collaborator, lyricist Hal David, during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.
Songs like The Look of Love (Dusty Springfield’s sultry 1967 hit, featured in the movie Casino Royale), This Guy’s in Love With You (a No. 1 hit in
1968 for Herb Alpert) and (They Long to Be) Close to You (a No. 1 hit in 1970 for the Carpenters) evoked an upscale world of jet travel, sports cars and sleek bachelor pads. Acknowledging this mystique with a wink, Bacharach appeared as himself performing his
1965 song What the World Needs Now in the 1997 movie Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, which spoofed the swinging 60s ambience of the early James Bond films. He also made cameo appearances in its two sequels.
Bacharach collaborated with many lyricists and even wrote some of his own words. But his primary collaborator was David, seven years his senior, whom he met in a music publisher’s office in 1957. The team’s artistic chemistry solidified in 1962, beginning with the hits they wrote and produced for Dionne Warwick, a gifted young gospel-trained singer from East Orange, New Jersey. Their urbane style was the immediate forerunner of the earthier Motown sound of the middle and late 1960s.
Bacharach and David worked in the Brill Building, the midtown Manhattan music publishing hub, and they are frequently lumped together with younger writers in the so-called Brill Building school of teenage pop, like the teams of Carole King and Gerry Goffin or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But they rarely wrote explicitly for the teenage market. Their more sophisticated songs were closer in style to Cole Porter, and Bacharach’s fondness for Brazilian rhythms recalled lilting Porter standards like Begin the Beguine.
Beginning with Don’t Make Me Over in 1962, the team turned out a steady stream of hits for Warwick, among them Anyone Who Had a Heart, Walk On By, Alfie, I Say a Little Prayer and Do You Know the Way to San Jose?.
Bacharach’s success transcended the Top 40. He won two Academy Awards for best song: for Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, written with David, in 1970, and Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do) , written with Peter Allen, Carole Bayer Sager and Christopher Cross, in 1982. His original score for 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which included Raindrops (a No. 1 hit for B. J. Thomas), won an Oscar for best original score for a non-musical. And the Bacharach-David team conquered Broadway in December 1968 with Promises, Promises.
With success in Hollywood and on Broadway, as well as a high-profile movie-star wife, Angie Dickinson, whom he married in 1965, Bacharach entered the 1970s not just a hit songwriter but a glamorous star in his own right. It seemed as if he could do no wrong. But that soon changed.
In 1973, Bacharach and David wrote the score for the movie musical Lost Horizon, adapted from the 1937 Frank Capra fantasy film of the same name. The movie was a catastrophic failure. Shortly after that, the Bacharach-David-Warwick triumvirate, which had already begun to grow stale, split up acrimoniously amid a flurry of lawsuits.
Reflecting on his split with David in
2013 in his autobiography, Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music, written with Robert Greenfield, Bacharach acknowledged “it was all my fault, and I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart”.
Bacharach endured several fallow years, personal as well as professional — his marriage to Dickinson was over long before they divorced in 1981 — but experienced a commercial resurgence in the 1980s through his collaboration with lyricist Sager, whom he married in 1982.
They hit their commercial peak in
1986 with two No. 1 hits: the Patti LaBelle-Michael McDonald duet On My Own and the Aids fundraising anthem That’s What Friends Are For, which went on to win the Grammy for song of the year. Originally recorded by Rod Stewart for the soundtrack of Ron Howard’s 1982 movie Night Shift, and redone by an all-star quartet billed as Dionne and Friends (Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John), it was Bacharach’s last major hit. He and Sager divorced in 1991.
Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on May 12, 1928. His father was a syndicated columnist and men’s fashion journalist who moved his family to Forest Hills, Queens, in New York City in 1932. His mother, Irma was an amateur singer and pianist who encouraged him to study music. He learned cello, drums and piano.
While still underage, he sneaked into Manhattan jazz clubs and became smitten with the modern harmonies of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, which would exert a huge influence on him.
After graduating from high school, he studied music at several schools, including McGill University in Montreal and the Mannes School of Music in New York. While serving in the Army in the early 50s, he played piano, worked as a dance-band arranger and met singer Vic Damone, with whom he later toured as an accompanist. He became German actor and singer Marlene Dietrich’s musical director in 1958 and toured with her for two years in the United States and Europe.
Other performers he accompanied in the 1950s included the Ames Brothers, Polly Bergen, Georgia Gibbs, Joel Grey, Steve Lawrence and a little-known singer named Paula Stewart, who in 1953 became his first wife. (They divorced in 1958.)
All the elements of Bacharach’s style coalesced in Warwick’s recordings, which he produced with David and arranged himself. In the typical Warwick hit, her voice was surrounded by strings and backup singers, the arrangements emphatically punctuated by trumpets echoing the influence of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.
Among the other artists who had hits with the team’s songs were Jackie DeShannon (What the World Needs Now Is Love), Dusty Springfield (Wishin’ and Hopin’, The Look of Love), Tom Jones (What’s New Pussycat?) and the 5th Dimension (One Less Bell to Answer). But Warwick was their definitive interpreter.
After the Lost Horizon debacle, Bacharach worked predominantly as a concert performer, conducting his own instrumental suites and singing his own songs in an easygoing voice with a narrow range. He periodically released solo albums but with negligible commercial impact.
Time eventually healed the wounds from the split with David and Warwick, and he reunited first with Warwick (most notably for That’s What Friends Are For) and later with David (for Sunny Weather Lover,
recorded by Warwick in the early
1990s). He found his greatest interpreter since Warwick in pop-soul balladeer Luther Vandross, whose lush 1980s remakes of A House Is Not a Home and Anyone Who Had a Heart
transformed them into dreamy quasioperatic arias.
He married Jane Hansen, his fourth wife, in 1993. She survives him, along with their son, Oliver; their daughter, Raleigh; and a son, Cristopher, from his marriage to Sager. Nikki Bacharach, his daughter with Dickinson, died by suicide in
2007.
Looking back on his career in his autobiography, Bacharach suggested that as a songwriter he had been “luckier than most”.
“Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote. “People may have heard some of their songs, but they never get to see them onstage or on television.” Because he was also a performer, he noted, “I get to make a direct connection with people.”
“Whether it’s just a handshake or being stopped on the street and asked for an autograph or having someone comment on a song I’ve written,” Bacharach added, “that connection is really meaningful and powerful for me.”