Burt Bacharach dies at 94
LOS ANGELES — At the Brill Building, the legendary songwriters’ mecca on Broadway in New York City, composer Burt Bacharach first teamed with lyricist Hal David in 1956. Over the next decade, the two helped define the broad reaches of popular music with a run of hit songs that poured from the radio, added depth and emotion to films and evoked memories with listeners.
Through their collaboration, Bacharach emerged as a commanding figure in popular music as a composer, arranger and record producer whose musically sophisticated songs had cross-generational appeal.
A multiple Grammy and Oscar winner, Bacharach died of natural causes last Wednesday at home in Los Angeles with his family by his side, his publicist Tina Brausam confirmed to The Times on Thursday. He was 94.
“Burt Bacharach. The very name is a synonym for popmusic success in the 1960s,” wrote Leonard Feather, The Times’ former jazz critic.
The beneficiaries of the Bacharach-David partnership were simply staggering: Gene Pitney (“Only Love Can Break a Heart,” “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa”), Jerry Butler (“Make It Easy on Yourself”), Bobby Vinton (“Blue on Blue”), Jack Jones (“Wives and Lovers”), Tom Jones (“What’s New, Pussycat?”), Dusty Springfield (“The Look of Love,” “Wishin’ and Hopin’”), Herb Alpert (“This Guy’s in Love With You”), Jackie DeShannon (“What the World Needs Now Is Love”) and B.J. Thomas (“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”), among others.
But Bacharach and David are most closely associated with Dionne Warwick, a talented young backup singer whom they initially enlisted to sing on their demo records.
Beginning with “Don’t Make Me Over” in late 1962, Warwick scored with a slew of Bacharach-David songs, including “Walk on By,” “You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart),” “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” “Alfie,” “Promises, Promises,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Message to Michael” and “Trains and Boats and Planes.”
“We were lucky,” Bacharach told the Chicago Tribune in 1987. “It was a case of all the right people in the right place at the right time. Hal and I found the perfect partnership, and Dionne was the perfect voice for our songs.”
Singer and music historian Michael Feinstein told The Times in 2011 that Bacharach and David were “absolutely the greatest songwriters of their generation,” standing shoulder to shoulder with the most treasured American composers.
Music historian and journalist Paul Grein said Bacharach, the winner of three Oscars and six Grammys, was “one of the greatest composers in pop music history.”
Bacharach and David “are, in some ways, the bridge between the Great American Songbook writers from the 1930s and the contemporary writers from the rock era,” he said.
And in the 1960s, when there were two distinct markets — “music for kids and music for adults” — Bacharach and David uniquely appealed to both, Grein said.
Unlike most songwriters who are not recognized in public, Bacharach became a well-known performer and recording artist in his own right.
As a piano-playing singer, he appeared in sold-out concerts and starred in his own TV specials, including the Emmy Award-winning “Singer Presents Burt Bacharach” in 1971.
“He was not a great singer, but he was a charming performer,” Feinstein said. “He knew how to put an entertaining show together. With backup singers, great orchestration, it was a great theatrical show. So he compensated for his own vocal shortcomings by creating a very entertaining, musically rich concert.”
The boyishly handsome Bacharach, whose aura of glamour benefited from his 1965 marriage to actress Angie Dickinson, continued to tour in concert well into his later years.
During their ’60s heyday, Bacharach and David also worked in film and shared Academy Award nominations for the title songs “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “Alfie” and for the song “The Look of Love” from “Casino Royale.”
In 1970, Bacharach won an Oscar for his score for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and he shared another with David for their hit song from that film, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”
The duo also worked on Broadway, writing the music and lyrics for “Promises, Promises,” the long-running 1968 hit musical comedy whose book was written by Neil Simon.
In 1970, the Carpenters scored a No. 1 hit with Bacharach and David’s “(They Long to Be) Close to You” and the 5th Dimension had a No. 2 hit with “One Less Bell to Answer.”