Burt Bacharach

For the very first post in my classic songs blog, I’m not going to highlight a specific song but rather a specific songwriter: Burt Bacharach. Burt passed away this week, aged 94, and he deserves a special mention.

Burt Bacharach was a legend, one of my musical heroes, and one of the most talented songwriters of the entire 20th century. He wasn’t a three-chord hack; Burt was well-schooled and a sophisticated and intelligent composer. He eschewed trite, traditional formats, letting his melodies take him over bar lines and through different time signatures and key changes. He loved extended chords and loved even more putting the melody in those extensions, playing around the 7th, 9th, and 11th tones the same way less-talented songwriters played within the confines of the basic triad.

The only modern songwriter who came close to Burt in using all those fancy chords and techniques you only read about in music theory books is Jimmy Webb, and as much as I love Mr. Webb, Burt had him beat in quantity, quality, and variety of compositions. While you could always tell a Bacharach tune a mile away (it’s those extended-note melodies), every single one was unique. He never repeated himself and he never, ever compromised. Whether it’s a musically complex tour de force like “Anyone Who Had a Heart” or a seeming pop trifle like “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?,” Burt’s notes and chords not only perfectly complemented Hal David’s words but always, always struck out into unexpected but perfectly natural directions. Some may have called his music easy listening, but it was anything but easy, musically—even though he made it sound that way.

In honor of Mr. Bacharach and all the wonderful songs he crafted during his long and productive lifetime, here’s a bit I wrote about him and Mr. David for an unpublished book about popular song in the 20th century. If you can’t tell, I’m a fan—and even though Burt graced us with his graceful presence for 94 astounding years, he still left us way too soon.

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Burt Bacharach (b. 1928) and Hal David (b. 1921) were perhaps the least Brill-like of all the Brill Building artists. Compared to other Brill Building songs, a Bacharach-David composition is… well, more sophisticated, both musically and lyrically. In fact, their time at the Brill Building was brief; their careers started well before the height of the Brill Building era, and quickly expanded beyond the confines of the Broadway music complex.

Unlike most Brill Building songsmiths, Burt Bacharach was a formally trained musician with a love for jazz. As a teenager in New York in the 1940s, he cruised the jazz clubs on 52nd Street, using a phony ID to gain entrance and listen to Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and the like. He studied music theory and composition at the Mannes School of Music in New York City, at the Berkshire Music Center, at the New School for Social Research, and at the Music Academy of the West; his teachers included Bohuslav Martinu, Henry Cowell, and Darius Milhaud, who also taught Dave Brubeck. While serving as a dance band arranger with the U.S. Army in Germany, he met singer Vic Damone, and later became Damone’s accompanist. He went on to accompany many name artists, and from 1958-1961 toured Europe and America as the musical director for Marlene Dietrich.

During this same period Bacharach began his successful songwriting career. His early songs were written with a series of collaborators, including Bob Hilliard (Gene McDaniels’ “Tower of Strength,” Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now,” and the Drifters’ “Mexican Divorce” and “Please Stay”), and Mack David (the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You”). But his most successful collaboration was with Mack’s brother Hal.

Hal David started writing songs in the 1940s, for the various big bands of the late 40s/early 50s. He then took up residence in the Brill Building, where, in 1957, he first met Burt Bacharach. They were both working for Famous Music at the time, and they soon formed one of the music industry’s most successful partnerships, with David contributing his worldly wise lyrics to Bacharach’s complex melodies.

The list of Bacharach-David compositions reads like a printout of Billboard hits. The duo created one hit song after another, including “The Story of My Life” for Marty Robbins; “Magic Moments” for Perry Como; “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” for Gene Pitney; “What the World Needs Now” for Jackie DeShannon; “The Look of Love” for Dusty Springfield; “This Guy’s in Love with You” for Herb Alpert, “What’s New, Pussycat?” for Tom Jones; “Wives and Lovers” for Jack Jones; “One Less Bell to Answer” for the 5th Dimension; “(They Long to Be) Close to You” for the Carpenters; and a string of top ten hits for simpatico singer Dionne Warwick.

You could tell whenever a Bacharach-David song came on the radio. Their compositions sounded more complex, more polished, more professional than the typical teen tunes of the time. There was no mistaking “Walk On By” or “Make It Easy On Yourself” as anything other than a Bacharach-David song, no matter who was doing the singing; in terms of harmonic and lyric intricacy, only Lennon and McCartney (and Brian Wilson, in his Pet Sounds phase) came close.

There was no denying that Burt Bacharach’s meticulously crafted music was much more sophisticated than the standard Brill Building pop. He wasn’t above stretching a typical four-bar phrase into five bars, or chopping it back to three, if that’s the way his melody wandered. Conversely, he wasn’t bound to the tried-and-true Doo Wop chord progressions—or to a single key over the course of a melody. In a Bacharach tune, the chords and rhythm went wherever the melody needed them to go.

Bacharach’s sophisticated music was well-matched by Hal David’s mature lyrics. David always seemed to be writing for a more adult audience, not ignoring the teen market but not playing down to it, either. His lyrics are spare, unsentimental, and universal in their approach; they weren’t self-centered chronicles of teen angst, like most of the songs on the charts at the time.

Of course, Bacharach and David’s more mature approach to pop music was at least partly a result of their own maturity; the duo were at least a decade older than the other Brill Building songwriters. It had been awhile since either Bacharach or David had been teenagers, and it’s from the perspective of a slightly older, more world-weary generation that they wrote their most lasting hits.

Take, for example, the song “Walk On By.” In lesser hands, this could have been a simple ode to lost love. Under Bacharach and David’s direction, we feel the protagonist’s pain and pride as she encounters an old lover. Leave her her dignity, she begs, just “walk on by” and let her grieve in private:

If you see me walking down the street
And I start to cry each time we meet

Walk on by, walk on by
Make believe
That you don’t see the tears
Just let me grieve
In private ’cause each time I see you
I break down and cry
And walk on by
(Don’t stop)

I just can’t get over losing you
And so if I seem broken and blue

Walk on by, walk on by
Foolish pride
Is all that I have left
So let me hide
The tears and the sadness you gave me
When you said goodbye
Walk on by
(Don’t stop)

Bacharach takes David’s words and arranges them in a way that defies traditional verse-chorus structure. The lines rush together (“Make believe that you don’t see the tears just let me grieve”) until the singer is forced to take a breath, then returning in a run of powerful triplet figures (“In private/’cause each time/I see you”) before it shoots upward with a plaintive cry (“I break down and cry”). The chorus-like section ends with a delicate call and response between the lead singer and the backup singers—“Walk on by (Don’t stop).”

To understand a Bacharach-David tune—and especially a Bacharach melody—you have to understand that Bacharach, like pioneering songwriter/producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, always thought in terms of making records, not just writing songs. He created the entire production in his mind, so that the backing instrumentals and vocals were as crucial to the sound as the shape of the melody. You can hear this in the interrelation of the vocal parts in the “Don’t stop” section of “Walk On By.” Are the words “Don’t stop” part of the melody? It’s hard to imagine the song without this line, even though it isn’t sung by the lead vocalist. This line answers the main melodic line and, in a sense, completes it. It’s all part of the whole.

Hal David once commented on how he and Bacharach approached writing a song:

“The main thing we try to do is find an original approach to whatever song we are writing. Being different just to be different is plain foolishness. We never do that. Anything that takes away from the emotion we are trying to express, we discard. If the song isn’t honest you may fool yourself, but you will never fool the public—at least, not for long. If we in truth do have a style it is because, in our search for originality, we have not written to a particular formula. When we achieve the freshness we are looking for, it’s a wonderful feeling.”

Perhaps the best representation of Bacharach and David’s writing is the theme song to the movie Alfie—quite simply, one of the best popular songs ever written. The words flow in a naturalistic manner, as if the protagonist is just talking to a friend. The lines run together—even the verses and chorus run together—as Bacharach wisely allows the melody to follow the words, rising and falling unaffectedly as the emotional level slowly builds:

What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give?
Or are we meant to be kind?

And if only fools are kind, Alfie
Then I guess that it’s wise to be cruel
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there’s something much more
Something even non-believers can believe in

I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you’ve missed you’re nothing, Alfie
when you walk let your heart lead the way
And you’ll find love any day Alfie
Alfie

The lyrics meander to their point, much as any conversation does. What’s the point of everything? Can we take more than we give, or should we be kind to others? And if only fools are kind, then it must be wise to be cruel—right?

The protagonist keeps talking, until she convinces Alfie—or herself—that there is a reason to live, that life is more than just living moment-to-moment. If there is nothing else, there is love; “without true love we just exist.” And, whatever else, love is something to believe in.

“Alfie” is a perfect melding of words and music; one follows and reinforces the other, the harmonies perfectly expressing the emotions of the lyric. Much of the melody is in extended notes, typified by the melody behind word “Alfie” in the second measure, leaping a fifth from an F (the third of the Dm7/G chord) to a C (the seventh of the chord). And that chord, a iim7/V, in just the second measure, acting as a dominant and leading back to the root C, is just beautiful.

Burt allows his melody to wander purposefully along with the thoughtful lyrics. There’s really no distinct verse and chorus, it’s just a melody that goes where the lyrics go accompanied by chords that fall in and out of the main key. The measure with the words “golden rule” features an unabashedly dissonant C diminished chord (preceded by our friend Dm7/G), and there’s even a bit that modulates into E minor for a measure, then into Eb major for a half measure, then into G, then back into C; it’s a marvelous piece of writing.

To the perennial question of what comes first, the music or the words, in the case of “Alfie,” it was Hal David’s lyric that was written first, after he read the screenplay for the movie. Bacharach then set the words to music, struggling for three weeks to find the right combination of melody and chords to do justice to David’s exceptional lyrics.

While Bacharach and David penned hits for artists as diverse as Jack Jones and the Stylistics, their best (and favorite) interpreter was singer Dionne Warwick. Bacharach and David first met Warwick—the niece of singer Cissy Houston and aunt of future star Whitney Houston—in 1962, when she was singing background vocals on a Drifters session. They quickly signed her up to sing demos of their compositions and, with the song “Don’t Make Me Over,” the demo job evolved into a star turn. The result was as perfect a collaboration between creator and performer as one could ever imagine. Warwick had the perfect voice—and skill—to handle Bacharach’s challenging melodies and David’s evocative lyrics; she ended up taking more than two dozen Bacharach-David tunes into the top forty.

In addition to his songwriting successes, Bacharach also composed the music for several 1960s and 1970s films, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Casino Royale, and What’s New, Pussycat? In 1968, Bacharach and David teamed up for a Tony-nominated Broadway musical, Promises, Promises; they also wrote the score for the 1973 film musical, Lost Horizon—one of their few flops.

The failure of Lost Horizon also signaled, for all intents and purposes, the end of the Bacharach-David team. The duo not only split with each other but also with singer Dionne Warwick; the result was an acrimonious batch of lawsuits and countersuits, and little was heard from either Bacharach or David for several years.

Burt Bacharach came out of his semi-retirement in 1980, writing (along with Paul Anka) the soundtrack for the film Together?. In 1981 Bacharach collaborated with Peter Allen, Christopher Cross, and future wife Carole Bayer Sager on the hit “Arthur’s Theme (The Best That You Can Do)”, from the movie Arthur. Bacharach continued to score the occasional film and write the occasional hit, including “That’s What Friends Are For” (from the movie Night Shift). He continued to work through the 1980s and 1990s, ending the period with a critically acclaimed collaboration with rocker Elvis Costello, which resulted in the hit song “God Give Me Strength” and the album Painted From Memory, a real treat. He also made cameo appearances in Michael Myers’ Austin Powers movies, playing himself.

Hal David moved to Nashville in the late 1970s and penned songs with Archie Jordan and other local songwriters; he also co-wrote “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” (a hit for Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias) with Albert Hammond. In the 1980s David served as the President of ASCAP, the music rights group, for which also served on the Board of Directors. He was also Chairman of the Board of both the National Academy of Popular Music and the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame. In 2000 he rekindled his partnership with Burt Bacharach to write two new songs for the Bette Midler/Nathan Lane film, Isn’t She Great. He passed away in 2012, aged 91.

Whatever their later accomplishments, both Burt Bacharach and Hal David will be forever remembered for their sophisticated extension of Brill Building pop. Their songs have truly become standards, taking their rightful place alongside the classic tunes of Cole Porter and George and Ira Gershwin. From “Alfie” to “What the World Needs Now is Love,” Bacharach and David have contributed some of the most memorable songs in the history of popular music; we would be poorer for their absence.

Selected Bacharach/David songs:

• “Alfie” (Cilla Black, Dionne Warwick)
• “Anyone Who Had a Heart” (Dionne Warwick)
• “Blue on Blue” (Bobby Vinton)
• “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” (Dionne Warwick
• “Don’t Make Me Over” (Dionne Warwick)
• “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” (Dusty Springfield)
• “I Say a Little Prayer” (Dionne Warwick)
• “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” (Dionne Warwick)
• “The Look of Love” (Dusty Springfield)
• “Make It Easy on Yourself” (Jerry Butler, Walker Brothers)
• “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (Gene Pitney)
• “Message to Michael” (Dionne Warwick)
• “One Less Bell to Answer” (5th Dimension)
• “Promises, Promises” (Dionne Warwick)
• “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (B.J. Thomas)
• “(They Long to Be) Close to You” (Carpenters)
• “This Guy’s In Love with You” (Herb Alpert)
• “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa” (Gene Pitney)
• “Walk On By” (Dionne Warwick)
• “What the World Needs Now is Love” (Jackie DeShannon)
• “What’s New Pussycat?” (Tom Jones)
• “Wishin’ and Hopin’” (Dusty Springfield)
• “Wives and Lovers” (Jack Jones)
• “You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart)” (Stylistics)

RIP, Burt Bacharach. Your music will truly live forever.