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The first time I interviewed Burt Bacharach, in 1995, his opening words to me were, "You realise our backs are up against the wall, right? Let's do this."
Whether he had a studio date or writing session that day, I don't know, but it was clear, as it would be each of the eight times we spoke over the years, that Bacharach, who died on February 8 at the age of 94 from natural causes, didn't enjoy revisiting his musical legacy. In conversation, he could seem preoccupied, like he was working out some melodic puzzle in his head. Ask him about the inspiration for "A House Is Not A Home" or "The Look Of Love," and he might come across as impatient or frustratingly brief. Of the latter, he told me, "I watched the scene of Ursula Andress dancing in Casino Royale and the melody came to me."
What mattered most for Bacharach was the now, the next, the new. "I like the present and the future," he said.
That restless, forward-looking energy was at the heart of his world-conquering melody writing. That several of his songs had cities in the titles — "Do You Know The Way To San Jose," "Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa" among them — makes poetic sense, because his tunes often felt like living skylines. With elegantly constructed architecture that yearned upwards, their dynamic push and kinetic leaps always seemed in quest of sky-scraping emotion.
Bacharach visualised it in a similar way. When I asked how he composed, he said, “ I like to get away from the piano. I can hear a long line that way, peaks and valleys. I can here the whole song without worrying about what my hands are playing. I get a sense of balance that I wouldn’t get by just sitting at the piano.”
Through the 1960s and early ‘70s, Bacharach found an ideal three-way balance with Hal David and Dionne Warwick. David’s everyman eloquence as a lyricist and Warwick’s nimble voice, with its cool ache, helped propel dozens of Bacharach’s tunes into the charts and the fabric of our times, beginning with Don’t Make Me Over in 1962. Make It Easy On Yourself (from 1963’s Presenting Dionne Warwick) and 1964 US Top 10 smash Walk On By.
“When I heard Walk On By the first time, it was probably an 8.5, or 9 on the tectonic scale, “ recalls Jimmy Webb, who, aged 18 in 1964, was two years away from his own success. “In the songwriting world, everybody’s ears perked up at the same time. It was like, “Holy moly, who and what are we dealing with here?!” And then, it was song after song”.
“Burt had all these sophisticated melodies, but then he’d insert these chord changes with a rootsy, gospel feel,” says Jackie DeShannon, who would debut several Bacharach-David hits in the ‘60s. “Think of Message To Martha or Reach Out For Me. Burt was in touch with the soul, and that brought listeners in.”
Of those earliest hits, Warwick’s Anyone Who Had A Heart (both Cilla Black and Dusty Springfield charted with covers in the UK) best epitomises the lavish emotional fireworks that became a hallmark of the Bacharach-David style. In our conversations, Bacharach said several times that he thought of songwriting and making records “in terms of miniature three-minute movies.” And there’s something Hitchcockian in those clock-like piano chord triplets with staccato bursts of melody riding nervously above. “Anyone could look at me…” It conjures a close-up of a spurned lover in a kind of fugue state, staring both desire and daggers at their once-significant other, before the plea of the chorus and its rush of beautiful anguish.
Webb says, “That song was unlike anything on the radio. It has classical cadences in the chord structure, and a full orchestra score and polyrhythms – in other words, changing time signatures – which you just didn’t hear in pop music back then. But just brought all his classical training right into the pop milieu. It was alchemy. It was off the map. And he wasn’t just mildly successful with it. He made it a dynasty. “
Burt Bacharach’s pre-dynastic apprenticeship was unlike any of his Brill Building contemporaries. An only child, he was born in Kansas City on May 12, 1928, and started piano lessons while in elementary school. His father’s journalism job took the family to New York, and Bacharach told me about long Sunday drives out of the city, listening to the classical music stations from the back seat. “The first piece of music that attracted me was Ravel’s Daphnis Et Chloe Suite,” he said. “It was lyrical and beautiful, and kind of turned my head around.”
In high school, too small to play sports, he pivoted towards playing in bands, and fell under the spell of jazz, especially the angular sounds of bebop. “I used to sneak into the clubs on 52nd Street,” he told me. “I heard Dizzy Gillespie’s big band one night, and Jesus, it as like a window opening.”
After serving in the army, he studied theory and composition with neo-classical composers Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud. It was the latter who recognised his student’s true gift and gently dissuaded him away from writing fringe avant-garde pieces. Bacharach recalled, “Milhaud said, ‘Don’t ever be afraid to write a tuneful melody.’ And that changed everything for me.”
For six years from 1956, Bacharach toured the world as Marlene Dietrich’s conductor and arranger. “He went everywhere with her, and that really influenced his musical education,” DeShannon says, “He soaked up all these musical flavours and styles – cabaret, folk, everything – and it came out in one big wonderful melodic trip.”
Sometimes that trip happened within one three-minute song. DeShannon’s What The World Needs Now (in a rare lapse of judgment, Dionne Warwick had passed on it) was a colourful example. “It’s a pretty waltz, a country song, with gospel changes, put together with Michelangelo-level craftsmanship,” DeShannon says. “Burt would combine different genres in such a way where you didn’t even know it. There’d be something for everybody in each song. His melodic sense was universal and inclusive.”
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