The best and the worst thing that could have happened to Burt Bacharach was his revival as some sort of pop culture icon in the past five years. For three decades he had been dismissed as the embodiment of memorable but vaguely embarrassing-to-like mum-and-dad music as the man behind every great lift journey. But then, along with bachelor pads, skivvies, cocktails and arch humour, Bacharach was back, publicly admired by that musical pickpocket from Oasis, Noel Gallagher, cheerily performing in the first Austin Powers film and wining a Grammy for a collaboration with Elvis Costello.
That was all well; but dangerously so. Because the arbiters of cool who giveth,
can just as quickly taketh away and it was clear that for many who rediscovered
Bacharach, it was not as a songwriter but as a symbol of a mostly mythical way
of life, much in the way the Rat Pack style has come to mean more than the sometimes
boorish, often overblown reality. When the moment, like the skivvies, passes,
Bacharach could return to the fringes.
But the renewal of interest in recent years has offered an opportunity to look
not only at what Bacharach did an astonishing run of hits from 1959 to 1972
that have passed into the lexicon of pop music but how he did it. And to dispel
some of the myths.
Perhaps the biggest misconception or mislabelling with Bacharach in both the
uncool and cool years is the idea that what he made is easy listening. It's
a tragically incorrect term if you mean easy listening as basic, plain, easy
to play and sing or wash the dishes to.
There's nothing easy about Anyone Who Had a Heart, which is in the defiantly
non-pop time of 7/8, or I Say a Little Prayer, which shifts rhythm and harmony
throughout the song, or Promises, Promises where time signatures seem to change
every bar. And ask any singer who's ever attempted to sing a Bacharach song:
the melodies sound easy enough but the range required, the flexibility needed
to handle the sudden and dramatic shifts is beyond the amateur and many professionals.
A few years ago, Bacharach explained that he wasn't trying to be difficult.
"I never did a 7/8 bar to consciously break the rules. It certainly came
as a surprise to me when I went to write it down. I'd say, that can't be right,
it comes out seven beats to the bar. But it felt right."
Polyrhythm, unconventional chord changes and alternative routes to the end of
a song reflected his interest in more than just popular music. As a teenager
in New York in the '40s he immersed himself in bebop jazz and simultaneously
in French composer Claude Debussy. He was impressed by the stricter modernism
of Berg and Webern the prevailing mood in classical composition mid-20th century
was melody-free serialism after all but he was encouraged to break the mould
in his time studying under composer and teacher Darius Milhaud at the Mannes
School of Music. Bacharach has said of Milhaud that "he told me never to
be afraid of writing a tuneful melody, whatever else was happening in the song".
For Bacharach would write pop songs: songs to be sung again, remembered later
and maybe whistled when the mind wandered. There was the easy flow of Do You
Know the Way to San Jose? that seemed to never run out and the nagging familiarity
of What the World Needs Now on one hand. Songs five-year-olds could grab on
to and enjoy. Then there's the teasingly distant line of Message to Michael
(that breaks into a very Brill Building middle eight) or the way I Just Don't
Know What to Do With Myself holds itself back. Again, despite their craft, their
difficulty, these songs are easily taken in and remembered.
But what marks out a great songwriter from the merely good are the intangible
extras. While Bacharach can be appreciated in the detail of the way I Say a
Little Prayer rises and falls back on itself, adding a new storey each time,
for example, he is best understood in the general, in the emotion. Bacharach
described himself as someone who writes from an emotional point of view rather
than a cerebral one.
You wouldn't call the emotional underpinning of some of his best-known songs
easy either. As Costello pointed out recently, there's a sense of darkness in
his music that's sometimes, but not necessarily, reflected in the lyric. There's
that romantic doubt in some of his sunniest songs which makes his music enduring,
Costello said.
Somebody else once said of Bacharach's Walk on By that heartache doesn't pour
out in such numbers as it does in soul music rather it settles over the singer
like an overcoat broken into the contours of the wearer. It becomes part of
the singer's social disguise, what hovers around her as she's riding the bus
or window-shopping on her lunch hour.
While Bacharach and his lyricist in the '60s, Hal David, were associated in
most people's minds with the great writers of the Brill Building period writing
teams such as Carole King and Gerry Goffin; Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann; Neil
Sedaka and Howard Greenfield they were markedly different in tone. Bacharach
and David were not writing about or for teenagers. In truth, they couldn't:
both men were older than the best-known Brill teams, who were not long out of
high school, and had toured the world, seen wars, lost and made money.
The emotional language of their songs, both lyrical and musical, was perforce
more nuanced, more calibrated to lives already led than lives to come. The sense
of sophistication that these songs brought to the Top 40 was not accidental.
"When I was doing those songs with Dionne [Warwick], I was thinking in
terms of miniature movies, you know?" Bacharach said. "Three-and-half-minute
movies with peak moments and not just one intensity level the whole way through."
It should also be understood that Bacharach's success as a songwriter lay in
his control. Not only over his craft, but also over the end product. As with
screenwriters, songwriters in the '60s were the useful but dismissible element
in the process. Once their part had been done they were sent away while the
real work of making a record was done by the producers, arrangers and, occasionally,
even the vocalists.
It was a system that had worked well since Tin Pan Alley at the beginning of
the century and was as efficiently applied at the soul powerhouses of Motown
and Stax as it was in the Brill Building publishing heartland of New York.
Bacharach chafed under this system. He didn't just write songs, he figured,
he wrote whole pieces that should be played in particular ways. Changing the
rhythm, the arrangements and the feel made them lesser songs.
"I became a producer and arranger out of self-defence," Bacharach
told Pulse magazine in 1995. "I'd write a song and the record company would
come to my publisher and say we like it but Burt's gotta change this three-bar
phrase to four bars. If he changes it, we'll give him so-and-so to record it.
And we wanted the record so we'd compromise. But they came out terrible."
None of this meant anything at first, when he was just another hack on the payroll.
But once he began racking up a few hits, he earned enough grudging respect from
the publishers and record companies to be given his head with a few songs and
the demo singer he and David had discovered, Dionne Warwick.
When those early songs with Warwick (beginning in 1962 with Don't Make Me Over
a song that shifts between 12/8 and 6/8, neither normal for pop songs, but which
has no trouble conveying the intelligent defiance of its protagonist), written,
arranged and produced by Bacharach, succeeded, the resistance to songwriters
taking control weakened everywhere. At Motown, for example, songwriters such
as Norman Whitfield, and later artists such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye,
took control in the studios.
With Bacharach in charge there were telling arrangements such as the mix of
woodblock, (the soon to be signature) flugelhorns and strings in Walk On By
that gave it a layer of class without trumpeting it. Or the glockenspiel in
one of his great tragic melodies, A House is Not a Home and the parping trumpets,
incongruous organ and simple two-beat timpani of Do You Know the Way to San
Jose?
This control didn't couldn't last, of course. Not for Bacharach, who was at
first a songwriter, after all, and would send his songs wherever they were wanted,
and not for lesser talents who could not always produce the quality and the
hits.
Maybe that, as much as the break-up of his partnership with David in the early
'70s and the severing of the relationship with Warwick, can be blamed for contributing
to the long, fallow years that lasted until the late '90s.
They were fallow commercially and creatively. While Bacharach had a few hits
in the '80s the sentimental That's What Friends are For and the throwaway Arthur's
Theme they did not deserve to be compared with the product of his peak years.
It wasn't until he combined with probably the finest all-round songwriter of
the post-punk years, Elvis Costello, for 1999's album Painted From Memory, that
Bacharach rediscovered his best.
Here were songs that had his unmistakeable romantic touch, coupled with the
twists that marked his confidence. They reminded us of his past but didn't seem
stuck there. They reinforced what we should have known but too easily forgot,
that at their best Bacharach songs seem to be timely but also timeless.