By JIM DIXON
In the fall of 1998, Rhino Records released a 3-CD boxed set of songs written by Burt Bacharach called The Look of Love. Music journalist Richie Unterberger, writing in an Allmusic review, called the set “certainly the best representation of his music likely to ever be assembled.” Twenty-five years later, that prediction holds up. Compilation producers Patrick Milligan and Alec Cumming picked the best versions of the best songs in the Bacharach catalog in almost every case, and they wisely concentrated heavily on Bacharach’s golden decade-and-a-half, 1958–1973 (all but four of the 75 songs were recorded during these years). In addition to pulling of an amazing feat of cross-licensing involving many record labels and rights holders, the producers commissioned excellent track-by-track annotations and overview essays on Bacharach, David, and Dionne Warwick.
So what if Rhino had decided to produce a second box of Bacharach, repeating none of the same recordings, but finding worthy alternate versions, plus a few rarities similar to The Look of Love’s uncovered jewels (“The Fool Killer”, “Blue Guitar”, “Made In Paris”, and “So Long Johnny”)? What if they had decided to go a bit bigger, with a 4-disc, 100 track sequel? Maybe they would have come up with a collection like the following.
THE LAST TIME I SAW MY HEART ✦ Marty Robbins
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
With Ray Conniff & His Orch.
Produced by MITCH MILLER
Columbia single #41282 (10/58) ● C&W #23
This cosmic waltz did not repeat the success that “The Story of My Life” had eleven months earlier, but it has its own charm. (Between the two came Bacharach & David’s “Sittin’ in a Tree House”, which revisited the whistling and simplicity of “The Story of My Life”, but sounded a bit more contrived.) “The Last Time I Saw My Heart” also brings in some of the Mexican flavor that returned on Robbins’ #1 hit “El Paso” in 1959, but it’s the piano glissandos and lyrics concerning finding oneself “somewhere in space” that make the song memorable. Of Hal David’s contribution, Serene Dominic, writing in Burt Bacharach: Song By Song, astutely notes that “[c]loser examination of David’s lyrics might lead one to conclude that they were originally scribed for a woman to warble, what with Robbins forever swooning in his lover’s arms and always having to climb his way up to her lips.” (This issue with flipped-gender lyrics leading to slightly scrambled storytelling will return again with the song “Message to Michael”.)
YOU’RE FOLLOWING ME ✦ Perry Como
(Burt Bacharach/Bob Hilliard)
With the Ray Charles Singers and Mitchell Ayres Orch.
Produced by HUGO & LUIGI
RCA single #47–7962 (10/61) ● Pop #92
Bacharach and lyricist Bob Hilliard were in the midst of writing a small run of classic songs for the R&B market (including “Please Stay”, “Tower of Strength”, “Any Day Now”, and “Mexican Divorce”, some of which were crossing over to the pop charts) when they wrote this this rockabilly-lite number for the pop market. It didn’t trouble the charts, but like Gene Vincent’s “Crazy Times”, “Charlie Gracie’s “I Looked for You”, and Tommy Sands “Love In a Goldfish Bowl”, it’s an example of Bacharach’s take on the kind of pop material that singers like Del Shannon, Bobby Vee, Dion, and Ricky Nelson were turning into hits, and that Elvis Presley was then singing in movies.
The record was produced by the team of Hugo & Luigi (Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore), who were hot enough in the early sixties to get their own custom logo included on the left side of the record label (though RCA’s wordmark and Nipper logo remained at the top of the label). During this time, Hugo & Luigi also produced several other big RCA hits including Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away”, The Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, and The Isley Brothers’ “Shout”. They also produced the little-known 1962 Bacharach & David song “Don’t Envy Me” for Joey Powers, a family friend of Como’s who sounded like he was having a genuine emotional crisis in the studio as he recorded Bacharach’s song about a lonely and lovelorn fellow.
Como delivers “You’re Following Me” with admirable verve for a crooner who was 49 years old and professed to hate the new sound. The chirping background vocals are expertly sung in a manner that suggests a group of high school sophomores, a touch that reflects Hugo & Luigi’s commercial instincts though probably not Como’s artistic vision. Every detail, in fact, has been attended to in this production, from the then-fashionable tic-tac bass to the crisp drums, the three-dimensional sounding finger snaps, and the Scotty Moore inspired guitar fills. It’s all hi-fi and perfectly mixed in a way that, for better or for worse, you would never hear on a genuine rockabilly record from this era.
YOU’RE TELLING OUR SECRETS ✦ Dee Clark
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Vee Jay single #409 (10/61) ● B-side of “Don’t Walk Away from Me”
Dee Clark was an operatic R&B singer whose biggest hit, “Raindrops”, came in the spring of 1961. For Bacharach & David, still looking to get back to the top of the charts for the first time since their two 1958 hits (for Marty Robbins and Perry Como), Clark probably seemed like a good bet, even if they were only getting on the B-side of the first single after “Raindrops”. “You’re Telling Our Secrets” is one of the better malt shop specials they wrote around this time, a group of songs that includes some memorable songs like “Forgive Me (For Giving You Such a Bad Time)”, “The Love of a Boy”, “Only Love Can Break a Heart”, and some less memorable songs like “Boys Were Made for Girls”, “Joanie’s Forever”, “Gotta Get a Girl”, “We’re Only Young Once”, and “A Girl Like You”.
Clark was an electrifying vocalist whose career unfortunately fizzled early, and he died in 1990 at 52, still trying to return to the national spotlight. The single’s A-side, “Walk Away from Me”, made it only to #92 on the pop chart, and the Bacharach B-side is a true obscurity, though it might have made a fine addition to the soundtrack of a John Waters movie. The slightly sadistic storyline of a couple laughing at the old love letters that the song’s narrator sent to one of them is one of Hal David’s darker lyrics, along with the humiliation storyline featured the lyric of “That Guy’s in Love” (the pre-Herb Alpert version of “This Guy’s in Love with You”).
WONDERFUL TO BE YOUNG ✦ Cliff Richard
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
With The Shadows
Dot single #16399 (10/62)
Though sometimes called “the British Elvis”, when singing Bacharach material, Cliff Richard often sounded more like Buddy Holly and Chet Baker than The King of Rock and Roll. With “Wonderful to Be Young”, the Holly influence on Bacharach’s writing is also evident. The song is, like many a Holly love song, simple and sweet, and it doesn’t require a large vocal range to sing. Richard later recorded a stripped down version of the song with some simplifications of the chords and melody that sounded even more Holly-esque, a version remained unreleased until 2008, when it appeared on Magic Moments: The Definitive Burt Bacharach Collection (Rhino/UMG).
“Wonderful to Be Young” was commissioned for the 1962 Paramount motion picture of the same name, which was a re-edited version of the U.K. comedy musical “The Young Ones”. The title song it replaced, “The Young Ones”, was also in the Buddy Holly mold, and was written by the US songwriting team of Roy C. Bennett and Sid Tepper, who wrote over 40 songs for the American Elvis.
THIRTY MILES OF RAILROAD TRACK ✦ The Hammond Brothers
(Burt Bacharach/Bob Hilliard)
Abner single #7005 (10/62)
Choo-choo! Clay and Walter Hammond were brothers from Groesbeck, Texas who, with fellow singer Julius Brown, released a few singles in the early 1960s as The Three Friends (sometimes credited on record labels as “The 3 Friends”). Clay Hammond was the lead singer, and the only one of the three to have a significant solo career.
“Thirty Miles” is apparently the only recording made under The Hammond Brothers name (it’s not clear if Julius Brown was included on “Thirty Miles or not), and it’s a joyous slice of stomping soul pop in the Sam Cooke mold. Aside from Clay Hammond’s lead vocal, the drumming is a standout feature of this little-known recording. The backbeat is firm and rocking, but there’s a great swing feel within the beat. The player may be Al Duncan, who was a house drummer for Vee Jay Records (the parent company of the Abner label) during this period.
“Thirty Miles” comes from Bacharach’s early sixties partnership with Bob Hilliard, at a time when the two were on a roll in the R&B scene with their songs for The Drifters, Gene McDaniels, and Chuck Jackson. They wrote the hits “Tower of Strength” and “Any Day Now” in 1961 and 1962, and this non-exclusive partnership eclipsed for a time (but did not replace) Bacharach’s ongoing collaboration with Hal David. Hilliard was a gifted lyricist who wrote the traditional pop songs “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” and “The Coffee Song”, both of which were memorably recorded by Frank Sinatra. He was able to successfully transition into writing 1960s pop for the emerging baby boom generation, and in addition to his work with Bacharach, he wrote the lyrics to the Brill Building classic “Our Day Will Come”.
As a solo artist, Clay Hammond recorded a series of singles between 1963 and 1970 for a variety of labels, and many of these tracks were collected in 2000 on the Kent CD Southern Soul Brothers, alongside a set of tracks by soul singer ZZ Hill. Hammond’s 1968 single “I’ll Make It Up to You”, which leads off the Kent CD and which he wrote, has become a Southern soul classic. “I’ll Make It Up to You” shows off a falsetto vocal to rival those of Al Green and Ron Isley, a vocal gift that is hinted at in the vocal flourishes that come at the end of “Thirty Miles”.
As for the little known Abner records (named for Ewert Abner, Jr., a Vee Jay executive), the label was a subsidiary label of Chicago’s Vee-Jay records, and released a few Dee Clark singles in 1959 (though Clark’s hit “Raindrops” came out on Vee-Jay). Abner was dormant for much of 1960 and all of 1961, and was briefly revived in 1962 for a run of six singles that included “Thirty Miles of Railroad Track”.
FORGIVE ME (FOR GIVING YOU SUCH A BAD TIME) ✦ Babs Tino
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by CHUCK SAGLE
Kapp single #472 (6/62) ● Pop #117
Casual fans of sixties pop could be forgiven for assuming that this Babs Tino single was Kapp Records’ attempt to copy the sound of Leslie Gore, who had a #1 hit in 1963 with her first single “It’s My Party” and followed up with a string of adolescent melodramas including “Judy’s Turn to Cry” and “That’s the Way Boys Are”. But a look at the release dates show that this was not the case — Tino’s “Forgive Me” was on the market 9 months before anyone had ever heard of Gore, and was helping create the teen pop sound that Gore capitalized upon until the Beatles and The Rolling Stones showed up. Tino recorded four Bacharach songs for Kapp in 1962, and “Forgive Me” is the strongest of the bunch. (The others were “Too Late to Worry”, “Keep Away from Other Girls”, and “Call Off the Wedding”.) Tino, who was from Philadelphia and recorded a lone single for that city’s Cameo Records in 1957, made no recordings after 1963, and little information about her subsequent life is available.
THE STORY OF MY LIFE ✦ Big Al Downing
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced by AL DOWNING, BOBBY POE & VERNON SANDUSKY
Kansoma single #01 (2/62) (also released as Chess single #1817) ● Pop #117
Singer and pianist Big Al Downing sounds a lot like New Orleans R&B legend Fats Domino on his R&B remake of “The Story of My Life”, which in 1958 was the very first Bacharach & David hit. Downing, however, was from Lenapah, Oklahoma, and had more success over the course of his career singing country music than R&B. He eventually became a frequent performer at The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, and was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. Like Dee Clark and Clay Hammond, he was a gifted but overlooked singer who bounced around the music scene for decades and had brief chart breakthroughs, though he never found sustained success at the national level.
Downing’s version of “The Story of My Life” was also released on Chess Records in 1962 and was given promotion by the label, but like the Babs Tino song previously discussed, it “bubbled under” at 117 on the Billboard pop chart and then quickly faded away. Nevertheless, it remains a delightful reimagining of the original Marty Robbins hit, complete with some lead harmonica that sounds like it escaped from a folk revival recording session.
LITTLE BETTY FALLING STAR ✦ Gene Pitney
(Burt Bacharach/Bob Hilliard)
Musicor LP #2003, Only Love Can Break a Heart (9/62)
Gene Pitney recorded seven Burt Bacharach songs between 1962 and 1964, and all feature great performances by Pitney and memorable arrangements by Bacharach. In terms of songwriting, “Little Betty Falling Star” is the least distinctive of the seven (and it’s the only song of the bunch with a lyric by Bob Hilliard, which may indicate that the tune was already a little old when Pitney recorded it). Nevertheless, it’s catchy and well produced, and Pitney really sells it, particularly on the nervous sounding, minor-tonality pre-chorus section (“I put you up there / So far above me”), which the producers wisely excerpted for a stark vocal-and-violin introduction that sounds like Pitney is singing from within your subconscious. Musicor curiously buried the song as an LP filler track, rather than give it even the smallest chance of breaking out as a Pitney B-side.
MAKE THE MUSIC PLAY ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and produced by BURT BACHARACH
Scepter LP #508, Presenting Dionne Warwick (2/63)
“Make the Music Play” was recorded as a demo in mid-1962 by Dionne Warwick prior to Warwick’s first official solo recordings as a client of Bacharah & David’s Blue Jac Productions. The song was soon recorded by The Drifters as “Let the Music Play”, but both recordings were held back from release until early 1963. Scepter records, looking to fill out Warwick’s first LP on the cheap after her first single became a hit, grabbed a couple of Bacharach demos off the shelf and deemed them worthy of being album tracks. It’s possible that additional production was done to prepare the demo for commercial release, but the basic rhythm track and vocal were from the demo used to entice The Drifters into recording the song.
MAGIC POTION ✦ Lou Johnson
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced and arranged by BURT BACHARACH
Big Top single #3153 (10/63) ● B-side of “Reach Out for Me”
Like Gene Pitney, Lou Johnson recorded just a handful of Bacharach songs in the 1960s, but each is a memorable performance. Like “Little Betty Falling Star”, “Magic Potion” is not Bacharach & David writing at the height of their powers, but the song is a good launching pad for Johnson to work his R&B magic. Bacharach keeps the studio band tight and focused, and the gentle, proto-ska beat carries the song more so than the somewhat off-the-shelf chord changes and vocal melody. (There’s also a great and unexpected vibraphone part that shows Bacharach going the extra mile to dress up a throwaway track.) Though “Magic Potion” appeared a year after the game-changing “Don’t Make Me Over” single by Dionne Warwick, it sounds a lot more like the R&B that Bacharach was writing (with both Hal David and and Bob Hilliard) for The Drifters and other acts in 1961–1962.
Johnson recorded two more Bacharach songs not included in this collection or in Rhino Records’ The Look of Love. The first was a 1962 version of “If I Never Get to Love You”, which gives the Gene Pitney version stiff competition. The second was a version of “(Don’t Go) Please Stay” recorded in 1969 at Fame Recording Studios. Arif Mardin’s arrangement of “Please Stay” adds a few superfluous harmonic and melodic decorations to the song’s “B” section (compare measures 44–47 to the original recording by The Drifters), but it is worth hearing for Johnson’s singing and the band performance by Muscle Shoals rhythm section. That arrangement was subsequently recycled by Mardin and Jerry Wexler for UK singer Lulu’s 1970 Melody Fair LP.
RAIN FROM THE SKIES ✦ Adam Wade
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by AL KASHA
Epic single #9566 (1/63) ● B-side of “Don’t Let Me Cross Over”
In the early 1960s, Pittsburgh native Adam Wade was frequently compared to Johnny Mathis (a rather lazy comparison seemingly based on nothing beyond their shared race), and Wade claimed Nat ‘King’ Cole as a primary influence, but on “Rain from the Skies” he sounds little like either of them. What he does sound like is a smooth and fairly generic Englebert Humperdink-style baritone (Humperdinck, to be clear, was several years away from starting his own recording career) . “Rain” was buried on the B-side of “Don’t Let Me Cross Over” and made no waves in North America, but it curiously became a musicians’ favorite in Jamaica, which led to Delroy Wilson’s 1968 ska cover. Other Jamaican covers were to follow over the next few years as well.
Bacharach researcher Serene Dominic claims “Rain from the Skies” marks the first time Bacharach used a flugelhorn melody for a song intro, though the horn in question sounds a bit more like a trombone. Regardless of which horn it is, Bacharach’s arrangement and melody are full of the musical devices that he was to use over and over throughout his 1962–1972 creative peak, and the song is part of Bacharach’s transition away from the worlds of Leiber & Stoller-style R&B and teen pop into his own aesthetic.
As for Adam Wade, his music career peaked two years before “Rain from the Skies,” when he had three top-10 pop hits in 1961. In the 1970s, he switched careers and broke racial barriers as a television actor and host, appearing on shows including Sanford and Son, Kojak, Good Times, What’s Happening, The Jeffersons, The Guiding Light, and Search for Tomorrow Most notably, he also hosted the 1975 daily CBS game show Musical Chairs for four months in 1975, which made him the first Black game show host on US television. In his 2022 New York Times obituary, his accomplishments in television, film, and theater naturally overshadowed his recording career, which was largely over by 1968.
I SMILED YESTERDAY ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced by BURT BACHARACH and HAL DAVID, arranged by BURT BACHARACH
Scepter single #1239 (10/62) ● A-side of “Don’t Make Me Over”
Dionne Warwick’s first A-side was passed over by radio DJs in favor of the hit hidden on the flip side, “Don’t Make Me Over” (which went to #21 for pop and #5 for R&B). Bacharach had wanted “Don’t Make Me Over” to be the A-side all along, according to Serene Dominic, but Scepter owner Florence Greenberg vetoed that idea in favor of “I Smiled Yesterday”, an upbeat (in both senses of the word) pop confection that was closer to the Shirelles teen-oriented sound that was keeping the lights on at the label. The prominent English horn riff at the beginning of the song and the “record skipping” conclusion to the bridge show Bacharach working to create something fresh within the confines of a Brill Building-style pop song. Given the song’s ska-like beat, you might have expected it to catch on in Jamaica like “Rain from the Skies” and produce a few covers on the island, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.
IT’S LOVE THAT REALLY COUNTS ✦ The Exciters
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by TEACHO WILTSHIRE, produced by LIEBER & STOLLER
United Artists LP #3264, Tell Him (12/62)
After The Exciters “Tell Him” single reached #4 on the pop chart in 1962, United Artists put together an LP to feature the song and the follow up single, “He’s Got The Power”. To pad out the album Leiber & Stoller chose to have the group record The Shirelles’ “It’s Love That Really Counts”, which had just managed to get on the charts in the fall of 1962 when Scepter released it as a B-side to “Stop the Music”. Arranger Teacho Wiltershine reconfigured the beat a bit to give it more of the baión feel that was all the rage at the time, and he put the song in a slightly higher key to give it more urgency. Where Shirelles lead singer Brenda Owens makes it sound like wise advice from an older sister, Exciters lead singer Brenda Reid sounds like she’s having an epiphany in the studio — note the spine-tingling way she belts out the words “and on!” at 1:59.
A brilliant arranging touch is having Reid drop out of the vocal at 0:38 while the rest of the group sings “It’s love that really counts / Believe me, it’s love that really counts / And baby, after loving you / I’m here to say / That no one else…”, only to have Reid slip back in and cooly deliver the payoff, “…will do.” At times in this recording, Reid is sometimes singing at the very limits of her voice (something you could say about many classic 1960s recordings by Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin as well), and the record is thrilling because of it.
A LIFETIME OF LONELINESS ✦ Steve Alaimo
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by BURT BACHARACH
Checker single #1042 (3/63)
Teen idol Steve Alaimo followed up his biggest hit, 1962’s “Every Day I Have to Cry” (a respectable, but not huge hit that topped out in Billboard at pop #46), with a single that contained this Bacharach tune as the B-side to “It’s a Long, Long Way to Happiness”. (The record label did not actually indicate which tune was the A-side, though Billboard’s April 6 review listed “It’s a Long, Long Way to Happiness” as the lead song.) Neither side of the single charted, and Alaimo spent the next decade releasing singles never that managed to climb higher than #72. While Jackie DeShannon’s 1965 remake of “A Lifetime of Loneliness” outshines the original recording, Alaimo (with Bacharach in the studio guiding him) managed to record a memorable version as well. The unusual musical intro features what sounds like a viola sawing away ominously, a sound more associated with the Velvet Underground circa 1967 than Burt Bacharach in 1963.
Gene Pitney or Lou Johnson could both have wrung more credible emotion out of the song, and likewise, Tom Jones could have really sold the song (especially its “without your love!” exclamations), but unfortunately none of those singers recorded it. On a side note, Hal David’s almost David Bowie-like line “I’m such a lonely human being” feels like a line that would not have been put in a song from the previous decade.
WHO’S BEEN SLEEPING IN MY BED? ✦ Linda Scott
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by STAN GREEN
Congress single #CG204 (12/63) ● Pop #100
Though the music and production style of “Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed” are in the “It’s My Party” mold, the lyric is a bit more clever and layered in irony than the blunt storytelling found in Hal David’s earlier teen melodramas like “Forgive Me” and “You’re Telling Our Secrets”:
Who’s been sleeping in my bed?
Who’s been cryin’ on my pillow?
Looks like there was someone walking the floor
If I’m not mistaken, her heart was breaking
The bouncy rhythms and anodyne singing further clue the listener into the fact that all this talk of tossing and turning all night is being delivered with a wink. This is most likely because the song, published by Paramount Pictures’ Famous Music, was written as a possible title song for the 1963 romantic comedy of the same name starring Dean Martin and Elizabeth Montgomery, a year before Montgomery landed her television series Bewitched. Further differentiating the song from the typical teen pop record (which tended to be even more white-sounding than this admittedly very white-sounding production) are the gospel background vocals that sound like they were lifted off of a Dionne Warwick record.
In the end, Paramount decided not to use the song in the film, and thus the Linda Scott single carried the “Inspired by the Paramount Picture” disclaimer. The song did briefly slip into the Billboard Hot 100 before fading into obscurity.
Songs such as this one carrying the title of a movie but not appearing on the movie soundtrack are sometimes called “exploitation” songs. In Bacharach’s case, the songs were typically commissioned or suggested by the studio releasing the movie (usually Paramount Pictures, which had been employing Bacharach regularly since the mid-1950s), either for possible inclusion on the soundtrack, or simply to serve as a form of backdoor promotion for the film. In other words, the word “exploitation” in this context does not necessarily reflect a mercenary attempt by the songwriters to cash in on the fame of a movie without the approval of the studio. One clue that this was the case is that the song was published by Paramount’s song publishing company Famous Music. By late 1963, Bacharach and David preferred to jointly publish their songs through their own Blue Seas and JAC song publishing companies, because doing so provided them with a larger share of the royalties in the event that the song became a hit.
Other “inspired by” songs written by Bacharach include “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance”, “Wives and Lovers”, “Fool Killer”, “Who’s Got the Action”, “The Hangman”, “The Desperate Hours”, “The Net”, “That Kind of Woman” and “Hot Spell”, all written before 1965. By the middle of the decade, Bacharach was hot enough that he was being commissioned to write full film scores, and film studios were no longer commissioning title songs that did not get used on a soundtrack.
IF I NEVER GET TO LOVE YOU ✦ Gene Pitney
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Musicor LP #MS 3056, I Must Be Seeing Things (1965)
Buried as the last track on a 1965 Musicor LP, “If I Never Get To Love You” was recorded two years earlier, when Bacharach and David were still on speaking terms with Pitney’s manager Aaron Schoeder. The songwriters had briefly been signed to Schoeder’s publishing company Arch Music in 1962, and they worked closely with Pitney in the studio on the occasions when Pitney was recording one of their tunes, three of which became top 10 hits for Pitney in 1962–1963.
Schoeder was considered a difficult personality even by the standards of the music business, and by the 1964 “Fool Killer’’ debacle (in which Schoeder assured the songwriters that their song “The Fool Killer” was going to be used in the film of the same title, which did not happen), Bacharach and David decided to cut ties with Schoeder and thus also severed their connection to Gene Pitney.
“If I Never Get To Love You” showcases the high drama and livewire energy that Pitney specialized in. Bacharach’s arrangement notably uses a furiously strumming acoustic guitar on the chorus to provide the kind of rhythmic tension that a drum roll might otherwise provide. And at 1:14, Bacharach uncharacteristically uses the “truck driver’s gear shift” to take the song up half a step in the primitive rock and roll manner, further increasing the tension. There’s nothing subtle about the song or performance, but it’s certainly over-the-top pop fun.
WISHIN’ AND HOPIN’ ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #1247 (3/63) ● B-side of “This Empty Place”
“Wishin’ and Hopin’” was the B-side of Dionne Warwick’s second single, “This Empty Place”, and for the second time in a row, the B-side song ultimately became better known, though in this case it’s because of Dusty Springfield’s 1964 hit recording. Serene Dominic, writing in Burt Bacharach: Song By Song, nicely summarizes the subtle differences in the approach taken by Warwick and Bacharach compared to Springfield and her musical director Ivor Raymonde:
“While Springfield’s version is just two notes shy of being a note-for-note re-creation, it does exhibit some marked differences. Warwick’s rendition sounds as if the singer is sharing a secret with the listener, while Springfield just throws open the shutters and blasts the advice to all Stepford Wives and girlfriends within earshot: ‘Wear your hair just for him, do the things he likes to do.’ Ivor Raymonde’s arrangement also has a slightly tougher edge to it…”
The song has an interesting historical footnote, in that it was originally published by Jonathan Music Co., a music publisher owned by singer Kitty Kallen’s manager and husband, Budd Granoff. This was unusual because most Bacharach & David songs at this time were being published either by U.S. Songs (owned by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller), or by Bacharach & David’s own publishing companies, Blue Seas Music and Jac Music. (The exceptions were usually songs written for films, which tended to be published by Film Studio publishing companies like Paramount’s Famous Music). “Wishin’ and Hopin’” may have been written for consideration as a Kallen B-side — several of Kallen’s singles at the time, including “Star Eyes”, “Make Someone Love You”, and “I’ll Teach You How To Cry”, had B-sides published by Jonathan music. This move by Granoff ensured that, if the A-side became a hit, the B-side provided Kallen household with half of the single’s total publisher’s royalties. (Such considerations may have played into Bacharach & David allowing a song like “You’re Telling Our Secrets” to first appear as a B-side by Dee Clark soon after he’d had a massive hit.) In any event, Kallen did not end up recording “Wishin’ and Hopin’”.
I CRY ALONE ✦ Ruby & The Romantics
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by MORT GARSON, produced by ALLEN STANTON
Kapp single #K-615 (10/64) ● B-side of “When You’re Young and In Love”
Ruby & The Romantics went to #1 in the spring of 1963 with their first single, “Our Day Will Come” (co-written by former Bacharach partner Bob Hilliard). A year and a half later, they were on their sixth follow-up single, the Van McCoy song “When You’re Young and In Love”, which carried a five-year-old Bacharach torch song on the flip side. Despite the consistently excellent quality of their output during this period — the soul classic “Hey There Lonely Girl” was among the follow-ups — they were unable to get back into the top 10.
Lead singer Ruby Nash was a gifted singer with a smooth, rich voice that made her something like the Sarah Vaughan of the Brill Building scene, and this B-side was given a first class treatment. Originally written with Maxine Brown in mind, “I Cry Alone” was first recorded by Dionne Warwick in the fall of 1962 for inclusion on her debut Scepter LP (a version to be discussed later). It has the melodic purity and simplicity of a 1930s Rodgers & Hart number, and is thus a bit of an outlier in the list of great Bacharach ballads.
Like Perry Como’s “Your Following Me”, the Ruby & The Romantics recording has a cinematic and hyperreal quality to it. The singing, instrumentation, recording and mixing are all nearly flawless by 1964 standards, with Nash’s warm voice bathed in a dollop of reverb. If you close your eyes, you can imagine watching her sing it in a film noir nightclub scene, with a lone spotlight illuminating a dress adorned with red sequins. It ends after a quick two and half minutes, fading to black against sawing cellos, leaving the listener wanting more.
TWENTY FOUR HOURS FROM TULSA ✦ Dusty Springfield
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by IVOR RAYMONDE, produced by JOHNNY FRANZ
Philips LP #BL 7594, A Girl Called Dusty (4/64)
Gene Pitney’s recording of “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa” was a hit in the fall of 1963, prompting this cover version by Dusty Springfield for her debut album, which was recorded in January of 1964. Springfield sticks close to the script, borrowing Pitney’s phrasing throughout, and especially on the clipped and growled words like “one” and “night” that contrast with the soaring, sustained notes on “Tul-sa” and “arms”. For a lesser artist than Dusty Springfield, such a close approximation of the idiosyncrasies of Pitney’s singing might be tedious, but when the artist is Dusty Springfield, the gambit works.
Plenty has been written about the lyric over the years, as it is one of the most vivid story songs ever written by Hal David, pointing the way in terms of narrative to songs like Jimmy Webb’s 1967 “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”. David’s way with vowels is emphasized in the parallel construction of “twen-ty four / ho-urs from” (with the mouth closing a little more on each of the three syllables of “twenty four”, and then doing the same thing again over the three syllables of “hours from”, only to close just a tiny bit more and then open wide on “Tul-sa!”).
And the lyrical kicker, in which the celebration of unbridled passion is nullified with “And I can never, never, never go home again” is David at his best.
REACH OUT FOR ME ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #1285 (10/64) ● Pop #20
Released 12 months after Lou Johnson’s version, Dionne Warwick’s more relaxed “Reach Out for Me” did significantly better on the radio. On the chorus, Bacharach manages to make the most basic ii-V chord progression, voiced by vibes and piano, sound a bit mysterious. Part of the trick involved ending the pre-chorus with a momentary key modulation (from C major to D major), thus allowing the return to the home key (which happens in the shift from the bright D6 chord to the dark D minor 7 chord under the words “reach out for me”) to sound exotic and even spiritual. From 1963 forward, this kind of simple but elegant harmonic sleight of hand, accented by carefully worked out orchestrations, would turn up repeatedly in the Bacharach catalog.
Another notable feature of this recording is Bacharach’s distinctive touch on the piano, which floats in and out as if it were performing a dance with Warwick’s vocal. Along with the increasing sophistication of the music, Hal David’s lyric in “Reach Out” leaves behind the dramatic highs and lows of hormone-fuelled young love and focuses on the disappointments and abuses adults can face in the grind of regular life. (Though the “good friends” who make you feel that you “haven’t a reason for livin’” do seem like something out of a David Lynch movie.)
(THERE GOES) THE FORGOTTEN MAN ✦ Gene McDaniels
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by PERRY BOTKIN, JR, produced by DAVE PELL
Liberty single #55752 (11/64) ● B-side of “Emily”
Gene McDaniels’ cover of “The Forgotten Man” showed up as a B-side just over a year after the original recording by Jimmy Radcliffe, and was largely ignored. McDaniels had taken Bacharach’s “Tower of Strength” to #5 on the pop and R&B charts in the fall of 1961, but his theatrical style of singing with its extra-precise diction was antiquated by the fall of 1964, when more gospel-inflected acts like The Four Tops, Major Lance, The Temptations, The Miracles, and Marvin Gay were at the center of the crossover R&B universe. Arranger Perry Botkin sticks very close to the Radcliffe record, and McDaniels delivers a cooler, but still captivating, take on what was quickly becoming an “oldie”.
ANYONE WHO HAD A HEART ✦ Dusty Springfield
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by IVOR RAYMONDE, produced by JOHNNY FRANZ
Philips LP #BL 7594, A Girl Called Dusty (4/64)
With her 1964 cover of “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, Dusty Springfield was showing up in the rearview mirror of not only Dionne Warwick, but also Cilla Black. Warwick’s single, the song’s debut, was released in November, 1963, and Black rushed out a version at the end of January, 1964 that went to #1 on the UK pop chart, to the chagrin of Warwick, whose version stalled in the mid-40s in the UK, despite making the top 10 in the US. Dusty Springfield did not attempt to enter the race with a single of her own, leaving her version as an LP track only. In hindsight, Springfield’s smoky cool verses and emotionally raw singing on the refrain make her recording one for the ages, close behind Warwick’s definitive take.
WALK ON BY ✦ Little Anthony and The Imperials
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced and arranged by TEDDY RANDAZZO
DCP International LP #6801, I’m On The Outside (Looking In) (10/64)
Several covers of “Walk on By” were on the market by the fall of 1964, after Dionne Warwick took the song to #6 pop. No less than Aretha Franklin put out a version on Columbia with a soundalike backing track a month after this version by Little Anthony and The Imperials appeared. Lead singer Anthony Gourdine makes an unfortunate lyric change with “so if I feel broken in two” instead of the original line, “so if I seem broken and blue”. David’s lyric, with the externally-focused “seem” rather than the internally-focused “feel”, makes it clear that the whole world (including the ex-lover) can see the narrator’s suffering. Aside from this minor flaw, the track showcases the pop-soul group at its mid-sixties artistic apex.
ANY OLD TIME OF DAY ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #1274 (4/64) ● B-side of “Walk on By”
Brazilian rhythms crop up frequently in the 1960s arrangements of Bacharach, but by the spring of 1964, a growing fascination in the jazz world with bossa nova (Stan Getz’s key recordings, “Desafinado” and “The Girl from Ipanema” were released in April of 1962 and March 1964 respectively) was seeping into Bacharach’s arrangements. “Any Old Time of Day” shows Bacharach moving from the related, but heavier, baión beat to a more subtle pulse built on the same basic “dum…dum-dum” pattern. The heavier baión wasn’t gone for good (see “The Last One to Be Loved”, from later in 1964), but Bacharach was starting to marry the cooler side of Warwick’s singing with more restrained, bossa-flavored arrangements. “Walk on By” is a perfect illustration of this, and the flip side continued the trend, particularly on the verses. Hal David’s lyric offers a nice contrast to the gentle musical breezes and minimalist vocal delivery, with its tale of a woman who is quite desperate for the love of an unavailable man. “I’m not lookin’ to try to get even / Even though you’ve been unfair” is one of several memorable lines in the lyric.
On a technical note, the very obvious tape splice between the eight measure instrumental introduction and the beginning of Warwick’s vocal (“Call me, I’ll be there…”) is unusual for a Bacharach production, and sounds almost like the kind of intentional collage effect that came into fashion in hip hop with the advent of digital sampling technology.
(THEY LONG TO BE) CLOSE TO YOU ✦ Dusty Springfield
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by IVOR RAYMONDE
Philips LP #BL 7820, Where Am I Going? (10/67)
Though first released as an LP track after the summer of love, Dusty Springfield’s recording of “Close to You” is a leftover from her 1964–65 sessions with musical director Ivor Raymonde, which provided the materials for her early singles and her first two LPs. Springfield and Raymonde decided to reimagine the song, discarding the slower, even 8th-note feel of Bacharach’s arrangements for Richard Chamberlain and Dionne Warwick and taking the song on a sprightly stroll with some gently funky drumming and acoustic rhythm guitar on the opening sections, and a more Phil Spector-like approach to the bridge (with heavy drums underpinning the lyrics that begin “On the day that you were born, the angels got together”). Springfield’s vocal is more rhythmically free than either Warwick’s or Karen Carpenter’s on the 1970 hit, and she manages to make the song casual and a bit sexy in a way that stands out from most other versions. Raymonde doesn’t completely stray from the Bacharach aesthetic in his arrangement, however. A vibraphone and soft brass chords play key roles in the opening sections, announcing to the listener that they will be journeying into the land of Burt, and they close out the song as the all-to-brief performance starts its fade-out after a mere two minutes and fifteen seconds.
THE LAST ONE TO BE LOVED ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter LP #523, Make Way for Dionne Warwick (9/64)
Dionne Warwick’s “The Last One to Be Loved” was the first recording of the song to be released, and was followed a month later by Lou Johnson’s (which turned up as the B-side to Johnson’s “Kentucky Bluebird” single). The mature Bacharach style is in evidence here, even though he’s still working with the baión beat that was the go-to rhythm of the Brill Building two years before this, when the Beatles weren’t on anybody’s radar in North America. The off-kilter, staccato rhythms in parts of the vocal melody, contrasted with a big, operatic chorus accented by Bacharach’s pounding piano — these would be features of Bacharach tunes for years to come. The song is very demanding of Warwick’s voice, and she’s stuck for extended periods singing at the top of her range, which lacks the creamy quality evident in her lower range. But she has plenty of moments to shine nevertheless, and when it comes to comparing the versions by Warwick and Johnson, it seems like a draw. The song remains known primarily to die-hard Bacharach and Warwick fans, and has never been included in a widely distributed Bacharach sheet music songbook.
ACCEPT IT ✦ Tony Orlando
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by GARRY SHERMAN, produced by BOB MORGAN
Epic single #9715 (8/64) ● B-side of “To Wait for Love”
Hiding on the flip side of Orlando’s old-fashioned Bacharach ballad “To Wait for Love” was “Accept It”, an angular song situated halfway between early-sixties Brill Building pop and British Invasion rock and roll. The chirping string section and the accordion player left over from the “To Wait for Love ‘’ arrangement are still in the orchestra, but the militant drums and chanking rhythm guitar take the song in the complete opposite direction of the A-side. The chord changes sound like something a guitar player might come up with by sliding a major chord shape up and down the neck until something interesting emerges. In the fifth measure of verse (“A”) sections, the song lurches up in key a half step for two measures (where Orlando sings “tears will never bring her back”), then lurches back down into the home key for the final two measures of the section, a momentary modulation that feels like you are being whipped around on a fairground ride. Such a harmonic move would be considered crude by the standards of a songwriter like Jerome Kern (or by Bacharach when he was writing more sophisticated material), but chord changes like this were plentiful in rock going forward from The Beatles. Hal David matches the gear grinding chord changes with the quasi-rhyme of “accept it” with “rejected” and “dejected”. With a less generic lyric, this might have become a minor Bacharach & David classic.
A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #1282 (8/64) ● B-side of “You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart)”
By 1964, the Dionne Warwick masterpieces were coming at a brisk clip, and her recordings naturally crowd out those of other artists during the middle years of the decade when doing a Bacharach survey like this. Even when she was covering another artist’s debut version of a Bacharach song as a B-side (as is the case with “A House Is Not a Home” and “Alfie”), she usually waxed a performance that stands shoulder to shoulder (or even surpasses) the version Bacharach first sanctioned and pretty much any other version as well. There’s not much to say about Warwick’s “A House Is Not a Home” other than it shows both Warwick and Bacharach in the studio at the very peak of their powers, creating art for the ages. Bacharach didn’t change much about the arrangement, but one detail that sticks out is the quiet acoustic guitar strumming on the Warwick recording during the verses. It brings in an extra touch of Brazilian swing that is not present on the Brook Benton original, though you have to listen closely to catch it. The atmospheric vibrato guitar accents tend to be the guitar parts that grab your attention in both versions.
While Warwick was justifiably irked when situations like the one with “Anyone Who Had a Heart” occurred (Cilla Black’s cover, rushed into the U.K. market shortly after Warwick’s version was released, went to #1 and took away potential sales of the Warwick single), Warwick was on the other side of the equation numerous times with singers like Lou Johnson and, in this case, Benton. Warwick’s “A House Is Not a Home” appeared a month after Benton’s, and both lingered in the bottom third of the Billboard Hot 100 in the late summer of 1964. Much later in life, Warwick took to competing with the younger version of herself with re-recordings of her Scepter material on her “Dionne Sings Dionne” records from 1998 and 2000, as she had sold her financial interest in her Scepter recordings to Warner Bros. in 1991.
LONG AFTER TONIGHT IS ALL OVER ✦ Jimmy Radcliffe
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by BURT BACHARACH, produced by Bert Berns
Musicor single #1042 (7/64)
Though Bacharach arranged and was de-facto producer of Jimmy Radcliffe’s earlier Bacharach recording, 1962’s “There Goes the Forgotten Man”, and served in the same capacity for Gene Pitney’s recordings of Bacharach material, Bacharach cut ties with Musicor owner (who was also Pitney’s manager and Radcliffe’s employer) in 1964 after the fallout over a misunderstanding or perhaps deception regarding Pitney’s recording of “The Fool Killer” appearing in the film of the same name. That may or may not be the reason that the brilliant R&B producer Bert Berns was at the helm for Radcliffe’s recording of the “Long After Tonight Is All Over”. Radcliffe and Berns were co-writers on The Chiffon’s 1963 song “My Block”, and the same year Berns produced “If I Would Marry You, a duet featuring Tammi Montgomery (the future Tammi Terrell) and Radcliffe. Thus, Radcliffe may have wanted Berns’ harder R&B production style for the song, which endeared the track to the UK’s Northern Soul scene in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Long After Tonight” has one of Hal David’s better song openers: “Tonight with you, for the first time / I have learned what my lips are for”. Inexplicably, when Dusty Springfield recorded the song in 1965, she flubbed the line and sang the non sequitur “Tonight will be, for the first time / I have learned what my lips are for”, thus putting a big dent in the fender of an otherwise brilliantly sung and produced recording.
TRUE LOVE NEVER RUNS SMOOTH ✦ Petula Clark
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced and arranged by TONY HATCH
Pye single #15668 (6/64)
As with Dusty Springfield’s recording of “Twenty Four Hours to Tulsa”, Petula Clark follows Gene Pitney’s phrasing quite closely on her soundalike version of “True Love Never Runs Smooth”, which was released 12 months after Pitney’s. Clark had been working with producer Tony Hatch for about a year when they recorded “True Love”, and none of their singles had caught fire, though the very next single they recorded after, “Downtown”, became the biggest hit of Clark’s career. Though Pitney eventually became quite popular in the UK, in the early sixties, only his single “Town Without Pity” saw any chart action, and his “True Love” was ignored. Hatch kicks the tempo up and gives the beat a bit more swing, and Clark’s smoother voice gives the recording the feel of an air-cushioned ride on a newly paved highway. And while the mandolin still strums away in the vamp sections before the verses, but, buried in the mix, it feels like a vestigial trace of Pitney’s more Mediterranean arrangement. The B-side is also noteworthy for Bacharach fans, as it features Clark’s take on Bacharach’s goofy minor hit “Saturday Sunshine”.
I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MYSELF ✦ Dusty Springfield
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by IVOR RAYMONDE
Philips single #1348 (6/64) ● Pop #3
“I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” was Dusty Springfield’s third UK single (and fifth single overall), and it became the second-highest charting song she had in the UK, going to #3. Tommy Hunt’s original release of the song almost two years prior had not charted in either the US or the UK, and the song was ripe for rediscovery when Springfield selected it. Once again, a slight quickening of the tempo gives the track a noticeably different feel from the version Bacharach conducted for Scepter (originally with a Chuck Jackson vocal, which was replaced by a vocal overdubbed by Tommy Hunt for the initial release of the song).
YOU’LL NEVER GET TO HEAVEN (IF YOU BREAK MY HEART) ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #1282 (8/64) ● Pop #34
The producers of the 1998 Look of Love anthology had to tread a fine line between giving Dionne Warwick her due as the greatest interpreter of classic-era Bacharach material and not making the anthology a de-facto Warwick boxed set. Warwick ended up with about a fifth of the total tracks on that set, and there were at least a couple where her definitive version of a song was passed over in the spirit of artist diversity. As great as The Stylistics’ 1973 version of “You’ll Never Get to Heaven” is, it doesn’t stray far from Warwick’s simply perfect version from nine years earlier (a wise decision by producer Thom Bell, who made it sound like the seventies without discarding the best elements of Bacharach’s arrangement). Indeed lead singer Russell Thompkins Jr.’s vocal could be considered a tribute to Warwick, so closely does he match her phrasing in certain passages.
TO WAIT FOR LOVE ✦ Tom Jones
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by LES REED, produced by PETER SULLIVAN
Decca single #12062 (1/65) ● B-side of “It’s Not Unusual”
Being on the B-side of a #1 record is perhaps the second-best place a songwriter can be, at least financially speaking. So Bacharach & David must have felt lucky when Tom Jones, then a completely unknown singer to most of the world, put a cover of their little known “To Wait for Love” on the flip side of his smash “It’s Not Unusual”. As Serene Dominic notes in Burt Bacharach: Song by Song, the rhythm track (recorded in November of 1964 by a group of London session players that guitarist Jimmy Page says he was a part of) sounds not surprisingly a bit like a Beatles track from the same time period. Tony Orlando’s version was not surpassed, but Jones soon enough took ownership of another Bacharach classic when he recorded “What’s New Pussycat” in the spring of 1965.
A QUESTION OF LOVE ✦ Andy Williams
(Burt Bacharach/Bob Hilliard)
Produced, arranged and conducted by ROBERT MERSEY
Outtake recorded in May 1965 for Columbia LP #2499, The Shadow of Your Smile (1966), first released in 2020 on The Emperor of Easy (Real Gone CD #0992)
Nearly 70 years after Bacharach and Bob Hilliard wrote “A Question of Love”, the world finally got to hear this lost song on the Andy Williams CD release The Emperor of Easy. Hilliard and Bacharch wrote together between 1960 and 1962, and had their greatest successes with R&B material. But there were forays into traditional pop, like “The Miracle of St. Marie” and “A Question of Love”. By 1963, Bacharach and David had formed an exclusive legal and artistic partnership, Blue JAC productions, and the Bacharach/Hilliard songs recorded after that point were from a small stockpile of unrecorded songs written by the two prior to Bacharch’s Blue Jac years. (The name “Blue Jac” came from the names of the individual publisher companies set up by Bacharach and David. Bacharach’s was Blue Seas Music, and David’s was “Jac”, which was an initialism taken from the names of his wife and two songs, Jim, Anne, and Craig.)
Arranger Robert Mersey goes maximalist with the orchestra on “A Question of Love” in the vein of Gordon Jenkins’ arrangements for Frank Sinatra. The song’s form is unusual, and feels more like la Chanson Française than traditional American popular song. The lyrics express the thoughts of a man whose hope for lasting love is nearly extinguished, though he remains tormented by desire:
Oh why would you want me to find love?
When the world is filled with broken hearts
And with dreams that won’t come true
Unless you knew I was gone from the start
And you felt the same way too
Oh why would you want me to find love?
And to give my heart for a one night thrill
That emotions seem to rush
I hope it’s not just a fool’s paradise
That the cruel hands of time will crush
Williams later recorded several Bacharach standards including “The Look of Love”, “Alfie”, “This Guy’s in Love with You”, and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”, but he makes more of an impression on lesser-known Bacharach tunes that have a theatrical bent, like “A Question of Love” and “If I Could Go Back”.
Bacharach himself had a fondness for Broadway-quality male voices, as can be seen in this quote from a 1968 interview with Skitch Henderson on National Guard Radio dug up by researcher Serene Dominic:
“I feel it affects more the male singers … it’s hurt them more than it’s hurt the big-belting girls. Shirley Bassey will still have a hit record. Vicki Carr will still have hits if the material is right. The big male voices don’t seem to strike it rich today [as recording artists]. Bob Goulet goes in and does a Broadway show and it’s magnificent, it’s an absolute joy to hear him on stage. But records, it’s something else.”
Bacharach did have male singers with big, theatrical voices interpreting his songs in the rock era, most notably Andy Williams, Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdink (though Jones mixed a big dose of R&B with his traditional pop influences). However, they weren’t taking his songs to the upper reaches of the pop charts, and Bacharach was lamenting the commercial prospects of such singers.
ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK A HEART ✦ Jody Miller
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by BILLY STRANGE, produced by STEVE DOUGLAS
Capitol LP #2412, Home of the Brave (10/65)
Just as Big Al Downing gave us a glimpse of what Bacharch would sound like as covered by Fats Domino, Jody Miller provides a similar glimpse into what Patsy Cline might have sounded like covering a Bacharach song of the Gene Pitney variety. Miller’s 1965 cover of Gene Pitney’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart” not surprisingly sounds a little more modern than Patsy Cline’s recordings, as the Nashville studio sound was steadily evolving throughout the sixties. But Miller’s throbbing voice and phrasing bear the influence of Cline, who died in March of 1963. Coincidentally, 1965 was the year that Pitney began a series of country music recordings himself, often in duets with fellow Musicor Records artists George Jones and Melba Montgomery.
Miller started out at Capitol records in 1963 with a folk album that looked to capitalize on the early-1960s boom in that genre, but the album sold poorly. With folk music on the way out, Miller went country. Her next album spawned a single, “Queen of the House” (an answer song to Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”) which gave her a hit and set her up for a country music career that lasted into the early 21st century.
Bacharach, obviously not a figure associated with country music, did have some forays into the genre, starting with his first hit, Marty Robbins’ “The Story of My Life”. His most overtly country song was probably 1970’s “The Very First Person I Met (In California)”, recorded by Dionne Warwick of all people. (Warwick famously passed on “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, thinking the demo sounded too much like country music.) “California” remained unreleased for decades, and feels like something Bacharach did mainly as an experiment. But in a 2013 interview with the Guardian’s Mick Brown, he told Brown he was working on some country songs, adding the caveat “I’m not sure that I can suppress my tendencies to harmonize in a certain way that’s very un-country.”
LOOK IN MY EYES MARIA ✦ Cliff Richard
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by GARRY SHERMAN
Columbia UK EP, Look In My Eyes Maria #8405 (5/65)
Cliff Richard dusted off this two year old B-side by Jay & The Americans and recorded it during a 1965 session held in New York that also produced his recordings of Bacharach & David’s “Everyone Needs Someone To Love” and “Through the Eye of a Needle”. While the other two songs were included on Richard’s Love Is Forever LP, “Look in My Eyes Maria” was the title track of a UK EP that came out a few months before. Compared to Jay & The Americans’ jaunty 1963 version, Richard’s narcotic vocal and Garry Sherman’s swirling arrangement with prominent low brass give the song a pleasantly hypnotizing feel, as if it’s floating along on gusts of the air coming out of those tubas and trombones.
THAT’S NOT THE ANSWER ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter LP #528, The Sensitive Sound of Dionne Warwick (2/65)
“The Sensitive Sound” indeed. Here’s another effortlessly brilliant Bacharach & David pop tune buried as a Dionne Warwick LP track. The girl-group sound of the arrangement sounds more like the Shirelles of 1962 than the Dionne Warwick of 1965, and it’s possible the song was grabbed out of the proverbial trunk when material was needed for Warwick’s fourth LP. Dated or not, the song has a catchy and memorable vocal melody that contrasts staccato phrases in the verse sections with longer tones on the refrain, a pattern that occurs repeatedly in Bacharach’s writing. The gentle “sha da, sha da” vocals on the refrain do as much work as anything else in the arrangement, which also has some great vibraphone lines and an unusual bit of twangy lead guitar that, as Serene Dominic points out, might be due to Bacharach working with a new-to-Bacharach studio crew at Pye Studios in London.
LIVE AGAIN ✦ Irma Thomas
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced by JERRY RAGOVOY
Recorded for Imperial Records, January 20, 1965, first released in 1992 on the CD “Time Is On My Side” The Best Of Irma Thomas, Volume 1 (EMI Records USA #97988)
Serene Dominic speculates that Bacharach provided the arrangement for this lost classic, pointing to the tack piano accents that enter at about 0:22 in the recording. The harmonization of Thomas’ voice with the low saxophone line when singing “I dance and drink” is another nice touch in this beautifully raucous slice of girl group soul. Producer Jerry Ragovoy was behind some of the most intense soul performances of the decade, including Lorraine Ellison’s “Stay With Me” and Garnet Mimms’ “Cry Baby”. Ragovoy was an occasional songwriting partner of producer Bert Berns (discussed in the entry for “Long After Tonight Is All Over”), who was 10 months older than Ragovoy. The two shared a vision of soul music that combined the intensity and grit of the Memphis and Muscle Shoals sounds with the large-scale production techniques of the Brill Building scene. Ragovoy was able to adapt to the changing sounds of soul in the following decade, and in 1975, Ragovoy produced one of Dionne Warwick’s best post-Bacharach songs, the exquisitely polished but still hard grooving “Move Me No Mountain”. The 2008 CD anthology The Jerry Ragovoy Story: Time Is on My Side 1953–2003 (Ace Records) is the place to start if you want to know more about this underrated pop genius.
As for the origins of “Live Again”, there is little information about the song other than the recording details and the details of the copyright registration, which was filed April 24, 1967 by the publishing companies owned by Bacharach and David, Blue Seas Music and Jac Music. Though the opening 8-measure “A” section of the song that begins at 0:18 sounds like Bacharach’s R&B writing from 1961–1963, the next 8-bar section (beginning at 0:33 with “…find me where the lights are bright every night”) has the kind of tricky rhythmic displacement in the vocal melody that sounds like Bacharach’s Dionne Warwick-era writing. (Note what sounds like the early placement of the word “every” that catches you off guard the first time you hear it.) How this song stayed buried for 27 years is a real mystery.
WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT ✦ Steve Lawrence
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by PATRICK WILLIAMS, conducted by JOE GUERCIO, produced by MIKE BERNIKER
Columbia LP #9219, The Steve Lawrence Show (9/65)
Though “What’s New Pussycat” had only been out a couple of months when Steve Lawrence made his recording, he must have been at least a little daunted at the prospect of covering a hit song that practically nobody could deliver with the power and charm of original interpreter Tom Jones. Luckily for Lawrence, Patrick Williams came through with an arrangement that came at the song sideways, allowing Lawrence add a touch of dry humor to Bachrach’s most unusual Kurt Weill-inspired polka-rock hybrid. The dreamy crooning in the lushy-orchestrated introduction, and the lounge lizard double time swing feel in later sections of the arrangement, take Lawrence out of direct competition with Jones and put him in more hospitable musical ground.
DON’T SAY I DIDN’T TELL YOU SO ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #1298 (2/65) ● B-side of “Who Can I Turn To”
Bossa-rach time. The beat feels Brazilian, but listen closely and you’ll hear a lot of interesting things happening in the bass line that you won’t hear in, for example, the bass line of Stan Getz’s “Desafinado” (or in the bass line of Petula Clark’s 1971 cover from the Warm and Tender LP). Other small details: The plucked cello melodies in the opening bars. The piano and snare drum figure played behind Warwick at 1:04 as she sings “tell you lies that you’ll believe”. (Another arranger might have just had the session drummer play cymbal hits in time with the piano.) But the most memorable effect of all is the instrumental break starting at 1:21 that features a slightly comical high-register muted trumpet melody, and Warwick singing along in unison, somewhat low in the mix and functioning as her own background singer. The effect is like listening to a very gifted seagull that wants to sing along with its favorite Bacharach song. On the Petula Clark cover, arranged by Arif Mardin, Clark half-heartedly hums the same line an octave lower, while what sounds like some kind of keyboard-generated brass chords play a harmonized version of the “seagull melody” in the original register.
Warwick’s recording is sui generis and seductive because both the song and the arrangement (it’s very hard to separate the two in this instance) fit her like a couture gown. Grab a pair of headphones and listen closely.
EVERYONE NEEDS SOMEONE TO LOVE ✦ Cliff Richard
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by GARRY SHERMAN
Columbia UK LP #3569, Love Is Forever (11/65)
From the same New York session that produced “Look in My Eyes Maria” came “Everyone Needs Someone to Love” and “Through the Eyes of a Needle”. The latter two were debut recordings, though both were released only as LP tracks on Richard’s Love Is Forever. “Everyone Needs Someone to Love” is part of a subset of easygoing Bacharach material that you could call “Bacharach shuffle” songs. These songs move along at a gentle lope, and if Bacharach sneaks in a curveball like a measure with five beats or a melody phrase that starts a beat later than you would expect, you don’t even notice. Several Bacharach & David milestones are in this category: “The Story of My Life”, “Magic Moments”, and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”. Though Bacharach & David didn’t write many of these specifically for Dionne Warwick, one exception is Warwick’s “Who Get’s the Guy”. Though there’s not much new happening musically or lyrically in the song, Garry Sherman’s arrangement uses abrupt half step key changes in a novel way, introducing one upward shift in the third bar of the introduction, then another upward shift at the beginning of the second chorus of the song (around 1:15), a more typical arranger’s move meant to give the performance the illusion of an energy boost after the main musical themes have all been introduced. (This type of mid-song abrupt key change is sometimes called “the truck driver’s gear change”.) Then, at the very end of the song, the song is “walked back” to its original key, with two half-step key changes in the downward direction, each setting up a section of only two bars, with the song ending after the two bars in the original key.
MY LITTLE RED BOOK ✦ Burt Bacharach and His Orchestra Featuring Tony Middleton
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced, arranged and conducted by BURT BACHARACH
Kapp single #685 (6/65) ● B-side of “What’s New Pussycat”
For Bacharach’s Kapp Records single version of his “My Little Red Book”, he basically recreated the arrangement he created for Manfred Mann on the What’s New Pussycat? soundtrack, subtracting the flute part and adding gospel singers to background support to singer Tony Middleton.
‘And who is Tony Middleton?’, you might ask, particularly if you were born after 1965 or were around earlier but never paid close attention to the singles “bubbling under” the Billboard Hot 100. Middleton was a member of the Harlem doo wop group The Willows, which he joined in 1952 and left a decade later. During the sixties and seventies, he recorded singles for a long list of recognizable labels, including Roulette, United Artists, Philips, ABC-Paramount, Mala, A&M, Scepter and others, but was unable to land a hit and a sustained recording and touring career. His pop recording career petered out after his disco outing “Lady Fingers” in 1976, recorded when he was 42. He continued to sing professionally into the 21st century, and a 2008 CD anthology titled Memories Are Made Of This that collected many of his 1960s singles showed that he’d managed to create a dedicated fanbase over the years despite his lack of fame. Middleton returned to his doo wop roots late in his career, regrouping in 1998 with several other original Willows and performing with them through 2009.
THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE ✦ Cliff Richard
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by GARRY SHERMAN
Columbia UK LP #3569, Love Is Forever (11/65)
The last song in the 1965 Bacharach trilogy by Cliff Richard is the one that has the most to do with where Bacharach & David were headed in the decade to come. While the lyric still concerns a lover pleading for his beloved to return after a “great big quarrel”, David spends more time in the lyric describing a concept, which is that by radically changing your perspective, you can achieve a goal, or experience personal growth, or even heal a broken relationship. The song is full of the nature imagery that ran throughout “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, a song that took a slow route to completion from 1962 to 1964 (with those nature-heavy verses being the last part to come, after David thought up the line “Lord, we don’t need another mountain” in 1964).
In “The Eye of a Needle” (the official title of the song, according to the 1978 “Bacharach & David” songbook), the script of “What the World Needs Now Is Love” is somewhat flipped. In the earlier song, God is so concerned with creating the impressive natural features of the earth that he neglects to put enough love into the world. God doesn’t need the eye of a needle so much as a telescope to get a better look at how we are treating each other. With “The Eye of a Needle”, nature, observed in a novel way, lets us put our personal conflicts into proportion.
The song points the way to others like 1972’s “The World Is a Circle”, which again introduces a new mental model to a listener who needs to take another perspective to move forward. And to 1968’s “As Long as There’s an Apple Tree”, which also leans more heavily on nature metaphors than earlier lyrics like “Close to You” that mention the natural world more in passing.
LOOKING WITH MY EYES ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12111 (9/65) ● Pop #64
“Looking with My Eyes” sounds fresh and modern almost 60 years after its release. Musician and entrepreneur Tom Cridland sums up the song’s appeal well: “[A]n epic of orchestra pop remarkable not just for the double set of brackets in its title but for an astonishing swirling momentum driven not so much by a conventional rhythm section as by the strings, the choir and periodic fusillades of percussion: tympani, tubular bells, boo-bams. And on top of it all, Dionne is doing as she always has done, negotiating Bacharach’s melodic twists, inhabiting Hal David’s words, singing like a real person who happens to be in possession of a divine gift.”
Cridland’s comments about the double set of brackets in the title refers to the title on the UK single released by Pye: “(Here I Go Again) Looking with My Eyes (Seeing with My Heart)”. In the US, the Scepter single and Scepter’s Here I Am LP stuck to the concise version of the title, “Looking with My Eyes”. Along with the follow up single, “Are You There (With Another Girl)”, this song showed Bacharach pushing forward with his own aesthetic and paying less head to the rest of the pop chart. Both songs picked up where earlier boundary pushing songs like “Only the Strong, Only the Brave” and “Don’t Say I Didn’t Tell You So” left off. As fate would have it, neither “Looking with My Eyes” nor “Are You There” was a smash, and it was Warwick’s “Message to Michael”, a song written three years prior, that next cracked the top 10 for Warwick.
MAKE IT EASY ON YOURSELF ✦ The Walker Brothers
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by IVOR RAYMONDE
Philips single #1428 (8/65) ● Pop #1 (UK), Pop #16 (US)
Here’s another chapter in the “What if __ had recorded __” book. This time, it’s The Walker Brothers giving you and idea of what “Make It Easy on Yourself” might have sounded like if recorded by The Righteous Brothers, whose breakout hit “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” had gone to #1 in the US and UK the year before. Today, Scott Walker is most often discussed as a pioneer of the avant garde in rock, and someone who helped pave the way for figures like David Bowie. Walker’s solo recordings of the late 1960s and 1970s overshadow his more pop oriented work with The Walker Brothers, who cut two Bacharach classics before Scott left the group for his solo career. The production of both Walker Brothers Bacharach covers had strong Phil Specter and Righteous Brothers influences. Ivor Raymonde’s arrangement for “Make It Easy on Yourself” sticks close to the Dionne Warwick version, which in retrospect was a good call — the song became their first UK #1, and put them on the map in the US, which had ignored their previous two singles.
DON’T GO BREAKING MY HEART ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12153 (6/66) ● B-side of “Trains and Boats and Planes”
Getting slightly out of chronological order, we have a 1966 Dionne Warwick cover of a song that appeared on Bacharach’s May, 1965 Hit Maker! on Kapp records. “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” is probably the fluffiest of Bacharach’s sixties bossa nova-inspired songs, and on her recording, Warwick doesn’t have a chance to show much range, vocally or emotionally. But as many songwriters, including Bacharach, have noted, it’s not easy to write a great simple melody. Warwick wisely keeps it simple herself, and let’s the song be what it wants to be. In 1966–67, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” was, not surprisingly, covered by middle-of-the-road artists including Herb Alpert, Sergio Mendez, Doc Severinsen, and Johnny Mathis. On the surprising front was Aretha Franklin’s disco-fied 1974 recording, which wanders far from Bacharach’s cool breeze aesthetic and seems targeted to dedicated fans of both Franklin and cocaine.
WHO’S GOT THE ACTION ✦ Phil Colbert
(Burt Bacharach/Bob Hilliard)
Arranged by HORACE OTT, produced by HAL MOONEY
Philips US single #40313 (10/65) ● B-side of “The Long, Long Tunnel”
Another Paramount Dean Martin film with a title that started with “Who’s” was 1962’s Who’s Got the Action. Paramount’s Famous Music published this Bacharach & Hilliard song, but by the time it slipped out as a B-side in 1965, the film was ancient history and Philips didn’t bother adding an “inspired by the Paramount Picture” message on the record label. The song itself is Bacharach writing at his smoothest and most commercial, but bits of his quirky side show up in the delicate zig-zagging melody that appears when the title phrase is being sung. Typical for Bacharach, this quirky melody provides rhythmic and dynamic contrast to a theatrical moment just before when the song hits a big, brassy IV chord and holds it for two measures, the first time during the “Where are the thrills that I’m dreaming about constantly” line, and the next time over Bob Hilliard’s best moment, “I want the wind to blow all of the leaves off my tree”. However, the gears do grind a little when the four bar bridge comes at 1:23 (“I’ll take chances, I’ll put my life on the line…”), a section which sounds like it was ripped out of a Soviet patriotic anthem and dropped into the song with little thought about what comes directly before or after. On a technical note, there’s what sounds like a crude tape splice at 0:26, where some fraction of a beat is added, though you might not notice unless you listen for it.
Phil Colbert was a Canadian singer who had briefly passed through the doo wop group Billy Ward and His Dominoes in 1958 before releasing a handful of singles between 1962 and 1970. In the late sixties he shifted to the business side and worked for several small labels as a record promoter until the mid-seventies, when he seems to have left the industry. Like Adam Wade, his vocal approach was more pop than R&B. Unfortunately for both singers, the Nat Cole formula of crossover crooning was becoming irrelevant for anyone not named Johnny Mathis by the midpoint of the decade.
HOW CAN I HURT YOU ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter LP #531, Here I Am (12/65)
Dionne Warwick’s 1965 releases included several Bacharach tunes with experimental writing or arranging, including “How Can I Hurt You.” The most extreme example is probably the heavily dissonant “Only the Strong, Only the Brave”, but “Looking with My Eyes”, “Don’t Say I Didn’t Tell You So”, and “Are You There (With Another Girl)” and “How Can I Hurt You” all stand well apart from the rest of the music found on the pop and easy listening charts of the day. As Serene Dominic notes, “How Can I Hurt You” sounds like a musical theater song when it shifts into a comical sounding polka beat while Warwick plays it straight singing a very high and demanding vocal line. Bacharach borrows a trick from “Don’t Say I Didn’t Tell You So” at 1:25 when he has a high wordless vocal sing in unison with a silly sounding melody, this time played on a flute instead of a trumpet. The vocal acrobatics and continually shifting rhythmic terrain bring to mind a song from three years later, “Promises, Promises”, as well as “What’s New Pussycat” from earlier in the year.
BLUE ON BLUE ✦ Gals & Pals
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced by ANDERS BURMAN
Metronome Sweden LP #15246 (1966)
Jody Miller’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart” and The Walker Brothers’ “Make It Easy on Yourself” both somewhat reimagined the original recordings by layering the Nashville sound over Jody Miller’s performance and the “wall of sound” over The Walker Brothers. But both stick with the fundamentals of the original Bacharach arrangement. Steve Lawrence’s “What’s New Pussycat” gives the song a fairly major overhaul, but sticks within the parameters of traditional popular music. With the Gals & Pals arrangement of “Blue on Blue”, we have a more radical approach, with a very modern sounding instrumental riff added that completely transforms the song. More of this is to come with the Cliff Richard arrangement of “Baby It’s You” and the Cilla Black arrangement of “What the World Needs Now Is Love”. And a little farther in the distance, the biggest hit of Bacharach’s career, “Close to You”, used an arrangement with key new musical material from Richard Carpenter. When it comes to hit versions, “Close to You” was one of a small number of Bacharach hits that departed significantly from Bacharach’s own vision. Ronnie Milsap’s 1982 version of “Any Day Now” and Naked Eyes’ 1982 version of “Always Something There to Remind Me” are other examples.
Back to Gals & Pals, the Swedish vocal harmony group’s recording is about the only cover of the Bobby Vinton hit that is worth hearing more than once. Both Bobby Rydell and Bennie Thomas recorded what amounted to soundalike covers, and in Italy, yet another Bobby, Bobby Solo, recorded the song as “Blu è blu”.
Gals & Pals recorded what is probably the very first Bacharach tribute album, Sing Something for Everyone, and the dreamy and cinematic “Blue on Blue” is the standout track on the album. In 1999, the Norwegian duo Röyksopp sampled the Gal & Pals recording of “Blue on Blue” for their song “So Easy”, which became a UK hit in 2002.
ANOTHER TEAR FALLS ✦ The Walker Brothers
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by REG GUEST
Philips single #1514 (9/66) ● Pop #12 (UK)
A year after “Make It Easy on Yourself”, The Walker Brothers returned to the land of Bacharach & David for an epic version of version of “Another Tear Falls”, a recording with the most ominous sounding down beat in all of sixties pop (it appears at 0:39 after the vocal introduction has cranked up the emotional tension to “11”). Arranger and conductor Reg Guest deserves a gold star here, achieving a level of intensity well beyond Ivor Raymonde’s still intense arrangement for “Make It Easy on Yourself”. Jackie DeShannon’s “Come and Get Me” may be the only other Bacharach recording from this era that builds such a gigantic wall of sound. Gene McDaniels’ 1961 Liberty Records recording (a mere B-side) was clearly the model for the Walker Brothers version, though The Walker Brothers sang it a whole step lower, starting in D♭ minor instead of E♭ minor. Marv Johnson released a version on the A-side of a 1963 United Artists single, and both McDaniel’s and Johnson’s version are good enough to sit alongside classic Bacharach interpretations from the era — either might have ended up on this compilation if The Walker Brothers hadn’t recorded it.
TRAINS AND BOATS AND PLANES ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12153 (6/66) ● Pop #22
We’re once again jumping slightly ahead chronologically to a 1966 recording of a song that Bacharach himself released as an A-side the previous year. Like “In Between the Heartaches”, “Trains and Boats and Planes” is a simple song by Bacharach standards, but in Dionne Warwick’s hands, it’s got everything it needs. The only imaginable reason that it was passed over for Rhino Records’ 1998 The Look of Love anthology in favor of Bacharach’s recording featuring The Breakaways is that The Look of Love was already quite full of Warwick masterpieces and the producers saw a chance to showcase a Bacharach UK hit. This is not to say that the version featuring The Breakaways is not successful on its own terms — writer Serene Dominic offers extensive praise for this version, saying of The Breakaways that their “dispassionate delivery blends perfectly with Hal David’s haunted verses”. But Warwick delivers heart-melting pathos in her performance, and the song is right in her sweet spot, vocally speaking.
IT DOESN’T MATTER ANYMORE ✦ Joanie Sommers
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced and arranged by ROBERT MERSEY
Columbia single #43950 (12/66)
Joanie Sommers was the female lead in On the Flip Side, the 1966 hour-long television musical written by Bacharach & David for ABC Stage 67 television series, and was featured on the Decca soundtrack alongside co-star Rick Nelson. Signed to Columbia Records at the time, Columbia decided to record Sommers singing two of Nelson’s features from the show, the Beatles-influenced “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” and the more traditional ballad “Take a Broken Heart”. Arranger Robert Mersey decided to forgo background vocals on “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore”, making Sommers’ vocal sound a little naked, but she still sounds more comfortable with the song that Nelson did on his version. (The double tracking on Nelson’s vocal gives it a plastic and rehearsed quality, the opposite of what this rock pastiche needs.) The song is, like “Accept It”, interesting because it shows Bacharach adapting the sixties rock idiom that was competition for his bread-and-butter adult contemporary work.
HERE WHERE THERE IS LOVE ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12133 (3/66) ● B-side of “Message to Michael”
Though Dionne Warwick had recorded several Bacharach songs in 3/4 or 6/8 time, including “Don’t Make Me Over”, “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, and “Forever My Love”, Serene Dominic speculates that “Here Where There Is Love” was an attempt to write one specifically in the mold of “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, with a humanitarian message at the heart of the lyric. Warwick regretted passing on the song and then watching Jackie DeShannon take it to #7 a few months later, and Bacharach & David naturally paid attention to which of their songs were connecting with the public and often reused elements of those songs in future compositions (there’s no “Everybody’s Out of Town” in a world where “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” did not become a hit).
“Here Where There Is Love” has a very unusual structure (which itself is not usual for Bacharach). It starts with a six bar introduction featuring just Warwick, a piano, and double bass. A nine bar section that functions as a chorus follows immediately, and the song title is sung twice in this section. Then comes a nine bar section that functions as a verse, and then a second chorus section. What sounds like a second verse section follows, but after 4 bars the song transitions into an 11 bar bridge that is mostly sung by the background singers without Warwick. The bridge uses very sparse orchestration and has no steady rhythm pulse coming from a drum kit and bass. Then comes a six bar transition back to the chorus that features an operatic soprano singing in unison with the first violin part. The song has some of the most fascinating bits of orchestration Bacharach wrote for Warwick, and like “How Can I Hurt You”, it sounds in places more like something you would see in a musical theater performance than on a top 40 radio station. And not too surprisingly, top 40 radio ignored it, though Warwick made the song both a single and the title song of her sixth album.
As it turned out, the B-side caught on, a cover of the 1962 “Message to Martha” (retitled “Message to Michael”), a song that had been released twice before in English (and once in German by Marlene Dietrich). “Michael”, recorded in France without Bacharach & David’s involvement and released against their better judgment (see the entry above on the Jerry Butler recording for more details), made it to #8, just one notch below “What the World Needs Now Is Love”.
SATURDAY SUNSHINE ✦ Johnny Mathis
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by TONY OSBORNE
Mercury single #72653 (1/67)
Though he released a one-off single on Cabot Records in 1957, “Saturday Sunshine” was Bacharach’s first single of the 1960s and the first to have material that sounded uniquely Bacharachian. (Though the B-side, ironically, sounded more like Henry Mancini than anybody else.) Bacharach’s recording of “Saturday Sunshine” featured an unidentified child singing notes of sometimes indeterminate pitch, and it did not become the next “High Hopes”. Nevertheless, four years down the road, Mercury Records thought the song would make a good single for Johnny Mathis, his final single for the label.
English arranger Tony Osborne, who worked with Shirley Bassey, Eartha Kitt, and Judy Garland, provided Mathis with a quite effective arrangement. Starting low-key, with a marimba part that sounds like it came from a Martin Denny record, things soon start swinging hard and a little funky, in the manner of a mid-sixties Tom Jones record. Osborne gets creative with the xylophone and orchestral chimes, and the arrangement just seems to build and build.
Despite the excellence of the “Saturday Sunshine” performance, it was ignored by radio in favor of its B-side, the Quincy Jones produced cover of a piece of 1962 corn called “Two Tickets and a Candy Heart”, a song originally recorded by the previously discussed Joey Powers. Mathis, who was recording Bacharach songs in the 1950s before Bacharach sounded like Bacharach, continued to record Bacharach into the later 1960s and the 1970s, including many of the warhorses (“Close to You”, “Alfie”, “Walk on By”, “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, “The Look of Love”, “I Say a Little Prayer”, and “This Guy’s in Love with You”). But like several other MOR crooners (Andy Williams, Englebert Humperdinck, and Steve Lawrence, to name three), he rarely makes much of an impression with the better known Bacharach material, but on quirkier Bacharach material like “Saturday Sunshine” he can be interesting. No doubt part of the reason is that with less competition, it’s easier to earn a place in a listener’s heart. But in some cases, the quirkier material takes the singer outside their comfort zone and makes them work a little harder to shape their performance.
TAKE A BROKEN HEART ✦ Joanie Sommers
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced and arranged by ROBERT MERSEY
Columbia single #43950 (12/66) ● B-side of “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore”
Joanie Sommers’ recording of “Take a Broken Heart” was the only contemporaneous recording other than Rick Nelson’s soundtrack recording of this wonderful ballad. Nelson’s version was his finest moment on the soundtrack album, and was, like Gene Pitney’s “The Fool Killer”, one of the most unexpected pleasures on Rhino’s The Look of Love anthology. Sommers offers a strong alternative, though she doesn’t capture the sense of yearning built into the song quite as effectively as Nelson. It’s surprising this song didn’t get covered by artists like Glen Campbell or Charlie Rich in the 1970s — it would have been perfect for a pop country balladeer of that era.
ANOTHER NIGHT ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12181 (12/66) ● Pop #49
Compositionally speaking, “Another Night” is an interesting hybrid of Bacharach’s mid-sixties experimental side and his early-sixties R&B and girl group writing. For example, in the first 14 measures of the song, the time signature changes four times, passing through 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4, and the song starts with an aggressive riff played over a chord that is technically not in the key signature (B♭ major in the sheet music, but A major on the Dionne Warwick recording). The opening verse section alternates back and forth between the plain root chord, B♭, and an impressionistic A♭/B♭ suspended chord, giving this part of the song a jazzy, modal feel. There’s a quick modulation to the key of A♭ for three measures, and then back to B♭ to set up to the chorus that feels like classic girl group pop (even though it too has a modal aspect). The driving rhythms give the song an incredible tension that support the comically bitter narrator of the song. Hal David’s approach in the lyric is something like the reverse of Lorenz Hart’s in “I Wish I Were in Love Again”, asking the listener to contemplate some beautiful aspect of nature (roses, birds, clouds and stars) and then slashing through the image with an point about the cruelty of the man tormenting the narrator through his lies and abandonment. One imagines the song caught the attention of the Broadway world, as it feels like a showstopper. It’s not the kind of Bacharach & David song that soothes or seduces, but its brilliance is there waiting for you when the mood strikes.
BABY IT’S YOU ✦ Cliff Richard
(Burt Bacharach/Mack David/Luther Dixon)
Arranged and conducted by MIKE LEANDER, produced by NORRIE PARAMOR
Columbia UK LP #6133 (4/67)
Our final episode of Sir Cliff in Bacharach Land is “Baby It’s You”, from his 1967 LP Don’t Stop Me Now. The record featured updated “swinging London” takes on not only “Baby It’s You”, but other early sixties classics including “Save the Last Dance for Me”, “One Fine Day” and “I Saw Her Standing There”. (In Canada, the album was released with the more descriptive title In a Mod Mood.)
Arranger Mike Leander baths “Baby It’s You” in orchestral candy, with a baroque brass opening, an active harp part that keeps the atmosphere pastoral, and an arpeggiated 12-string acoustic guitar that marries a little Byrds to all the Beatles influences (the very melodic and active electric bass part certainly brings Sir Paul to mind). Richard digs in on the vocal more here than in earlier episodes, fairly growling “I don’t want nobody, nobody baby!” at 2:09.
ANY DAY NOW ✦ Carla Thomas
(Burt Bacharach/Bob Hilliard)
Produced by ISAAC HAYES & DAVID PORTER
Stax LP #718, The Queen Alone (6/67)
After Carla Thomas and Otis Redding released their classic Stax LP King & Queen, Stax continued to give Thomas the royal treatment, both musically and promotionally, on 1967’s The Queen Alone, which featured Thomas’ Memphis funk take on Chuck Jackson’s 1962 hit “Any Day Now”. The song, which did not make the top 10 for Jackson, was attractive to many artist over the years, and at least nine cover versions were released in the five years between the Jackson recording and Thomas’ (which was an LP track and thus not intended for the charts). It continued to be recorded regularly throughout the late sixties and the seventies, until Ronnie Milsap’s 1982 recording went to #1 Country and became so ubiquitous on radio and commercial background music playlists that the song became arguably overexposed. Still, it remains a pop standard and gets a new recording every five or so years, even into the 2010s. Thomas’s version features the Stax house band and production team at its very peak, when the band members were usually the members of Booker T & The M.G.’s plus the Memphis Horns. Producers Isaac Hayes and David Porter were also Stax’s star songwriting team at the time, and wrote “Soul Man”, “Hold On, I’m Comin’”, “I Thank You”, and several other Southern soul classics for the label’s artists. Thomas’s records, like the great “B-A-B-Y”, combined kittenish (but still soulful) vocals that would be right at home on a mid-sixties Brill Building production with the distinctive Stax rhythm section feel. This combination works perfectly with “Any Day Now”.
With regards to the title of the Stax LP, Etta James had earlier laid claim to the title “Queen of Soul” when she released her Argo LP of that name in 196. And in 1967, Aretha Franklin had not yet been universally recognized as the reigning monarch (though the push for Franklin’s coronation came soon after, with the 1968 Columbia anthology titled — you guessed it — Queen of Soul). Today, soul is recognized as a vast continent, and among its sovereigns are Carla Thomas, who holds the title “Queen of Memphis Soul”.
I WAKE UP CRYING ✦ Tom Jones
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced by PETER SULLIVAN
Decca LP #4909, 13 Smash Hits (12/67)
Tom Jones’ 1967 LP 13 Smash Hits might lead you to expect a batch of Jones singles, but this is actually an album of mainly material made famous by other artists. “I Wake Up Crying” wasn’t a true smash hit (it went to #59 pop and #13 R&B), but it was a highlight of Chuck Jackson’s early career. Jackson’s aching, well-paced vocal and the bolero-like arrangement featuring Bacharach on piano make the Jackson version definitive. But Tom Jones and his arranger (either Charles Blackwell or Johnny Harris, who are jointly credited for arranging the entire LP) manage to find another angle on the song that makes the Jones recording a worthy runner-up.
Most noticeably, the massive-sounding drums, low brass, and plucked strings create an unforgettable introduction, sounding like King Kong is afoot. The groove here is just a bit faster and funkier than on Jackson’s version, and Jones wraps his voice around the beat like a snake coiling tightly across the branch of a tree, sounding simultaneously heartbroken and extremely horny. It’s a somewhat lighthearted performance all in all, like an Austin Powers movie boiled down to two minutes 20 seconds of soul music.
ALFIE ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12187 (3/67) ● Pop #15, B-side of “The Beginning of Loneliness”
It’s Dionne singing “Alfie” in 1967 — of course it’s perfect.
ME JAPANESE BOY ✦ Harpers Bizarre
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by NICK DECARO, produced by LENNY WARONKER
Warner Bros./Seven Arts LP #1739, The Secret Life of Harpers Bizarre (9/68)
Jumping ahead chronologically slightly, we have a sunshine pop take on 1964’s “Me Japanese Boy” by Harpers Bizarre, who specialized in sounding both cosmically blissed out and old fashioned at the same time. Call it sophisticated bubblegum pop. Nick DeCaro sticks pretty close to Burt Bacharach’s original arrangement for Bobby Goldsboro, though he takes the key up from D to F.
(THERE’S) ALWAYS SOMETHING THERE TO REMIND ME ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter LP #563, The Windows of the World (8/67) ● Pop #65
Dionne Warwick recorded a demo of “Always Something There to Remind Me” in 1964, and gave her blessing to Bacharach’s production of the Lou Johnson version of 1964. She recorded the song again in 1967 for commercial release as an LP track, and when that version ended up as a B-side for “Who Is Gonna Love Me” in August, 1968, it became an unexpected chart hit for her. The arrangement feels more intimate and small-scale than recordings like “Alfie” and “Another Night” from the same time period, but it does build in intensity to an impressive crescendo at the modulation that starts around 1:49. The groove and tempo, which were in place on the original 1964 arrangement, turned up again on Warwick’s April 1968 top 10 single “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”, which might explain why DJs and the public fell for “Always Something There to Remind Me” later in the year.
ARE YOU THERE (WITH ANOTHER BOY) ✦ The Buckinghams
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced by JIMMY WISNER
Columbia LP #9703, In One Ear and Gone Tomorrow (7/1968)
The Buckinghams weren’t a one-hit wonder, but they were basically a one-year wonder, with all of their top 40 hits charting in 1967. “Are You There (With Another Boy)” was released the next year as an album-only track, though it sounds like a quintessential late-1960s AM radio hit.
THE WINDOWS OF THE WORLD ✦ Scott Walker
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by PETER KNIGHT, produced by JOHN FRANZ
Philips LP #7840, Scott 2 (3/1968)
Like “Another Tear Falls”, Scott Walker’s version of “The Windows of the World” starts with a tense and eerie orchestral introduction, an early warning signal for the slow-moving front of ennui that’s approaching. Walker was deep into Jacques Brel during this era (indeed, the album that contains “Windows of the World” also contains three Brel compositions), but the Bacharach aesthetic isn’t so much discarded as stretched and molded into a different and darker shape once the arrangement moves past the introduction.
WHO IS GONNA LOVE ME ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12226 (8/68) ● Pop #33
Superficially similar to the earlier “Here Where There Is Love”, the two songs are, on closer inspection, hardly twins. While “Who Is Gonna Love Me” doesn’t follow a classic songwriting formula like the 32-bar structure of “Blue Moon” and “I Got Rhythm”, it’s much less experimental than “Here Where There Is Love”. It contains basically two sections, neither of which is clearly a verse or a chorus. Of particular interest in terms of the composition is that in the first section, Bacharach never brings in the tonic (root) chord of the key signature, leaving the listener wondering if the building tension will ever be resolved. After a modulation into another key in the second section, Bacharach does finally give us a tonic chord, then walks us into yet a third key before returning to the original key. All of this is done almost imperceptibly, unlike the more stark transitions in “Here Where There Is Love”.
Perhaps the most obvious difference for casual listeners between “Here There Is Love” and “Who Is Gonna Love Me” is that in the former song, Bacharach repeatedly sends Warwick to the top of her vocal range, including on the title phrase that we hear repeatedly throughout the song. On “Who Is Gonna Love Me”, Warwick gets to spend more time singing her “butter notes”, the notes in the lower range of her voice. Warwick, in this respect, is similar to Karen Carpenter, who once said about her own hypnotizing low range, “the money’s in the basement”. On her sixties and seventies records, when Warwick sails high, the effect can be powerful and thrilling. But her voice thins out at the top, and when she stays there for an extended amount of time, the ear starts to miss the richness of her alto range. To be fair, most great singers, male or female, cannot sing at the very top of their ranges for measure after measure and sustain the energy and thrill of their high notes.
WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS LOVE ✦ Cilla Black
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by MIKE VICKERS, produced by GEORGE MARTIN
Parlaphone LP #7041, Sher-oo! (4/1968)
Arranger Mike Vickers creates quite an effect in the trumpet introduction of “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, creating a mesmerizing sound cascade that sounds like something that inspired Philip Glass. The lip busting line continues for a full 30 seconds, over which Cilla Black sings the opening lines of the song. The song then kicks into a slightly funky swinging-London pop groove with brass and mallet percussion providing decorations around Black’s vocal. The trumpet comes back in for the final 30 seconds, thus giving a full third of the song this highly unusual texture.
Like Cliff Richard’s “Baby It’s You” arrangement, it strays far from a Bacharach production, but it still keeps the song itself in the spotlight. Everyone from Tiny Tim to Mahalia Jackson to Tony Joe White to Lawrence Welk recorded “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, but not surprisingly, there are few that challenge the Jackie DeShannon original. Dionne Warwick’s 1966 recording is certainly a contender, but it does have some flaws, including on CD issues, vocal distortion throughout the more forceful portions of the performance.
I SAY A LITTLE PRAYER ✦ Aretha Franklin
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced by JERRY WEXLER
Atlantic single #2546 (7/68) ● Pop #10, R&B #3
As with Dionne Warwick’s recording of Alfie, there isn’t much to say about Aretha Franklin’s “I Say a Little Prayer” that hasn’t been said in countless other places. A few words about the Bacharach & David songs in her discography are pertinent, however. Franklin didn’t record many Bacharach & David tunes, so there’s no real pattern to the recordings she did do. Early on, she recorded a soundalike arrangement of “Walk on By” for Columbia. The vocal is distinctively Aretha — she’s not copying Warwick phrasing or mannerisms — but overall, the conservative performance may surprise listeners who only know Franklin’s work from 1967 onwards, after she signed with Atlantic records. “I Say a Little Prayer” was her second Bacharach & David song. In 1972, she recorded “April Fools”, and in 1974 she recorded both “You’ll Never Get to Heaven If You Break My Heart” and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”. The 1970s recordings feature longer arrangements and stray fairly far from the world of Bacharach and Warwick.
One noteworthy technical detail about Franklin’s arrangement of “I Say a Little Prayer” is that she reharmonizes the song in three or four places, though generally just by replacing a single chord with a harmonically related chord (usually a slight simplification and using harmonies more likely to be found in gospel and simple pop writing). You have to listen very closely to detect the chord substitutions in Franklin’s version, which was performed in A major, a whole step higher than Warwick’s original.
LET ME BE LONELY ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12216 (4/68) ● B-side of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”
Bacharach finally wrote his version of a deep soul tune for Dionne Warwick with “Let Me Be Lonely”, a waltz ballad that allows Warwick to embellish and decorate her vocal more than usual. This is the kind of tune that Al Green and Willie Mitchell could have turned into one of Greens’ classics, but aside from a 1973 cover by the 5th Dimension, the song was mostly ignored.
PROMISES, PROMISES ✦ Jerry Orbach
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by JONATHAN TUNICK, produced by HENRY JEROME and PHIL RAMONE
United Artists LP #9902, Promises, Promises Original Broadway Cast Album (12/1968)
Jerry Orbach was the original interpreter of one of Bacharach’s most notoriously tricky songs, and he handled it with ease. Lasting less than two minutes, it goes by all too quickly. Many writers have noted the stylistic relationship between Promises, Promises and Stephen Sondheim’s Company. In Orbach’s performance as Chuck Baxter in Promises, Promises, you can hear him as a musical cousin of Company’s Robert, particularly when listening to the title songs of each show. The two characters were similarly situated New York bachelors navigating romance in the late 1960s, each a little older than the Woodstock generation, but neither yet far into middle age.
THE APRIL FOOLS ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12249 (4/68) ● Pop #37
The 1969 romantic comedy The April Fools featured precious little believable chemistry between leads Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve, but it did have two redeeming qualities: an extended cocktail party scene that is one of the most amusing depictions of upper class Manhattan life during the age of aquarius that you will ever see, and the Dionne Warwick title song. “The April Fools” must have been a song in consideration for Rhino Records The Look of Love anthology — it could have easily taken the spot held by “The Balance of Nature” and the set would have been not a jot less delightful. The song is a rhythmic cousin of “In Between the Heartaches” and “The Windows of the World”, and has one of Warwick’s most gorgeous vocal performances of the sixties.
IN THE LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE ✦ Dusty Springfield
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by ARIF MARDIN, produced by JERRY WEXLER, ARIF MARDIN, TOM DOWD
Atlantic LP #8214, Dusty In Memphis (3/69)
Dusty takes an older Warwick tune for a spin. It’s 1969, so the electric sitar that kicks off Arif Mardin’s arrangement is not unexpected. Springfield takes the song at a brisker pace and has gentle Latin percussion pushing the rhythm section along. Springfield’s recording is more of a reimagining of the tune, in the manner of Cliff Richard’s “Baby It’s You” and Cilla Black’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, than was typical of Springfield’s Bacharach performances earlier in the decade.
KNOWING WHEN TO LEAVE ✦ Betty Buckley
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by JONATHAN TUNICK, conducted by IAN MACPHERSON
United Artists LP #9902, Promises, Promises Original London Cast Album (1969)
Betty Buckley had a big, smooth voice that could do just about anything musical theater of the Promises, Promise era required. Taking over Jill O’Hara’s role when the show moved to London, she wrung this showstopper for all it was worth. Thankfully a cast album was made to capture her performance. An Orbach & Buckley cast and recording would have made for a terrific album, though Jill O’Hara’s rawer performances are great to have on record as well.
SHE’S GONE AWAY ✦ Burt Bacharach
(Burt Bacharach)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BURT BACHARACH & PHIL RAMONE
A&M LP #4188, Make It Easy on Yourself (6/69)
“She’s Gone Away” finds Bacharach in an Ennio Morricone mood. It was recorded around the time that Bacharach was scoring Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, so perhaps he had cowboys on the mind, or even wrote the theme as part of his scoring work. The opening theme of “She’s Gone Away” was later turned into the verse melody of the song “How Does a Man Become a Puppet”, an awkward song (in no small part because the phrase “become a puppet” is one of the most ridiculous sounding combination of words a person can sing) recorded in 1970 by Bacharach’s old friend Ed Ames. In 1997, Mike Patton, a musician best known for his singing with the alternative metal band Faith No More, recorded a arrangement of “She’s Gone Away” that largely followed the Bacharach original, while adding in a bit of theremin that paid homage to Bacharach disciple Brian Wilson at the same time. Patton’s version appeared on the Tzadik Records anthology Great Jewish Music: Burt Bacharach, a record that is relevant to two additional entries in this compilation.
I’M A BETTER MAN (FOR HAVING LOVED YOU) ✦ Engelbert Humperdinck
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by ARTHUR GREENSLADE, produced by PETER SULLIVAN
Decca single #12957 (8/69) ● Pop #38
Engelbert gets his very own “This Guy’s in Love with You” with “I’m a Better Man”. Serene Dominic sums up the record well:
“As schmaltz goes, “I’m a Better Man” is top-notch, carried along by a classy circular piano figure similar to the one on his previous hit, “The Way It Used to Be.” What blue-haired lady could resist a handsome devotee with mutton-chop sideburns promising he’ll gift-wrap the moon and stars just to illustrate his devotion?”
The song mostly stays with the chord scale of its key (F major), and is one of Bacharach’s simplest songs from this period. There is, however, one smooth harmonic trick in the tenth measure, with the lyric “with you to turn to”. Here the song unexpectedly slides down from Gm7 (the ii chord) to G♭maj7 (the ♭IImaj7), then goes back to regularly scheduled programming with another Gm7. The effect makes it feel like the narrator is momentarily floating in a reverie as he thinks of the comfort his lover provides, and when the harmony snaps back to the Gm7, the narrator triumphantly sings that he too is snapping back into being his better self.
THE LOOK OF LOVE ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter LP #575, Dionne Warwick’s Greatest Motion Picture Hits (8/69)
Bacharach, like any good musician, was very sensitive to tempo, and in a handful of cases regretted in interviews that he felt the tempo wasn’t perfect on some of his more famous recordings. For example, he came to feel that his production of Dionne Warwick’s “I Say a Little Prayer” was slightly too fast. Whether or not he had the same misgivings about the 1967 soundtrack version of Dusty Springfield’s “The Look of Love”, when he went into the studio with Dionne Warwick two years later to record the song, he slowed it down ever so slightly. (Warwick also sang the song a half step higher than Springfield.) The orchestra feels larger, and the orchestration shimmers around Warwick’s voice and punctuates certain words (“look,” “in,” “disguise”) in place of the starker piano accents in the “Casino Royale” version.
The song calls for extreme vocal restraint, and both Springfield and Warwick keep things simmering throughout without ever boiling over, but Springfield keeps things slightly cooler overall, while Warwick digs in more for the climatic “how long I have waited”, and takes more liberties with vocal decorations. In the end, Springfield’s recording sounds like the platonic ideal of the song itself, while Warwick’s sounds like the platonic ideal of a Burt Bacharach-produced Dionne Warwick ballad. Both are incredible performances that leave the competition in the dust.
MESSAGE TO MARTHA ✦ Jay and The Americans
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by THOMAS KAYE, produced by SANDY YAGUDA
United Artists LP #6719, Wax Museum (2/70)
Jay and The Americans got to “Message to Martha” rather late, recording it on the second of two consecutive LPs released in 1969–1970 that saw them going back to the songs of the 1950s and early 1960s. Their sunshine pop arrangement, with a prominent conga drum, brings the song into the current moment, but the album spawned no singles and ultimately didn’t leave much of a mark on pop culture. Still, their “Martha” works, and easily surpasses their 1964 recordings of “Look in My Eyes Maria” and “To Wait for Love”.
The song had a long history and multiple titles by 1970. Jerry Butler was the first artist to record “Message to Martha” in 1962, though his version remained unreleased until it appeared as LP filler in December, 1963 on the Need to Belong LP. Lou Johnson’s 1964 recording, released under the title “Kentucky Bluebird”, was, like Butler’s, mostly ignored, but it earned its place on the 1998 Look of Love boxed set and became a fan favorite. The song only became well known after Dionne Warwick put it on the charts as “Message to Michael”, though Bacharch & David weren’t initially on board — they thought the song worked better when sung by a man. There are a couple of obvious reasons why they might have held this opinion.
Firstly, at the level of songwriting craft, the pleasing vowel assonance in the key phrase “message to Martha” is thrown away in the “Michael” version of the lyric (the repeated “eh” sound in “message” and “ah” sound in “Martha” provide a symmetry that is absent in the clunkier-sounding “message to Michael”).
At the narrative level, there are subtle (and, to be sure, dated) nuances to the lyric when it is about “Martha” that go missing when the subject becomes “Michael”. Martha, a country girl who has gone to the city to make it in show business, is in a vulnerable position, economically and otherwise. The narrator, singing from Matha’s small-town world, tells us that she sings in “some café” (obviously not a prestigious one), and that she’s “gone and changed her name”. Thus the story paints the picture of a woman who might have to sell herself in whatever manner it takes to get ahead, and Martha’s name change hints at a woman as interested in protecting her reputation as in creating a new persona. Despite having no idea how to contact her beyond the bluebird express, the narrator is clearly willing to take Martha back, reputation intact or not. When the subject is changed to “Michael”, the vulnerability of the main character woven into the lyric largely disappears.
After the song went to #8 for Dionne Warwick, Hal David wrote in his 1970 book What the World Needs Now that “it was obvious that we had subconsciously written the song for her, even though we were writing it for a man to sing.” That may be true if you substitute “Bacharach” for “we” and focus only on the music, but David undersells the finer points of his own work by suggesting that his lyric didn’t tell a cinematic tale of Matha’s plight.
ODDS AND ENDS ✦ Johnny Mathis
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by ERNIE FREEMAN, produced by JACK GOLD
Columbia LP #727, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head (2/70)
Johnny Mathis shines while singing this classic Hal David lyric full of vivid detail (“an empty tube of toothpaste and a half filled cup of coffee” — note once again the repeating closed mouth / open-mouth vowel pattern sustained over 14 consecutive syllables!). Arranger Ernie Freeman smooths out the beat and gets rid of the tack piano from the Dionne Warwick recording, but otherwise we are firmly in the land of Bacharach here, with gentle brass, low flutes, swelling strings and graceful piano accents.
I’LL NEVER FALL IN LOVE AGAIN ✦ Mark Lindsay
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by ARTIE BUTLER, produced by JERRY FULLER
Columbia LP #9986, Arizona (2/70)
Like Rick Nelson, Mark Lindsay had western roots but managed to sound slightly southern when singing Bacharach ballads. That could be in part due to the success of country pop hits at the time like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Ode to Billie Joe”, and the continuing influence of acoustic blues and rural folk music on the sixties counterculture. On “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”, Lindsay, the former lead singer of Paul Revere & The Raiders, takes a Glen Campbell approach to the comic love song from Promises, Promises, and manages to pull it off. It didn’t make a big impression on the public, but it seems to have made an impression on Bacharach & David, who chose Lindsay to record their title song for the movie Something Big in 1971.
LET ME GO TO HIM ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12276 (3/70) ● Pop #32
Another dramatic waltz for Dionne in the manner of “Who Is Gonna Love Me” from 1968. The soaring chorus of “Let Me Go to Him” shows Warwick in complete command, vocally, sounding smoother at the top of her range than she did a few years before. The chorus also has the big, sustained notes that eventually became the calling card of Whitney Houston (and that were already a feature on Cissy Houston’s solo and Sweet Inspirations recordings of the era). “Let Me Go to Him” looks forward to the simpler ballads Bacharch would write in the 1980s (songs like “On My Own” and “Heartlight”), but the waltz beat and traditional orchestration separate it from such later work. Ending a big commercial ballad with a 30-second fadeout over a small string ensemble would not have happened after the mid-1970s.
THIS GUY’S IN LOVE WITH YOU ✦ Jimmy Ruffin
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Produced by JIMMY ROACH
Soul LP #727, The Groove Governor (9/70)
Soul covers of Burt Bacharach songs are a miniature genre unto themselves. At the extreme end of the spectrum are Isaac Hayes’ epics like the 12 minute “Walk on By” and the 11 minute “Look of Love” from 1969–1970. Compilations like Ace Records’ 2014 Let the Music Play: Black America Sings Bacharach and Motown’s 2002 Motown Salutes Bacharach do a great job covering this territory. Bacharach’s original harmonies and arrangements are often stripped down or completely discarded in soul covers to give more room to the vocalist and the groove, and the results can thrill in some cases and land with a thud in others.
Jimmy Ruffin’s soul hipster take of “This Guy’s in Love with You” stands out in a sea of MOR covers that flooded the market in 1969–70, and it charms in its warmth and sincerity. Part of the secret is that the song itself is one of Bacharach’s simplest ballads of the era. While the Herb Alpert arrangement has some iconic musical material (starting with Pete Jolly’s electric piano vamp that opens the song) that we miss, the original arrangement and rhythmic feel isn’t as integral to the song as is the case for songs like “A House Is Not a Home” or “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”. Ruffin’s down-home delivery of lines like “I wined you and dined you, brought you candy and flowers” will either make you chuckle or inspire you to find a different version of the song to listen to. From there, Ruffin sings the song at a level matched by of his peers beyond the immortals like Marvin Gaye and Al Green.
If Ruffin isn’t your bag, B.J. Thomas recorded the song for Scepter in 1969 with an arrangement by Don Sebesky. Or you might want a version by any of several female singing legends who recorded contemporaneous versions of “This Girl’s in Love with You”, including Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Petula Clark, and Dianna Ross.
The substitution of the word “girl” for “guy” does, however, disrupt the flow of the lyric — the “irl” sound in “girl” and “girl’s” closes the mouth more, even for a singer who compensates by pronouncing it “ge-ell” and fudging the consonants. With David’s original lyric, the mouth remains open on “guy” and “guy’s” and completes a pattern of alternating closed and open sounds (“you [closed] / see [open] / this [closed] / guy [open] this [closed] guy’s [open] in [closed] love [open] with [closed] you [open]”). God is in the details.
RAINDROPS KEEP FALLING ON MY HEAD ✦ Four Tops
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by DAVID VAN DE PITTE, produced by FRANK WILSON
Motown LP #721, Changing Times (9/70)
This recording is the second and final example here of a Bacharach song being reimagined in a soul context, and the Four Tops go in some respects farther afield than Jimmy Ruffin did in “This Guy’s in Love with You”. A hat tip to Serene Dominic for highlighting this unusual version of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”. Arranger David Van De Pitte manages to combine the gentle comedy at the heart of the song with the Tops’ sweet harmony vocals. It’s hard to imagine a recording that sounds more like 1970 than this version of “Raindrops”, which came at a peak moment for both Bacharach and sweet soul.
MAKE IT EASY ON YOURSELF ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by LARRY WILCOX, produced by STAN GREEN
Recorded live at the Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel NJ, summer 1970
Scepter single #12294 (9/70) ● Pop #37
Though we heard The Walker Brothers’ “Spector-ized” 1965 version of this song earlier, Warwick has to be represented on this particular song, which goes back to the very beginning of her relationship with Bacharach. She was famously a bit furious with Bacharach for taking the song to Jerry Butler for its initial commercial recording, after she’d recorded a demo of such quality that Scepter ended up releasing it commercially the next year.
Unusually for her Scepter years, a live 1970 performance of “Make It Easy on Yourself” was issued as a single and became a hit late in her tenure at the label. Warwick had grown as a singer in the eight years since her demo recording, and the live setting and new arrangement by Larry Wilcox give her complete interpretive leeway. Vocally speaking, while she doesn’t do anything drastically different from her studio work, she shows what she could do away from the studio with Bacharach and his A-team session players.
EVERYBODY’S OUT OF TOWN ✦ Robert Goulet
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by ERNIE FREEMAN, produced by SONNY KNIGHT
Columbia LP #1051, Robert Goulet Sings Today’s Greatest Hits (6/70)
Robert Goulet brings “Everybody’s Out of Town” into Broadway territory with his 1970 recording, sounding intentionally uneasy with everything around him. The zany melody Bacharch wrote for the phrase “everybody’s out of town” ensures that whoever sings the song is going to sound a little comical, and Goulet amplifies this by playing it completely straight. This kooky rewrite of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” is far from a Bacharach masterpiece, but it’s part of a thread of happy-go-lucky loping pop songs that goes back to “The Story of My Life”.
By the mid-1970s, “Close to You” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” had become so globally ubiquitous that for many people, they were the Burt Bacharach sound. By the 1980s, Bacharach was very intentionally avoiding this sound in his writing and arranging. But in the spring of 1970, when B.J. Thomas released the first recording of the song, giving the public a sequel to “Raindrops” must have seemed like the obvious move to make.
SEND MY PICTURE TO SCRANTON PA ✦ B.J. Thomas
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12283 (7/70) ● B-side of “I Just Can’t Help Believing”
Like “I’m a Better Man”, “Send My Picture to Scranton PA” is a minor and not completely successful Bacharach & David song, but on the other hand, neither is at the level of “How Does a Man Become a Puppet”. “Scranton PA” is of particular interest because B.J. Thomas, like Gene Pitney, was such an effective male interpreter of Bacharach material. Like Lou Johnson several years earlier, Thomas’ special relationship to Bacharach & David was sometimes compared to that of Dionne Warwick (though obviously the quantity of recordings Johnson and Thomas made with Bacharach & David, even combined, was dwarfed by the Warwick catalog).
Like some of Hal David’s other message songs, the lyrics of “Scranton PA” get a little clunky, as if telegraphing the moral superseded craftsmanship:
Well, no one there ever tried to understand
They ignored me
Maybe now they’ll give kids a helping hand
I was the guy they cast aside
Musically, the arrangement is full of Bacharach’s classic vocabulary (tack piano, mellow brass, soaring strings), but rhythmically there’s a harder backbeat that shows Bacharach changing along with the times. The beats would get even harder on later productions like 1975’s “I Took My Strength from You”, and by the 1980s, even the ballads like “That’s What Friends Are For” were sporting heavy downbeats and snare hits that would have sounded very out of place on a Dionne Warwick recording from 1962–1972.
THE GREEN GRASS STARTS TO GROW ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12300 (11/70) ● Pop #43
Hal David’s simple and sweet lyric for “The Green Grass Starts to Grow” is effective without being showy, with a particularly strong pair of lines for the song’s main hook:
Slowly the green grass starts to grow
Softly the sunshine of your smile melts the snow
The alliteration (“green grass … grow” / “sun — shine … smile … snow”) shows the kind of craft that was expected of lyricists of his generation. The pastoral imagery fit well with the culture of the late sixties and early seventies, when all things natural were in vogue.
Bacharach provided a sunny tune that fit hand in glove with David’s lyric, and, on the short tagline, had faint echoes of a big hit from earlier in the year, the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun”. Though the term “sunshine pop” is a retronym that didn’t exist at the time, “Green Grass” is the one of the Bacharach & David songs most deserving of the label (along with, naturally, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”). It’s too bad the Carpenters could not find a place for the song on one of their early seventies albums.
BE AWARE ✦ Barbra Streisand
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and produced by BURT BACHARACH
Recorded in March, 1971, with additional production and mixing in 2021. First released in 2021 on Release Me 2 (Columbia CD #19439863402)
One thing you could say about the singing of Barbra Streisand is that though there are subtleties woven throughout almost every vocal she ever recorded, her singing in the broadest sense is not subtle (that’s not a knock on Babs, as you could say the same of any great artist who utilizes bold strokes alongside finer details). You could say the same about Hal David’s lyric for “Be Aware” — there are lots of subtleties when you examine it at the level of the individual line, but it’s not a subtle lyric. Another thing that is not subtle is a celebrity-centered television special from the late sixties or early seventies, and “Be Aware” was written specifically for Streissand to sing on Singer Presents Burt Bacharach, which aired on CBS on March 14, 1971. For some music fans, a little Streissand goes a long way, and if any of those fans are reading this, they can be reassured that this compilation only has a little Barbra Streissand. Her versions of “Alfie”, “One Less Bell to Answer”, and “A House Is Not a Home” are not included here.
Though Dionne Warwick also recorded “Be Aware”, it does seem to be custom-tailored for a vocal show horse like Streissand (Warwick niece Whitney Houston would have also been a natural for this song), and it doesn’t play to Warwick’s strengths as a singer.
WHO GETS THE GUY ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12309 (3/71) ● Pop #57
“Who Gets the Guy”, Dionne Warwick’s last Bacharach & David-penned single for Scepter, is a curious amalgamation of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and “Are You There (With Another Girl)”. The prominent whistling and sunny harmonies give the song a carefree feeling, but the lyric concerns a woman sitting in a movie wondering if the rumors are true that her lover is cheating on her, and if he is going to ditch her as soon as the lights come up. It probably all seemed very familiar to listeners in 1971, but a decade later, when Warwick was recording bland synth-pop like “For You” for Arista, a song like “Who Gets the Guy” must have seemed like a transmission from a vanished civilization.
WIVES AND LOVERS ✦ Burt Bacharach
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BURT BACHARACH & PHIL RAMONE
A&M LP #3501, Burt Bacharach (6/71)
Bacharach’s 1971 “Wives and Lovers” recording is one of his most ambitious solo recordings, and goes well beyond the approach he took to many of the instrumental arrangements he made of his pop songs. By 1971, Bacharach’s performing career was well under way (he would continue to perform concerts of his music well into the 2010s), and it’s possible that he wrote this arrangement with his concerts in mind. It certainly has enough twists and turns to keep a live audience transfixed.
The song also appears on previously mentioned Great Jewish Music: Burt Bacharach (Tzadik, 1997). The album is a John Zorn-produced anthology of mostly “downtown” (avant garde) New York jazz musicians covering classic Bacharach compositions, much in the tradition of the 1980s anthologies produced by Hal Willner that paid tribute to composers like Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill, and Charles Mingus. Trumpeter Dave Douglas, for his contribution, recorded an arrangement credited to him of “Wives and Lovers” scored for trumpet, flute, bass saxophone, and piano.
Listeners familiar with Jack Jones’ classic 1963 recording, but not with Bacharach’s 1971 self-titled album, might have assumed that Douglas started with the Jones recording and came up with the arrangement from there, as it feels exploratory, like the work of a jazz arranger and practitioner. But in actuality, the Douglas arrangement is almost entirely adapted from Bacharach’s own 1971 arrangement of “Wives and Lovers”, which goes much further in its transformation of the song than Bacharach’s instrumental take on the 1965 “Hit Maker!” album. Douglas did show a great deal of ingenuity in boiling down Bacharach’s mid-sized orchestral score to a piece that could be played by four instruments, and the two recordings are both recommended.
LONG AGO TOMORROW ✦ B.J. Thomas
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH and PAT WILLIAMS, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Scepter single #12335 (10/71) ● Pop #61
“Long Ago Tomorrow” shows an overtly progressive side of the Bacharach & David team, and doesn’t seem related in any way to their previous songs introduced by Thomas, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”, “Everybody’s Out of Town”, and “Send My Picture to Scranton, PA”. “Long Ago Tomorrow” starts with eight measures of mostly static harmony and a modal-sounding melody that leaves the listener uncertain what tonality of the song will end up in. Its opening is thus reminiscent of 1965’s “Looking with My Eyes” as it establishes a searching, unsettled mood. After the opening measures, the song evolves into a slightly more conventional dramatic ballad with a soaring chorus in the style of “Make It Easy on Yourself”, “The April Fools” and “Let Me Go to Him”, though throughout the verses it avoids every landing on the tonic chord, and the tonality is only firmly established during the chorus.
The song was written for the 1971 film originally released in the UK as The Raging Moon, a romantic drama about a young man who loses his ability to walk and enters into a complicated and ultimately doomed relationship with a woman who is also disabled. As with the 1962 film “Wonderful to Be Young”, Bacharach & David were not involved until plans were made to release the film in the US, and the distributors changed the title and commissioned a new title song, which was “Long Ago Tomorrow”.
FREEFALL ✦ Burt Bacharach
(Burt Bacharach)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BURT BACHARACH & PHIL RAMONE
A&M LP #3501, Burt Bacharach (6/1971)
The 1971 instrumental “Freefall” is sui generis in the Bacharach catalog. The opening 30 seconds, played by three harpists and a triangle player, with brief wordless vocals, sounds like a movie cue or the background music for a whimsical television commercial. The title suggests the piece is about an experience or psychological state, and the opening section feels simultaneously happy and disorienting. The full orchestra comes after the introduction and the piece moves to more familiar sounding territory for a Bacharach instrumental, with melodic phrases being traded off between strings and brass, but the three harps return at 1:02 and resume the musical freefall, this time over the rhythm section. There’s an intense saxophone break over a rapid-fire snare drum part, and the arrangement continues evolving in unexpected directions, like a pop version of the Rite of Spring.
Like Bacharach’s arrangement of “Wives and Lovers” from the same album, it leaves you asking “why didn’t Bacharach record a whole album of arrangements and instrumentals this ambitious?” At the end of the decade, he did release his version of a grand musical statement, the half-instrumental concept album “Woman”, but it lacked the focus and inspiration of his 1960s and early 1970s instrumentals like “Nikki”, “She’s Gone Away”, “Pacific Coast Highway”, and “Freefall”.
“Freefall”, not too surprisingly, turned up on 1997’s Great Jewish Music: Burt Bacharach, in an arrangement played by composer and harpist Zeena Parkins. As a composition, it’s turn-on-a-dime transitions, slightly anarchic finale, and refusal to play by any stylistic or formal rules must have appealed to the compilation’s producer, composer and saxophonist John Zorn.
SOMETHING BIG ✦ Mark Lindsay
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by JOHN D’ANDREA, produced by MARK LINDSAY
Columbia single #45506 (12/71)
“Something Big” was among the very last new Bacharach & David songs to be released prior to their Lost Horizon misadventure (released slightly later than “Something Big” were “I Just Have to Breathe”, “The Balance of Nature”, “If You Never Say Goodbye”, and “Be Aware”). “Something Big” has the same sunny optimism as “The Green Grass Starts to Grow” from the year before, and like that song and “Long Ago Tomorrow”, it’s an overlooked gem from the tail end of the classic Bacharach & David era.
The song was commissioned for a Dean Martin comedy western of the same title, and Mark Lindsay, whose soft rock cover of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” had come out the year before, was chosen to sing it. The film was set in the 1870s, an era not evoked in the slightest by Bacharach’s very 1970s-sounding production. But as this contrast had worked so well with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Bacharach was at the apex of his fame in 1971, the producers made a good bet. The brisk finger-picked acoustic guitar played over a gentle rock beat brings to mind a more famous movie theme from the era, “Everybody’s Talkin’”. However, “Something Big” uses enough of Bacharach’s favorite harmonic and orchestral devices to leave no doubt as to who the composer is. While it did not become the next “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”, it did become a favorite of Bacharach aficionados including guitarist and producer Jim O’Rourke, who recorded a faithful rendition in 1999.
HASBROOK HEIGHTS ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BOB JAMES, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Warner Bros. LP #2585 (1/72)
“Hasbrook Heights” was first recorded by Bacharach himself in 1971. On his recordings, he sings the entire vocal (sometimes with double tracking to fatten up the vocal sound), and it feels like a highly personal and custom-tailored song (the vocal demands are slight). Bachrach’s version opens with just the vocal and piano, and it sounds like you are in Burt’s living room listening to him preview a new composition. For Dionne Warwick’s version, which came the following year, Bob James invokes the spirit of Bacharach by replacing the piano with a ukulele and trombone, bringing to mind both “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and “Everybody’s Out of Town” simultaneously. “Everybody’s Out of Town” would have probably been a better choice for a breezy album cut designed to balance the heavier broken heart material that Warwick specialized in, but with “One Less Bell to Answer” on the same album, it might have looked like Warwick was relying to heavily on the recent Bacharach hits of other artists. Or perhaps Warwick just really liked “Hasbrook Heights”. The recording is almost like catching Warwick at a party giving an impromptu living room performance of a song you’d never guess she knew.
IF I COULD GO BACK ✦ Andy Williams
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and conducted by ARTIE BUTLER
Columbia LP #31625, Alone Again (Naturally) (9/72)
We call once again on the Emperor of Easy to go deep into art song territory with “If I Could Go Back”, a song from the score of the ill-fated 1973 movie musical Lost Horizon. Williams’ performance was released in September of 1972, almost six months ahead of the movie release, presumably as part of a full court press by the movie’s producers to whet the public’s appetite for the film with key songs. (The 5th Dimension’s recording of Lost Horizon’s “Living Together” likewise appeared several months before the movie release.) “If I Could Go Back” starts with 45 seconds of Williams gently lamenting in the style of a broadway ballad, then works its way into a gentle soft rock groove that builds in intensity and even includes big fuzz-guitar accents at 1:42 and 1:49 and in equivalent later sections. The song closes with a ponderous spoken line (“And would I go back…if I could go back”) recited over the anxious-sounding minor chords that also open the song. Williams becomes, for the four and a half minutes of “If I Could Go Back”, the Emperor of Unease.
ONE LESS BELL TO ANSWER ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BOB JAMES, produced by BACHARACH & DAVID
Warner Bros. LP #2585 (1/72)
The 5th Dimension who took “One Less Bell to Answer”, which had been first recorded 1967 by Keely Smith, to #2 on the pop chart in December of 1970, a peak year for Bacharach on the charts (his “Close to You” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” were the 2nd and 4th biggest songs of that year). Dionne Warwick and arranger Bob James took on the challenge of reinterpreting “One Less Bell” while it was still a fresh hit, shifting the key down a whole step and opening with a slow and moody A minor introduction, setting a very different tone from the sunny D major seventh chord and flute melody that open the 5th Dimension record. Everything about Warwick’s performance is darker, lower, and slower than Marilyn McCoo vocal on the 5th Dimension recording, and if you want to hear someone mine the depths of the song, Warwick is your woman.
THE BALANCE OF NATURE ✦ Burt Bacharach
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BURT BACHARACH & PHIL RAMONE
A&M LP #3527, Living Together (12/73)
After the massive success of “Close You You” in 1970, it’s not surprising that Bacharach & David decided to write another sweet love song full of Hallmark card nature images. Serene Dominic compares the song to “As Long as There’s an Apple Tree”, which also seems apt. “The Balance of Nature” is more musically subdued than either until it gets to a bridge that shifts the up in pitch by two full steps for a short but theatrical interlude.
In a 2013 on-stage interview with Mitch Albom, Bacharach lays the blame for his post-Lost Horizon breakup with Hal David on his own ego and selfishness, but also suggests the two were getting stale by 1972:
“The other question is what could we have written if we hadn’t split up. I don’t know what we would have written. Had we ‘run out’ a little bit? Had we been depleted and robbed of creativity?”
By 1972, they were in the curious position of having their music everywhere in the culture, but nothing they had written together since “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” in mid-1969 had become a big hit (“Close to You” and “One Less Bell to Answer” were written in 1963 and 1967 respectively). “The Balance of Nature” may have been one of the songs Bacharach had in mind when he implied that he and David were treading water by 1972. The only cover it spawned aside from Bacharach’s own was by The Anita Kerr Singers.
Music journalist David Menconi, quoted in the liner notes to The Rare Bacharach 1 (Raven, 2002) said that Bacharach was motivated as much by having hits as anything else, though you can extend Menconi’s point to include cover versions, which also counted as cultural currency (and sometimes led to surprise hits down the road):
“He’s all about the hits, you know. If it wasn’t a hit then it wasn’t a good song. Burt has this very pragmatic, almost English mentality that if something is not successful, it means that it’s not that good. That goes contrary to popular thinking, where you’ve got VH1 telling everybody that the obscure, the underdog things are better. But Burt turns that on its head. If you’re good you’ll be famous when you’re alive — not after you’re dead.”
I TOOK MY STRENGTH FROM YOU ✦ Stephanie Mills
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BURT BACHARACH & HAL DAVID
Motown LP #859, Living Together (10/75)
Despite Bacharach’s harsh words to David in 1973 during an argument they were having about a profit split for a movie that turned out to be anything but profitable (“Fuck you and fuck the picture” he claims in his memoir to have said to David), the two managed to patch things up enough in 1975 to write and produce an album for Motown’s Stephanie Mills. The truce didn’t last, however — after this album, the Bacharach & David artistic partnership withered quickly. Unrecorded songs by the pair were copyrighted in 1978 (though it’s not clear when they were written), and there were brief reunions for one or two songs many years later, but For the First Time was essentially the last go round for the pair.
The album wasn’t completely new — the single was a disco arrangement of “This Empty Place” done by Kenny Asher, and there was also a cover of Dionne Warwick’s “Loneliness Remembers (What Happiness Forgets)” — but it did have several eight new songs including “I Took My Strength from You”. Bacharach liked the latter enough to include it on his next solo album, Futures, along with “No One Remembers My Name”. “I Took My Strength from You” was one of the six Bacharach-arranged tracks from “For the First Time”, and it shows Bacharach’s embrace of more modern soul music vocabulary (to which he added an old favorite sound, the tack piano). It’s also pretty clearly a gospel song, though Hal David not surprisingly stays ecumenical and steers clear of references to any particular religion.
The memorable bass line went missing on Bacharach’s own version and on the 1978 disco cover by Sylvester, and it may have been a contribution from the uncredited session player. An instrumental cover by Evynd Kang on the 1997 tribute album Great Jewish Music: Burt Bacharach (Tzadik) featured a busier version of the original bass line which became a focal point of the arrangement.
THE SWEETEST PUNCH ✦ Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach
(Burt Bacharach/Elvis Costello)
Arranged by BURT BACHARACH, produced by BURT BACHARACH & ELVIS COSTELLO
Mercury CD #314 538, Painted from Memory (9/98)
Jumping forward in time to the mid-1990s Bacharach revival, “The Sweetest Punch” was an atypically cheerful track on the mostly dark Elvis Costello collaboration Painted from Memory. Costello has said in interviews that he was a full participant in the musical half of the collaboration, and was not simply replacing Hal David in the lyricist chair. Thus it’s hard to know with certainty which songs germinated with musical ideas from Bacharach, and which came from Costello doing his best adult contemporary pastiche.
For “The Sweetest Punch”, the track would be worth including just for Bacharach’s perfect piano work, even if he’d not contributed a note to the song itself. As with his playing on “Reach Out for Me” and countless other Dionne Warwick arrangements, the piano provides graceful counterpoint throughout the song and is instantly recognizable. The tubular bells, vibraphone, and other orchestral colors also give the song a strong sixties Bacharach stamp, though the backbeat comes from his later work.
HERE I AM ✦ Ronald Isley
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and produced by BURT BACHARACH
DreamWorks CD #B0001005, Here I Am (11/03)
Ron Isley’s Here I Am album allowed Bacharach to take a valedictory trip through his sixties catalog with a singer who he’d known at that point for forty years. At 62, Isley still had a falsetto that allowed him to navigate a demanding melody like “Here I Am” (he was probably doing 1960s Dionne Warwick better than Dionne Warwick at this point). Isley sings the song three steps below Warwick’s original recording (in D to her A♭), which isn’t obvious at first listen because his high notes put in such high relief by rich low end of his voice.
Despite being included in a hit film and being one of Bacharach’s most memorable sixties ballads, “Here I Am” was rarely recorded after 1965, and Isley’s 2003 version was the first noteworthy cover.
I CRY ALONE ✦ Dionne Warwick
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and produced by BURT BACHARACH
Scepter LP #508, Presenting Dionne Warwick (2/63)
Going back to the beginning to give Dionne Warwick a curtain call, “I Cry Alone” presents Warwick, Bacharach and David at the very beginning of their sixties run. The song, written in 1960, is stylistically old fashioned compared to the ballads Bacharach & David started writing for Warwick in 1962.Warwick wrings it out, going from icy cool to impassioned within a single line. Though she refined her singing and grew as an artist through the decade, the magic was all there in her first Scepter sessions.
ALFIE ✦ Burt Bacharach
(Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Arranged and produced by BURT BACHARACH
A&M LP #4131, Reach Out (11/67)
Bacharach considered “Alfie” to be his greatest song, and his 1967 instrumental arrangement offers a very personalized vision of the song. Like his instrumental “Freefall”, the arrangement mesmerizes and evokes an altered psychological state, though not in the manner of trippy psychedelia. The brisk rhythmic pulse subdividing the beat and the chugging acoustic rhythm guitar feel like an audio portrait of city life — one can imagine a montage of movement through transportation systems, corporate offices, supermarkets — while the dreamy trumpet and unexpected key changes suggest the daydreams and interpersonal connections that make the working stiff’s life worthwhile. The arrangement also feels like the closing credits music for a movie, and for this reason, along with the special place the song holds in the Bacharach catalog, it seems like a fitting closer for a Bacharach compilation.
NOTES:
Hard calls
“Any Day Now” — Carla Thomas or Eddie Kendricks? Eddie’s version is masterful, and highly recommended, but there’s a sweet charm to Carla Thomas’ singing that is irresistible, and the 1969 Stax Records production is likewise wonderful. Eddie’s record is produced like a Barry White seduction-fest, which is a bit incongruous with the lyric. With Carla, you hear some pain in the voice.
“Raindrops Keep Falling My Head “— Dionne’s recording has the Bacharach arrangement and production magic, but the song isn’t the type that shows off her gifts the best. (“Who Gets the Guy” is sort of Dionne’s “Raindrops”) The Four Tops recording, on the other hand, is surprisingly effective, and has lots of audacious touches in the arrangement. It’s too much fun to not include. (Tip of the hat to Serene Dominic for recommending Four Tops.)