The death of composer Burt Bacharach this past week gives us a fitting occasion on which to celebrate his work — work mostly with lyricist Hal David. Bacharach and David formed a professional partnership made in Cosmic American Music heaven.
As Lloyd Billingsley counsels us in his brief American Greatness tribute to Bacharach: “Take a good look and listen, people. You won’t see a composer like this ever again.” For detailed background see Stephen Holden’s New York Times obituary, the Burt Bacharach: A House Is Not a Homepage site, or the 2013 memoir written with Robert Greenfield, Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music. His legacy to American popular music is wide and deep.
Picking out a few illustrative examples, I can’t even say we are munching like giraffes at the top of the tree. We are simply taking a taste. In a quest to keep this within manageable bounds, I have limited myself to 15 tracks. I have posted the tracks below in chronological order of recording rather than date of the song’s first release. Please forgive me for every omission in this homage.
Bacharach and David had a hit in 1962 with with Jerry Butler’s “Make It Easy On Yourself.” Butler had flipped over the demo sung by Dionne Warwick with Bacharach’s arrangement. History must be told! In a sense, this is where it began, with Bacharach sitting at the controls for Butler and creating the lush sound Butler had heard on the demo. The Walker Brothers had a hit with the song again in 1965.
Gene Pitney covered the Bacharach-David number “Only Love Can Break a Heart” and turned it into a number 2 hit in 1962. Pitney was not too shabby a writer himself. His own composition “He’s a Rebel” kept this track out of the number 1 spot.
The Beatles picked up on the Shirelles’ hit version of “Baby It’s You” as soon as it came out in 1961. They made it a staple of their early live act. Like every other cover the Beatles performed, they improved on the original. Mack David and producer Luther Dixon (“Barney Williams”) are also on the writing credits.
Bacharach and David found Dionne Warwick to be the preeminent voice of their work. They wrote 39 chart hits for her. Here I can only pick out a few of my own favorites of their collaboration with her. “Anyone Who Had a Heart” was a hit off the album of the same name in 1964.
“Any Old Time of Day” is a deep track off the album. The Bacharach-David collaboration with Warwick produced produced a chest full of treasures. The hits were not the beginning and the end of their collaboration. This is an example of a buried treasure.
Make Way For Dionne Warwick (1964) was her third album and the first to chart. “You’ll Never Get To Heaven (If You Break My Heart)” was one of the Bacharach and David numbers on the album. The single reached number 34.
I made my way downtown Minneapolis in the fall of 1967 to see Dionne perform in Dayton’s Sky Room. Dionne had us singing responsively to “Walk On By.” Also from that third album, it had been a top 10 hit for her in 1964.
Dionne rejected Bacharach and David’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love” when it was first offered to her. With Bacharach at the controls, Jackie DeShannon recorded it in early 1965. I love every track in this post, so it’s redundant to say I love this track, but I love this track.
We owe Dusty Springfield’s recording of “The Look of Love” to 1967’s spy spoof Casino Royale. I think this is more like the sound of love.
Dionne Warwick’s 1968 cover of Bacharach and David’s “(There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me” was also arranged and conducted by Bacharach. It is the third of five hit versions of the song.
Both Dionne Warwick (number 4, 1967) and Aretha Franklin (number 10 on the pop chart, number 3 on the R&B chart, 1968) had hits with “I Say a Little Prayer.” Bacharach commented on Aretha’s cover: “It’s a better record than the record we made.” Both Dionne’s and Aretha’s are powerfully moving tracks.
In his Memphis sessions with Chips Moman at American Sound Studio in 1969 Elvis reached back to cover the 1962 Chuck Jackson hit “Any Day Now.” Bacharach wrote this one with Bob Hilliard before his partnership with Hal David had cemented. Ken Emerson writes perceptively about Jackson’s recording in his Brill Building history Always Magic In the Air. In the second volume of his Elvis bio Peter Guralnick calls it a “lyrical take” on Chuck Jackson’s R&B hit. I’m trying not to say I love this track.
Bacharach was a handsome man with personal shortcomings he owned up to in his memoir. The actress Angie Dickinson was his second wife (1965 to 1981). The songwriter Carole Bayer Sager was his third (1982-1991). Bacharach teamed up with Sager to write “On My Own,” which Warwick recorded in 1985. Patti LaBelle had a number 1 hit on the single with Michael McDonald in 1986. By the way, in 2013, Sager interviewed Bacharach about his memoir in a 60-minute video posted here on YouTube.
Bacharach and Elvis Costello wrote and recorded the single “God Give Me Strength” in 1996. They continued working together to produce the 1998 album Painted From Memory.
The Dutch vocalist Trijntje Oosterhuis has recorded two albums of numbers from the Bacharach songbook. Her warm voice is embedded in arrangements that may rescue the best-known songs of the catalog from overfamiliarity. “Do You Know the Way To San Jose?” was a Grammy-winning smash for Dionne Warwick in 1968. Let’s go out with Hal David’s witty lyrics ringing in our ears.
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