“It’s a short form, three and a half minutes, so everything counts. You can get away with murder in a 40-minute piece but not in three and a half,” Burt Bacharach said of pop songs. With obsessive attention to detail and supreme melodicism, the composer aimed to make every bar count, turning each cluster of notes into a series of “Magic Moments”, the title of one of his first hits with lyricist partner Hal David. Their profuse run of success in the 1960s and early 70s established Bacharach, who has died aged 94, as a giant of popular song.
Their classics range from the breezy jollity of “What’s New Pussycat?” to the Oscar-winning standard “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” and the sophisticated orchestral balladry of “Alfie”, Bacharach’s favourite composition. His ability to turn three-minute songs into “miniature movies”, as he put it, was forged in the claustrophobic setting of a small, cigarette-smoke-filled room with a battered upright piano and a window that did not open on to the Midtown Manhattan streets below. It was in the Brill Building, an 11-storey song factory where teams of professional songwriters churned out material for record labels.
The cigarette smoke was produced by David, who commuted from his marital home on Long Island. Meanwhile, the handsome, charming Bacharach, seven years younger, lived what was then known as the bachelor life in his East Side apartment. He would eventually tally four marriages during the course of his long life, including a glamorous union with the actress Angie Dickinson in the 1960s. “Burt’s the only songwriter who doesn’t look like a dentist,” his fellow tunesmith Sammy Cahn wryly commented.
Born in 1928, he grew up in Forest Hills, New York, a lonely child, self-conscious of his Jewish background because “all the kids I knew were Catholic”. His father was a newspaper columnist. Initially drawn to sports, Bacharach was encouraged to take up piano by his mother, an amateur songwriter. It led to his studying music formally under Modernist composers such as Darius Milhaud, who encouraged him to trust his instinct for melody.
In 1956, he was recruited as Marlene Dietrich’s arranger, conductor and accompanist. The German star doted on him. “You don’t vant my autograph. You vant his!” he recalled her telling fans outside a show. He was working for her when he started writing with David, whom he met in the Brill Building. “Magic Moments” landed them a UK number one in 1958, sung by Perry Como. But the real fruits of their partnership came after Bacharach, under the guidance of fellow Brill Building writer Jerry Leiber, stopped writing what the hipper Leiber referred to as “chichi, East Side, red-carpet-type songs”.
With the likes of “Make It Easy on Yourself”, initially a 1962 hit for the R&B singer Jerry Butler, Bacharach learnt to incorporate the sounds of black American pop into his orchestrations. Seemingly telepathically attuned to one another, with lyrical ideas inspiring new melodic phrases and vice versa, he and David found their perfect vocal foil in Dionne Warwick. “She had pigtails and dirty white sneakers,” he said of his first encounter with the versatile young singer in 1961, “and she just shone.”
Their run of chart success with Warwick included “Walk on By”, “Do You Know the Way to San José” and “The Windows of the World”. There were many hits for other vocalists too, such as Dusty Springfield’s version of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” and Aretha Franklin’s “I Say a Little Prayer”. A bridge back to the golden age of Tin Pan Alley and Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bacharach and David opened a new chapter for the Great American Songbook in the era of The Beatles and Motown. A disputatious split with David in 1973 was Bacharach’s biggest regret.
Although he was mischaracterised in later years as easy listening, there was nothing straightforward about his music, which he tinkered with compulsively in the recording studio. “He writes in hat sizes. Seven and three-fourths,” Frank Sinatra said of the unusual time changes that the composer managed to fit into his three-minute gems.
Bacharach fitted a vast amount of work into his life, too, at the cost, he admitted, of his marriages. Survived by his fourth wife, Jane Hansen, he continued writing and performing songs well into old age, an open-minded and generous collaborator with younger admirers such as Elvis Costello. He leaves behind an immense body of work, abiding proof of the multitudes that the best pop songs can contain in their brief span.
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