In 2013, Burt Bacharach’s autobiography showed how difficult easy things can be. The “King of Easy”, the composer and arranger, who was able to turn melodies into unforgettable catchy tunes like no other, described how hard he had to work for it: No song was ever the result of a lightning-fast inspiration, he had to work through each one laboriously and tediously must. He composes in his head, never at the piano, and always listens to the instrumentation and arrangement, which is why everything has to be recorded together, Bacharach said. He also chronically distrusts the first ideas and constantly works on the melodies. He suffered from insomnia all his life because of this.
In the music scene, Bacharach was known for his perfectionism. The recording session for his song “Alfie” – which became a hit as the title track of the 1966 film of the same name – is legendary, when he had the singer Cilla Black repeat it a good 30 times until beatles-Producer George Martin interjected, “I think you got it the fourth time. What are you looking for?” “That bit of magic,” was Bacharach’s reply. The audience only ever got the “magic” end product.
Burt Bacharach was born in Kansas City in 1928, the son of a journalist and a music teacher. Its name is derived from the city of the same name on the Rhine and refers to the German-Jewish roots of the emigrated family. He grew up in New York and as a teenager wanted to be an athlete. He was a passionate tennis player throughout his life, later he bred racehorses and, since 1993, was his fourth marriage (after the actresses Paula Stewart and Angie Dickinson and fellow songwriter Carole Bayer Sager) to Jane Hansen – his former ski instructor. Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie, for whom he fell in love at 15, led him to music. At 19 he wrote his first song for the band leader Sammy Kaye, who was very successful in the 1940s.
Marlene Dietrich called for him – he became her musical director
Studying music at McGill University and at the renowned Mannes College of Music in New York (today’s “New School”) was not easy for him: “Classical music seemed dark and difficult to me – until I discovered Debussy and Ravel.” From his famous composition teachers Bohuslav Martinu, Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud, he not only learned orchestration and composition, but also a sentence that was perhaps crucial: “Never be ashamed of a melody that you can whistle,” Milhaud once told him.
Initially, of course, Bacharach struck as a pianist for pop singers like Vic Damone and the Ames Brothers through. Until he got a call from Marlene Dietrich to see her perform in Warsaw. “She was waiting for me in the snow with a Dior scarf by the gangway and the first thing she did was pour me a vodka,” he recalled. Bacharach remained Dietrich’s musical director for five years and made her a singing star with tailor-made arrangements and songs. “How many men like that do you find? He was the only one for me,” she later gushed about him – but soon had to share him with others like Perry Como as his songwriting fame grew.
The breakthrough came in 1961, in the legendary trio with his lyricist Hal David and the singer Dionne Warwick, his discovery and muse. In this constellation alone, twelve million records with hits like “Walk on By”, “Anyone Who Had a Heart” or “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” were sold. Until Bacharach dissolved this triumvirate in 1973 out of anger at the failure of the film musical “Last Horizon”. A serious career setback followed, but he was back on top in 1981 with the number one hit “Arthur’s Theme” sung by Christopher Cross from the soundtrack of the hit film starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minelli. Everyone wanted to work with him again, just like Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand once did. Now it was Elvis Costello, Noel Gallagher and – most recently, in 2011 – Ronan Keating. He also got back together with Hal David and Dionne Warwick in 1993.
As befits the master of easy listening, he passed away gently
The impressionism of Maurice Ravel, the nonchalance of bossa nova, but also the melancholy of gospel flowed together in Bacharach’s songs. The arrangements were always more elaborate than you thought you heard. In the background of “What’s New Pusscat”, for example, five pianos create tension. Often he sat in pop unusual instruments such as oboe, triangle or vibraphone. Even John Zorn, the great avant-gardist and experimenter, is one of his admirers: “Bacharach’s songs go beyond expectations of what a pop song should be. Complex harmonies, chord changes with unexpected turns and modulations, unusual shifts in tempo and rhythm lurk everywhere – and yet the whole thing sounds so natural that you can’t stop whistling it.”
60 “Top Forty” hits came together, 16 Grammys, the Oscar and the Golden Globe, the “Polar Music Prize” as the unofficial Nobel Prize for music and many more. In the US, he was a superstar who made cameo appearances in TV series like nip/tuck or the Austion Powers films and caused a sensation with his last solo album “At This Time” in 2005 because of his surprising angry accusation against conservative US politics. In Europe, he remained in the shadow of the stars he made, although he mostly worked in the background. But the ambitious man ticked that off too: at the age of 89 he went on a two-year tour of Europe, and in 2018 he gave his first ever Germany concert in Berlin – “the best of my life,” he said in interviews afterwards. Now the great songwriter Burt Bacharach, creator of indelibly feathery things like “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” or “I Say a Little Prayer” has fallen silent. At 94, he passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles, as was his due.
