Burt Bacharach and Hal David

Composer Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David wrote a series of love songs in the 1960s and ’70s that made restless hearts rocket to the moon.

by Gary Marmorstein

One afternoon in the early 1970s, riding a New York City bus with friends, I heard the Fifth Dimension’s "One Less Bell to Answer" coming from another passenger’s transistor radio. I started crying. My friends, who worshipped the Rolling Stones, didn’t understand why. Maybe it was composer Burt Bacharach’s haunting chime-like six-note figure for the title that made my eyes fill, or maybe it was the suggestion of abandonment in Hal David’s lyric—one less egg to fry.

To paraphrase another Bacharach-David song, There’s always something there to remind us. Yet their songs are so much more than occasions for nostalgia. They’re unclassifiable. But as the creators of The Look of Love, the new musical based on their catalog, have discovered, there’s a strong thematic strain in Bacharach and David’s songs. They’re restless pilgrimages toward love, pensive journeys that are more internal than simply getting home to San Jose.

Burt Bacharach and Hal David

In many of their tunes, Hal David’s lyrics express this unsettled feeling in highly concentrated form. L.A. is a great big freeway/ Put a hundred down and buy a car/ In a week, maybe two/ They’ll make you a star is worthy of any line in "Hooray for Hollywood," by one of David’s idols, Johnny Mercer. I hear the music coming out of your radio goes the accusation in "Are You There (with Another Girl?)," connoting a universal insecurity. Foolish pride, begins the line from "Walk on By" — that’s all that I have left/ So let me hide. In "A House Is Not a Home," the unforgettable title song to an all but forgotten movie about Manhattan madam Polly Adler, pride has evaporated altogether: When I climb the stair/ And turn the key/Oh please be there. Such exquisite torture is familiar to anyone who’s ever been in love.

The Bacharach-David catalog addresses our longing to be loved and our desire for confirmation that we’re loved still. It’s not a meadow we need, as the Jackie DeShannon hit reminds us. And if "What the World Needs Now" makes some of us flash back to the mid-1960s—the Bacharach-David heyday when London was swinging, California was germinating flower power, televisions were blooming "in living color," and we were on our way to the moon—the theme remains relevant. Threatened by radioactive "dirty" bombs and germ warfare, we may feel it’s more pertinent than ever.

Burt Bacharach

Burt Bacharach was born in Kansas City in 1928 and raised in New York (mostly in Queens) and other cities because of the itinerant nature of his dad Bert’s career as a syndicated King Features columnist. Before he studied with innovative composers Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud, Bacharach had come under the influence of the French impressionists—particularly Erik Satie and his playful, stop-and-start rhythms—as well as American beboppers, none more so than Dizzy Gillespie. Bacharach worked as a jazz and rehearsal pianist for several recording artists and was soon composing on assignment for Famous Music, the music publishing arm of Paramount Pictures. Famous, like so many publishers, was then housed at the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway. In the twilight of Tin Pan Alley song production, the Brill Building was its central factory. Bacharach collaborated there occasionally with the veteran lyricist Mack David.

Mack David’s kid brother Hal was also roaming around the Brill Building. Growing up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, David looked up to Mack and drew inspiration from local songwriters Arthur Altman ("All or Nothing at All") and Jack Lawrence ("Tenderly"). Although Hal David had become an ASCAP member as early as 1943, when he was only 22, he held a day job for awhile as a copywriter. However brief, that career proved to be excellent training in the compressed expression required of any lyricist.

Through much of the 1950s Bacharach and David each labored for Famous Music, writing songs for movie soundtracks or, just as frequently, songs that could be exploited solely for publicity purposes. Many were written for Paramount movies. Bacharach and Mack David, for instance, came up with a title song for The Blob (1958), the "B" thriller that introduced Steve McQueen to drive-in customers.

Hal David added a lyric to Alex North’s theme to The Rainmaker (1956), among dozens of other assignments. By the time they decided to work together, they were both Brill Building journeymen who could be relied on to meet a deadline. The idea was to write a few songs, then go their separate ways as most of their colleagues did.

It didn’t work out that way. The team quickly turned out hits for Perry Como ("Magic Moments") and Marty Robbins ("The Story of My Life"). Their songs began to show up regularly on Top 40 stations. Turning the AM dial in the early 1960s, you could catch the Shirelles’ "Baby, It’s You" (1961) or Bobby Vinton’s "Blue on Blue" (1963).

The Fifth Dimension

The team was already highly regarded when, observing an early 1962 Drifters recording session of one of their songs, they were stopped in their tracks by the nectar voice—and maybe, too, those mile-high cheekbones—of a backup singer named Dionne Warrick. From East Orange, New Jersey, Warrick had sung for awhile in The Gospelaires, a family group that included her aunt, Cissy Houston, and was ready to break out on her own. Bacharach and David took her to Scepter Records to record. After one false start and an inadvertent misspelling that resulted in the surname Warwick, the beautiful young singer had a hit with the team’s "Don’t Make Me Over." Since then, Dionne Warwick has been as crucial to the Bacharach-David oeuvre as Lotte Lenya was to Kurt Weill’s. Warwick’s pearl-like tones could navigate the songs’ idiosyncracies without fuss and make them sail over the airwaves so smoothly, you felt as though you’d heard them all your life.

Still, what makes the songs so seductive? Or, as the lyric to "Alfie," one of the finest movie songs ever written, goes, I know there’s something much more/ Something even non-believers can believe in. If Hal David’s lyric chides the movie’s title character for his amoral behavior, it also offers him a prescription: When you walk let your heart lead the way. Lacking a chorus, the lyric refuses to sit still.

That restlessness is evident, too, in Bacharach’s music for "Alfie." The notes stumble and slide, climb back up the ladder two steps at time and then slip, but the construction is so solid that the whole song towers and can’t be knocked down.

In Bacharach’s tunes, harmonic eccentricities are the norm. Think of the Whoa-whoa whoa whoa exhalation that punctuates the funhouse theme of "What’s New Pussycat?" Remember the scurrying, lyricless tag at the end of the Academy Award–winning "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head"? What is that? And who else composes like that?

Perry Como

The restlessness of the Bacharach-David songs, with their shifting, utterly odd time signatures, are, in the end, inimitable. Hum the title tune of their one Broadway show, Promises, Promises, and you’ll be reminded how the time keeps changing, with no four consecutive measures alike. Bacharach’s brassy orchestrations only accentuate this rhythmic complexity. The trumpet-heavy title tune of the 1967 James Bond spoof Casino Royale lurches like a happy drunk, but one you want to help across the street. Traditionally, the standard popular song form has been A-A-B-A (each letter denoting a theme), but many a Bacharach tune is so thematically busy that it practically runs through the alphabet. Still, you follow where the Bacharach-David song takes you because you have to know how it resolves—if it resolves.

One more memory. On a humid July night in 1968, in the wake of two nationally devastating assassinations, my father allowed me to accompany him to the Kismet Inn, on Fire Island, so he could grab a beer. Six years under legal drinking age, I nursed a ginger ale and watched grownups slow-dance to Herb Alpert’s wispy parlando on "This Guy’s in Love with You." My hands are shakin’/ Don’t let my heart keep breakin’. The dancers clung silently, desperately to each other. "This Guy’s..." is one of Bacharach-David’s more conventional songs, except for the crescendo that cascades into the plea, I need your love/ Say you’re in love/ In love with this guy/ If not, I’ll just die. I think the dancers wanted what I wanted—to hear if the guy’s prayer would be answered.

In Bacharach-David’s best songs, an answer isn’t guaranteed. The pensive search for love is tantamount to the search for a state of grace. And you’ll find love any day, Alfie. Maybe he’ll find it, maybe not. Either way, these are songs even non-believers can believe in. w

Gary Marmorstein is the author of Hollywood Rhapsody (Schirmer Books).

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