Who You Calling Easy?

Burt Bacharachs middle-of-the-road reputation hasnt done justice to his true radical nature, writes Michael Dwyer.

WHEN BURT Bacharach raises his voice in anger - f-word included - its not an easy listening moment. Thats why one of the key lines was deleted from his most recent album, At This Time.

"I always wished the record company had let that stand, that last line of Who Are These People? " Bacharach says in a broken whisper, sounding every one of his 79 years. " We gotta make a change, before its too late. Thats the way it is on the record. But what Elvis (Costello) sang, what I wrote was, We gotta make a change, or else were all f-ed!

"The way Elvis sang f-ked was just . . . I mean, it could make you laugh, make you feel good and give you chills at the same time," he sighs. If anyone can deploy such a delicate balance of emotions in one song, its Burt Bacharach.

By contrast, the act of corporate censorship was typically ham-fisted. It came at the behest of Sony top dog in Britain, Rob Stringer, who believed At This Time had to adhere to the middle-American morality code as determined by influential CD retailer Walmart.

Its amusing to note that Stringer had cut his teeth on the profanity of the Clash circa 76, when Bacharach was already resting on his laurels as the premier American hit-maker of the post-war era. But that was just the tip of a veritable iceberg of irony.

At This Time marked the first time in Bacharachs long career that he had written his own lyrics. Some tripped to the beats of hip-hop renegade Dr Dre (NWA, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent), and most simmered with fury at the actions and inactions of George W. Bushs White House.

"Ive been writing love songs all my life, never rocking the boat," Bacharach wrote in his first blog of June 06.

"The closest I came to writing music with any social and political connotation was What the World Needs Now is Love. When that song was written 40 years ago, it was an important song. And, now, it is a thousand times more so."

Somehow, in this incredibly daring leap of company and conviction, all that the Grammy judges heard was 2005s best pop instrumental album. Like the American voice of dissent at large, it was as if Bacharachs words simply didnt exist when Costello sang:

"This stupid mess were in just keeps getting worse So many people dying needlessly Looks like the liars will inherit the earth Even pretending to pray And getting away with it."

True to his mild-mannered reputation, the songwriter is gracious about the whole bizarre whitewash. He makes a point of calling Stringer "a great record man". Few men alive know what that means as well as he.

Late last year, Bacharach quietly clocked up a golden anniversary in pop: 50 years since his first number one record, with Marty Robbins version of The Story of My Life.

Written in the Brill Building in New York, the hallowed songwriters factory that fuelled the American music business in the 50s, it would be the first of nearly 50 top-10 hits he wrote with lyricist Hal David before their litigious falling out of 73.

In a sense, the 29-year-old pop novice was slumming it in the Brill corridors, where Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Neil Sedaka, Phil Spector, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were all racing to write the next vacuous teen hit. "You could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours," King recalled to journalist Simon Firth.

"I never liked rocknroll," Bacharach confesses today. His more sophisticated ambitions had been ignited in the bebop jazz clubs of the 40s, buzzing to the radical harmonic experiments of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. Hed toured as Marlene Dietrichs musical director and studied with Darius Milhaud, the French composer renowned for furthering the polytonal innovations of Stravinsky, Bartok and Debussy.

Bacharach would soon bring an enigmatic complexity to pop that would creep under the worlds skin and stay there. "Easy listening", we came to call his signature muted horns, stacked strings and elaborate melodies, but anyone who has performed one of his songs knows that label is an absurd misnomer.

"Id rather that than elevator music," the maestro laughs, but his exasperation shows . "You take a song like Anyone Who Had a Heart, and you tell me thats easy listening? You gotta be kidding. Hold it up to the light and you see its not easy at all. But if you wanna call it that, hey, be my guest."

The toe-tapping challenge of that tunes time signature shifts may sound academic (5/4 to 4/4 to 7/8, if youre counting), but Bacharach suspects such subliminal lures to be the basis of his longevity. Hes scathing about the record men he knew in those early days, the ones who insisted he dumb down his melodic and rhythmic eccentricities before theyd let stars such as Marty Robbins or Perry Como record his songs.

"I started producing records out of self-defence. It was a way to protect the material," he says. "It was sort of like being in the army and listening to the second lieutenant say Charge! and everybody gets killed. The second lieutenant doesnt know what hes talking about any more than the (record) man who ruins a perfectly good song by making a four-bar phrase when it belonged as a three-bar phrase.

"But when somebody let me get in the studio and set the tempo I wanted to set, put the strings where I wanted to put them, write the orchestration, make the record . . ." he leaves the rest of that story to the record books.

So complete and detailed is Bacharachs vision for a song that hes mostly disinterested in the countless cover versions they continue to spawn. Recently, ultra-hip rock duo the White Stripes furthered his legend - but mainly their own - by covering I Just Dont Know What To Do With Myself with all the delicacy of a sawn-off shotgun.

Asked about such questionable tributes in general terms, Bacharach mutters a polite demurral containing the verb "to butcher", and notes that at least they were "done right" once. And its not a generational thing. In 66, when Cher had first crack at the song he considers his personal best, Alfie, he let her know shed blown it.

By that time, Bacharach and Hal David had found their voice. With gospel-trained New Jersey girl Dionne Warwick, they forged a bond that shadowed and often bettered the new singer-songwriter model of the 1960s, the one that changed the dynamics of the business forever. Amazingly, Bacharach claims to have had little interest in the Beatles, though of course he was aware of them: they covered his song, Baby Its You, on their first album.

Like all bands, Bacharach-David-Warwick eventually came unstuck, ending their golden reign in high dudgeon. Their Waterloo was the film musical of 73, Lost Horizon. Veteran New York magazine critic John Simon seemingly spoke for all when he said it had "arrived in garbage rather than in film cans".

"Boy, I blew everything up then," Bacharach croaks, clearly still pained by the memory. "I worked on that film for two years and I thought the songs were good, you know? When we wrote them. But when you see it on film . . . Peter Finch is singing If I Could Go Back, and that was a very emotional song, beautifully sung by whoever sang his (voice) in the role. But when you see the film put together, you dont give a shit whether he stays or goes."

Bacharach was showbiz royalty in 73, married to Hollywood golden girl Angie Dickinson. "That really hurt; the failure, the disaster. I didnt take it well," he whispers. He disappeared to his Del Mar retreat in southern California for a full year, declaring his partnership with David "written-out" and throwing Warwicks career into stalemate.

"So everybody sued everybody and Ive got myself only to blame for that," he says. "Its all fine now but, you know, if I look for a mistake . . ." Again, history finishes his sentence eloquently. He wouldnt have another hit for eight years, when he co-wrote Arthurs Theme with his third wife, Carole Bayer Sager.

For all his years in the wilderness, Bacharachs comfort is more profound than most songwriters can dream of. Its not just the 48 top 10 hits, nine number ones, six Grammys and three Oscars. Nor was it exactly the slightly ironic embrace of the late 90s cool school, forged in association with Austin Powers kitsch. Like the "king of easy listening" accolade, that was a backhanded compliment that missed the point of why singers and audiences keep coming back.

"Theres a lot of resilience, apparently, in my catalogue; in these songs," he says. "Maybe because they had meat on em, maybe cause they were urban or cosmopolitan, or they werent so easy to figure the first time around, cause there was more to them than your average one-four-five (a common chord pattern) song, you know?"

In spite of Sonys censorship, Bacharachs latest album is not for sale at Walmart, although it naturally stocks triple-disc greatest hits packages and several tribute albums. And, of course, hell play mainly his 60s hits - "done right" with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra - when he returns to Melbourne next month.

But hes not easy enough to ignore what he sees as his most important work, At this Time. When all the greatest love songs in the world have been sung, he says, "Were all still f-ed."

They long to be close to him

Burt Bacharach is often cited by Paul Zollos weighty reference tome, Songwriters On Songwriting (Da Capo Press). Admirers range from pop harmony king Brian Wilson to difficult listening provocateur Frank Zappa, who helpfully noted that "prior to (Bacharach and David) there had been little of bitonal and polytonal harmonic implication in American pop music".

Its hard to get a bum note out of Melbourne musos either:

Harry Angus, the Cat Empire: "He didnt just write a tune, he usually has these intricate trombone, flugelhorn or flute countermelodies going on as part of the composition. A lot of orchestration in songs is sort of filler. His arrangements are written into the song."

Ultimate: Ill Never Fall in Love Again (1969). "The brass line at the beginning is almost a better melody than the chorus."

Paul Grabowsky: "His best songs are like miniature music dramas, songs which fold a complex emotional picture into a three-minute format. He uses the rhythm of the spoken word as his guide, and his sophistication as a composer enables him to go way beyond the terrain of most pop music."

Ultimate: Make it Easy on Yourself (1962) "An absolute killer of a song."

Paul Kelly: "No question that Bacharach is great: melodic, inventive and concise - and such lightness of touch. But you cant talk about Bacharach without talking about Hal David. Its the words as much as the music that make those songs so wonderful. Id love to be able to go back in time and see them at work together on those songs. How did they get the words to fit those idiosyncratic, shifting time signatures?"

Ultimate: I Say A Little Prayer (1967), Walk On By (1964), I Just Dont Know What To Do With Myself (1964), 24 Hours From Tulsa (1963). "Little movies all."

Lisa Miller: "He had an ear for the perfect interpreter of his compositions. They had to be brilliant technically to pull off all those orchestral sweeps and dives in the melodies and they had to make it sound effortless so we would all sing along. I love that he didnt favour a typical or smooth voice. That tension saved his songs from potential sappiness and catapulted them to the stars."

Ultimate: Anything. "Except maybe The Blob (1958)."

Kim Salmon: "His stuff sounds so simple and direct and yet he has the most improbable things going on behind the facade. The result is something very complex that anyone can enjoy on first listening. Thats the mark of a true artist."

Ultimate: Casino Royale soundtrack (1967). "Hes probably the pioneer of that groovy-baroque thing."

Sally Seltmann, New Buffalo: "The melodies to most of his songs are so strong that they can stand alone with no chord accompaniments. Just try singing Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head out loud."

Ultimate: Thats What Friends Are For (1982). "Anyone who can write a friendship song that inspires tipsy teenage girls to hug and sway and sing out loud with tears in their eyes is obviously on the path to songwriting genius."

Patrick Williams, Blacharach: "The most extraordinary songs of our time, in terms of his ability to capture the sense of a lyric and embed it in a landscape of music. My band does loving renditions. Theres no f-ing around with this stuff as far as Im concerned."

Ultimate: Reach Out For Me (1964). "I think people find it harder to reach out for help these days. Its a song of reassurance for all of us."

An Evening with Burt Bacharach and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra 6-9 February at 8pm at the Arts Centre, Hamer Hall. Ticketmaster 1300 136 166.

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