Anyone Who Had a Heart (13 page)

Chapter

11

What’s It All About?

I
have never had a song come to me fully formed, in a blinding flash of inspiration. What I do is tinker. I fiddle. If a melody comes too easily to me, I don’t think it’s any good, so I turn it upside down and look at it in the middle of the night. A pop song is a short form so everything counts. You can get away with murder in a forty-five-minute piece but not in a three-and-a-half-minute song.

Some songs just beat you up because they seem to have too many notes or too many words or are just too much. So what I do is play with the melody, explore it, question it, and see if I can keep making it better. Sometimes a song can overwhelm the listener and make them sick of it after loving it for days. So I have to take on the role of the listener as well as the composer. If a song is starting to beat me up while I’m working on it, I know it’s wrong.

I also have great difficulty letting things go if I get stuck while I’m writing, and that was what happened while I was working on “Alfie.” Howard Koch, who was running Paramount Pictures at the time, asked Hal and me to come up with a song for a film that had already been shot in England and the studio was going to release in America. I read the script in New York, as did Hal, and then I called Koch to tell him how much we liked it.

The song had to tell people what the picture was about, and when Hal called me up from Long Island and read me what he had written over the phone, I knew he had come up with the best lyrics he or anybody else had ever written. It’s a great, great lyric. Because I already had the words, the music took a form I might not have gone to otherwise. I don’t know how many bars are in each section of the song, because I never counted, but it was not a normal eight-bar structure. Instead of eight-bar phrases with an eight-bar bridge, there are ten bar phrases in “Alfie,” and I only got there because of Hal.

It was still a very difficult song for me to write and I had a deadline, so I was under a lot of pressure. I remember going to a theater in New York to see a play while I was writing “Alfie.” My mind was on the song and I was watching the play but I couldn’t let go of what was in my head. The result was that I walked out of the theater three hours later without having paid any attention to the play, and I had also not made any progress on the song because my mind had been so split that I couldn’t fully concentrate on it. I did have one revelation that night, which was that something in the turn of the melody was not working. I would never have realized this while sitting at the keyboard because I can never tell when I go bar by bar. The only way I can do it is by visualizing the scope of the entire song in my head.

After I finished “Alfie,” I made a demo of it in New York with Kenny Karen singing as I played piano. Since Famous Music paid for the session, I was also able to overdub a couple of violins. When the word came down that Lewis Gilbert, who had produced and directed the movie, wanted Cilla Black to record the song, I sent her the demo in London.

Cilla Black:
Brian Epstein was my manager and he had me listen to this song and it was some fella singing “Alfie.” I actually said to Brian, “I can’t do this. For a start, Al-fie? I mean, you call your dog Alfie. I’m sorry. I can’t sing a song, ‘What’s it all about, Al-fie?’ Can’t it be Tarquin, or something like that?”

Because I really didn’t want to record the song, but didn’t want to say an outright “no,” I thought I’d be really difficult for a change and start putting up barriers. So first of all I said I’d only do it if Burt Bacharach himself did the arrangement, never thinking for one moment that he would. Unfortunately, the reply came back from America that he’d be happy to. So then I said I would only do it if Burt came over to London for the recording sessions. “Yes,” came the reply. Next I said that in addition to doing the arrangement and coming over, he had to play on the session. To my astonishment it was agreed that Burt would do all three! So by this time, coward that I was, I really couldn’t back out.

Cilla was a big star and I had a lot of respect for both her and George Martin, who was going to produce the session, so I flew to London and rehearsed Cilla in George Martin’s flat. Then I went in to record “Alfie” at Abbey Road Studios with a forty-eight-piece orchestra and the Breakaways singing backup at a session Brian Epstein brought someone in to film.

When I walked into the studio where the Beatles had recorded all their greatest songs, I knew where I was but my focus was such that I didn’t think about the history of the place or pay it any respect at all. I didn’t say, “Hello, George Martin, it’s a pleasure to have you in the booth at the producer’s chair.” It was more like, “George Martin, yeah, great,” because I only had one purpose in mind. All I cared about was that I had to do “Alfie” with Cilla Black and I didn’t know what to expect from her and I was going to do it all live and conduct and play piano at the same time while trying to get a great vocal from her.

Cilla Black:
There was so much range and it was unbelievably hard, so when I started the song in that soft voice, it was awfully difficult to get all that energy up, literally from my boots, to go for that high note. I was hurting.

I really don’t think anyone had ever put Cilla through something like this before. She had a really strong pop voice but what I wanted her to do on “Alfie” was go for the jugular. We did twenty-eight or twenty-nine takes and after each one, I kept saying, “Can we do better than that? Can I get one more?” The way Cilla remembers it, George Martin finally asked me, “Burt, what are you looking for here?” I said, “That little bit of magic,” and he said, “I think we got that on take four.”

I don’t remember him saying this but it wouldn’t have mattered to me in any event, because I hadn’t come all the way over to London to have someone else tell me that. When I walked into that studio that night, all I wanted was to get 100 percent from the drummer, the bass player, and everybody else. It was a long night and Cilla got exasperated with me but in a good way and she sang her ass off.

Mike Myers:
If you’ve seen the video of that session on YouTube, Burt breaks Cilla in the studio. He was going to do it until it was right and I love the quote from her. “I wanted to foo-kin’ kill him but he was so foo-kin’ gorgeous.”

Of all the songs I’ve written, I would have to put “Alfie” at or near the top of my list of favorites. One of the reasons I feel that way was something Miles Davis told me one night many years later when I was having dinner with him and Cicely Tyson in Los Angeles. I had always idolized Miles as a musician but as a dinner partner, I found him difficult, to say the least, because he only ever talked about himself. I really liked Cicely but in terms of the conversation, she didn’t get much to say. At one point, Miles said he thought “Alfie” was a really good song.

Despite all the hits I had already written, I still always had the feeling that maybe I was putting the world on and I wasn’t really all that good or original. But when Miles Davis said “Alfie” was a good song, he dispelled a lot of that doubt for me and gave me the kind of credibility I had never been able to give myself.

Although Lewis Gilbert decided to use Sonny Rollins doing his own composition called “Alfie’s Theme” as an instrumental in the film, Cilla’s version was released in England in January 1966 and went to number nine in the charts. “Alfie” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1967. By then, Dionne had also recorded the song and she performed it at the Academy Awards show.

When I had attended the Academy Awards for the first time in 1965, I was just so happy that “What’s New Pussycat?” had been nominated that it didn’t matter much to me when I lost, because I never thought I was going to win. With “Alfie,” I walked in feeling very hopeful.

I was sitting with Angie when they announced that “Born Free” had won the Oscar. Dusty Springfield’s brother, who was watching the show on television and could see me on camera, claimed that when they made the announcement I said, “Shit!” I don’t remember saying that but it’s entirely possible, because when I heard the announcement, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t won and I was really pissed off.

Slim Brandy:
Burt was married to Angie and he called me. By now, I had been going with somebody else. Burt’s a man of few words, and he said, “Hey. It’s me. Hi, baby, what are you doing?” I said, “What do you mean, ‘What am I doing?’ ” He said, “Can I see you?” And I said, “You know, Burt, this is pretty weird. First of all, I’m annoyed with you. It would have been nice if you’d called me to say you were getting married so I didn’t have to hear it the way I did. Because we’ve always been close.” He said, “I know, baby. I didn’t know how to really say it to you, but I want to see you.”

This was in New York City. We went out to a few bars and had a few little dinners and then he told me he was leaving Angie. This was before he knew she was pregnant. I loved Burt. There wasn’t one moment, and I’m never shy about saying this, that I would not have gone back to him. I don’t know why he was leaving Angie at that point and I didn’t want to know. He was telling me he loved me and that was all I wanted to hear.

Then I got a phone call from Burt saying, “I can’t leave her. She’s pregnant.” We sat, we cried, we kissed, we talked, and that was the end of that. Then there was an article about the two of us in one of those gossip columns: “Why is Burt Bacharach seeing his ex-girlfriend?” They called me a model and I had never been a model. We weren’t having an affair. It happened so fast, it was like two, three days in New York, and I wasn’t ready to hop into bed with him. We were just looking at each other, reconsidering the whole thing. Obviously, we weren’t finished with each other. That’s the whole point of my relationship with Burt. The truth is, I don’t think we ever left each other. We never really finished. Later on, he used to say, “Same time next year.” Because we would see each other every year, if not more.

With Slim, I just kept bouncing back and forth. The two of us would connect and reconnect and then connect again. Slim was a tough one to leave because we had so much history together and she had been so young when we had first gotten together in Vegas. In a lot of ways she was still the same woman who had gone to bed with me wearing a bathing suit. The other thing about her was that she certainly wasn’t waiting for me, but then once Nikki was born, everything changed for me.

Angie Dickinson:
Although I didn’t see Nikki until the fifth day, I thought she was gorgeous and incredible, but she looked like a tiny sculpture of a prisoner of war because her legs were about as thin as a finger and she had fairly big feet. They kept her in an incubator for three months and Burt and I went to see her every single day, but we couldn’t touch or hold or cuddle or soothe her because they wanted to protect her from disease. When Nikki was finally released, she weighed almost five pounds but seemed contented and normal, and in my opinion, she was doing wonderfully.

Chapter

12

The Look of Love

C
harlie Feldman owned the movie rights to the first James Bond novel but couldn’t come to terms with the producers who were making all the other Bond movies, so he decided to do
Casino Royale
as a satire. He asked me to do the score and write some new songs for it with Hal. It was only the second movie I had ever done, and because there were nine screenwriters, five directors, and seven different actors, including David Niven, Peter Sellers, and Ursula Andress playing various versions of Bond, I had no guidance at all.

Before I went to London I had started watching the movie in the house where Angie and I were living, off Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles. Just like she had done for me on
What’s New Pussycat?
, Angie would change the reels for me on the Moviola and then go to bed while I worked in the next room. While she was sleeping, I watched this one scene over and over again because Ursula Andress looked so drop-dead gorgeous in it. And that was how I came up with the theme for her that became “The Look of Love.”

I flew to London on Super Bowl Sunday. Angie stayed in Los Angeles to take care of Nikki, so I was living by myself in a rented apartment about a block from the Dorchester Hotel. They had leased some space in the basement for the music editor who would thread all the reels of the rough cut into the Moviola for me, because I still didn’t know how to work it.

By the time I started working on the picture, all the directors had already left so there was no one to tell me where the music should start and where it should stop. I was having trouble writing the score because no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t seem to get a handle on what the movie was about. My hours were screwed up and the music wouldn’t stop playing in my head so I started taking too many sleeping pills, Seconal as well as some other stuff a friend in London had given me.

I would go out to dinner by myself at nine-thirty at night, have a couple of Jack Daniel’s, come back to the flat, watch the film, and write for a couple of hours. Then I would take a couple of pills and sleep for maybe three hours. As soon as I woke up, I would make some coffee and go to the keyboard. At about eleven in the morning, I would take a nap and as soon as I woke up I would start all over again. Everything was out of synch and I was bouncing off the walls. I also had to record the entire score in London and by the time I was finished doing that, I was totally blown out and exhausted. Looking back on all this now, I feel like I’m lucky to have lived through it.

There was no pressure on me when I got back to Los Angeles, so I started feeling better. But so long as there was still music running through my head at night when I was trying to sleep, I still had a problem, and it would be a long time before I finally managed to get that resolved.

Hal and I wanted Johnny Rivers to record the theme song for
Casino Royale
, so they brought him over to London but he didn’t like the song. He wasn’t very nice about it and left abruptly. Herb Alpert then saved my ass by offering to record it as an instrumental with the Tijuana Brass. Herb took the track I had made for Johnny Rivers and inserted his trumpet and the Tijuana Brass. Herb and Jerry Moss released it on A&M Records and the song became a hit.

I had originally scored “The Look of Love” in the film as a very sexual instrumental theme. Then Hal came up with lyrics for it and we took Dusty Springfield into the studio to record the song. I had first met Dusty when she came to New York in February 1964. By then, she had already cut her own version of “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” a song Hal and I had written that Dionne had recorded a year before as a B-side. I did my best to talk Dusty into releasing “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” as a single in the States. She was ambivalent about it but let it come out. A disc jockey in New York started playing the song and the record went to number four in the charts.

Dusty was a great girl with a really soulful voice, but she was very hard to record. We were both perfectionists but Dusty was much harder on herself than she needed to be and I think that if we had ever tried to do an album together, we would have destroyed one another. Dusty was so insecure that when we cut “The Look of Love” together in London she would go into a separate control room so she could listen to the playback by herself. I told her that what she had done was great and that it was exactly what we wanted for the picture. I had scored it to begin with a gourd, which is a Brazilian percussion instrument, followed by a very sexy saxophone.

The song was a hit and then became an even bigger one when Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 cut it a year later. “The Look of Love” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song in 1968 but the Oscar went to “Talk to the Animals,” from
Doctor Dolittle
. So when it came to winning this award, Hal and I were now three-time losers.

Hal was still a lot more political than me and the fact that one of his sons was now old enough to be drafted inspired him to write the lyrics for “The Windows of the World.” Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it’s a good song. “The Windows of the World” was also on an album of the same name, which had a track on it called “I Say a Little Prayer.”

When I cut the song with Dionne, we had a great trumpet player named Ernie Royal in the studio. Although I had never worked with him before, Ernie had played with Dizzy Gillespie and was one of the best, but he had an attitude at times. Back then I would write dummy lyrics that had no meaning and then have the copyist put them on the horn parts after I had done the score. I would write out all the notes for the trumpet line and the score. Although the notation was right, putting words to it, like, for instance, “Just holding on,” made the song more lucid for me than just having the notes on paper.

All the musicians I usually worked with got used to this because what I was doing was asking them to think lyrically as they played the notes. I would sing the words I had written to the horn players and then tell them to play those lyrics on their instruments.

After I did this in the studio that night, I said, “Although these words make no fucking sense, do you hear what they are saying?” Ernie said, “I don’t get it, man. You want it staccato or not?” I said, “I want it the way I wrote it and just sang it,” and he said, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” I said, “Let’s take a break.” Then I talked to the music contractor and said I didn’t want to use Ernie for the rest of the date, because I didn’t want that kind of attitude in the studio. It didn’t take away from Ernie Royal being a great trumpet player, but he could have made things impossible.

Even after we had cut “I Say a Little Prayer,” I still thought I had blown it because the tempo was too fast, so I fought to keep it from coming out as a single. One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne.

The flip side of the record was the theme song from the movie
Valley of the Dolls
. Since Hal and I had not written it and we were still under contract to Scepter, we cut the song with Phil Ramone at A&R Studios in New York, where we were now starting to make one big hit after another for Dionne.

Phil Ramone:
The first thing Burt and Hal cut with us was Dionne’s version of “Alfie.” My mother, Minnie, came to the date to meet Burt and the record did very well and then she came to another Bacharach date and she was always knitting in the corner and her gift to you would be a sweater or a scarf. Which is what she gave Burt, because he would always complain about the air-conditioning in the studio and tell me, “Turn it down!”

It got so bad I finally had a knob installed right on the console for him to turn the air-conditioning down because otherwise he would keep fucking with it. I would say, “Don’t go more than a degree because if you do, the whole system is going to reheat and send up cold air.” Burt was also germophobic and would wash his hands before he washed his hands and you simply could not argue with him about it. What Burt never found out until later was that the knob didn’t really work. It was just my way of pacifying him during sessions so he could concentrate on the music.

The next session we did together was “I Say a Little Prayer.” My mother gave Burt the scarf she had knitted for him and they chatted up a storm. When he and Dionne came in to do a another record, Burt said, “Where’s your mom? How come she’s not here?” I said, “Well, I didn’t think she had to be here. We’ve had like three hit records in a row. Are you crazy?” But Burt had got it in his head that my mother being there had helped both songs become hits and he would not start the session without her.

So I called my mother and said, “Burt would really love to see you. He’s got it in his head that you’re his good-luck charm. Can you grab a cab and come right to the studio?” She lived in Manhattan so she came to the studio, and that was the night we cut “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” The song went into the top ten and Dionne won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Pop Vocal Performance of 1968.

What I would sometimes do back then was write against the mood of Hal’s lyrics. The melody I came up with for “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” is bright and rhythmic, so you might think the song is happy, but it’s about someone going back to San Jose after having blown a chance at becoming a star, and is not a happy song by any means. When I played it for Dionne for the first time, she couldn’t believe Hal had written lyrics with the phrase “whoa, whoa, whoa” for her to sing, and she didn’t want to cut it.

Hal had been stationed in San Jose during World War II, and although Dionne says she only recorded the song because it meant so much to him, I had to really push her to do it. After the song became a top-ten hit, Dionne got to love it and I think she also visited San Jose and became an honorary citizen of the city.

“Do You Know the Way to San Jose” opens with bass and a bass drum. I doubled the keyboards, and the strings come in on the second eight and the brass section plays on the instrumental passage. It was a lot for anyone to control, so Phil Ramone would come out into the studio to hear how the music sounded. Then he would know how much of it he could get on tape when we cut it live.

Before he ever started producing, Phil was already one of the greatest engineers. Because he had been a child prodigy on the violin, he could read music and really knew how to keep a string section under control. In the studio, Phil could always tell which violin in the section was cheating by not giving as much as we needed to make a song really work.

Right around this time, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass were scheduled to do a television special on CBS. Herb was looking for a song he could sing to his wife, Sharon, on the show so he gave me a call.

Herb Alpert:
There’s a question I always ask great writers that I asked Burt that day over the phone. “Is there a song you have tucked away in your drawer or someplace or a song that didn’t get the right recording that you find yourself whistling in the shower?” And he sent me “This Girl’s in Love with You.” I called Hal David in New York and asked him if he wouldn’t mind changing the gender. I flew to New York and waited while he worked on it, and as I was leaving his place, I asked Hal the same question I had asked Burt and Hal sent me “Close to You,” a song I had also never heard before.

Burt wrote the arrangement for “This Guy’s in Love with You” and he was in the studio when we cut it at Gold Star Recording. In the studio, I’m the opposite of Burt. He is a perfectionist who likes everything to sound exactly the way he hears it in his head. I close my eyes and I’m from the feel-it school. Obviously, Burt feels it as well but I take a different approach. If it feels right, I stop.

So we had the track and I wanted to see whether my voice would sound good on it. A bunch of the singers and Burt and a couple of musicians were in the control room while I was doing a demo of the vocal. I did one take and went back into the control room and they all looked at me and said, “Don’t touch it.” I said, “What do you mean, don’t touch it? That’s just the demo.” Burt said, “Don’t touch it, man. It sounds great.” I touched up a couple of things here and there but that was the take.

If it feels good, I stop. In tune, out of tune, it doesn’t matter. Burt was conducting and Pete Jolly played piano and Burt may have played the other piano. As far as I remember, it was Burt and Hal’s first number-one hit.

“This Guy’s in Love with You” starts with a keyboard. The rhythm section comes in after four bars and Herbie starts to sing and then he plays trumpet. He wasn’t a great singer but there was a certain charm in his voice because he sang the song like a trumpet player and then emulated what he had just sung when he played trumpet. “This Guy’s in Love with You” was never meant to be a single, but the reaction after Herb sang it on the television special was so strong that he and Jerry Moss decided to rush-release it on A&M. It became the first number-one song Hal and I had ever written.

Since then, “This Guy’s in Love with You” has been covered by about 130 different artists, including Chet Atkins, James Brown, Booker T. & the M.G.s, Ella Fitzgerald, Arthur Fiedler, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. In 1996 I played it live onstage at Royal Festival Hall in London with Noel Gallagher, the lead singer of Oasis.

Noel Gallagher:
A lot of people like Burt Bacharach because they think he’s kitsch. And then there’s a generation of songwriters who respect him immensely for what he’s done, and for the songs that he’s written. He’s a big hero of mine. A big songwriting hero.

We were on the road and I was writing this song and I must say it took me nearly two and a half years to work out the chords to “This Guy’s in Love with You.” I moved it up two keys, swapped all the chords around, put it backwards, and then put the words to it, and it’s called “Half the World Away.” I would say “This Guy’s in Love with You” is the best love song ever. If I could write a song half as good as “This Guy’s in Love with You” or “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” I’d die a happy man.