Think of Burt Bacharach and one tends to recall such hits as ”Walk on By,” ”The Look of Love,” ”Raindrops Keep Fallin` on My Head” and ”What`s New Pussycat?,” standards that are the epitome of sophisticated, urbane pop music.
Picture meeting the famous composer/conductor, and it`s easy to conjure up the appropriate image: Bacharach in an elegant tux, sipping champagne while he casually tinkles the ivories in some fabulous penthouse.
So it`s a bit disconcerting to find him holding court in Southern California surfer country, where he`s happily if temporarily ensconced in a rented Los Angeles home for a couple of months. ”I just thought it`d make a nice change,” he explains simply.
Casual ocean living certainly seems to be agreeing with Bacharach, who will appear here at the Chicago Theatre beginning Wednesday alongside Dionne Warwick, the voice that has become inextricably linked with his music through the years. Comfortably dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, the silver-haired and tanned composer looks far younger than his nearly 60 years.
Perhaps it`s the influence of the youngest member of the Bacharach household, Christopher Elton, the 1 1/2-year-old son of the composer and his lyricist partner and wife, Carole Bayer Sager.
If it`s a surprise not to find Bacharach at the center of some sophisticated cocktail party, it`s even more surprising to find him looking contented and pleased amidst the domestic clutter of family life. Sure, the guest house-his work room-is jammed with racks of synthesizers and hi-tech equipment and the very latest in compositional tools. But to get there, you have to pass a clothesline adorned with the very latest in baby wear.
Bacharach seems to relish the contrasts between image and reality.
”People always think I was this child prodigy on the piano, that I just couldn`t wait to sit down and practice,” he comments with a sly grin. ”But you want to know the truth? I hated it! In fact, I only did it to please my mother. She was the one who encouraged me.”
Bacharach`s father, the late, nationally syndicated show-biz columnist Bert Bacharach, ”wasn`t at all musical,” he continues, ”but he was a good athlete, and at first, that`s what I was really interested in. I liked sports. But I never had any strong musical goals like some people. I just went with the flow.”
The flow took the Missouri-born boy to New York, where he grew up and where he first became exposed to the artists who would change his life. ”I think one of the biggest turning points in my whole life was first hearing the music of Dizzy Gillespie,” he says. ”It suddenly awakened something inside me, and to this day, he`s one of my biggest heroes along with guys like Charle Parker. Their music really inspired me.”
Despite jazz becoming his first love, the young Bacharach ended up enrolling at McGill University and the Mannes School of Music to study classical composition under such famous teachers as Darius Milhaud, Bohuslav Martinu and Henry Cowell. But after a stint in the Army, he found himself drawn back to the world of smoky piano bars and nightclubs, not always successfully. ”I remember getting a gig playing solo piano in this bar up on the Cape-they fired me after a few days,” he recalls ruefully.
But after being hired as a conductor by Vic Damone and then Marlene Dietrich, Bacharach was on his way. ”An amazing lady, and an amazing talent” he says fondly of Dietrich. ”I worked with her for eight years, on and off, toured everywhere in the world, and learned a hell of a lot from her. She taught me to only go for the best, and to always give 100 percent, whether you`re playing the grandest hall or the smallest.”
It appears that Dietrich was equally supportive of her protege`s talents. ”When `Promises, Promises` became such a hit years later, she personally sent out 50 copies of the glowing New York Times review to agents and bookers all over the world, and each with the identical note-`I told you so,`
” laughs Bacharach. ”What a woman, huh?”
The young composer already had been busy writing songs during the late
`50s, with some success, but it was when he started collaborating with lyricist Hal David, and then singer Warwick, that Bacharach really struck gold. During the next decade, the team scored an enviable string of 39 chart successes, including such classics as ”Do You Know the Way to San Jose,”
”Walk on By” and ”Always Something There to Remind Me.”
”We all met at the Brill Building, and it just clicked-we got on a roll and everything we did seemed to work,” recalls Bacharach. ”We were lucky. It was a case of all the right people in the right place at the right time. Hal and I found the perfect partnership, and Dionne was the perfect voice for our songs.”
But the perfect partnership gradually soured in the late `60s, ending in a messy split marred by lawsuits and mutual recriminations. ”It was a combination of things,” Bacharach says today. ”A writing partnership is like a marriage, and maybe some of the magic had worn off, and maybe we weren`t writing as well together as we had. Perhaps we`d just run out of gas.
”And because we also had a commitment to produce Dionne, as well as write for her, it all became very unpleasant when we couldn`t deliver what we were supposed to deliver,” he continues.
Matters were made worse when the 1973 film musical ”Lost Horizon,” with a score by Bacharach and David, flopped. ”It was a catastrophe, just the worst,” he admits, looking pained even at the memory. ”It`s not easy to do a film musical, because there`s no margin for error.
”Anyway, that disaster brought everything to a head with Hal, and the arguments got very nasty,” he continues. ”It probably would have been all right if we`d had a big hit, but it blew us out completely.”
Smarting from the failure of the film and his personal and professional relationships, Bacharach left Los Angeles for Del Mar to lick his wounds. ”I wasn`t really hiding,” he says, ”but L.A.`s not a great place to be seen in if you`re connected with a monumental turkey like `Lost Horizon.` I just had to get away for a while and recoup my energy and creativity.”
But for the next 10 years or so, it seemed as if the Grammy/Oscar/Emmy-awar d winning composer had lost his touch. Between 1971 and 1981, Bacharach failed to score a single Top 10 hit. And his 1978 album, ”Women,” a pet project he recorded with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, fared the worst, failing to make even the Top 200 chart.
During that period, his personal life also appeared to disintegrate. After 13 years of marriage to actress Angie Dickinson, Bacharach ended up in divorce court. ”I think we just ran out of gas, too,” he says.
”We`d been separated for four or five years anyway, but it was still a pretty traumatic time for me, especially coming not long after `Lost Horizon.` ”
With the collapse of his career and his marriage, did Bacharach ever contemplate calling its quits from the music scene? ”Never,” he insists quickly, ”although there`s always that nagging fear at the back of your mind that perhaps you`ve dried up, that it`s over.
”And the only way to counteract that sort of thinking is to keep working, and keep slugging away at the writing. You know, writing`s never been easy for me, and I often find it difficult to read the commercial marketplace and judge what might be successful. But when you`ve been very successful, and then you can`t seem to hit it right, it can make you crazy. And by the end of the `70s, I was really way out there in left field.”
Bacharach credits Carole Bayer Sager, whom he married in 1982, with bringing him ”back down to Earth. She`s got a much better sense of what`s commercial and accessible, of what will work and what won`t, than I have,” he says, ”and we work together really well. I`ve found the perfect collaborator, for the second time.”
The results certainly speak for themselves. After his long `70s slump, Bacharach teamed with his wife, Cristopher Cross and Peter Allen to produce the Oscar-winning hit ”Arthur`s Theme” in 1981. More hits followed, for the likes of Neil Diamond and Roberta Flack, and then in 1986, another Bacharach- Sager song, ”That`s What Friends Are For,” reunited Bacharach with Dionne Warwick. Also featuring guest appearances from Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight, the record went straight to No. 1.
The husband-and-wife team quickly scored another No. 1 hit with Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald`s ”On My Own,” which they also co-produced. And most recently, they wrote and produced the theme song to the new Diane Keaton film ”Baby Boom.” Titled ”Everchanging Times,” it`s performed by Siedah Garrett, who`s currently riding the charts with the Michael Jackson duet ”I Just Can`t Stop Loving You.”
”We`ve also got songs on the new Natalie Cole album, the Ray Parker Jr. album, and the upcoming Gladys Knight album, so I really feel I`m back on a roll again,” says Bacharach enthusiastically. ”But right now, my main focus is this current tour with Dionne. After all the problems we went through in the past, it`s great to get back together again and just make music and do what we do best. And it`s a particular treat for me, to hear all those old tunes sung by that voice. It`s a real trip down memory lane.”
Despite his record, Bacharach is far from comfortable living off memories, however. ”Now my writing`s back on track, I`ve got big plans for the future,” he says. ”I`d love to do another musical, perhaps with Neil Simon, and I`d love to do another movie with songs-not a musical, but a film with musical interludes.
”That`s what I enjoy doing, and it`s important to do what you really enjoy,” he adds. ”I used to think, perhaps I could have written the great American symphony if I`d stuck with it when I studied under Milhaud and Cowell. But then I realized that`s B.S. If I`d truly wanted to do that, I`d have pursued it and done it. But I did what I wanted to do deep down inside, and I have no regrets about that. I`m happy.”
