WHEN BURT BACHARACH encountered Marie Dionne Warrick at the August 13, 1961, session where Leiber and Stoller produced the Drifters singing Bacharach and Bob Hilliard’s
Mexican Divorce, he recognised that, even in pigtails and sneakers, the backup vocalist possessed, in addition to a grin as toothy as his own, “a kind of regal elegance”.
The 21-year-old music major at Hartt College in West Hartford, Connecticut, hailed from East Orange, New Jersey, and a deep gospel background. Although Leiber felt that Warrick’s “piping voice” was too “high-pitched” to carry a pop song, Bacharach was captivated. Yet it was Warrick who made the first move, approaching him at the session in search of work as a demo singer. Later she auditioned for Bacharach and (Hal) David in their Brill Building office. “After two or three songs,” David recalled, “Burt and I were impressed. We told her that the next time we wrote a song that was right for her we would ask her to make the demo.”
It would be well over a year before Warrick released her first single. In the interim, Bacharach, writing with David, Hilliard, and others, had four Top Ten singles, seven more in the pop charts, and at least two other records worthy of becoming hits. In other words, as fortunate as Bacharach and David were to find, in Warrick, their muse, they were already extremely accomplished songwriters when they consummated one of pop music’s most memorable ménages à trois.
For Bacharach, the hits had begun with Gene McDaniels’s Tower of Strength. Born in Kansas City, raised in Omaha, and discovered in LA, McDaniels was steeped in gospel and jazz. He cared little for the pop music he recorded for Liberty Records, beginning with a Bacharach-David song, In Times Like These, that sank like a stone. A nimble tenor who could turn on a dime from a growl to a falsetto, McDaniels felt more kindly toward Bacharach and Hilliard’s Tower of Strength, appreciating its humour and hammy trombone solo. Bacharach felt that producer Snuff Garrett rushed the tempo, which may explain why the lead sheet for the next song of his that McDaniels recorded, Another Tear Falls, with a Hal David lyric, dictated the arrangement with penciled instructions such as “use Bass & Drums with or without Elect. Guitar” and “add piano over girls”.
It was a song Florence Greenberg (founder of Scepter records) rejected, however, that gave Bacharach control of the finished product. When Greenberg dismissed the demo of Make It Easy on Yourself, performed by Dionne Warrick, Bacharach and David brought the ballad to Vee Jay Records, whose vice president for A&R and publishing, Calvin Carter, snapped it up for Jerry Butler, an original member of the Impressions who was now a solo star.
Carter gave Bacharach free rein in the recording studio, allowing him to conduct the orchestra playing his own arrangement, while Carter presided passively in the control booth. Butler recalled that Bacharach, always the ladies’ man, showed up at the recording session with a beautiful, deeply tanned woman in an orange dress who turned out to be Angie Dickinson, Frank Sinatra’s friend and co-star in Ocean’s 11, whom Bacharach had begun dating.
“I’ve always been grateful to Calvin Carter,” Bacharach said, “because he let me go in and make my first record where I could actually be in the studio and write the arrangement. That gave me the confidence and enough of a story so that other people would let me do the same.” Make It Easy on Yourself distilled everything Bacharach had learned from Leiber and Stoller. “Many of the flourishes that one might think characterise Bacharach as a songwriter turn out on closer inspection to be evidence of his skills as an orchestrator,” the critic Francis Davis observed. “Bacharach himself might not see the point of such a distinction.” The songwriting is inseparable from the sweep of the strings on Make It Easy on Yourself and the delicate clarity of its instrumental details. “All these years later what’s remarkable about the song is how grown-up it sounds,” Davis continued. It’ s all the more remarkable because the self-sacrificing sentiment of Hal David’s lyric might have lent itself to Bobby Vee’s juvenile mewl just as easily as to the stoicism of Butler’s magisterial baritone.
The success of Make It Easy on Yourself strengthened Bacharach’s hand. He no longer had to fold when an A&R man told him, “Burt, I like that song, but it’s in 3/4 time. If you put it in 4/4 time, we’d record it.” “That’s how I started in this business,” Bacharach said, “with somebody putting their two cents in and kind of ruining the song . . . obscuring what it was that I had really intended.” Once Bacharach assumed control as arranger and conductor, if not always producer of record, he occasionally intimidated an artist. “I was never so nervous as when Burt Bacharach was in the studio,” recalled the Shirelles’ Shirley Owens. “I told Florence, I just can’t sing with him in the room. He’s a perfectionist, and . . . I thought if I sing one little note that’s flat he’s going to know it. But he said, ‘I’m not going anyplace,’ so that was that.”
Gene Pitney once said that having Bacharach as an arranger and conductor “was better than having a producer”. Aaron Schroeder (Pitney’s manager) and Wally Gold were only nominally in charge when Bacharach arranged and conducted Only Love Can Break a Heart, True Love Never Runs Smooth and Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa, one of Bacharach and David’s greatest records. Having written so much for the movies, Bacharach composed a song for Pitney that sounded like a score. Instead of reflecting or recapitulating a film’s plot, David made up a story line out of whole cloth this time, fabricating a yarn of adultery that made Bacharach-Hilliard’s Mexican Divorce seem like child’s play. Suspense mounts from the opening measures as trumpets, an electric guitar, and finally Pitney himself in turn repeat a two-note figure so catchy that no one complained when it reappeared two years later in Billy Joe Royal’s Down in the Boondocks. The (Brazilian) baion beat seems out of place on the Great Plains, but so is the singer, who will never make it home to Tulsa, as it turns out. When he succumbs to a roadside woman’s attractions, the tempo races and the trumpets flutter deliriously, sweeping listeners up into the singer’s sexual abandon. After this thrill comes the chill of the concluding decrescendo as the opening riff returns, tolling faintly now like a distant death knell, and the singer realises, “I can never, never, never go home again.”
Pitney recorded a few other Bacharach-David songs, but their relationship ended when Bacharach and David fell out with Schroeder, whose aggressiveness was extreme even for the music business. By then Bacharach and David had found another singer who could meet their every musical demand.
When Florence Greenberg heard the demo of Make It Easy on Yourself, she was excited by the singer, not the song. (She also turned down He’s a Rebel for fear it might lose the Shirelles airplay and bookings in a South that did not take kindly to uppity black girls.) “To hell with the song,” Greenberg said. “Who’s the girl?” She was Dionne Warrick, and Greenberg not only signed her to Scepter but also engaged Bacharach and David in a package deal to produce her. When a single did not quickly ensue, Warrick, singing demos and backups for Bacharach and David and filling in for an indisposed Shirelle at live performances, gave vent to her increasing frustration. “I felt Burt and Hal had given my songs away and they felt they hadn’t and that maybe I was being a bit unreasonable. Well, one word led to another . . . and finally I said, ‘Don’t make me over, man!’ and I walked out. About a week later I walked back in. The mad was gone and they had written Don’t Make Me Over.”
Although Greenberg was not initially enthusiastic about the song, Warrick’s recording of the ballad established her career and, thanks to a misprint on the single’s label, her name: Dionne Warwick. She took in stride not only the melody’s daunting range (“She had to sing an octave and a sixth,” Bacharach marvelled, “and she did it with her eyes closed”) but also the rhythm’s highly irregular vacillation between 12/8 and 6/8.
Don’t Make Me Over peaked at No 21 in January 1963. Instead of capitalising on this auspicious debut, however, Warwick’s next two singles scarcely nudged into the charts. This was especially dismaying because in 1963 Bacharach and David enjoyed enormous success not only with Pitney but with far less talented singers.
