241 Pizza

For artistic far more than for commercial reasons, Bacharach and David needed Dionne Warwick as much as she needed them. Bacharach once said that Warwick’s voice had “the delicacy and mystery of sailing ships in bottles”. It’s a disconcerting image, suggesting music that is hermetically sealed and devoid of emotional affect. Fortunately for everyone, Warwick refused to be bottled.

Warwick listened to Bacharach play a sketch of a song in his apartment on East 61st Street. “What are you waiting for?” she said. “Finish it!” David completed the lyric for Anyone Who Had a Heart in the bedroom while Bacharach and Warwick rehearsed another song in the living room. As painstaking as Bacharach, David always regretted that an accent in the fourth measure fell on the preposition “of” rather than on the noun “dream.

” Setting lyrics to a song that shuttled between 5/4 and 4/4 and threw in a bar of 7/8 for good measure certainly posed a challenge. So did playing it. When the house band at the Apollo balked at the score of Anyone Who Had a Heart, Bacharach insisted: “Feel it rather than read it.”

When Ben Weisman first heard Bacharach’s music, he thought his songs would never make it because they were too complicated. But the time changes and chord changes in Anyone Who Had a Heart do not register consciously with most listeners; instead we hear a reassuring pulse of rock’n’ roll triplets and Warwick’s devastated cri de coeur. A dynamic tension between the complexity of Bacharach and David’s musical demands and the emotional intensity of Warwick’s vocal galvanises this and many of their collaborations. Anyone Who Had a Heart peaked at No 8 in February 1964, and Walk On By came close on its heels. Greenberg preferred another song, Any Old Time of Day, and released Walk On By as its B-side, but when New York DJ Murray the K played both songs and asked his listeners to pick their favorite, they flipped for Walk On By.

Walk On By reached No 6 and was followed by an embarrassment of riches. Before the year was out, Warwick released You’ll Never Get to Heaven (if You Break My Heart), A House Is Not a Home and Reach Out for Me.

While the enchanting You’ll Never Get to Heaven was another Bacharach-David-Warwick original, sprinkling the light fantastic on the bossa nova of Walk On By, the other songs had previously been recorded. Warwick had become such a star that her version of A House Is Not a Home outsold Brook Benton’s rendition of the theme song for the film based on the madam Polly Adler’s memoirs. David wrote the lyric first in this instance and did so quite cunningly. You’d never guess that the house in question is a brothel from David’s wrenching romantic plea: “I’m not meant to live alone / Turn this house into a home.” Bacharach, David, and Warwick were such a formidable team that year that the songwriters felt little need to collaborate with anyone else. “There was nothing that Burt could write musically, or I could write lyrically,” David said, “that she couldn’t do.”

“The more that Hal and I wrote with Dionne, the more we could see what she could do,” Bacharach explained. “She can go that high, and she can sing that low. She is that flexible. She can sing that strong and that loud, and be so delicate and soft, too . . . The more that I was exposed to that musically, the more risks, the more chances, I could take.”

Bacharach credited his study of classical composition with enabling him to “move beyond the boundaries” of pop songwriting. Instead of composing at the piano, he wrote music in his head and then wrote it down on paper. Elaine Orlando remembered when Bacharach rushed into Hill and Range’s offices frantically seeking a pencil and paper. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “I wrote something on a fence,” Bacharach said, “and I have to go back and copy it.”

Edited extract from Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson, Fourth Estate, £15; 352pp

Simply Brill . . . the best of an era

BURT BACHARACH AND HAL DAVID
I Say a Little Prayer (Dionne Warwick)
Walk on By (Dionne Warwick)
Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head (B. J. Thomas or Sacha Distel)Essential listening: The Look of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection (WEA) is a double-disc treat

CAROLE KING AND GERRY GOFFIN
Take Good Care of My Baby (Bobby Vee)
Will You Love Me Tomorrow (The Shirelles)
Up On the Roof (The Drifters)
Essential listening: King performs her own songs on Natural Woman (Legacy), while British artists cover King and Goffin classics on Goin’ Back (Sequel, available from www.amazon.co.uk/marketplace)

HOWIE GREENFIELD AND NEIL SEDAKA
Breaking Up is Hard to Do (The Cookies)
Oh! Carol (Sedaka)
Stupid Cupid (Connie Francis)
Essential listening: Sedaka’s recordings are collected on Greatest Hits (Camden)

DOC POMUS AND MORT SHUMAN
Save the Last Dance for Me (The Drifters)
Sweets For My Sweet (The Drifters)
Viva Las Vegas (Elvis Presley)
Essential listening: Till the Night Is Gone: A Doc Pomus Tribute (WEA, Amazon marketplace) includes covers by Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson

BARRY MANN AND CYNTHIA WEIL
We Gotta Get Out of This Place (The Animals)
You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling (Righteous Brothers)
On Broadway (The Drifters)
Essential listening: Hits from the horse’s mouth are to be found on Soul and Inspiration (Atlantic)

JEFF BARRY AND ELLIE GREENWICH

River Deep, Mountain High (Ike and Tina Turner)
Be My Baby (The Ronettes)
Da Doo Ron Ron (The Crystals)
Essential listening: Ellie Greenwich sings her own material on I Can Hear Music (Razor & Tie, from Amazon marketplace) and Jeff Barry’s demos are preserved in his volume of the Brill Building Stars series (CKW)

JERRY LEIBER AND MIKE STOLLER

Hound Dog (Big Mama Thornton)
Jailhouse Rock (Elvis Presley)
Stand By Me (Ben E. King)
Essential listening: There’s a Riot Goin’ On! The Rock’n’Roll Classics of Lieber and Stoller (Rhino) includes the original and best versions

FURTHER LISTENING

On Broadway: Hit Songs and Rarities

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