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.
I walked out onstage that night at Royal Festival Hall and got a standing ovation and part of me was thinking, “You’re not dead. You don’t have some incurable disease—or do you? Does the audience know something about me that I don’t know?”
Noel Gallagher had gone on record saying “This Guy’s in Love with You” was one of the best songs ever. We got together before the show in my hotel suite to rehearse it so he could perform it onstage with me and the BBC Concert Orchestra. He was really nervous but I said, “Don’t worry. It’s going to be great.�
�� His appearance was supposed to be a big secret but word got out somehow and there were all these photographers down front who were definitely not there to see me.
When Noel walked onstage, he saw a sixty-four-piece orchestra with a complete string section and it must have scared the shit out of him. But he did well and was very happy about his performance. After the show, Noel got really smashed with his whole entourage. We had another show to do the next night so after Noel left, I asked my band, “What do you think? Will he make it, or not?” Noel never showed up, so I had John Pagano, one of my background singers, perform it the next night.
Chapter
13
I’ll Never Fall in Love Again
I was scoring Casino Royale in London when David Merrick came up and introduced himself to me at a party. By then he had already won a slew of Tony Awards and was generally recognized as the most successful producer on Broadway. We talked for a little while, but I didn’t think much more about it at the time. Two years later, he got in touch to ask if Hal and I would be interested in doing the score for a musical Neil Simon was going to write.
The way I heard the story from Neil, Merrick had taken him to lunch that day to ask if he had any ideas for a musical. When Neil told him he only had ideas for plays, Merrick said, “If you did have any ideas, are there any composers you would like to work with?” Neil said the music Hal and I were writing would be a breath of fresh air on Broadway. Then Merrick asked Neil if there was a book or a film he wanted to adapt and Neil started talking about The Apartment, the Billy Wilder film starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine that had won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1960.
Writing for the Broadway stage had never been a particular dream of mine and if I had known what I was getting into, I might never have done it. But Merrick was very astute and he sold me on the idea by saying it was time for theater to change by opening itself up to people so they could do their own thing. I decided to say yes because Neil Simon was doing the book and the property itself was so great.
Some musicals are absurd, but when I read what Neil had written, I knew the show was funny and had a lot of heart. Aside from the fact that the lead character talks directly to the audience throughout the play, Neil’s book was pretty faithful to the movie. Chuck Baxter, a young guy who works at a big insurance company—and also just happens to have the same last name I used when I formed my first band at Forest Hills High School—tries to make his way up the corporate ladder by letting his bosses use his apartment for their extramarital affairs. Then Chuck falls in love with one of those girls.
Promises, Promises, the title Neil came up with, refers to all the promises Chuck’s bosses make to give him a better job in return for this favor, which they never keep. The movie had been set in 1959. By the time we got around to doing the play, sexual attitudes had changed so much that the show already seemed out of date to a lot of people. My concern was the music, and so I thought Neil would fix any of the problems with the story before we opened in New York.
I knew all the songs had to come from what Neil had written and serve the characters he had created. For me this was a good thing because it was restrictive. Hal wrote all the lyrics first and I spent the summer working on the music. By the time I flew to New York in September, I had sixteen songs to play for the cast on the first day of rehearsal.
I wish I could say I was happy to be there, but I wasn’t, because I was going to have to spend the next three months rehearsing in New York and then go on the road to Boston and Washington for previews. Nikki was just two years old and so Angie and I decided it would be better for them both to stay in Los Angeles while I was working on the play. Angie did agree to fly in a couple of times so we could all be together.
We rehearsed for the first time on Labor Day on the sixth floor of the Riverside Plaza Hotel on West Seventy-Third Street. Hal was there along with Merrick, Neil Simon, choreographer Michael Bennett, and Robert Moore, who was going to direct the show. All the actors were there as well, including Jerry Orbach, who had been cast to play Chuck. After we rehearsed the show for about two weeks, Neil Simon went to Merrick and said, “I hate Jerry Orbach. I can’t stand him. Let’s get Tony Roberts to do the part instead.”
Since it was Neil’s play, Merrick called Tony Roberts in Hong Kong and had him fly to New York. By the time Tony landed at the airport, Neil had suddenly fallen in love with Jerry Orbach’s performance and told Merrick he couldn’t imagine anyone else ever playing the part. Tony Roberts eventually wound up playing Chuck in London and he was very good.
We spent six weeks rehearsing in New York. Right from the start I was obsessed with getting the rhythm section in the orchestra to play what I had written the way I wanted to hear it. Even though no one in theater would have ever considered doing something like this, I was such a complete novice that I even offered to pay for extra rehearsals so the rhythm section would be steaming by the time we got to Boston.
To get as close to the kind of sound I was used to hearing in the recording studio, I brought Phil Ramone in to mix the sound, and the two of us came up with the idea of creating a different kind of orchestra pit for the show. Our initial idea was to have the pit partially enclosed with the background singers down there to reinforce the voices onstage. By the time we finally got to New York, the concept got even more complicated than that.
In those days, producers always took a show out of town before it opened on Broadway, so we went to Boston, where the opening night reviews were pretty good. Eliot Norton, the theater critic for the Boston Globe, said the songs Hal and I had written were “as freshly different from those of their contemporaries as were those of Rodgers and Hart in their first shows. . . . It is sophisticated music with its own quick pulse, a nervous beat that catches and reflects something of the tension of the times and suits perfectly the people and the plot of the show, which is sophisticated.”
Despite that, we all knew we still had work to do and Neil Simon had to revise certain scenes. It was something he was very good at doing, which was why they called him “Doc.” The weekend after we opened, I had the worst sore throat of my life. I thought it was just a cold but by the third or fourth day, it just kept getting worse. What I should have done was call my physician in L.A., but instead I called the hotel doctor and he put me into Massachusetts General Hospital, where they told me I had pneumonia.
I hadn’t been in a hospital since I’d had my tonsils out when I was four years old, but at least I was lucky enough to be in a great one. I also knew that as soon as I got out again, I had to write four new songs for the show. David Merrick may have been a great producer but he was not a very pleasant guy. I never knew if he really liked anything, because I never saw him smile.
While I was in the hospital, he started calling me to ask, “How long do you think you’re going to be in there? Because we have new music to write.” When I told him I didn’t know, Merrick said, “Can we get a piano in the hospital room? Because if you don’t get better soon, I’m going to have to bring in some other writers.” At that point I said to myself, “Screw this! This is my life and it’s more important than this show.”
The day I got out of the hospital, I still felt like shit. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in a hotel room with Hal and try to write a new song for the show. Hal had already come up with the lyrics to “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and my hospital stay had inspired him to write, “What do you do when you kiss a girl? / You get enough germs to catch pneumonia / And after you do, she’ll never phone you.”
I sat down at the piano and set Hal’s lyric sheet up in front of me. Maybe because I was still not feeling all that well, I wrote the melody for “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” faster than I had ever written any song before in my life.
Phil Ramone: Merrick was famous for being a dick. The show was damn good in Boston, with lots of laughs. Neil, Burt, Hal, myself, and Michael Bennett were all in the
men’s room after the show when Merrick came in and said, “If you think this fucking show is going to work, you’re out of your minds.” Then he looked at Burt and Hal and said, “We’re missing a song in the middle of the second act and what we need is something the audience can whistle on their way out of the theater.” Michael Bennett went into a stall and just started sobbing and Burt and Hal went off to write “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”
We came in with the song the next morning and it went into the show a couple of nights later. “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” became the outstanding hit from the score and pretty much stopped the show every night.
When we got to Washington, D.C., I still didn’t feel right. I was sure my pneumonia had returned but I had to stand in a cold sweat at the back of the theater every night and listen to Merrick tear into Michael Bennett by saying the dancing was not good enough. It was brutal to watch because I knew how brilliant Michael really was.
I was still coughing and the only person I knew well enough in Washington to call and ask about a doctor I could go see was Ethel Kennedy, who had come to a couple of my recording sessions in New York and was a fan of my music. Ethel sent me to a doctor who took some X-rays and told me my pneumonia had not returned. That made me feel better but I still had to stand at the back of the house every night and watch what was going on between Merrick and Bennett. Angie had come to see me in Boston, but by now she had gone back to Los Angeles, so I was alone in a not-so-great hotel and none of this seemed like fun to me.
It was also torture to be in the theater and listen to someone else conducting my music. And I just didn’t think the guy we had was right for the job. Merrick felt the same way and he kept nudging me and saying, “Why don’t we fire the bastard?”
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 13