Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music

by Burt Bacharach

  One night I went backstage and said to the conductor, “What were you doing with the tempo of the second song in the second act?” When he said, “Was it too fast or too slow?” I knew we were fucked. If he had said, “Yeah, it was a little fast,” I could have dealt with it. But this was like my coming out of the control room in a recording studio to tell a trumpet player he was out of tune only to have him ask, “Am I sharp or am I flat?” Which was also something I’d gone through before.

  I went to Merrick and said, “This guy isn’t making it. We have to get rid of him.” We decided to have Harold Wheeler, the dance music director who was playing piano in the pit and now does Dancing with the Stars on television, take over. Harold had never conducted a show before but I said, “It doesn’t make a difference. Get him. He understands my music.” Merrick liked the idea of having a black conductor so he hired him and Harold proved he could do it.

  When we finally came into New York after seven weeks on the road, I walked into the Shubert Theatre only to discover that the place was acoustically dead. Phil Ramone came up with the idea of not only partitioning the pit but also putting four girl singers alongside the orchestra so that for the first time in Broadway history, the chorus would be in the pit rather than onstage.

  Phil covered the walls and floors and ceiling of the pit with acoustic insulation and put in seventeen microphones and processed what the girls were singing through an echo chamber. He installed an eleven-channel mixing board at the back of the house so the sound could be mixed live during the show. Everything we did at the Shubert has since become standard practice for Broadway musicals.

  Phil Ramone: I wasn’t union, so I couldn’t run the board, but I would be standing over the sound guy at the back of the theater during the show so I could tell him what to do. Burt was so sensitive that he would say, “No, no, no. We lost that word.” He didn’t like the sound at the Shubert and although what we did there had never been done before on Broadway, it wasn’t like we invented it.

  Merrick said to me, “You can’t do this show without wireless microphones. It’s impossible.” And I said, “Put your money where your mouth is.” Wireless microphones were still in their infancy back then, and during a show you were as likely to hear the taxicabs outside as the vocalist, so the set designer and I worked really hard to hide microphones all over the stage.

  I put surround sound in the theater for the background effects and the girls and the strings. The girls were singing around two mikes and the pit was like a studio. It had some separation and was lined with acoustical material and we had speakers around the theater mainly for the special effects, but the music was still coming from the pit. In the Rodgers and Hammerstein era they had hardly ever miked the orchestra but we had more input so it became a well thought out process.

  Even at the end, when things started to work really well, Merrick said to me, “You’ve got to cut back some of that pit. People think it’s a recording. They think you’re just playing a fucking tape.” That pit was horrible, very deep, so we could actually bury the band in it, but that wasn’t the idea. So we cut the pit back and at the end of the show, people used to come down the aisles to watch the band play the walk-out music. They could see and hear them and there would be two or three rows of people just looking into the pit while listening to Burt’s songs. At that point, I think we could have even sold records from the pit.

  There were some challenging songs to sing in that show, and the toughest one had to be “Promises, Promises,” which had successive bars of five/four, three/four, four/four, six/four, three/four, four/four, six/four, three/eight, four/eight, and four/four. When I first wrote it out, I knew I was changing time signatures nearly every bar but the reason I did it that way was the urgency of what was happening onstage and it felt really natural to me. God bless him, Hal also wrote some really brilliant lyrics for that song.

  If I had been an actor who had to sing that song every night, I would have been pretty angry at the composer, and that was exactly how Jerry Orbach felt about it. He once told me, “You’re breaking my back every night with that song. Why did you have to make it so difficult?” I said, “That’s because the song has to be faithful to the story line and I’m governed by what the character has to say onstage. Chuck is pissed off because he’s been lied to and betrayed by his bosses and he’s all through with promises, promises. So when he sings that song, he has to show his anger.” As it turned out, Jerry wound up winning a Tony Award for his performance in the show.

  By the time we got to New York, Neil had made the show half an hour shorter than it had been in Boston, and Hal and I had replaced five of the original songs in the score. The show opened on Broadway on December 1, 1968, and by then we had already racked up a million and a half dollars in advance ticket sales. Angie had flown in from Los Angeles and my parents were there and the theater was filled with people like Merle Oberon, Sidney Lumet, Ethel Merman, Tammy Grimes, Carol Channing, Milton Berle, Cab Calloway, Herb Alpert, Ben Gazzara, and George Segal. Just as I had done on the road, I watched the show from the back of the house with Neil, Hal, Merrick, and Robert Moore.

  Neil, who had been through far more opening nights than me, was nervous because he thought the audience was not responding as it should. When the curtain came down at around nine-thirty, all the critics rushed out of the theater to write their reviews. I went with Angie and my parents to El Morocco, the nightclub on East Fifty-Fourth Street where Merrick was throwing a party for about 250 invited guests.

  Angie and I got there at around eleven and went to a little office upstairs so we could watch the first reviews on television. The reviews were good but not raves. At about two in the morning, someone walked into the party with a copy of the New York Times. Clive Barnes had given us a great review, so everyone knew the show was going to be a hit.

  Freddy Robbins was at El Morocco that night interviewing people for a promotional record that was then sent out to radio stations to help plug the show. Although Freddy spoke to every celebrity he could find there that night, Hal was not one of them. While Freddy was talking to my mother, Merrick walked by and said, “Thank you for giving me Burt.” Merrick also told Freddy he thought I would be writing many other shows because I was stage-struck and that I was the first new original American composer since George Gershwin.

  After the show opened, I actually got to spend time with Ira Gershwin in L.A., because Angie was friendly with him and his wife, Lee. On Saturday nights, Angie would often go to their house to play poker. I didn’t play but I would turn up about a half hour before the game broke up because they always had great corn rye bread. I got to know Ira a little and he was kind enough to give me a copy of the sheet music for “Strike Up the Band.” On it he wrote, “For Burt—The Fifth B—(in no particular order)—Beethoven, Brahms, Berlin, Bach & Bacharach—with admiration, Ira Gershwin.”

  It was a gift I treasured but I never liked hearing anyone say I was the new George Gershwin, because I knew I could have never even carried that man’s music case. If George Gershwin hadn’t died when he was thirty-nine years old, there is no knowing how much more great music he would have written.

  Even though I knew Promises, Promises was a hit and I should have been really happy about it, all I could say to Freddy Robbins when he interviewed me that night was how much I was looking forward to getting away to Palm Springs for a couple of weeks with Angie and Nikki. More than anything, I was worn out. Promises, Promises was the hardest thing I had ever done. I had seen Angie six times in four months, taken too many sleeping pills, and still hadn’t gotten enough sleep because music kept running through my head like a jukebox playing all night long.

  None of it had been really joyful or exciting for me and I already knew I would never write another Broadway musical. In the theater, with a live orchestra in the pit, the tempos change nightly, and all that was out of my hands. In a recording studio, I could get it right on tape and it wo
uld be there forever.

  I spent another couple of days in New York and went into the studio to record the cast album. Then I got on a plane and flew to California, where Angie had rented a house in the desert. All I wanted to do was get away from music, hang out in the sun, play tennis, and start feeling better. About a week and half later, I got a call from Merrick, who said, “I just wanted you to know that Richard Rodgers was in to see the Sunday matinee.” I thought that was great but then Merrick told me there had been a substitute drummer and five other key subs in the orchestra for the performance. I said, “That’s just terrible! That’s the way Richard Rodgers got to hear my show?” It just killed me to know that, but the only way I could have controlled that was to be in the pit myself every night conducting the orchestra, which was something I was not willing to do.

  Promises, Promises ran on Broadway for four years. The show opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London a year later and ran there for 560 performances. The cast album wound up winning a Grammy Award and Dionne had hits with both “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” and “Promises, Promises.”

  Shortly after the show opened I got a call from the American Symphony Orchestra saying Leopold Stokowski wanted me to write a serious work for them to perform. When I told my mother about it she broke down and started crying. After I learned that it would be at least two years before the orchestra could perform whatever I had written, because of the way symphony orchestras scheduled their programs, I turned the offer down. My mother was really disappointed but I was used to the immediacy of the record business, where you write a song, play it for the artist, go into the studio, make the record, and then track it on the radio for the next six weeks.

  While I was in Palm Springs I didn’t touch a piano and I stopped writing. Instead I played tennis every day. I called my agent, Freddy Fields, and told him to get me out of scoring a new motion picture comedy called The April Fools, starring Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve. I told Freddy I was too burned out to do the job but I agreed to write the title song and they brought in Marvin Hamlisch to come up with the score.

  Two weeks in Palm Springs became four weeks, and then six, and I still didn’t miss having to sit down at the piano every day and write. After two months, I was tan, my backhand had improved, and for the first time in a very long while I wasn’t even thinking about music. Larry Gelbart, who created M*A*S*H for television and wrote A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, had a great line: “If Hitler is alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.” At the time, that was exactly how I felt as well.

  The pneumonia had really taken a lot out of me and it was hard to recover. What I learned was that the longer you stay away from your craft, the harder it is to reenter. What I would say to people who write music is that if you stop for a while and think you can pick it up again anytime you like, it’s really not that easy. There is something to be said for going to your piano or guitar every day, even if you don’t write anything, just so you can keep in touch with your music. If you do that, there will be days when something magical happens, but you have to do it on a daily basis.

  Chapter

  14

  Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head

  At a time when no one under the age of twenty-five wanted to listen to the music their parents liked, the songs Hal and I were writing seemed to appeal to both generations. I guess the best way to explain what started to happen for me during the next two years is that The Hitmaker, the first album I had done on my own, sold a grand total of 3,500 copies in America. My second album, Reach Out, which Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss put out on A&M in 1967, sold 135,000 copies in nine months.

  Herb and Jerry were great guys and I loved them both. While I was making Reach Out, I saw Herb on the A&M lot one day and he asked me, “How did it go in the studio last night?” I said, “You know, it was good but on ‘What the World Needs Now Is Love,’ I didn’t get what I was looking for.” These were the days when I would try to cut three songs in a three-hour call. Certainly two, but since I was working with a huge orchestra, I never wanted to run over because that would cost the record company money. So I was stunned when Herb said, “You didn’t get it? Go back in and do it again.” I said, “Just that one song?” And he said, “Yeah.” I had never heard that from a record company before but that was just how good A&M Records was.

  A few months later I got a call from the brilliant film director George Roy Hill at Twentieth Century Fox, who said he wanted to meet with me. Since I had still done only two films at that time, it was really more like an audition. When I walked into George Roy Hill’s office, he was sitting at the piano playing Bach, and doing it really well, too, and I thought, “This is just amazing. A good director who also knows music.” In terms of my working on the score, that could have been both a plus and a minus. After I got to know George a little better, I learned he had studied music at Yale with Paul Hindemith, who had also taught Helmut Blume, my piano teacher at McGill.

  George knew exactly where he wanted music in this picture he had just shot and where he didn’t want it. When the music was there, he wanted it to be important. After he showed me a rough cut of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I agreed to score the picture for him.

  There were certain scenes in the film that had been shot as musical interludes. During one of them Paul Newman is riding around on a bicycle with Katharine Ross sitting on the handlebars. George had cut the sequence to “The Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” by Simon and Garfunkel. Even after I started working on the movie, I had no idea if George wanted to hear someone sing during that sequence.

  After running the scene over and over on a Moviola, I heard this melody I thought could be a song. When I hear a melody, the orchestration comes out of the same cloth. I knew this song was going to start with a ukulele, and that there would be a tack piano on it to get a honky-tonk kind of feeling. What I would do back then was come up with words that had no meaning but just sounded good to me on the notes I was writing. I think Paul Simon also does this to help guide him to where he is going on a song. I wrote the entire melody, and the only words that kept running through my mind from top to bottom were “Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head.”

  I got together with Hal and gave him the melody. He tried very hard to come up with another title, because if you watch the scene in the movie, the sun is shining pretty brightly as Newman and Ross ride around on that bicycle. My title might not have made any literal sense but those were the words that sounded good to me on the notes I had written and they did contour the melody.

  Hal came up with lyrics in a couple of days. Then he wrote another set of lyrics and took what he liked best from each and glued them together. George Roy Hill had to sign off on the song, so he came to my house. Hal was there and when I played George our song, he liked it right away.

  After I had finished scoring the movie, I ran into Dick Zanuck, the president of Twentieth Century Fox, in a restaurant. He told me he had to fight the board at the studio to keep the song in the picture because they thought it was too risky and unconventional. All I knew was that the song seemed right to me for the time period of the picture. Although it wasn’t particularly pop and not a western song by any means, it did fit what the actors were doing in the scene. If I had known that Dick Zanuck was fighting the people at the studio to keep the song in the picture, I’m sure I would have freaked out.

  Ray Stevens was a very hot singer at the time, so the studio brought him out to watch the movie and hear the song to see if he wanted to record it. Ray Stevens hated the movie and he hated the song. Time was running out so we took it to B. J. Thomas, who was on Scepter Records, which made things comfortable for us. He had sort of a country pop voice and even though B. J. had laryngitis when we cut the song in the studio together, he knew exactly how I wanted him to phrase it. We did five takes and I thought it was great.

  On the day after Sharon Tate was m
urdered in Los Angeles, I flew up to San Francisco to watch a preview of the movie. Paul Newman was there but he was drinking beer in his trailer and so we never talked to one another. Because the composer always comes in last on a picture, the only person who worked on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that I ever met was George Roy Hill. I had a lot of respect for him, and since he was on my side, I thought, “Well, if he’s not worried about this song being in the picture, it must be all right.” When the bicycle scene was over, the audience erupted and I thought, “This is great.”

  Two weeks later I cut the version of the song that was released as a single with B. J. Thomas at A&R Studios in New York. I was torn between two takes, one that sounded comfortable and one that had a lot more energy. I wound up making a splice right in the middle of the song so that it moved from the slower version to the faster one and that was the single they released.

  George Roy Hill also had me write a piece of music called “South American Getaway” to accompany the sequence when Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Katharine Ross go to Bolivia. That’s the piece I’m most proud of in the picture. George always liked the Swingle Singers and what we did on it was use vocalists like instruments. The love theme I wrote for the picture didn’t have any lyrics, but after the movie came out and we were making the soundtrack album, Hal offered to write words for it.

  He came up with a lyric I hated for “Come Touch the Sun”—“Where there is a heartache, there must be a heart”—but when you’re writing with somebody and rolling along together very successfully, you have to pick your battles carefully. It wasn’t like I could go to Hal and say, “Could I take my melody back and have somebody else write the words?” I just had to let it go, and what I did from then on was to call the song an instrumental.

  “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” was released in October 1969 to coincide with the opening of the movie. The song went to number one on the charts in January 1970 and stayed there for a month. On March 11, I won a Grammy for the cast album from Promises, Promises and another Grammy for Best Motion Picture Score for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Three days later, Dwight Hemion, who had directed a Kraft Music Hall special I had done on NBC, and Peter Matz, who had conducted the orchestra, were given Emmy Awards for the show.