To me, “God Give Me Strength” has a certain timelessness. It worked as a period piece, but it also worked for the time when the movie was released and I was really happy with what we had done. I like to think that if the movie had been a little bit better, the song might have been nominated for an Academy Award, but that didn’t happen.
Elvis Costello: The film came out and it didn’t really go anywhere. I knew we were technically eligible for an Oscar nomination but there was no way the film was visible enough for the song to have any kind of audience. Had it been any kind of high-profile film, I think the song would have been a serious contender. Just the scale of it. But you don’t write songs with the idea of what kind of awards you might win.
The song was nominated for a Grammy and I’d never been to the Grammy Awards, because it never seemed like anything I would ever be involved in. But Burt and I had gotten friendly by then so I said, “I’ll only do this for you, Burt.”
Burt and I were asked to present together. We went through a curtain and there was this like nine-foot spokesmodel person who was guiding us through and I noticed, not for the first time, that if I stood next to Burt Bacharach in the company of a woman, I would suddenly become invisible. Just invisible. She was a young woman but she looked at him and went, “Oh my goodness!” And I was just some bloke who was standing there.
Some years later, I got to read the citation when Burt was given the Polar Music Prize. I was standing in the lobby of the Royal Concert Hall in Stockholm with Burt and the other two honorees, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Bob Moog. Quite a group. Here comes the queen of Sweden and she sees Burt, and I could see her just go weak at the knees. She looked at Burt and went “Whaaa,” and I thought, “Here we go again.” Everyone else just becomes invisible.
About a year later, Elvis and I started working on an album together that took us months to do. Except for “God Give Me Strength,” nothing was ever fast with Elvis and me. We started in a room in my condo in Santa Monica with me at a keyboard, an acoustic piano, and a synthesizer playing stuff over and over. Then Elvis would go his way and I would go mine but neither of us could ever let it go. I could call Elvis at four in the morning and I knew he would be awake thinking about the same thing as me.
Elvis Costello: So I rang Burt up and said, “What do you think about doing a whole record together?” I went to a writing apartment he had on the edge of Santa Monica and Venice and we worked in a room and got started. It only occurred to me later that the only other person he had ever written music with was Neil Diamond. We both came up with openings or sections of music and in some cases, we ended up writing the complementary or bridging section. In some cases, the music was complete.
It doesn’t make any of us better to know who wrote which portions of what song, but I don’t know whether you can tell who wrote what. I think the assumption by most people reading the credits was that Burt wrote all the music. In fact, he wrote all of the music to just three of the songs. One of them was “This House Is Empty Now,” which I wrote a bridge for that we didn’t use, and the only purpose that served was to prove that the song, despite its length, needed one. He then wrote the one that you hear and replaced mine because the one I wrote wasn’t as good. “The Long Division” is entirely his. “Such Unlikely Lovers” is entirely his.
All of the other songs are some kind of collaboration in different proportions. The collaboration also grew and changed with how much comfort we had with one another. Once we started to get into the rhythm of this language, the songs stopped sounding like my idea of what Burt sounded like, with him correcting me like I was doing some kind of crazy, very esoteric exam. It became a dialogue, not because we were so in tune, but because we could literally complete each other’s sentences in songs like “I Still Have That Other Girl.” And there were sections where we were writing within the phrase together.
Most of the songs were written with us both sitting at a piano or a synth and playing together or me standing and waving my arms around going, “That’s it!” If I suggested a musical phrase, he would get inside it and stretch it over a longer framework. It was his idea to take “Painted from Memory” off the piano and put it on the guitar. In “My Thief,” we actually wrote the two sections and then Burt did these incredible things to make it hold together.
From the point of view of being the lyricist throughout, I had to listen to what was being said in the music whether or not I had anything to do with it but particularly when there were these sections where I would go, “Oh my goodness, what is this saying?” I took away some of the pieces in instrumental form and really struggled for a while trying to match the scale of the composition with baroque lyrics.
What I then realized was that I was competing with the music rather than complementing it. What I had to do was to listen to the voice in the song and what it was saying and arrive at the feeling of it. I didn’t think for a moment we were writing songs that were in any way comparable to what Burt had written with Hal. I was quite happy just to be where we were but it did give me an appreciation of what an incredible technician Hal was. That he could write songs that opened up in the right places for the melody but beyond that were not merely facile but also stories that moved you and used language that was familiar without being clichéd. It’s a very, very difficult balance.
On “This House Is Empty Now,” I kept singing the word “remember” over and over while I was playing a passage on the piano, so Elvis used that to shape the lyrics for the song. Elvis later told me he was worried he wouldn’t be able to come up with words to match the music we were writing, but once he broke through with the lyrics for that one, it all started to flow for him.
Thematically, Painted from Memory was about lost love. Elvis always liked to call it a heartbreak record of sad songs for people who luxuriate in melancholy. Even though we would work together for four or five days at a stretch every couple of months, it still took us two years to finish writing all the songs.
Elvis Costello: Then I came up against the non-negotiable aspect of the shape of the melody. Like what Carole had been through with Burt. “Could it just have a three-syllable word here that makes sense or makes the rhyme?” “No.” Of course, Burt didn’t know that I didn’t know the terminology. “A sixteenth note? What’s he talking about? Is that a semiquaver?” I’m thinking in quavers because that’s the little bit of learning I have. He’ll joke about the fact that we were both up at three o’clock in the morning and he knew I was the other person pacing about that one phrase. He’d call and say, “Elvis. I’ve got it!” You’d think we were safecrackers or something. It was absolutely fantastic.
Perhaps the most thrilling thing is that when we wrote “I Still Have That Other Girl,” we were tinkering with the melody and we came to this part of the song where Burt said, “I think it needs a bridge.” And he started sketching there and then in the room. I looked at him and his eyes were back in his head and he was playing and it was so thrilling that I went, “That’s it. That’s it!” When we stopped the tape, he said, “What did I play?” We just about managed to decipher it with me blurting out over it. But at that moment, Burt had just left the room. He had gone somewhere. It was like, “Oh my God, that’s him composing.”
I was sitting at the keyboard and we were up to the bridge. I just started to play something that was off a little metrically and changed bars and Elvis said, “What is that?” I said, “It feels pretty good.” It seemed to evolve from where Elvis had been with the opening verses and he was very enthusiastic about it. I didn’t remember what I had played, which is the reason I always run a tape when I’m at the keyboard and just communing with music.
I don’t want to stop to write it down, because by the time I do, I could lose half of what I did. I want to be able to leave the keyboard and hear exactly what it was. I can check it on the tape and then go away and listen to it in my head and get a picture. I know there are people who go from one bar to
the next but I can’t. I’ve got to see the whole perspective of how the song evolves. It really worked on “I Still Have That Other Girl” and made the song more immediate than some of the others we did on the album.
Elvis Costello: Burt wanted Johnny Mandell to write the chart for “Painted from Memory.” He talked about David Foster doing some stuff. He talked about Quincy Jones doing some stuff. In the end, I said, “I really think it’s you. You’ve got to do it.” And then once we got in the studio, Burt was in the control room with the 58, a Shure vocal mike, plugged into the board because he speaks so quietly. He was waiting in the chair and we’ve got the flugelhorn players out there and he’s going, “No, no.” He’s written it, mind you, the chart’s out there, and he’s going, “No,” and singing minute phrases that can’t be written down. And he sang it back to them exactly as he heard it. He was just as emphatic about that as the way he wanted me to phrase the melody.
When we recorded Painted from Memory, I wound up playing piano on practically every track because it was like, “If it doesn’t work, I’ll take the blame.” After we cut the record, Elvis and I went out to perform it live onstage with a twenty-four-piece orchestra.
Elvis Costello: It was fantastic being on the road with Burt. We really didn’t make it easy on ourselves, because we opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York. So we weren’t kidding around. And we were not going out there to play the Burt Bacharach/Hal David songbook. We were playing new songs, so it was a big thing to ask people to come see the first rendition of this in a live performance. I opened the show with an acoustic version of “Baby, It’s You” just to kick it off, and then I introduced Burt, who did “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” There weren’t many fast songs on Painted from Memory so I did “Alison” as well as “My Little Red Book.”
It was a very demanding schedule for Burt because of his perfectionism in terms of the orchestration. He didn’t delegate. We went to Chicago to play the Chicago Theatre and ran out of time to rehearse on the stage, so he put the string section in the lobby and rehearsed with them with an electric piano in the lobby. It was incredible. He had string players all the way up the stairs. We also played the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles and went to London and did it at the Royal Festival Hall.
When we started doing the interviews for Painted from Memory, there were people who didn’t understand who Burt was. They’d come in and say, “Of course, you are the King of Easy Listening. You are in the lounge. You are the elevator music.” And I would go, “What are you talking about?” I remember this one German journalist who was very belligerent and started to lecture Burt for not ever having gotten on the rock-’n’-roll train because the world had been in social uproar and rock ’n’ roll was liberating the kids, man. And Burt very patiently said, “You know, I had just come out of the Army and I had studied with Darius Milhaud and listened to Dizzy Gillespie so Bill Haley and His Comets just didn’t make it for me.” It was such a killer argument.
I really felt like I was blessed to be able to work with Elvis, because he had such a spectacular way of telling stories and tracking down words that said things so differently from anyone else I had ever written with. Both of us were perfectionists but we still wanted to go for feeling in every song. I think that’s what came through on Painted from Memory and why people responded to it so positively.
Elvis had never had much use for the Grammy Awards, because when he had been nominated as the Best New Artist in 1979, the award was given to a disco band named A Taste of Honey for a song called “Boogie Oogie Oogie.” I dragged him with me to the ceremony after “God Give Me Strength” was nominated, but we lost to Natalie Cole. A year later, Elvis and I won the Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for “I Still Have That Other Girl.”
Chapter
23
Man of Mystery
I knew who Mike Myers was from seeing him on Saturday Night Live. He had an idea for a movie he wanted me to be in, so I met with him at his house and he turned out to be a huge fan of my music. I never saw the script and it wasn’t a lot of money but I really liked him so I said I would do it, although I don’t know if we even talked about what it was going to be.
I was on my way to Chicago to do a concert so I stopped off in Las Vegas, where Mike was filming. I stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel, and when it came time for me to do my scene, I got on top of this open-top bus going down the Strip at two in the morning.
Mike Myers: I was driving home from hockey practice in Los Angeles one day shortly after my father had passed away, and “The Look of Love” came on the radio and I instantly felt the character and the movie of Austin Powers enter my brain. Peter Sellers was my dad’s hero and that scene with Peter Sellers and Ursula Andress in Casino Royale when “The Look of Love” is playing just delighted my dad because it was a combination of Sellers, James Bond, and Burt Bacharach. For my father, the highest praise he could ever give anybody was “I wish he was English.” And my father used to say of Burt, “He’s one of them great Americans, you know, that you just wish were English. And you feel he is somehow.”
My dad was from Liverpool, and there is a strange Mersey tunnel between the north of England and Burt Bacharach because he’s a sensual guy who writes sensual music and Liverpool is all about being sexy and funny, and having a strong take on the world and being able to sing a song, tell a joke, or tell a story. Oasis are from Liverpool, and they are obsessed with Burt and have his photograph on the cover of their first album. Elvis Costello is from Liverpool and both he and Burt have been in the Austin Powers movies.
The scene with Burt in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery was in the script from the beginning. If you write it, they will come. We shot all night long on the Strip in Las Vegas and there were some considerations like stoplights that weren’t straight up and down but sort of bow in the center, almost killing Burt and Elizabeth Hurley as they sped by them while he was singing live on top of the bus.
I was doing “What the World Needs Now Is Love” to a prerecorded piano track but I was singing live. We shot it and then they had to reshoot it, and by the time we were finished, it was four in the morning. Then I got on a plane and went to do a show in Chicago.
Mike Myers: It was all about me being a straight-up fan of Burt, and so for all of us who had the privilege of being there that night, this was one of those can’t-believe moments. The scene runs about a minute and a half in the movie and if that was what began the Burt Bacharach resurgence, I would be completely honored. Because truly he’s the greatest ever.
Nobody thought the movie was going to do anything, but all of a sudden seven-year-olds all over the country were coming up to me and saying, “I just saw you in Austin Powers.” About a year after the movie was released, I was in Los Angeles when I got a call from Lilly Tartikoff, the widow of NBC president Brandon Tartikoff. She was running the Fire and Ice Ball at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. It’s a very prestigious benefit for breast and colon cancer research and just about every star in Hollywood was going to be there that night. Lilly said, “Burt, you’ll be the only performer and you don’t have to do your whole show, just fifteen or twenty minutes.”
I said, “Lilly, you know I’ve been to the Beverly Hilton for a lot of charity events. People can’t get out of there quick enough, and most of them like to leave before ten o’clock. They’ll all be looking at their watches while I play so I really don’t feel all that good about doing this.” But she talked me into it.
I was introduced by Antonio Banderas, who did one of the worst introductions ever. I was up there with my band and my singers to make some music and I had picked out a medley of songs I had written for movies because I figured, “Hey, we’re in Hollywood, right?” Before we started to play, I explained what we were going to be doing, and it wasn’t as though I lost the audience at that point because I’d never had them. I could see a lot of people I knew and they were all up talking and netwo
rking with one another. Jane was sitting with Terry Semel, the CEO of Warner Bros., who said to her, “These people are making so much noise that Burt is going to blow up.” And about seven minutes into the set, that was exactly what happened.
We were right in the middle of “April Fools” when I cut the band and picked up the microphone and softly said, “Listen, folks. I’m having a really difficult time up here onstage even hearing myself play. The whole band is having a difficult time. I’ve done concerts all over the world and you are the rudest people I’ve ever performed before.”
Everyone shut up and we all went back in and picked up right where we had left off. I got to the end of the set and when I went into the chorus of “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” everyone stood up. I took a bow, quietly said, “Fuck you all,” and walked offstage.
What I was feeling was a combination of real anger and frustration but also self-doubt. Like, I must not be very good. And then I said, “Fuck! I’m just as good as any of those people out in the audience.” But something like that is a real blow to your self-esteem.
Then Jane and I went to Aspen, where she had asked me to do a benefit for a ski and snowboard company that brings disadvantaged kids out there to learn how to ski and snowboard. It was at the St. Regis Hotel. Just like they had done at the Fire and Ice Ball, people started talking while I was trying to play. So I said, “People, if you want to talk, you can talk. But it’s not considerate to me or to other people in the audience who want to hear the music. So if you want to talk, why don’t you just go outside?”
What made it even worse for me was that these two shows were back-to-back. The way I reacted at both of them was completely different from what I would have done when people talked in the audience while I was playing Vegas in the early days. I mean, if I had ever said something like this back then to the customers at the Riviera Hotel, one of the guys who ran the place would have had me killed!
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 22