To the bookstore, walk on, buy. Fans wishin’ and hopin’ that Burt Bacharach’s autobiography, ANYONE WHO HAD A HEART (Atlantic Books), would be as memorable as his tunes won’t be disappointed.
The story of his life is a real “what’s it all about?” that begins with a startling confession: “I had only been married to Angie Dickinson for about nine months when I started thinking about a divorce”.
Anyone who had a heart would be captivated by this confession, and the heart is further corralled by the revelations of the Burt and Angie’s daughter’s premature birth and her subsequent psychological problems.
But that’s Bacharach to the future. Back to Bacharach’s boyhood, we learn of his sleep deprivation. “Because I kept hearing music in my head I had real insomnia as a kid”.
“When I was 15 I’d sneak into clubs with a fake ID. Dizzy Gillespie was the guy I loved the most. I’d go to Birdland to catch Count Basie. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way”.
Teaming up with lyricist Hal David was monumental and the duo ruled the Sixties with a songbook that have not only become classics, but standards. I have those songs in my music collection- I guess a lot of people who would be interested in this book would also have these records – and I found myself playing the songs as I read, thus forming a commentary on their production.
“Whenever I was having a problem in the studio, instead of staying in the control room I would break the orchestra for ten minutes and go into a stall in the men’s room and lock the door behind me. Thinking it through in my head rather than going to the piano, because if I did that, my hands would just automatically go to all the old familiar places and I would never be able to work through it at all”.
The act of creation is examined as well as the frustrations with the commercial side of the music business.
For instance, Florence Greenberg, music executive, had a track record when it came to not knowing when Hal and Burt had written a hit – she put WALK ON BY as a B side, for example.
The movie business fuelled Bacharach’s ascendency and the book is full of fascinating anecdotes about Hollywood. Pissed off that ALFIE got gazumped by BORN FREE at the Oscars, the Academy Award finally came two fold with BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID for best score and the song, RAINDROPS KEEP FALLING ON MY HEAD.
Those raindrops started falling, flooding into his next film project, and Bacharach was just like the guy whose beat was too big for his head, nothing seemed to fit.
LOST HORIZON was a major disaster, a monumental failure – not only a bad picture but it tore asunder the working relationship of Burt and Hal. “It was really stupid, foolish behaviour on my part and I take all the blame. I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart”.
After LOST HORIZON opened, he got in his car and went down to Del Mar, and disappeared. “I disappeared from Hal, I disappeared from Dionne, and I disappeared from my marriage”.
The disintegration of his marriage to Angie Dickinson culminated in their eventual divorce in 1981 and within a year he wed songstress, Carol Bayer Sager. Again it was a case of music before marriage, riffs before relationships, although it did produce the Oscar winning song THE BEST THAT YOU CAN DO from the film, ARTHUR.
Unfortunately, when it came to his wife, the best that Burt could do was not enough, and the union was dissolved in less than a decade. Carol Bayer Sager was writing songs that were cries for help. “When Aretha Franklin recorded SOMEONE ELSE’S EYES Burt would say “do you think the bass is high enough?”. I don’t think he ever heard the lyrics. All Burt cared about was whether the right sounding syllables were on his notes.”
The best that you can do: To the bookstore. Walk on. Buy.