Song Lyric of the Day (Classics IV, With an Appropriate Tune for Recent Turbulent Weather)

“You were the sunshine, baby, whenever you smiled
But I call you 'Stormy' today.”—James Cobb and Buddy Buie, “Stormy,” performed by Classics IV on their Mamas and Papas/Soul Train LP (1968)
 
The image accompanying this post, The Storm (1881), was created by American painter Edward Mitchell Bannister and hangs in the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum.

Quote of the Day (Graham Parker, on Why Pop Musicians Make Bad Actors)

“Pop musicians are too full of themselves to act properly.  It’s all preening and posing for us.  We mug, we mime, we throw shapes, we pose, we do weird things with our eyeballs, but we can’t act.  I think deep down many musicians, myself included, consider acting and film making a much higher art form and we wish we were actors.  We spent too many time in music trying to manipulate people’s emotions in under ten seconds.  It’s excessively phony.  I don’t know why there aren’t more actors whose music is any good, though.  But let’s leave Jeff Bridges out of this.  He’s allowed to do anything and it’s always good.” —English singer-songwriter Graham Parker quoted by Cameron Crowe, “When Musicians Act – And It’s Not Terrible,” Vanity Fair, January 2013

The image accompanying this post, showing Graham Parker after his set at Brit's Pub in Minneapolis, MN, was taken July 18, 2010, by Susan Lesch.

Quote of the Day (Elvis Costello, on the Difference Diana Krall Made in His Life)

“My opinion of myself was lower than the ground. What good could come of this new friendship?

“I thought I might be Diana's ‘confidante,’ perhaps write her a song or two. Lately I’d been pulling pianos out from under covers anytime I'd find one parked in the wings of the theater, or I'd go back to my hotel room and work upon a wretched little electric keyboard, my voice hushed against eavesdroppers, saying things that I had lately let others say for me.

“The first song I wrote was called ‘When Did I Stop Dreaming?’”— Rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink (2015)

Twenty years ago today, Elvis Costello and Diana Krall were married on Elton John’s estate outside London, in a mash-up of styles and sensibilities: he, a dark knight of Britain’s New Wave, before moving on to other genres where he continued to vent his wit, rage, and emotional turmoil; she, Canadian, cool, and composed, bringing her blond sultriness and glamour to pop standards seldom seen since the heyday of Peggy Lee.

There was also the couple's contrast in appearance. The year before the wedding, Costello recalled in his memoir, at their joint presentation of Song of the Year at the Grammys, Krall “was so beautiful. I looked like an unmade bed.”

At this point, Costello felt worse than he admitted looking. With a difficult 17-year relationship with Cait O’Riordan ending, he was as mired in the slough of despond as he had been during his great 1998 collaboration with Burt Bacharach, Painted From Memory (which I discussed in this blog post from a few weeks ago).

Meeting Krall lightened Costello’s heart when he was, as the stark title of one of his songs from that period went, “In the Darkest Place.”

As the mutual admiration of Costello and Krall grew into friendship, though, she turned to him for comfort as well, as she experienced within two months the deaths of her mother and one of her mentors, bassist Ray Brown. Costello observed, “The imminent intensity of our friendship was bound up in this powerful sorrow.”

Most people don’t end up marrying the friends who pull them to shore just as they think they’re drowning inside, let alone joining them in family and creative unions. (Costello helped his wife write a haunting lament for her mother, “Departure Bay.”) But in whatever form it takes, the kindness of those who unexpectedly enter our lives can make a real difference, a light in a season of darkness.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Elvis Costello and Diana Krall on the red carpet at the 2009 Juno Awards in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, was taken on Mar. 29, 2009, by Shayne Kaye.)

Flashback, September 1998: Costello, Bacharach Release Searing Songs of Heartbreak

Twenty-five years ago this month, two songwriters who few could have predicted, two decades before, would ever collaborate released Painted From Memory, a CD that won a Grammy and recharged their creative energy. 

The album yielded a dozen tightly crafted pop songs and considerable creative satisfaction for Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach. If their artistic union went swimmingly, the same could hardly be said of the romantic betrayal, pain, hurt, and regret present on every song in this collection, courtesy of this unlikely duo’s relationships with the six wives they had already had to this point. 

Understandably, Costello has made no bones about these songs being “excessively personal.”

When Costello burst on the music scene in the late 1970s, he quickly gained a reputation for rapid-fire, blistering tunes that matched his reputation at the time as a surly young new wave artist. In the same period, Bacharach found himself experiencing a case of the middle-aged crazies, having split from his second wife, actress Angie Dickinson, and his longtime lyricist, Hal David.

Twenty years later, they were in different places, musically and mentally. Costello had gained a well-deserved reputation for being among the most versatile and musically adventurous musicians of his generation, collaborating with country, jazz, hip-hop, classical music, and R&B artists. Bacharach was seeing something of a career revival, with his songs from three decades before receiving renewed exposure in film hits like My Best Friend’s Wedding and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

Costello had long been a fan of Bacharach, more than 25 years his senior, and had even played “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” early on in concert. He finally met Bacharach in 1989 when the two recorded at the same studio.

But what brought the pair together to work was the 1996 film Grace of My Heart, set in the Brill Building songwriting factory of the late Fifties and early Sixties—an environment that had bred, among others, Bacharach and David.

Bacharach had already been engaged to write the music for the song intended for the movie’s Carole King-like protagonist when Costello came on board to write the lyrics. They worked long distance, exchanging lyrics and arrangements via fax.

The result, “God Give Me Strength” (featuring the voice of Kristen Vigard but lip-synched by Illeana Douglas), was a distinct high point in the movie. Thankfully, it didn’t stop there.

As Costello noted in his 2015 memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, “To have written a song like ‘God Give Me Strength’ and simply stopped would have been ridiculous, so about a year later we began a series of writing sessions, the first at Burt’s work studio near Santa Monica and later in a hotel suite on Park Avenue… One of us would lead the way with an opening statement, perhaps a verse or even all the way through a refrain, and the other would naturally follow with an ever more elaborate bridge of resolution, but as the exchange of ideas got faster and faster, we found ourselves completing each other’s musical sentences at the piano.”

If two words could summarize the creative fusion between the two, it would be “painstaking” and “accommodation.”

The two song craftsmen were used to creating the most intricate examples of their specialties: Costello, twisty lyrics spitting out satire, sarcasm, and wordplay; Bacharach, irresistible hooks that masked complicated arrangements filled with changing time signatures and irregular phrasing, all somehow refined from his classical music training and love of bebop.

In Bacharach, Costello found a master of the studio whose compositions were so complex that they required musicians who could meet his exacting standards. On the other hand, he had to find a way to place his own words naturally into this sumptuous sound.

As he told Chris Willman in a March interview for Variety Magazine, his first thought was: “‘How am I ever gonna make sense with something so, so, so spaced out?’… So this was more of a challenge for me, to make those words really land on the (minimal beats), and have it still make sense and have it still sound like me. It took a bit of puzzling.”

At the same time, the relationship agonies expressed in the songs required Costello to convey a naked, soul-baring emotion he had rarely had to summon to date. Each song, after all, was a character study in which a complex character ranged across betrayal, being cuckolded, feeble self-justification, self-recrimination, hatred and heartbreak.

And here’s the thing: beneath its shimmering orchestral pop surface, replete with tinkling piano, French horn, and muted strings, the lyrics did not deviate in the slightest from the CD’s first note to last. The first song is not titled “In the Darkest Place” for nothing—not with Costello singing, “I'm lost, I have abandoned every hope.”

Costello and Bacharach chose the song that brought them together, “God Give Me Strength,” to close out their CD. But if the protagonist has chosen to reach out past himself, it’s because he has to: he is in such despair that God is his only hope.

Few moments in pop music describe the searing loss of a lover with the outburst that Costello lets loose at the song’s climax:

I might as well wipe her from my memory
Fracture the spell, as she becomes my enemy
Maybe I was washed out like a lip-print on my shirt
See, I'm only human, I want her to hurt.

Marinated in melancholy, Painted From Memory masterfully expressed what Wall Street Journal critic Marc Myers called this past March “the anguish of failed relationships—creating a new breed of saloon song minus the saloon.”

"I Still Have That Other Girl" brought Costello and Bacharach a 1999 Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. But it turned out to be the last studio album they put out during Bacharach’s lifetime.

Bacharach died in February, only a few weeks before the release of a 4-CD box set, The Songs of Bacharach and Costello. The set includes a remastered version of Painted From Memory; Taken from Life, a song cycle reflecting the development of Painted from Memory into an abortive Broadway musical that would have been co-produced by Big Bang Theory showrunner Chuck Lorre; a collection of concert performances, mostly piano-and-vocal from Costello and another Bacharach collaborator, Steve Nieve; and other live Costello performances of scattered Bacharach and David songs over the years.

Recently I blogged about another artist—director Martin Scorsese—moving in a direction not expected by longtime fans with his adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence. In a similar radical overturning of expectations, Costello, with Bacharach’s plush orchestration in Painted From Memory, could not have more astounded listeners who wanted no part of collaboration with one of the prime purveyors of Sixties MOR music.

Yet Costello, like Scorsese, created what many now regard as a distinct highlight in a career full of them. And Painted From Memory, like The Age of Innocence, continually rewards those who return to it to find new subtleties each time.

Flashback, June 1963: Brian Wilson Takes Studio Helm for Beach Boys

As the eldest of the musical Wilson brothers and co-songwriter of their first original hits, Brian Wilson was already the center of attention for The Beach Boys. 

But in June 1963, the 21-year-old took on even greater importance as he assumed the role of producer, moving the band into some of the most innovative territory in 1960s pop music even as the additional pressure from it all endangered his fragile psyche.

I became interested in this topic because of the brief scenes devoted to Brian’s studio sessions for Pet Sounds and the single “Good Vibrations” in the 2014 biopic Love and Mercy.  

If music employs elements of mathematics, then the story of how Brian solved so many harmonic equations simultaneously—all within the tight space of a 2 1/2-minute pop single—makes him seem like Einstein discovering the formula for relativity while everyone else is merely adding 2 and 2.

Paul Dano’s Brian in Love and Mercy is, initially, remarkably self-assured for someone so young, coaxing skilled studio musicians towards the sounds he hears in his head. He’s not dictatorial or arrogant in his perfectionism, just hyper-focused—until he finally hears what he has in mind, producing the most beatific of smiles.

Brian had only formed the Beach Boys two years earlier, but his mastery of songwriting and recording techniques was advancing rapidly. And he now had learned enough to know what hadn’t been working, and to try to do something about it.

He and the other Beach Boys had been quietly fuming about how hurriedly and cavalierly their initial producer at Capitol Records, Nick Venet, had arranged their first two LPs, Surfin’ Safari and Surfin’ USA. As a bass player himself, Brian especially hated the poor bass sound coming out of Capitol’s studio.

Brian’s father, Murry Wilson, pressed Capitol to let Brian be in sole charge of the band’s production from now on. The record company reluctantly agreed.

On June 12, Brian took his engineer and studio right-hand man, Chuck Britz, into Western Recorders studio, where the Beach Boys worked on two of their seminal early hits, “Little Deuce Coupe” and “Surfer Girl.”

Two days later—still a handful of days short of turning 21—Brian turned to L.A.'s Gold Star studio, used by one of his musical heroes, Phil Spector—and, over the next four years, until a devastating nervous breakdown diminished his influence in the band, evolved into one of the most influential forces in pop music.

But more interesting to me ultimately was how Brian came by his musical acumen, what his innovations were, and why—along with Phil Spector, George Martin, and Berry Gordy—he ranks among the most influential musical producers of the Sixties.

To answer the first question: however Brian developed as a musician—the bassist and keyboard player in a rock ‘n’ roll band—was as basic as learning one’s ABCs. Even obvious early influences like Chuck Berry, The Lettermen, the Four Freshmen, and Jan and Dean could only take him so far.

He needed people who could fire his imagination. From the age of four, Brian was taken with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, bowled over by “everything” about it, he told NPR in an interview 13 years ago: “The chords, the melodic movement, the arranging, the impetus, the excitement, the beauty. It was just an absolute work of art."

Among slightly older contemporaries, Brian found a couple of others who provoked him into thinking how he could expand his musical palette.

As a composer and producer, Burt Bacharach was blending the complex chromatic shifts in jazz into three-minute pop melodramas of aching and loss.

The “Wall of Sound” created by Spector particularly affected Brian. He played one of the hits of the super-producer labeled the “first tycoon of teen” by Tom Wolfe, “Be My Baby,” “a hundred times every single day,” according to the lead singer on the single, Ronnie Bennett (who later married Spector). 

In fact, Brian wrote in the following year “Don’t Worry, Baby,” hoping vainly that it would be used by the man he regarded as the greatest producer in the world.

As Brian increasingly used the group of ace studio musicians known as “The Wrecking Crew,” other members of the Beach Boys—notably, Mike Love—began to chafe about where they would fit in with all of this. 

With so little to do instrumentally themselves, how long would they have to wait around in the studio till he got what he wanted? Where would deviating from their surf rock sound take them on the marketplace? How would they perform this in concert? And where would their own harmonies fit in?

On this last score, certainly, their fears proved groundless.  Brian adopted Spector’s method of doubling up on instruments, including ones that were quite unusual in pop music. (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”, on Pet Sounds, featured two pianos, three guitars, three basses, four horns, two accordions, drums, and percussion.)

But, as noted in Scott McCormick's September 2017 post from the blog “Disc Makers,” the Beach Boy leader also exercised restraint and allowed for more aural space, enabling more intimate harmonies—exactly his group’s forte.

A year and a half later, Brian’s crippling workload and frenetic songwriting-arranging-touring schedule led him to have a nervous breakdown while on tour, leading him to stop performing live so he could concentrate on the studio. It was the first indication of the mental health issues that would plague him from then on. 

But, even as he worried about how the Beach Boys would compete musically against a foreign invader on the U.S. charts—the Beatles—Brian would be creating work that would be imitated by fellow musicians and loved by millions of fans for the next 60 years and counting. 

Always musically adventurous, he was evolving the group from its Berry-based guitar foundation and surf-and-hot-rod teen subject matter to polyphonic pop symphonies that would take in a wider age group and world.

This Day in Pop Music History (Carl Wilson, Beach Boys' Glue to Brother Brian’s Genius, Dies)

Feb. 6, 1998— Carl Wilson, the youngest of three brothers who formed the nucleus of the Beach Boys—and the one who kept the band together when his siblings spiraled into mental illness, substance abuse and family feuding—died at age 51 of lung cancer in Los Angeles.

As chief songwriter and studio mastermind, Brian Wilson has always been rightly seen as the group’s genius (as I myself acknowledged in a prior post on the making of the band's masterpiece, Pet Sounds).

But Carl made his own distinct creative contributions from the beginning—and, when Brian stopped touring in the mid-Sixties because of a nervous breakdown, and Dennis Wilson grew ever more wild and dangerous in pursuing women, alcohol and drugs, Carl took on a larger role in the studio and on the road, functioning as the group’s de facto leader.

None of this could have been easy. But Carl also had to maintain the Beach Boys’ sense of experimentation while keeping in the fold lead singer and cousin Mike Love, whose unwillingness to stray far from the band’s original surf sound and subject matter increasingly threatened to turn the group into a nostalgia act.

From the start, Brian knew that Carl, four and a half years younger, was open to new sounds, learning how to play guitar from imitating Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley chords and, in the mid-Sixties, learning the 12-string Rickenbacker as well.

As Brian’s mastery in the studio increased, his confidence in his kid brother’s harmonies grew, and he featured Carl more and more on lead vocals, including two of the Beach Boys’ seminal songs in their most musically innovative period, “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations.”

Still only 14 years old when the band’s first hit, “Surfin’,” climbed the charts in 1961, Carl would be all of 21 when Brian’s collapse during the Smiley Smile sessions thrust him into the role of studio leader, too.

The Beach Boys’ turmoil in this period was a microcosm of what the nation was also experiencing at this time: generational conflict (the Wilsons’ abusive father Murry sold publishing rights to their songs for what turned out to be a comparative pittance); flirtation with Eastern religions (Love visited the Indian ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi); drugs; violence (Dennis even briefly shared his home with Charles Manson); and Vietnam (Carl filed for conscientious objector status).

Yet the group was being written off as hopelessly square, as musical tastes turned sharply towards harder rock.

Carl was not without his own problems, particularly as he hit his 30s, including drugs, alcohol and a painful divorce. But he displayed a resilience that his older brothers lacked.

In the process, he not only overcome his own issues, but spent much time trying to release Brian from the clutches of his psychiatrist-Svengali, Dr. Eugene Landy, and served as an emotional anchor for his nieces and nephews when their fathers fell deeper into personal difficulties. (Dennis would die in a drowning accident in 1983.)

Brian’s waning presence in the band was much discussed—overwhelmingly to its detriment—in the post-Smiley Smile period. But in many ways that criticism was unfair. Much of the Beach Boys’ most interesting work—including mainstays of their live shows for nearly the next half-century—was recorded in this time, including “Darlin,’” “Sail on Sailor,” "Friends," and two particular favorites of mine featuring Carl on lead vocals, “Wild Honey” and “Long Promised Road.”

It might have been, though, that Carl’s most significant contribution during these years of critical and popular neglect was just to keep the band together as a touring unit. Though the band would never again have the sustained chart success it had experienced in the early to mid Sixties, audiences and critics would come around again to see them as seminal influences in popular music.

There were times, particularly in the early Eighties, when the internal strains of leading so many dysfunctional band members wore on Carl. 

In 1980, annoyed at the group’s lack of rehearsal time and its choice of material, he quit and released two solo albums. Their commercial failure, and the other band members’ vow to change, led him to rejoin two years later—though, for the next decade and a half, he increasingly yielded to Love on the Beach Boys’ musical direction.

The Beach Boys have continued to perform up to the present, but they have become increasingly riven into Love and anti-Love factions. Something irreplaceable died with Carl 25 years ago—an amazingly sweet, pure voice that reflected the singer’s gentle spirit and soul.

As friend and songwriting collaborator Robert White Johnson said after in an interview for The Vinyl Dialogues blog:

“I don’t think Carl ever got the accolades that he deserved for his musical contributions, instincts and abilities. If it hadn’t been for him, the Beach Boys would have died a long time ago. He kept it together, he kept it going. He was the heartbeat, he kept it real, vocally and artistically. He was a true inspiration to me, even with his regard to his humanity. It doesn’t take me much to get teary-eyed thinking about him. I was honored to be his friend.”

Quote of the Day (Carina Del Valle Schorske, on the Painful Origin of a Pointer Sisters’ Country Hit)

“Anita Pointer wrote the first draft of the country song ‘Fairytale’ at a motel in Woodstock while she and her sisters were on tour singing backup for Dave Mason. She was still reeling from the revelation that her new boyfriend, a San Francisco radio DJ, had been married all along—a story so common she’d call it cliché if she didn’t have to plot the next chapter herself. That night she stayed up late running her favorite James Taylor tape on repeat, and the lyrics she wrote channeled his plainspoken style: There’s no need to explain anymore—I tried my best to love you, now I’m walking out that door. Once the tour was over, Anita’s baby sister Bonnie provided the bright and buoyant melody, as if to sustain the momentum of departure.”—Writer and translator Carina Del Valle Schorske, “Fairytale: The Pointer Sisters, the Great Migration, and the Soul of Country,” Oxford American, Issue 119, Winter 2022

I had just bought the latest issue of Oxford American this weekend when I heard about the death of Anita Pointer. The sad news brought back to me—as, I’m sure, it did countless other music fans—40 years and more ago, when she and her sisters embodied all the sass and ebullience of our collective youth.

The vocal harmonies of the Pointer Sisters began in youth gospel choirs in their parents’ church, before they would be heard, to joyous effect, across other genres: soul, pop, rock ‘n’ roll, and most surprisingly, as Ms. Schorske indicated, country.

(Not only did “Fairytale” win a Grammy for Best Country and Western Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group, but Anita would join sisters Ruth, June and Bonnie in appearing at the Grand Ole Opry—one of the first African-American acts to headline at that legendary venue.)

Alex Traub’s obituary for Anita in The New York Times stressed the versatility of her lead vocals: how, from her low register, she could “coo,” deliver “an earnest, imploring tone,” segue to a “huskier, sexier side,” but above all singing “with the speed and flavor of molasses.”

Although Traub’s piece sums up Anita’s protean vocal gifts, you really should read Ms. Schorske to appreciate what a cultural touchstone she created in “Fairytale”—a song that symbolized not only their musical restlessness, but also the larger movement that The Pointer Sisters represented as part of the Great Migration from the Deep South of the Jim Crow era. (Their parents left Arkansas for Oakland, Calif.)

Anita’s urge to remember the heritage of slavery and racism found an outlet in a collection of objects related to African-American history, a constant reminder to her that “everybody don’t love you and you have to prove them wrong.”

Remembrance was her private means of defiance, though the adoring public for her and her sisters will surely remember their public exultation in the face of everything, in hits like “Yes We Can Can,” “Jump (For My Love),” “Automatic,” “Fire,” and my favorite, “I’m So Excited.”

(For more on Anita Pointer and her sisters, you might want to listen to her interview three years ago with "Nasty" Neal Jones on the “Inside Your Head” podcast, promoting Fairytale, her memoir written with brother Fritz. In it, she discussed her sisters’ struggle starting out at Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, as well as the group’s appearances on Sesame Street, The Carol Burnett Show, and entertaining the troops with Bob Hope during the Gulf War.)

Quote of the Day (Jimmy Webb, on the Inspiration for ‘Up, Up and Away’)

“We jumped in the basket, they fired up the balloon and we slowly began to rise. The ascent was an epiphany. It was a beautiful day and the sun splashed across the balloon's surface. Looking up inside, the bright colors seemed like a cathedral's stained-glass window….Up there, Willie [deejay William F. Williams] and I joked with each other. He said, ‘We ought to make one of those teen beach movies, but in the desert about ballooning.’”—American singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, on the genesis of “Up, Up and Away,” quoted in Marc Myers, “Anatomy of a Song: Why ‘Up, Up and Away’ Really Is About a Balloon Ride,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2, 2021

Okay, gather ‘round, all you aging baby boomers—and especially those with a mind-altering substance at hand (or just thinking of consuming one):

“Up, Up and Away,” one of the first hits by the precocious Jimmy Webb (all of 17 at the time!), is not—I repeat, not—a drug song. Got that?

That’s a tough pill to swallow for some Boomers, who in their heyday—their twenties and thirties—wanted to turn everything into a drug song, the better to transgress against the older generation.

They may have felt within their rights to think so, because so many of their musical heroes did use drugs and made no apologies for it. And if these counterculture icons were songwriters, that meant they were poetic and stuff, so the central ideas of their songs could very easily serve as metaphors for drugs, right?

Not quite. 

The list of songs reputed to be drug songs but disclaimed as such by their creators include “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Eight Miles High,” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” You can almost see these songwriters close their eyes as they’re asked for the millionth time about a tune they may have dashed off in no time but after its release got unwanted (and unwarranted) notoriety from the FBI, fire-and-brimstone preachers, and hippies who couldn’t help thinking how cool they were to know the real story behind it!

You can put Webb among those creators who, just this once, want to be taken literally about a song that embodies for so many fans a carefree way of life. 

Is it really so hard to believe, he seems to be saying, that his Grammy-winning tune—one of the first I ever heard pour out of a transition radio, in the version made famous by The Fifth Dimension—might really have been the theme for a movie that never got made—one of those Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello-style teen romps, but instead of “Beach Blanket Bingo,” maybe better called “Balloon Magic Bingo”?

We live in a skeptical age, but I, for one, believe Mr. Webb. After all, in his memoir The Cake and the Rain, he ‘fessed up to all other kinds of misadventures with drugs up to his late 20s. As long as he was making a clean breast of things, why wouldn’t he own up to this, too?

There’s also the matter of the above quote. It’s so detailed, so impressionistic, that it can only convey the kind of day that imprints itself forever in the memory. It’s gotta be true.

If you don’t believe it, too, I guess I’d rather be “suspended under the twilight canopy.”

Song Lyric of the Day (Bacharach and David, on the ‘Dream in Your Heart’)

“Fame and fortune is a magnet

It can pull you far away from home

With a dream in your heart you're never alone.”— "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," music by Burt Bacharach, lyrics by Hal David, recorded by Dionne Warwick for her Valley of the Dolls LP (1968)

Bacharach’s effervescent melody and Warwick’s lighter-than-air vocals can only go so far in camouflaging David’s melancholy, even searing lyric about a disappointed dreamer returning home.

Celebrity can happen virtually overnight, but it’s a big if, and in the meantime “weeks turn into years.” In the freeway culture of Southern California, those looking for the big time may be as likely, in this setting, to be pumping gas as waiting on tables.

It’s all insubstantial and transitory. In the end, the song’s symbol of home, San Jose (not the high-tech center it is now, but a farming community filled with orchids), feels as elusive as L.A.

So, why waste one’s life and stick around for a quest so empty and unfulfilling for so many? It’s that single line, the song’s single light in the darkness: “With a dream in your heart you're never alone.” The songwriting partners could surely relate to that, with Bacharach noting that he “knew  all nine floors” of New York’s fabled Brill Building, where he had to endure constant rejection from the music publishers gathered there.

Warwick did not warm to these lyrics. “It was not one of my favorite songs that Hal David wrote,” she told People Magazine’s Liz McNeil in a 2019 interview. “I just couldn’t imagine Hal writing a lyric that had ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa….'”

Her lack of faith in the song manifested itself initially in her first try at it. “When she performed it at the recording session, I think it was the only time during that period we didn't get a vocal from her that was good enough to use,” Bacharach recalled for Michael Fremer in a 1985 interview for Analog Planet Magazine. “So we had to bring her back into the studio to have her overdub her vocals."

The songwriting duo’s persuasion finally produced the desired result. "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" (asked rhetorically, so, oddly enough, there’s no question mark in the title) sold 3.5 million copies and earned Warwick a Grammy for Best Contemporary-Pop Vocal Performance, Female.

Or, as the singer told McNeil laughingly, she “cried all the way to the bank. What can I tell you?”

(The image accompanying this post shows David on the left and Bacharach on the right, with Warwick between them—anchoring this picture, as she did with so many of their songs.)

Film Review: ‘Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice’

I only saw Linda Ronstadt once in her roughly 40-plus career as a singer, and though it was still at a relatively early stage, the impression she made at the Garden State Arts Center on that night in 1976 still lingers: a petite, dark-eyed singer caught out by a single spotlight, her voice filling the amphitheater until it had engaged every heart with songs of longing, joy and loss.

I did not know until watching Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice that this queen of rock ‘n’ roll doubted her ability so much that, if she saw one audience member talking to another, she might assume they were conversing about the bad show she was putting on.

How wrong she was. The documentary, in general release for several weeks now, reminded me that this voice created an indelible portion in the soundtrack of my youth in the mid-to-late Seventies, and I’m sure many Baby Boomers feel similarly. She was inescapable on the radio and in the print outlets that made rock ‘n’ roll so enormously essential back then—not just a Time Magazine cover but glamorous Rolling Stone photos by Annie Liebowitz. 

All of this was not without struggle. The film painstakingly sets out two challenges she faced in her career, particularly starting out in the late Sixties and Seventies: being taken seriously by the male-dominated community of musicians, and convincing record executives to permit her to try new artistic challenges, especially when they did not seem initially to be commercially viable.

To tackle the first challenge, Ronstadt became instrumental in creating a de factor musical sorority consisting of Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and singer-songwriter Karla Bonoff. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, these artists shared her broad musical tastes. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, Ronstadt displayed an almost unmatched versatility with different musical genres. 

Already having displayed her facility with country, folk, R&B, pop, and New Wave, she became even more adventurous as she entered middle age, trying her hand at Gilbert and Sullivan (Pirates of Penzance), the Great American Songbook (three LPs in collaboration with producer Nelson Riddle), and Mexican ranchera. 

As the documentary makes clear, she imbibed her eclectic tastes at an early stage from her immediate family. Canciones de mi Padre (“Songs of my Father”), the biggest selling non-English language album in American recording history, paid tribute to her German-Mexican father, who, the singer remembers, was gifted with a rich baritone that reminded her of Frank Sinatra. Ronstadt’s mother bequeathed to her an appreciation for Gilbert and Sullivan. Her siblings fed her interest in country (Hank Williams was a great favorite), pop and folk.

Without dwelling on it, the documentary takes note of her offstage private life (California Gov. Jerry Brown and singer-songwriter J.D. Souther were, for a time, romantic interests, and in the Seventies speed and diet pills were her principal forms of self-medication). 

But it is more interested in aspects of her life that rock ‘n’ roll’s patriarchy, for one, did not take as seriously as it should have until her career was effectively over: her abundant talent and significant influence in the music industry.

Fond reminiscences and high praise for her skill are offered in interviews conducted especially for the film with friends and associates such as critic-turned-filmmaker Cameron Crowe and performers Raitt, Parton, Harris, Bonoff, Souther, Don Henley, and Jackson Browne.

In one of the interviews, Browne—whose early song “Rock Me on the Water” was covered by Ronstadt—labeled the singer “an auteur” who could make a song her own, even if she didn’t write it herself. In the most compelling segments of the film, abundant footage of her concerts and TV guest spots demonstrates not only her feel for lyrics but her magnetic stage command, even dating back to her first appearances at L.A. music meccas like the Whiskey A-Go-Go.

Ronstadt last performed in concert in 2009, as she realized that Parkinson’s Disease was undermining her vocal range. But her CDs confirm the beauty and purity of her voice when she was healthy.

Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman might have asked more bluntly why it took male-dominated electors nearly 20 years after her eligibility to enshrine her in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But they do underscore her continual role in widening the vistas of the music industry. She leaped over genre barriers even as she helped pry the doors open to emerging singer-songwriters and female artists.

At long last, we can now reckon how much we are in her debt, more than we could ever have imagined at the time.

Flashback, March 1969: Campbell Scores With Another Webb-Penned Hit, ‘Galveston’

It’s not unusual for a recording artist to achieve a supernova of commercial success, even over a sustained period. Think of Elton John for the first half of the Seventies, or Michael Jackson from 1979 (Off the Wall) to 1991 (Dangerous). But it’s another thing entirely to achieve that level of broad acceptance not only on the radio but on film and TV. For that, we’re talking about Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles—and, in 1969, Glen Campbell.

In March of that year, Capitol Records released the 13^th album by the country singer, Galveston. To a burgeoning career as a recording star, he was now adding to his repertoire TV variety-show host (The Glen Campbell Good Time Hour) and even actor (True Grit), playing second male lead to the grizzled veteran John Wayne. Campbell had become, as his friend, the songwriter Jimmy Webb, would put it nearly a half-century later, “a small industry.”

Webb himself had become something of a “small industry,” if not with Campbell’s visibility. He did not have the singer’s number of media outlets, but he had an even wider array of people who clamored for his work. In 1967, he had come away with Record of the Year for the Fifth Dimension’s recording of his “Up, Up and Away.” The following year, he had simply set the music industry on its ear by composing an epic “pop cantata” that became a smash for Richard Harris, “MacArthur Park.”

But the recording star with the greatest affinity for Webb’s work was Campbell, who won a Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance for “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” then followed with Grammy and Country Music Award nominations for “Wichita Lineman.” 

Webb had initially begged off Campbell’s request for an appropriate follow-up to “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”—i.e., “something about a town”—with the weary observation that he “just about exhausted the Rand McNally phase of my career,” the songwriter recalled in his 2017 memoir, The Cake and the Rain. But then he yielded, turning out another geography-based smash, “Wichita Lineman.” “Galveston”—originally performed by, of all people, Don Ho—furnished Campbell with another hit in this vein that would serve as the title cut of another best-selling LP.

Both men enjoyed great appeal among the music spectrum through their association. The 22-year-old Webb, who had seen his tunes place among the rhythm and blues charts as well as pop, now found that the plaintive, storytelling qualities of his songs hit the sweet spot with country audiences. 

And Campbell, who had spent the previous decade cutting his musical teeth as a guitarist for the likes of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, The Beach Boys, and Phil Spector, could translate a distinctly regional sound into broader national appeal through both his musical gifts (wide vocal range and vast skill with multiple stringed instruments) and personal factors (boyish good looks and down-to-earth, humorous manner). Before Kenny Rogers, Taylor Swift, LeeAnn Rimes, or Lionel Richie, Campbell had shown the way as probably the first true country-pop crossover recording star. 

As a sign of that appeal, “Galveston” would be nominated for Country Music Awards for Album and Single of the Year and rise to #1 on the country charts, but it also made it to #4 on the U.S. pop charts. In a 2011 interview, Webb—who contributed another hit, “Where's The Playground Susie,” to Campbell’s 1969 LP—marveled at how Campbell managed to convert his songs into gold: 

"Glen was very, very good at commercializing my songs. He could come up with great intros and great solos, great breaks, and he wrote perfect strings, because he wrote very little. It was a minimalist approach and it just left Glen out there with the song and the guitar. I tended to write a little bit more as an arranger, and probably too much. So I could have done better to have stayed out of Glen's way, I think."

In another sense, though, Campbell’s single, dominated by producer Al de Lory’s thick layer of arrangements, was performed at an upbeat tempo totally at odds with its underlying message. A song about solitude, anticipated mortality, and loss, its lyrics need to be silently absorbed before they can even begin to be remotely understood.

I wasn’t moved by “Galveston”—I couldn’t concentrate on it, even—until I heard Webb himself perform it on his 1996 CD, Ten Easy Pieces. Campbell far surpassed Webb in the pristine quality of his voices, but stripped to the bone, with just the songwriter accompanying himself on the piano, “Galveston” throbs with all its intended melancholy.

Like another pop classic of the late Sixties, the Bacharach-David tune “I Say A Little Prayer," “Galveston” is a study in ambiguity, composed at the height of the Vietnam War, in the voice of someone separated from a lover because of wartime service. But Hal David’s lyrics are so general that they have been applied in contexts completely unrelated to the conflict (such as the 2010 revival of the team’s musical Promises, Promises, when it was inserted to boost Kristin Chenoweth’s role). It has been interpreted most often simply as a statement of undying commitment and love. I would be very surprised if more than one radio listener in a thousand has understood it in any other way.

“Galveston” has never had a problem being seen against a backdrop of war—indeed, it’s well-nigh impossible, with that lyric “while I watch the cannons flashin',” to regard this in any other fashion. But opinions remain divided about which war was meant. Some listeners thought Webb meant the Spanish-American War—not unnaturally, as the seaport served as the jumping-off point for servicemen on the way to Cuba. Less defensibly, others looked all the way back to the Civil War.

But Webb was deeply opposed to the Vietnam War. If he didn’t engage in fist-pumping protest songs, he forced listeners to work harder: to understand the pain of a military man far away from the 21-year-old woman he still remembers “standing by the water,/Standing there looking out to sea.” (A second verse, included on Don Ho’s version but not Campbell’s, makes the narrator’s pain even more explicit: “Wonder if she could forget me, I’d go home if they would let me/ Put down this gun and go to Galveston.”)

After a five-year hiatus, Campbell and Webb would collaborate on four more albums over the next four decades—including, most poignantly, Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb: In Session (2012), released after Campbell announced that he had Alzheimer’s.

The enduring commercial appeal of the two was recognized two years ago by Capitol Nashville/Ume, when the label reissued on vinyl the three Campbell albums that constituted his transformation from ace session player to solo superstar in his own right: Gentle on My Mind, Witchita Lineman, and Galveston. 

Webb may have groaned about songs with place names in the titles, but the quartet of hits that Campbell covered—“By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” and “MacArthur Park”—became pop classics that evoke the aching places in the heart. Whether Webb knew it or not then or not, love and loss have habitations and names, and millions of listeners have responded overwhelmingly to his evocation of them in the last half-century.

(The photo accompanying this post shows Glen Campbell in 1969 on his Glen Campbell Good Time Hour TV show.)