Song Lyric of the Day (Bacharach and David, on ‘The Blues They Send to Meet Me’)

“But there's one thing I know:
The blues they send to meet me won't defeat me,
It won't be long 'til happiness
Steps up to greet me.”—"Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head,” lyrics by Hal David, music by Burt Bacharach, first performed by B.J. Thomas on the “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” Soundtrack (1969) 

Remembering American composer, producer, pianist—and Oscar-winner for this gem of a song—Burt Bacharach (1928-2023).

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.)

Photo of the Day: Where Music Used to Live

“Better take that picture while you can,” a passerby in Times Square growled as I took the image accompanying this post. “That store is gonna close soon.”

His was one of those typically unsentimental New Yorker acknowledgements of the evanescent nature of their city’s landmarks. Actually, I was taking the photo because I knew that very fact.

A week ago, Colony Records—a six-decade mainstay on 49^th Street and Broadway—announced that it would shut its doors soon, yet another victim of the digital revolution that has allowed music aficionados to download tunes at will. It’s funny, but I had passed by this establishment—a longtime mecca for anyone hunting down elusive sheet music, vinyl records or CDs—virtually every workday over the last decade on the way to my office, but—despite my curiosity about what lay behind the window display—I had never been tempted to go in. Now, the opportunity was passing.

When I read Aaron Edwards’ New York Times piece about the closing, I was additionally surprised to learn that the store was located on the ground floor in the Brill Building, legendary in the music industry as the bridge between Tin Pan Alley and the modern songwriting era. Here in this Art Deco songwriting factory, such hitmakers as Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, Neil Sedaka, and Neil Diamond (not to mention producers Phil Spector and Don Kirshner), created one pop classic after another in the 1950s and 1960s. That glorious history led it to be named a city landmark two years ago.

The heyday of the Brill Building passed at least 40 years ago, but this weekend another link to that glorious era in songwriting died: Hal David, the lyricist partner of Burt Bacharach. David was the less flamboyant of the two--the one who didn’t make guest appearances in Austin Powers movies, the one who didn’t provide musical accompaniment to Marlene Dietrich; the one not married to Angie Dickinson. But it’s inconceivable to think of the duo’s songs without the more earthbound one. He could be indomitably optimistic ("Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head"), but for my money he was at his best in wistful songs tinged with regret, such as these lyrics from one of his less well-known hits, recorded by B.J. Thomas, "Long Ago Tomorrow":

"Maybe I'll get to change the world
Before it changes me
And maybe my life
Will always be
Just as happy as it seems."

When Bacharach and David first began collaborating at the Brill Building, the term “songwriting factory” meant exactly that. Music was made to order for the artist, and Bacharach took over producing simply in an attempt to make sure the pair’s songs weren’t ruined during recording.

Joni Mitchell, from a far different musical environment, summed up the sense of loss created by the modern era:  “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” This past week, the passing of Colony Records and Hal David was mourned by hundreds of thousands on social media, a non-physical environment not even around when they helped bring music to the world.

Flashback, March 1937: ‘Lost Horizon’ Inspires One Classic, One Disaster

Most of his works are not read these days, but in the two decades before his death in 1954, the English writer James Hilton churned out a stream of novels eagerly snatched up by the public. Several of these were adapted to film, including two that became classics in the 1930s: Goodbye, Mr. Chips, about a beloved longtime British prep-school teacher, and Lost Horizon.

The latter film premiered in Los Angeles on March 10, 1937. Directed by Columbia Pictures’ ace director, Frank Capra (who would later helm the Yuletide evergreen, It’s a Wonderful Life), it fulfilled initial expectations as the studio’s biggest “prestige” project to that point. Over the years, this film about Shangri-La, an idyllic place deep in the Himalayas, secluded from a war-torn outside world, has maintained its high reputation.

Not the least of the movie’s virtues was its music, created by rookie film composer Dimitri Tiomkin, which supported the action on screen without upstaging it. Thirty-five years later, producer Ross Hunter decided to make music the focus of a remake.

The difference between the two versions can be summarized in this way: Capra’s launched one career, started a longtime collaboration and friendship, created a catchphrase, and became a classic. Hunter’s derailed several careers, disrupted a couple of collaborations and friendships, sparked a host of legendary wisecracks, and became a camp classic. Oh, and did I mention that it led to a messy tangle of litigation and may have contributed to a divorce?

Everybody associates Capra’s name with the first film. You’d be hard-pressed to find a movie fan who could name the director of the remake without consulting a printed or Internet reference. (If you really must know, it was Charles Jarrott, who had handled Anne of the Thousand Days with far less incident only five years before.) No, the names associated with the remake were not a director, but the previously golden lyricist Hal David and composer Burt Bacharach.

Why did one project (at least largely) succeed while the other became a fiasco? The difference between success and failure is seldom as clear-cut as it seems at first, and Capra’s version flashed alarming signs of being a stinker at an initial preview in Santa Barbara. Nevertheless, several factors undoubtedly meant vastly different fates for the two motion pictures:

  

          1) Attention to pacing. Columbia boss Harry Cohn was notorious for claiming that his twitching behind was a sure sign that a film was in trouble. (Upon hearing this, wiseguy screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz famously cracked: “Just imagine—the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!”) His subordinates developed similar tendencies, perhaps none more so than Capra, who, after hearing howls of laughter at the preview, spent more than two days sweating out what to do before cutting the first two reels. That single change shortened the film by 20 minutes and grabbed the audience by the lapels with a spectacular opening scene: the burning of a city. In contrast, the remake featured the title tune, then did not feature another song until nearly another 40 minutes had elapsed. True, it’s hard to imagine what song Bacharach and David could have concocted to fill the space. (I don’t think “I’m a-Dyin’ on a Jet Plane,” as a British diplomat and his fellow passengers brace themselves for a crash landing while fleeing unrest in Southeast Asia, would have worked). But without something, audiences must have twitching for the music to start in earnest, even if it turned out to be middle-of-the-road pap--which it did.

2    2) Actors exactly right for the lead roles. If you’ve seen David O. Selznick’s adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, it’s impossible to imagine anyone topping the portrayal by Ronald Colman of brilliant, world-weary, damaged Sydney Carton. Lost Horizon’s Robert Conway might have been a 20^th-century diplomat rather than an attorney during the French Revolution, but he was the same psychological type. Capra correctly insisted to Cohn that Colman was the only “actor in the world to play the lead,” then pulled another coup by casting, against far more studio opposition, 38-year-old Sam Jaffe to play the ancient High Lama. If only the casting of the leads had been similarly impeccable in the Hunter version. Now, it’s true that Hollywood had grown accustomed, over the last decade or so, to dubbing for actors who couldn’t sing. But to employ three nonsinging principals in the same movie (Peter Finch, in Colman’s role, along with Liv Ullman and Olivia Hussey) was really pushing matters.

           3) Composers and music suitable for the project. Capra went to bat not only for his cast, but for his composer—and it was an even bigger gamble. Tiomkin, an ex-concert pianist, had no track record in scoring to speak of. Yet Capra backed him to the hilt. (The director’s only attempt to pull his punches was to hire, as the conductor, famed movie composer Max Steiner—who, Capra was certain, would assume control of this score if he sensed trouble. It wasn’t necessary, for, as the director crowed later, “Tiomkin’s music not only captured the mood, but it darned near captured the film.” Hunter wasn’t so lucky in getting studio execs to back his choice for the music, Michel Legrand.  In one sense, their feelings were understandable. Legrand might have created fine music for several films (including The Thomas Crown Affair and Summer of ’42), but his experience with musicals was nil. (In fact, he would not have his first, Amour, until nearly 30 years later. It flopped, but at least, for his fans, it has become a noble failure on the order of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro or Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along.) Bacharach and David not only had an Oscar in hand for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” but had also created the Broadway hit Promises, Promises (not to mention 39 charting singles from 1962 to 1970 with Dionne Warwick alone). But their success with Promises, Promises, I’d argue, was chimerical. The latter did as well as it did largely because of Neil Simon, who had crafted funny, tight books for Little Me and an uncredited pinch-hit for Sweet Charity.

4) A sense of the zeitgeist. Capra’s film appeared at a point when horror over World War I and indignation at the propaganda and profiteering generated by it had mounted so high that isolationist legislation threatened to hamstring FDR’s response to Fascism.(Later, after WWII broke out, an anti-war monologue by Colman was deleted, lest it interfere with the war effort.) “The world was hungry for a lift,” Capra wrote in his memoir, The Name Above the Title, “hungry for quickening examples of how individuals overcome the dreads of their environment.” Though there was some question about whether Lost Horizon really was a money-maker for Columbia, there seems little reason to dispute Capra’s contention that its release, publicity drumbeat, and favorable critical reception lured a host of filmmakers to the studio.

In the 1930s, Capra’s feel for the popular pulse seldom faltered. Hunter’s, on the other hand, proved abysmal. For the past half-dozen years, various Hollywood attempts to duplicate the megablockbuster success of The Sound of Music—i.e., Doctor Doolittle, Star, Hello Dolly, and, yes, and adaptation of Hilton's Goodbye Mr. Chips—had failed dismally. The powers that be missed the new style of musical sequences ushered in by the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, in which director Richard Lester filmed the Fab Four in performance rather than as characters breaking out into song. The possibilities of such naturalistic filming were exploited in an unprecedented fashion in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, in which the songs comment on the plot but the characters themselves sing in traditional performance venues.

More than ever, audiences sensed the enormous anachronism of characters bursting spontaneously into song in Bacharach and David’s Lost Horizon. And, in a year when the wounds of the Vietnam War remained open and the crimes of Watergate were exposed, it seemed positively ludicrous to listen to a song called “Share the Joy.”

Bacharach and David were old enough—and well-connected enough in the songwriting fraternity—to remember that even the great songwriter Harry Warren (42^nd Street) had stumbled with his 1956 Broadway musical adaptation of Hilton’s novel, Shangri-La, which lasted a mere 21 performances. The fate of that show should have given them pause.

But if your lyrics are being sung by the likes of Dusty Springfield, Jackie DeShannon, Tom Jones, Dionne Warwick, and too many others to keep count—or, better yet, if your music has led to an Oscar for Best Song and you’re married to Angie Dickinson—well, it’s hard to think that much is denied you.

It was as inevitable that this extraordinary streak of successes would come to an end as that the fall would be so spectacular. Tensions had begun to surface even before Hunter signed Bacharach and David to this project, and additional strains—including what Bacharach felt was his disproportionate share in trying to keep this project from falling apart—finally tore the two collaborators apart. (Warwick, whose recording contract involved them producing her work, ended up collateral damage, and her suit against them only widened the litigation morass now unfolding.) The reviews were atrocious (according to the ever-quotable John Simon, the movie "must have arrived in garbage rather than film cans"), and the box office was so bad that the film shortly became nicknamed “Lost Investment.” The film ended up losing $9 million, or an inflation-adjusted $47 million.

(Actually, preview audiences sensed the turkey coming even sooner. They laughed even harder than those that had given Capra heart palpitations 35 years before. The cause: this musical, featuring what Hunter had claimed would be "wholesome entertainment," featured a "fertility dance" replete with heavily oiled and toned guys frantically running around, as if they had lost their way to the health club. Still, the decision to yank the sequence might have been a mistake: At least it made audiences howl. The rest of the footage made them yawn.)

And so, as audiences followed the image of a plane going down in flames in Asia, they also were watching the crash-and-burn of one of the half-dozen most successful songwriting teams of the last decade; the prolonged depression of Bacharach, as he absorbed the blows from critics ready to pile on after his great success; and, perhaps not surprisingly, the end of his marriage to Dickinson.

When you consider this fallout, I’m sure that Bacharach has, over the years, tuned out anything reminding him of this project, whether indirect (the news of a version of Capra’s original, with the antiwar material restored) or direct (the announcement of a DVD release of the musical). This year, however, as he works on his memoir, Anyone Who Had a Heart (due out this November), he might at last be forced to dredge up all these bad memories.

Theater Review: “Promises, Promises,” Starring Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth

I have meant to review this show for nearly three months, but one thing after another got in the way. Now, I have no excuse: What better time to talk about a show, after all, with a musical number called “Turkey-Lurkey Time,” than on Thanksgiving?

You could argue, I suppose, that, given its decidedly tepid opening notices, the continued survival of Promises, Promises has more to do with star power than anything else. But this would be a myopic misreading—just the type of thing that Gotham theater critics provide, without thinking twice.

I almost didn’t see the revival of the 1969 Burt Bacharach-Hal David musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s classic 1960 corporate satire, The Apartment. Critical carping was so overwhelming that early on, I figured that, more likely than not, their negative judgment had to be more right than wrong.

But eventually I recalled that as a teenager, during a phase of reading plays as opposed to seeing them performed (the type of thing you do without money of your own), I had been struck, in an anthology of comedies by Neil Simon, by how funny the book he created for the show was. And by early September, given the circumstances of my life, I decided that I could really, really, really use a good laugh or two. So I went to the Times Square TKTS booth and, to my astonishment, not only found that I didn’t have to stand in line long, but that the show wasn’t sold out—and that it turned out to be quite good, in the bargain.

You could practically hear the condescension dripping from New York Times critic Ben Brantley’s review of the show back in April. The gist of it was—you’ll never guess!—that the show was “dated.” Its view of sexual harassment was retrograde, he sniffed. He also couldn’t resist a dig at the Times’ critic from the late Sixties, Clive Barnes, who hailed the show for bringing to the stage “the music of today.”

Just one problem with the review: damn near everything. To start with: maybe the show hadn’t been mounted on Broadway in more than 40 years, but what of it? Neither, before its recently closed production at Lincoln Center, had Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, which, by nearly every measure, is one of the half-dozen greatest American musicals.

The current production, now at New York’s Broadway Theatre, under the direction and choreography of Rob Ashford, is hardly perfect. It is, however, perfectly enjoyable, with much less to be ashamed of than Brantley.

We theater fans, according to the critical naysayers, are supposed to feel that we’re not really receiving an authentic version of the original show, since two Bacharach-David hits have been added to boost Kristin Chenoweth’s role as Fran Kubelik: “A House Is Not a Home” and “I Say a Little Prayer.”

But when have musicals—or their creators, for that matter—ever been so purist? None other than Stephen Sondheim (known, to a considerable portion of theater cognescenti, as “God”) has been known to take the chisel to a number of his shows, most prominently Merrily We Roll Along and Bounce. Moreover, a virtual cottage industry—the “revisal”—has sprouted up that has heavily changed the books of musicals. Why are texts considered objects for theater scalpels but not lyrics and music?

As it happens, the two added songs work unexpectedly well in their new context. Very casual Bacharach fans would be astonished to hear that “I Say a Little Prayer” was originally written as an antiwar song, during the Vietnam War era. The lyrics only hint at this in the most indirect way. As an expression of deep, ineradicable romantic longing in Promises, Promises, on the other hand, it works far better in this musical.

A secondary, sillier controversy broke out about the show after a Newsweek critic wondered how openly gay Sean Hayes could play the romantic heterosexual lead, C.C. (Chuck) Baxter. The short answer is: Easy! But let’s indulge the Newsweek fellow for a tad longer:

1) Theater and film require more willful suspension of disbelief than any of the other performing arts except, perhaps, for operas (and even that appears to be changing, as divas become far more aware of how they look on high-definition screens in cinemas). Does anyone familiar with Susan Sarandon’s romantic history find fully credible the idea of her playing a Roman Catholic nun in Dead Man Walking? And who on earth can accept, without considerable laughter, the concept of Denise Richardson--outfitted in tank top and shorts--as a nuclear physicist named Dr. Christmas Jones in the James Bond feature, The World Is Not Enough? Talk about straining credulity! Given all that, is Sean Hayes as a heterosexual really that outlandish?

2) The only way that Hayes might be regarded as unbelievable would be if he played Chuck in the same campy manner as he did Jack McFarland on Will and Grace. Such was not the case here, however.

3) Hayes is a marvel of comic timing and slapstick. Watch the several minutes of comic gold he spins with one prop--one of those Sixties office chairs meant more to be admired for their unusual shape than to be sat in--during Baxter’s scene with his lousy boss, Jeff Sheldrake. Hayes grins nervously, twists, slides, sinks, and finally collapses. He’s a worthy successor to two other comic masters who preceded him in the role of Chuck: Jack Lemmon, who originated the role of Chuck in The Apartment, and Martin Short, who performed in a 1990s revival of the show at Encores!

4) Hayes’ voice is overshadowed by his comic talent, but it shouldn’t be. It’s not just strong and certain, but able to meet the demands that Bacharach’s acrobatic score makes on it. Take the title song. In a memorable appraisal of Bacharach more than a dozen years ago in The Atlantic Monthly, critic Francis Davis noted how devilishly difficult the song “Promises, Promises” was: it “starts off in a 3/4 time too fast and [is] diabolically syncopated to be called a waltz and then changes meter twenty times, often after just one bar.” Yet Hayes handles it all with aplomb.

If there’s any actor miscast here, it’s Chenoweth. Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment played the role of Fran, the office worker who captures Chuck’s heart, in the most appropriate way: as a perky woman still too young and naïve to know when someone is breaking her heart. Given her age (early 40s) and a glamorous hairdo reminiscent of Bacharach’s ex-wife, Angie Dickinson, it’s difficult to view her Chenoweth's Fran as anything but wised-up in matters of the heart.

And yet, most people--and I would count myself among them--wouldn’t care a bit, anyway, that Chenoweth is not exactly suited for this role. By the end of her first song, I could only marvel how such a large sound could issue from such a remarkably petite woman. I suspect that I wasn’t the only member of the audience who felt this way. Hers is the type of voice any composer would clamor to have perform his or her songs.

One other cast member should be mentioned: Katie Finneran, in one of her last performances before she left the cast to have a baby. Her performance as a barfly of easy virtue is hilarious. The role, very funny in the Wilder film, becomes a sheer, giddy delight here.

Promises, Promises, the only musical comedy from the Bacharach-David team, spawned two Dionne Warwicke hits: "Promises, Promises" and "I'll Never Fall in Love Again." The comic talents of Hayes and Finneran--and the magnificent voice of Chenoweth--were given ample room by the two composers, and it makes one sorry--Ben Brantley to the contrary--that they didn't try more stage productions before their collaboration came to an end after the disastrous musical film adaptation of Lost Horizon.