Burt Bacharach, the uniquely gifted and popular Oscar-winning composer who wowed millions with the whimsical arrangements and unforgettable tunes of “Walk on By,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” and dozens of other hits, has aged died 94 years old.
Bacharach died of natural causes at home in Los Angeles on Wednesday, publicist Tina Brausam said on Thursday.
For the past 70 years, only Lennon-McCartney, Carole King and a handful of others have rivaled his genius when it came to instantly catchy songs that continued to be performed, played and hummed long after they were written. He’s had a string of top 10 hits from the 1950s through the 21st century, and his music has been heard on everything from movie soundtracks and radios to home stereos and iPods, whether it’s “Alfie” or “I Say a Little Prayer.” ‘ or ‘I’ll never fall in love again’ and ‘This guy is in love with you’.
Dionne Warwick was his favorite performer, but Bacharach, usually with lyricist Hal David, also created top-notch material for Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones and many others. Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Frank Sinatra were among the countless artists who have covered his songs, with more recent artists singing or sampling him including White Stripes, Twista and Ashanti. “Walk On By” alone has been covered by everyone from Warwick and Isaac Hayes to British punk band The Stranglers and Cyndi Lauper.
Bacharach was both an innovator and a step backwards, and his career seemed to run parallel to the rock era. Raised on jazz and classical music, he had little taste for rock when he entered the business in the 1950s. His sensibilities often seemed more in tune with Tin Pan Alley than Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and other writers who later emerged, but rock composers appreciated the depth of his seemingly old-fashioned sensibility.
“The short version of him is that he’s got something to do with easy listening,” Elvis Costello, who wrote the 1998 album Painted from Memory with Bacharach, said in a 2018 interview with The Associated Press. “It may seem pleasant be listening to these songs, but there’s nothing simple about them. Try playing them. Try singing them.”
He triumphed in many art forms. He was an eight-time Grammy winner, Broadway award-winning composer for Promises, Promises, and a three-time Academy Award winner. In 1970 he received two Academy Awards for the film score of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and for the song “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (shared with David). In 1982, he and his then-wife, lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, won Oscars for “Best That You Can Do,” the subject of “Arthur.” 1967 James Bond parody Casino Royale.
Bacharach has been well rewarded and well connected. He was a frequent guest at the White House, whether the president was Republican or Democrat. And in 2012 he was presented with the Gershwin Prize by Barack Obama, who sang “Walk on By” for a few seconds during a campaign appearance.
In his life and in his music he stood apart. Fellow songwriter Sammy Cahn joked that the smiling, wavy-haired Bacharach was the first composer he knew who didn’t look like a dentist. Bacharach was a “swinger,” as such men were known in his day, whose many romances included actress Angie Dickinson, to whom he was married from 1965 to 1980, and Sager, his wife from 1982 to 1991.
Married four times, his most enduring ties were to work. He was a perfectionist, taking three weeks to write “Alfie” and hours tweaking a single chord. Sager once observed that Bacharach’s life routines have remained essentially the same – only the women have changed.
It started with the melodies – strong and yet interspersed with changing rhythms and surprising overtones. He attributed much of his style to his love of bebop and his classical training, particularly under the tutelage of famed composer Darius Milhaud. He once played a piece for piano, violin and oboe for Milhaud which contained a melody which he was ashamed to write, since 12-point atonal music was then the fashion. Milhaud, who liked the piece, advised the young man: “Never be afraid of the melody.”
“That was a great confirmation for me,” Bacharach recalled in 2004.
Essentially a pop composer, Bacharach’s songs became hits with country artists (Marty Robbins), rhythm and blues artists (Chuck Jackson), soul (Franklin, Luther Vandross), and synth-pop (Naked Eyes). ). With the help of Costello and others, he reached a new generation of listeners in the 1990s. Mike Myers recalls hearing the sultry “The Look of Love” on the radio and quickly finding inspiration for his retro spy comedies Austin Powers, in which Bacharach made cameos.
Even in the 21st century he broke new ground, wrote his own lyrics and recorded with rapper Dr. turn up
He was married to his first wife, Paula Stewart, from 1953 to 1958 and to Jane Hansen for the fourth time in 1993. He is survived by Hansen, as well as his children Oliver, Raleigh and Cristopher, Brausam said. He was preceded in death by his daughter with Dickinson, Nikki Bacharach.
Bacharach knew the heights of applause, but he recalled growing up as a loner, a small and confident boy who was so uncomfortable with being a Jew that he even taunted other Jews. His favorite book as a child was Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; Referring to the sexually impotent Jake Barnes, he considered himself “socially impotent”.
He was born in Kansas City, Missouri but soon moved to New York City. His father was a columnist and his mother a pianist who encouraged the boy to study music. Although he was more interested in sports, he practiced the piano every day after school so as not to disappoint his mother. Even as a minor, he snuck into jazz clubs with a fake ID and listened to the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie.
“They were just so incredibly exciting that I suddenly got involved with music in a way I’d never been before,” he recalls in the 2013 memoir Anyone Who Had a Heart. “What I heard in those clubs turned my head.”
He was a poor student in high school but managed to get a place at McGill University Conservatory of Music in Montreal. He wrote his first song at McGill and spent months listening to Mel Torme’s The Christmas Song. Music may also have saved Bacharach’s life. He was drafted into the army in the late 1940s and was still on active duty during the Korean War. But officials in the US soon found out about his gifts and wanted him with them. When he went overseas it was to Germany where he wrote orchestrations for a recreation center at the local military base.
After his release, he returned to New York and tried to get into the music business. He initially had little success as a songwriter, but he became a popular arranger and accompanist, touring with Vic Damone, the Ames Brothers and Polly Stewart, who became his first wife. When a friend who was touring with Marlene Dietrich was unable to do a show in Las Vegas, he asked Bacharach to step in.
Things quickly clicked for the young musician and timeless singer, and Bacharach traveled the world with her in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At each performance, she introduced him in grand style: “I want you to know the man, he’s my arranger, he’s my accompanist, he’s my conductor, and I wish I could say he’s my composer. But that’s not true. He’s everyone’s composer… Burt Bacharach!”
In the meantime, he had met his ideal songwriting partner – David, as enterprising as Bacharach was lively, so domesticated that he left at 5 a.m. every night to catch the train back to his wife and children on Long Island. In a tiny office in the famous Brill Building on Broadway, they produced their first million-selling “Magic Moments”, sung by Perry Como in 1958. In 1962 they discovered a backing singer for the Drifters, Warwick, who had “a very special kind of grace and elegance,” Bacharach recalled.
The trio produced hit after hit, starting with “Don’t Make Me Over” and continuing with “Walk on By”, “I Say a Little Prayer”, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”, “Trains and Boats and Planes, Anyone Who Had a Heart, and more. The songs were as difficult to record as they were easy to hear. Bacharach liked to experiment with time signatures and arrangements, for example having two pianists on “Walk on By” whose performances were only slightly out of sync to give the song “a snappy feel,” he wrote in his memoir.
In addition to Warwick, the Bacharach-David team produced winners for other artists. These include: Make It Easy on Yourself for Jerry Butler, What the World Needs Now Is Love for Jackie DeShannon and This Guy’s in Love with You for Herb Alpert.
The partnership ended badly with the dismal failure of a 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon. Bacharach became so depressed that he isolated himself at his Del Mar vacation home and refused to work.
“I didn’t want to text Hal or anyone else,” he told the AP in 2004. He also didn’t want to honor a commitment to record “Warwick”. She and David both sued him.
Bacharach and David were eventually reconciled. When David died in 2012, Bacharach praised him for writing lyrics “like a miniature film.” In the meantime, he kept working, vowing never to retire and always believing that a good song could make a difference.
“Music softens the heart, makes you feel something when it’s good, brings emotions that you might not have felt before,” he told AP in 2018. “It’s a very powerful thing when you’re able to do that, when you have it in your heart to do something like that.
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The late Associated Press writer Bob Thomas contributed to this report from Los Angeles.
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