(From Paula Stewart’s personal collection)
Burt and Paula at Beverly Hills Hotel with Slim Brandy in the foreground
(From Paula Stewart’s personal collection)
Burt and Marlene Dietrich on tour, circa early 1960s
(Deutsche Kinemathek/Marlene Dietrich Collection, Berlin)
In the studio with Hal David and Dionne Warwick
(From Hal David’s personal collection)
Burt and Hal David
(From Hal David’s personal collection)
Chapter
11
What’s It All About?
I have never had a song come to me fully formed, in a blinding flash of inspiration. What I do is tinker. I fiddle. If a melody comes too easily to me, I don’t think it’s any good, so I turn it upside down and look at it in the middle of the night. A pop song is a short form so everything counts. You can get away with murder in a forty-five-minute piece but not in a three-and-a-half-minute song.
Some songs just beat you up because they seem to have too many notes or too many words or are just too much. So what I do is play with the melody, explore it, question it, and see if I can keep making it better. Sometimes a song can overwhelm the listener and make them sick of it after loving it for days. So I have to take on the role of the listener as well as the composer. If a song is starting to beat me up while I’m working on it, I know it’s wrong.
I also have great difficulty letting things go if I get stuck while I’m writing, and that was what happened while I was working on “Alfie.” Howard Koch, who was running Paramount Pictures at the time, asked Hal and me to come up with a song for a film that had already been shot in England and the studio was going to release in America. I read the script in New York, as did Hal, and then I called Koch to tell him how much we liked it.
The song had to tell people what the picture was about, and when Hal called me up from Long Island and read me what he had written over the phone, I knew he had come up with the best lyrics he or anybody else had ever written. It’s a great, great lyric. Because I already had the words, the music took a form I might not have gone to otherwise. I don’t know how many bars are in each section of the song, because I never counted, but it was not a normal eight-bar structure. Instead of eight-bar phrases with an eight-bar bridge, there are ten bar phrases in “Alfie,” and I only got there because of Hal.
It was still a very difficult song for me to write and I had a deadline, so I was under a lot of pressure. I remember going to a theater in New York to see a play while I was writing “Alfie.” My mind was on the song and I was watching the play but I couldn’t let go of what was in my head. The result was that I walked out of the theater three hours later without having paid any attention to the play, and I had also not made any progress on the song because my mind had been so split that I couldn’t fully concentrate on it. I did have one revelation that night, which was that something in the turn of the melody was not working. I would never have realized this while sitting at the keyboard because I can never tell when I go bar by bar. The only way I can do it is by visualizing the scope of the entire song in my head.
After I finished “Alfie,” I made a demo of it in New York with Kenny Karen singing as I played piano. Since Famous Music paid for the session, I was also able to overdub a couple of violins. When the word came down that Lewis Gilbert, who had produced and directed the movie, wanted Cilla Black to record the song, I sent her the demo in London.
Cilla Black: Brian Epstein was my manager and he had me listen to this song and it was some fella singing “Alfie.” I actually said to Brian, “I can’t do this. For a start, Al-fie? I mean, you call your dog Alfie. I’m sorry. I can’t sing a song, ‘What’s it all about, Al-fie?’ Can’t it be Tarquin, or something like that?”
Because I really didn’t want to record the song, but didn’t want to say an outright “no,” I thought I’d be really difficult for a change and start putting up barriers. So first of all I said I’d only do it if Burt Bacharach himself did the arrangement, never thinking for one moment that he would. Unfortunately, the reply came back from America that he’d be happy to. So then I said I would only do it if Burt came over to London for the recording sessions. “Yes,” came the reply. Next I said that in addition to doing the arrangement and coming over, he had to play on the session. To my astonishment it was agreed that Burt would do all three! So by this time, coward that I was, I really couldn’t back out.
Cilla was a big star and I had a lot of respect for both her and George Martin, who was going to produce the session, so I flew to London and rehearsed Cilla in George Martin’s flat. Then I went in to record “Alfie” at Abbey Road Studios with a forty-eight-piece orchestra and the Breakaways singing backup at a session Brian Epstein brought someone in to film.
When I walked into the studio where the Beatles had recorded all their greatest songs, I knew where I was but my focus was such that I didn’t think about the history of the place or pay it any respect at all. I didn’t say, “Hello, George Martin, it’s a pleasure to have you in the booth at the producer’s chair.” It was more like, “George Martin, yeah, great,” because I only had one purpose in mind. All I cared about was that I had to do “Alfie” with Cilla Black and I didn’t know what to expect from her and I was going to do it all live and conduct and play piano at the same time while trying to get a great vocal from her.
Cilla Black: There was so much range and it was unbelievably hard, so when I started the song in that soft voice, it was awfully difficult to get all that energy up, literally from my boots, to go for that high note. I was hurting.
I really don’t think anyone had ever put Cilla through something like this before. She had a really strong pop voice but what I wanted her to do on “Alfie” was go for the jugular. We did twenty-eight or twenty-nine takes and after each one, I kept saying, “Can we do better than that? Can I get one more?” The way Cilla remembers it, George Martin finally asked me, “Burt, what are you looking for here?” I said, “That little bit of magic,” and he said, “I think we got that on take four.”
I don’t remember him saying this but it wouldn’t have mattered to me in any event, because I hadn’t come all the way over to London to have someone else tell me that. When I walked into that studio that night, all I wanted was to get 100 percent from the drummer, the bass player, and everybody else. It was a long night and Cilla got exasperated with me but in a good way and she sang her ass off.
Mike Myers: If you’ve seen the video of that session on YouTube, Burt breaks Cilla in the studio. He was going to do it until it was right and I love the quote from her. “I wanted to foo-kin’ kill him but he was so foo-kin’ gorgeous.”
Of all the songs I’ve written, I would have to put “Alfie” at or near the top of my list of favorites. One of the reasons I feel that way was something Miles Davis told me one night many years later when I was having dinner with him and Cicely Tyson in Los Angeles. I had always idolized Miles as a musician but as a dinner partner, I found him difficult, to say the least, because he only ever talked about himself. I really liked Cicely but in terms of the conversation, she didn’t get much to say. At one point, Miles said he thought “Alfie” was a really good song.
Despite all the hits I had already written, I still always had the feeling that maybe I was putting the world on and I wasn’t really all that good or original. But when Miles Davis said “Alfie” was a good song, he dispelled a lot of that doubt for me and gave me the kind of credibility I had never been able to give myself.
Although Lewis Gilbert decided to use Sonny Rollins doing his own composition called “Alfie’s Theme” as an instrumental in the film, Cilla’s version was released in England in January 1966 and went to number nine in the charts. “Alfie” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1967. By then, Dionne had also recorded the song and she performed it at the Academy Awards
show.
When I had attended the Academy Awards for the first time in 1965, I was just so happy that “What’s New Pussycat?” had been nominated that it didn’t matter much to me when I lost, because I never thought I was going to win. With “Alfie,” I walked in feeling very hopeful.
I was sitting with Angie when they announced that “Born Free” had won the Oscar. Dusty Springfield’s brother, who was watching the show on television and could see me on camera, claimed that when they made the announcement I said, “Shit!” I don’t remember saying that but it’s entirely possible, because when I heard the announcement, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t won and I was really pissed off.
Slim Brandy: Burt was married to Angie and he called me. By now, I had been going with somebody else. Burt’s a man of few words, and he said, “Hey. It’s me. Hi, baby, what are you doing?” I said, “What do you mean, ‘What am I doing?’ ” He said, “Can I see you?” And I said, “You know, Burt, this is pretty weird. First of all, I’m annoyed with you. It would have been nice if you’d called me to say you were getting married so I didn’t have to hear it the way I did. Because we’ve always been close.” He said, “I know, baby. I didn’t know how to really say it to you, but I want to see you.”
This was in New York City. We went out to a few bars and had a few little dinners and then he told me he was leaving Angie. This was before he knew she was pregnant. I loved Burt. There wasn’t one moment, and I’m never shy about saying this, that I would not have gone back to him. I don’t know why he was leaving Angie at that point and I didn’t want to know. He was telling me he loved me and that was all I wanted to hear.
Then I got a phone call from Burt saying, “I can’t leave her. She’s pregnant.” We sat, we cried, we kissed, we talked, and that was the end of that. Then there was an article about the two of us in one of those gossip columns: “Why is Burt Bacharach seeing his ex-girlfriend?” They called me a model and I had never been a model. We weren’t having an affair. It happened so fast, it was like two, three days in New York, and I wasn’t ready to hop into bed with him. We were just looking at each other, reconsidering the whole thing. Obviously, we weren’t finished with each other. That’s the whole point of my relationship with Burt. The truth is, I don’t think we ever left each other. We never really finished. Later on, he used to say, “Same time next year.” Because we would see each other every year, if not more.
With Slim, I just kept bouncing back and forth. The two of us would connect and reconnect and then connect again. Slim was a tough one to leave because we had so much history together and she had been so young when we had first gotten together in Vegas. In a lot of ways she was still the same woman who had gone to bed with me wearing a bathing suit. The other thing about her was that she certainly wasn’t waiting for me, but then once Nikki was born, everything changed for me.
Angie Dickinson: Although I didn’t see Nikki until the fifth day, I thought she was gorgeous and incredible, but she looked like a tiny sculpture of a prisoner of war because her legs were about as thin as a finger and she had fairly big feet. They kept her in an incubator for three months and Burt and I went to see her every single day, but we couldn’t touch or hold or cuddle or soothe her because they wanted to protect her from disease. When Nikki was finally released, she weighed almost five pounds but seemed contented and normal, and in my opinion, she was doing wonderfully.
Chapter
12
The Look of Love
Charlie Feldman owned the movie rights to the first James Bond novel but couldn’t come to terms with the producers who were making all the other Bond movies, so he decided to do Casino Royale as a satire. He asked me to do the score and write some new songs for it with Hal. It was only the second movie I had ever done, and because there were nine screenwriters, five directors, and seven different actors, including David Niven, Peter Sellers, and Ursula Andress playing various versions of Bond, I had no guidance at all.
Before I went to London I had started watching the movie in the house where Angie and I were living, off Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles. Just like she had done for me on What’s New Pussycat?, Angie would change the reels for me on the Moviola and then go to bed while I worked in the next room. While she was sleeping, I watched this one scene over and over again because Ursula Andress looked so drop-dead gorgeous in it. And that was how I came up with the theme for her that became “The Look of Love.”
I flew to London on Super Bowl Sunday. Angie stayed in Los Angeles to take care of Nikki, so I was living by myself in a rented apartment about a block from the Dorchester Hotel. They had leased some space in the basement for the music editor who would thread all the reels of the rough cut into the Moviola for me, because I still didn’t know how to work it.
By the time I started working on the picture, all the directors had already left so there was no one to tell me where the music should start and where it should stop. I was having trouble writing the score because no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t seem to get a handle on what the movie was about. My hours were screwed up and the music wouldn’t stop playing in my head so I started taking too many sleeping pills, Seconal as well as some other stuff a friend in London had given me.
I would go out to dinner by myself at nine-thirty at night, have a couple of Jack Daniel’s, come back to the flat, watch the film, and write for a couple of hours. Then I would take a couple of pills and sleep for maybe three hours. As soon as I woke up, I would make some coffee and go to the keyboard. At about eleven in the morning, I would take a nap and as soon as I woke up I would start all over again. Everything was out of synch and I was bouncing off the walls. I also had to record the entire score in London and by the time I was finished doing that, I was totally blown out and exhausted. Looking back on all this now, I feel like I’m lucky to have lived through it.
There was no pressure on me when I got back to Los Angeles, so I started feeling better. But so long as there was still music running through my head at night when I was trying to sleep, I still had a problem, and it would be a long time before I finally managed to get that resolved.
Hal and I wanted Johnny Rivers to record the theme song for Casino Royale, so they brought him over to London but he didn’t like the song. He wasn’t very nice about it and left abruptly. Herb Alpert then saved my ass by offering to record it as an instrumental with the Tijuana Brass. Herb took the track I had made for Johnny Rivers and inserted his trumpet and the Tijuana Brass. Herb and Jerry Moss released it on A&M Records and the song became a hit.
I had originally scored “The Look of Love” in the film as a very sexual instrumental theme. Then Hal came up with lyrics for it and we took Dusty Springfield into the studio to record the song. I had first met Dusty when she came to New York in February 1964. By then, she had already cut her own version of “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” a song Hal and I had written that Dionne had recorded a year before as a B-side. I did my best to talk Dusty into releasing “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” as a single in the States. She was ambivalent about it but let it come out. A disc jockey in New York started playing the song and the record went to number four in the charts.
Dusty was a great girl with a really soulful voice, but she was very hard to record. We were both perfectionists but Dusty was much harder on herself than she needed to be and I think that if we had ever tried to do an album together, we would have destroyed one another. Dusty was so insecure that when we cut “The Look of Love” together in London she would go into a separate control room so she could listen to the playback by herself. I told her that what she had done was great and that it was exactly what we wanted for the picture. I had scored it to begin with a gourd, which is a Brazilian percussion instrument, followed by a very sexy saxophone.
The song was a hit and then became an even bigger one when Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 cut it a year later. “The Look of Love” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song in
1968 but the Oscar went to “Talk to the Animals,” from Doctor Dolittle. So when it came to winning this award, Hal and I were now three-time losers.
Hal was still a lot more political than me and the fact that one of his sons was now old enough to be drafted inspired him to write the lyrics for “The Windows of the World.” Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it’s a good song. “The Windows of the World” was also on an album of the same name, which had a track on it called “I Say a Little Prayer.”
When I cut the song with Dionne, we had a great trumpet player named Ernie Royal in the studio. Although I had never worked with him before, Ernie had played with Dizzy Gillespie and was one of the best, but he had an attitude at times. Back then I would write dummy lyrics that had no meaning and then have the copyist put them on the horn parts after I had done the score. I would write out all the notes for the trumpet line and the score. Although the notation was right, putting words to it, like, for instance, “Just holding on,” made the song more lucid for me than just having the notes on paper.
All the musicians I usually worked with got used to this because what I was doing was asking them to think lyrically as they played the notes. I would sing the words I had written to the horn players and then tell them to play those lyrics on their instruments.
After I did this in the studio that night, I said, “Although these words make no fucking sense, do you hear what they are saying?” Ernie said, “I don’t get it, man. You want it staccato or not?” I said, “I want it the way I wrote it and just sang it,” and he said, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” I said, “Let’s take a break.” Then I talked to the music contractor and said I didn’t want to use Ernie for the rest of the date, because I didn’t want that kind of attitude in the studio. It didn’t take away from Ernie Royal being a great trumpet player, but he could have made things impossible.
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 12
