I just read how Letterman (or some late night host) was convinced to wear a suit an tie. The reasoning made sense — his more outrageous and outside comic approach would seem even more so coming from a guy who looked completely establishment.
During their reign at the very top of the Top 40, Burt Bacharach and Hal David seemed safe as milk, a couple pros who grew up around the Brill Building and were now cranking out middle of the road hits for the suburban crowd. Wrong – they were just hiding there, disguised as a couple rat-pack hangers on.
Behind the suits there was something sneaky and cool going on in their music and it's sad to read of Hal David's passing marking the official end of a sterling partnership. Bacharach's music, which sounded tame compared to the songs it rubbed shoulders with in the '60s was actually off kilter, odd and very hard to play. The changes were completely unpredictable and hard to learn, the measures were broken while the melodies skittered like a graceful spider up and down a wall. What sounds like Muzak on first encounter reveals itself to be something more akin to Brazilian music upon closer inspection. It was complicated and difficult. That is why the Hal David was absolutely the perfect lyricist for him.
David wrote lines that were direct, honest and fitted to the melody like a perfectly tailored suit. He was a bit older than his contemporary hit makers, he didn't score his first hit until his late 30s and he certainly wasn't looking over his shoulder at scrappy game changers like Dylan or the Beatles. He kept his own course and in doing so managed to bring Bacharach's songs back from the ether and plop them right down in the middle of everyday life.
Early on they found their perfect delivery system in the aching soprano of Dionne Warwick. She was not a rafter raising gospel diva even though she did come up in the church. There was always something of the elegant nightclub singer in her delivery and again, the shiny coat of polish often hid something much deeper. Listen to "Alfie" or "Windows of the World" and you will hear one of the most balanced teams ever to work the fields of pop music deliver what amounts to a secular prayer. These songs, and many others they wrote, were an oasis of quiet in a landscape that was anything but serene.
Hal David often wrote questions, he lived and worked in those kind of times and as much as anyone, he defined them. And though the songs he created with his partners fit that era so well, you can play any of them today and experience more than nostalgia. "Don't Make Me Over," based on a comment Warwick made at a session, is a strong of feminist statement. And if there was ever a time when the world needed love, it would be now. And it's always now.
Shifting from the personal to the universal with casual ease, wrestling the complex creations of Bacharach to the ground and doing it all with unbelievable warmth and a sentimentality that doesn't seem corny, David did it and made it look so easy you would never suspect just how hard that job must have been. Giants did indeed walk the earth in the era before auto-tuning, let's just hope they haven't left for good.
