Rant #3,071: Promises, Promises

Well, we lost a great one yesterday when Burt Bacharach passed away at age 94.

Bacharach was the much more visible of the songwriting duo of Bacharach—the tunesmith—and Hal David—the lyricist—and they dominated the 1960s and into at least the early 1970s with their pop concoctions that somehow drew you in even if you didn’t want to be drawn into the sheer sugar of their music.

They wrote what I consider the first “ear candy” songs, tunes that got into your head and which you couldn’t get out of your head, no matter how hard you tried.

Take this one song of theirs in particular—“Promises, Promises”—from the Broadway show of the same name.

I wrote about this song way back in Rant #512, May 27, 2011. Here is what I had to say about that song, but it could have really been said about any song in the Bacharach/David catalog of hits:

“Did you ever have a song that you can’t get out of your head?

A song that you don’t necessarily like, but it sticks in your brain like peanut butter sticks to bread?

I have been going through this the past few weeks with a song from my childhood that I had pretty much forgotten about, until hearing it on the radio a few weeks ago.

And since hearing it, I can't get it out of my head.

The song is “Promises, Promises” from the 1968 Broadway show of the same name, a production which was written by Neil Simon. It’s from the only Broadway show that Burt Bacharach and Hal David ever wrote the score for. Although I never saw the show, it is supposedly based on the 1960 film “The Apartment,”

The song’s most popular version was by Dionne Warwick, who had a top 20 hit with it when the show was on Broadway. It has also been sung by many others, including Jerry Orbach, in the original Broadway show, Tony Roberts, in the London cast, and most recently, Sean Hayes in the 2010 Broadway revival.

Anyway, I just can’t get this tune out of my noggin, and I don’t know why.”

The Bacharach/David team wrote many songs like that, including the following:

“What’s New Pussycat”

“Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”

“Anyone Who Had a Heart”

“Alfie”

“I Say a Little Prayer”

“My Little Red Book”

“I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”

“Long Ago Tomorrow”

“The Look of Love”

“Do You Know the Way to San Jose”

And honestly, that is just scratching the surface of their writing … they gave a real bombastic Broadway feel to all of their songs, and the public ate up this pop pabulum as if it were real sugary candy, myself included.

Dionne Warwick certainly was their muse, as they wrote many, many hits for her, but they also wrote hits for the likes of Tom Jones, B.J. Thomas, Herb Alpert, Jackie DeShannon … the list goes on and on and on.

While David was pretty much in the background in this partnership—he was a closeted gay man through most of those years--Bacharach was way out in front, recording his own albums of his own tunes, appearing all over TV and the movies, and living a celebrity lifestyle that made him a ubiquitous presence in the Hollywood gossip pages of the 1960s and early 1970s.

His marriage to Angie Dickinson put him right out in front, and unlike David, he seemed to enjoy the notoriety, although it led to some nasty reporting and an eventual divorce from the actress.

And it also led to a divorce between David and Bacharach, and although the two did continue their careers with other co-writers—Bacharach even teamed up with the likes of Elvis Costello for a period of time—the hits kind of dried up by the 1980s, although Bacharach did have one more absolutely huge hit, a former throwaway that he and Carole Bayer Sager originally wrote for Rod Stewart in 1982.

“That’s What Friends Are For” became a huge hit for Dionne Warwick and some top pop co-singers when it was revived in 1985 as an AIDS benefit anthem, selling millions of copies and generating many more millions to AIDS research.

With the passing of Bacharach, the world has lost one of last of the great pure pop songwriters, a guy who made millions off of pop songs that had hooks at least a mile long, sung by some of the world’s great pop singers.

And you know, now that I think about it, I still can’t get “Promises, Promises out of my head.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.