Dionne Warwick/Burt Bacharach-Hal David/Scepter Records

[JSngry]

I come here today to tell all who will listen that "In Between The Heartaches" is a perfect piece of jaw-droppingly original music in every regard, & that when I say "perfect", I mean perfect, and when I say"music", I mean music. That it's taken me about 43 years to discover it for myself suggests that greatness is never destroyed, it's sometimes just hidden really well, as well as that maybe what I think I know is more like what I know I think.

[Christiern]

The Bacharach formula and her recordings with him are pleasing to the ear, but I have never heard Dionne Warwick in person when she wasn't horrendous. I don't think some recording engineers get half the praise they deserve.

[JSngry]

Recording & its evolutions has created a reality of music, including great music, for which live performance is by no means a relevant criteria of the work itself. Just as cinema is not theater, a record is not a concert.

Oh well!

[skeith]

I come here today to tell all who will listen that "In Between The Heartaches" is a perfect piece of jaw-droppingly original music in every regard, & that when I say "perfect", I mean perfect, and when I say"music", I mean music. That it's taken me about 43 years to discover it for myself suggests that greatness is never destroyed, it's sometimes just hidden really well, as well as that maybe what I think I know is more like what I know I think.

Sorry to get off this topic, but your sentiments express what I am feeling about a lot of classic country music.

Please help me I'm fallin' for it!!

[Christiern]

Carter Family, they don't come much better.

[Larry Kart]

The Bacharach formula and her recordings with him are pleasing to the ear, but I have never heard Dionne Warwick in person when she wasn't horrendous. I don't think some recording engineers get half the praise they deserve.

I heard her in person in the late 70s or early '80s twice -- once she was horrendous, once she was great. My impression was that the bad time she was really stoned. [Added in edit: IIRC she was literally staggering around the stage at times.]

[JSngry]

The Bacharach formula and her recordings with him are pleasing to the ear, but I have never heard Dionne Warwick in person when she wasn't horrendous. I don't think some recording engineers get half the praise they deserve.

I heard her in person in the late 70s or early '80s twice -- once she was horrendous, once she was great. My impression was that the bad time she was really stoned. [Added in edit: IIRC she was literally staggering around the stage at times.]

Recording & its evolutions has created a reality of music, including great music, for which live performance is by no means a relevant criteria of the work itself. Just as cinema is not theater, a record is not a concert.

FWIW, the gist of this thread was intended to be a look at the music as found on record, since there is a "conceptual" thrust to so much of it, a specificity of "presentation" to a degree that live performance of this material in this form would be musically redundant at best, unnecessary and/or anti-climatic at worst. This is a distinctly different aesthetic that that of the "recording as document" school, and one may or may not find it valid to whatever degree, but it is a reality nevertheless.

Now, having said that, I'll go ahead and say this again - "In Between The Heartaches" is a perfect piece of jaw-droppingly original music in every regard, and that originality grows, not decreases, in my estimation with each listen. Hearing it in person may be a painful experience or an ecstatic one, depending on any number of variables, but my point is that that is not a particularly relevant point when one is evaluating the record. For stuff like this, 99% of the time, the record is the point of it all.

[Christiern]

I just recalled that I actually did hear Dionne sing well in person. It was many years ago at a Eugene McCarthy rally in Madison Square Garden. She sang "If" and it was excellent.

[Larry Kart]

The Bacharach formula and her recordings with him are pleasing to the ear, but I have never heard Dionne Warwick in person when she wasn't horrendous. I don't think some recording engineers get half the praise they deserve.

I heard her in person in the late 70s or early '80s twice -- once she was horrendous, once she was great. My impression was that the bad time she was really stoned. [Added in edit: IIRC she was literally staggering around the stage at times.]

Recording & its evolutions has created a reality of music, including great music, for which live performance is by no means a relevant criteria of the work itself. Just as cinema is not theater, a record is not a concert.

FWIW, the gist of this thread was intended to be a look at the music as found on record, since there is a "conceptual" thrust to so much of it, a specificity of "presentation" to a degree that live performance of this material in this form would be musically redundant at best, unnecessary and/or anti-climatic at worst. This is a distinctly different aesthetic that that of the "recording as document" school, and one may or may not find it valid to whatever degree, but it is a reality nevertheless.

Now, having said that, I'll go ahead and say this again - "In Between The Heartaches" is a perfect piece of jaw-droppingly original music in every regard, and that originality grows, not decreases, in my estimation with each listen. Hearing it in person may be a painful experience or an ecstatic one, depending on any number of variables, but my point is that that is not a particularly relevant point when one is evaluating the record. For stuff like this, 99% of the time, the record is the point of it all.

Agree with your points above about the conceptual power of those recordings as recordings. I was responding to Chris's post and recalling my estimate at the time of what might have been making a difference in those two in-person Warwicke performances I heard.

[JSngry]

Yeah, I know. I've been doing some casual thinking about how different musics are in essence either "performances" or "works" & I find it interesting how much "pop" actually falls in the latter category (and how much "rock" into the former). The Warwick/Bacharach/David collaborations definitely fall into the "works" category afaic.

Edit to add that the one song I cite, "In Between The Heartaches" is so full of sudden dynamic & emotional shifts that doing a straight take vocal might well have been counterproductive, that recording it in segments might actually have given a better, truer final result. I don't know how much, if any, of this was actually done, but if Dionne did in fact sing it all, or even most of it, in one take, then she deserves a helluva lot of credit (and even if she did it in segments, hey, great job), because that song & that arrangement follow no rules or no logic other than their own. To deal with that, you gotta be ready to just "go there" without any sort of fallback, jump off a cliff into the unknown and know you're going to fly. That's one helluva thing for anybody to do, a "pop singer" in particular.

Edited October 23, 2008 by JSngry

[Larry Kart]

Would have been interesting to have been a fly on the wall when things like "In Between The Heartaches" were recorded. Is there much information anywhere on how Bacharach-Warwick worked in the studio?

[JSngry]

Not that I'm aware of, but I'm coming to this stuff waaaaay late, so maybe there is & I just haven't found out about it yet.

If not, there needs to be. This stuff is every bit as worthy of research as Pet Sounds, etc,, I think.

[Alexander Hawkins]

If you're interested, Bacharach played the Electric Proms last night in London - video here.

I caught a little of the performance...some nice stuff (beautiful arrangements especially for a couple of numbers), although his stage manner grated a little a times...

[Hot Ptah]

Carter Family, they don't come much better.

That's really true. I find Sarah Carter's voice very compelling. It is certainly not a "great" voice in a high art sense, but it has a poignant quality that I really like.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Burt Bacharach (with Hal David and others) wrote some pretty ordinary songs in the fifties - "The story of my life" and "Magic moments" - not anything that would prepare you for what would come later.

I first noticed the team's name on Chuck Jackson's "The breaking point" in 1961. Then Bacharach's (with Hilliard) on Etta James' "Waiting for Charile to come home", the B side of "Somethin's gotta hold on me". Apparently at the same time, they wrote a couple of B sides for the Drifters, but I can't remember them, though I expect I bought them at the time.

But I was wondering how they made the transition from "Magic moments" to "I wake up crying" (an earlier Chuck Jackson single). And I found this interesting bit here.

"I Could Make You Mine" (1960) and "Somebody Else's Sweetheart" (1961) as recorded by The Wanderers

In the '50s, only overly elocuted black singers like Johnny Mathis, Joe Williams, Gene McDaniels and Della Reese recorded Bacharach-David songs. But it's with rougher R&B artists like Chuck Jackson and the Drifters that the team would find their true voice.

But before all that happened, there was the Wanderers -- a group criminally overlooked by all but the most rabid doo-wop aficionados. This New York quartet had both the elegance of the Platters and the comic elements of the Coasters, plus a lead singer in Ray Pollard whose Herculean octave leaps make both these songs unexpected treasures of the genre.

For the team's first forays into "black music," Hal David employed the "triangle" song formula -- where the protagonist falls in love with his best friend's girl -- while Bacharach makes a musical joke of actually inserting a tingling triangle on "Somebody Else's Sweetheart." For the next few years, no song will escape a Manhattan recording studio without having some union player tingling a triangle.

While neither song was a hit, "I Could Make You Mine" is the only pre-Dionne song that Bacharach and David ever went back to the studio to recut with Ms. Warwick. It appeared on her Anyone Who Had a Heart album in 1964.

In particular, I was struck by the list of black singers who's recorded Bacharach/David songs in the fifties

Johnny Mathis, Joe Williams, Gene McDaniels and Della Reese

OK, a little research tells me that Mathis recorded "Heavenly" and "Faithfully" in 1959, the former of which was a big hit in the UK. But Joe Williams? Gene McDaniels? Della Reese?

Well, I found a Joe Wiliams single

That Kind of Woman - Joe Williams

(Hal David-Burt Bacharach)

Orchestra conducted by Jimmy Jones

Roulette 4185 (1959)

I've found a few more references to Mathis and Reese (from 1957) here

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TKJU6Ce...result#PPA21,M1

And more research recalled the B side of Gene McDaniels' 1962 single "Chip chip", which was a beautiful, jazzy ballad, "Another tear falls" and always my favourite Gene McDaniels cut. For some reason or other, I never noticed who had written the song. (But I can't trace any fifties McDaniels recordings of their songs.)

Also in 1962, Jane Morgan, the most uncompromisingly STRAIGHT singer I've ever heard, made an album for Kapp "What now my love" which was arranged (and maybe produced?) by Burt Bacharach. I bought this purely on the strength of Bacharach's name. It was interesting. Jane really had the wrong kind of voice and approach for Bacharach/David songs. But she did do a decent version of "Waiting for Charile to come home" (not fair to compare Morgan with James) and the album as a whole was very interesting with (I think I remember) songs like "Here's that rainy day" and "It never entered my mind". I suspect the musicians on board might get a good bit more than I did out of this album.

MG

[JSngry]

Upping this for this

No Scepter, , not Hal David, not released until last year, and not even a "great song", at least in the "pop" sense. But geez...that's some convoluted shit right there, yet it almost, almost comes together. If it had...holy shit.

I dig the lyrics too, how it starts out like it's going to be "Guess Who I Saw Today?" and then shifts the perspective a full 180.

I'll take a "failure" like this any day. Soooo close...and shows how tight the rope was on their earlier work. Sounds like somebody/everybody looked down for a moment too long and then, well, you know.

[sgcim]

I used to play with a pianist/arranger, Mike Alterman, who was DW's manager and accompanist just before she hit it big.

She left him for Burt and Hal, and the rest is history.

Mike was the pianist with Woody Herman on the "East Meets West" LP, and spent eight traumatizing months on the road with Chet Baker back in the 60s.