Burt Bacharach: Parking cars, pumping gas and sanding boats

 

Whenever I think of Burt Bacharach, I remember a spring day in 1968 when I was part of a small group of kids who were sanding and varnishing the boats we would sail that summer in sailing school. The day was cool and windy, the kind of intrusive wind that you felt you had to shout over in order to be heard. So we didn't talk much, the instructors and the kids, and the wind was like a hiss of static or rushing water, a white noise that dominated the afternoon as we rubbed our woodblocks wrapped in sandpaper back and forth upon the hulls of the overturned Albacores in the yacht club parking lot. This auditory buffer seemed to give the song going through my head more room to grow and stretch to fill every corner of my brain until long after we headed for the streetcar stop and home. The song that had been going through my head all day was a pop song I must have heard on the radio: "Do You Know the Way to San José."

The words suggested images of "cool" through the narrow lens of my 13-year-old's world view; can you direct me to this cool place in California? This other cool place, L.A., is a great big freeway. Maybe they'll make you a star. The melody soared and the rhythm bounced with energy. It wasn't hip, like Jefferson Airplane, but it was trendy: TV trendy. "Parking cars and pumping gas." 

It was, of course, one of the first major hits for the massively successful trio of Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Dionne Warwick.

In the years to come, Bacharach's music propelled the mainstreamiest of mainstreams into a late-modern era. While my peers and I wallowed in Dylan, Hendrix, CSNY and the Band in our teens, Bacharach's music, his then-unconventional yet accessible chord structures and melodies, became the musical language of the grey-sideburn set. This was music for people who owned sprawling ranch-style bungalows with kidney-shaped backyard pools, learned transcendental meditation and watched Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. 

For a time, I rather disliked Bacharach, mainly out of ignorance, the way teenage boys develop tribal allegiances and hostilities toward various musical genres. Only much later, maybe 20 years ago, I listened to Bacharach's songs with unprejudiced ears. The music that once evoked shallow fashionableness to me now sounded full, complex and masterful. The simple yet evocative chording of "Close to You"; the hip optimism of "Say a Little Prayer"; the mild irony of "I'll Never Fall in Love Again." And then there was the theme from Arthur (on which Bacharach was a collaborator), which seemed to bring the same late-'60s, comfy-couch ambiance into the 1980s. And the puzzling complexity of "Promises, Promises," a mind-boggling experiment in rhythms, time signatures and structure.

When Hal David died in 2012, a newspaper obituary printed the sparse lyrics to "Do you Know the Way to San José" in full and I read them properly for the first time, with that boat-sanding afternoon still in mind. The song is actually about unrealized dreams, about failing to make it in L.A. and returning home, to San José. That bright, hopeful tone came from Warwick's sweet voice combined with the rhythmic and melodic flair that could only be conjured by Bacharach — the man who stretched the era of the Great American Songbook into the 1960s and beyond.  

 

Life and The Love Boat

The Love Boat, Season 4, Episode 18, "Aquaphobic/Humpty Dumpty/the Starmaker," Feb. 7, 1981.

I never watched a full episode of The Love Boat during its decade-long run starting in the mid-1970s. It seemed a stodgy, shallow show at a time when television comedy was becoming more progressive and experimental, with shows like Mork & Mindy and Saturday Night Live. Today, a Love Boat episode is like a peek back at television's most conservative faction moving reluctantly into a new era. 

In the episode I watched yesterday, Isaac, the moustachioed bartender, learned that a music executive was among the newly boarded passengers, and hoped to be discovered as a singer. He arranged to perform a guest set in the cocktail lounge, and recruited three of the ship’s maids to be his back-up singers. Isaac, it turned out, was not a good singer, but the maids, played by the Pointer Sisters, were very good, so the music executive passed on Isaac and signed the three maids.

Meanwhile, a middle-aged man hoped to overcome his fear of water with the help of his fiancé. Enter Louis Nye, who had played the Drysdale's coddled, Ivy League son on the Beverley Hillbillies and would later play Susie Green's irascible father on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Here, he was an aquaphobe who couldn't venture out of his cruise ship cabin without wearing an oversized, prop lifejacket that looked like it was made from sofa cushions. Shedding the flotation device, according to the story's logic, would signify victory over his phobia. I won't spoil the ending, but the captain and the ship's doctor appear to devote an inordinate amount of time and attention to this single passenger's problem. 

And then there's the former college football star, played by David Hasselhoff — before Knight Rider and Baywatch, and long before that depressing viral video of him dining off the floor — who could not accept that his glory years on the gridiron were behind him. He also is the ex-boyfriend of Julie, the cruise director, and they dabble in rekindling their romance, which is apparently permitted on the Pacific Princess.  

The song Isaac and the sisters performed was "He's So Shy." The first time I heard that song I was sitting in women's strip club in the late '70s with a couple of friends of both sexes. We were there out of ironic curiosity — people did things like that in those days. During a break in the male stripping (short bodybuilders with moustaches and long, dark hair) someone from the crowd selected a song on the jukebox and joined a small group of friends on stage where they sang along with the record. They danced an understated Motown-type choreography and snapped their fingers as they sang; a friendly-looking guy in a preppy cardigan led the group into a dip at the knees at the beginning of each chorus. It looked as if these friends — five or six men and women — had planned this temporary takeover of the stage and had rehearsed these moves beforehand. Moves I would remember some 40 years later. 

The Grammys: An unknown blues singer, and a broken record

 This is a test post, as I haven't been on here in years. 

As I posted on Twitter this morning, the Grammys telecast (which aired last night on CBS) used to stand out from the other awards shows by showcasing the many sometimes unprofitable genres the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences represents, by including  jazz, classical and folk performances among the commercial stuff. And it always expressed a clear stand in favour of music education in public schools. While last night's show included acknowledgement of a "music educator of the year" and some advocacy for education, the show has become in recent years indistinguishable from other celebrity glitz-fests, such as the American Music Awards, the People's Choice Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards.

Some highlights: The in memoriam segment, featuring Kacey Musgraves, Mick Fleetwood, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow and Migos' Quavo; Harry Styles receiving his award from bis biggest fan, a grandmother from Sudbury, Ont.; and a nod to the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, put together by Questlove (the Roots) and including a long list of notables, including L.L. Cool J., Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Busta Rymes, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Missy Elliot, Big Boi and De La Soul, to name but a few. Inevitably, the omnipresent D.J. Kaled, who always manages to stake out a prominent position in these events, was everywhere.

Unknown Bonnie Raitt

Song of the Year honours went to Bonnie Raitt, who beat out Adele, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. Raitt's expression of utter shock upon hearing her song title ("Just Like That") called was reminiscent of Meryl Streep's feigned astonishment at the Golden Globes a few years ago. But Raitt's incredulity was real. She was likely resigned to an honorary mention alongside the reigning stars.

No one, however, was more surprised at Raitt's win than the reporter at U.K. trash tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported: "Shock as unknown blues singer beats Beyonce, Adele and Taylor Swift to win Song of the Year."

Whose record did Beyonce break?

Beyonce set the record for total Grammys won by an artist, taking home her 31st gold gramophone. But I heard no mention made during the telecast, or since, of the incumbent record-holder: Georg Solti, the Hungarian/British symphony and operatic conductor and long-standing musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. 

Born in Budapest in 1912, Solti studied with Bela Bartok and later, in the 1930s, worked under Arturo Toscanini at the Salzburg Festival. Before the Second World War, Solti fled Hungary's increasing antisemitism for London, where he conducted a season of ballet at the Royal Opera House. During the war, he found refuge in Switzerland, where, forbidden to work as a conductor, he earned a living as a pianist. After the war, he made a name for himself as a fastidious, demanding conductor with such notable companies as the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Covent Garden Opera Company in London. 

Solti joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1967. He made numerous recordings with the CSO, including the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler. He made several operatic recordings with the CSO and other orchestras. Solti's recording of Wagner's "Der Ring Des Nibelungen," recorded in Vienna in 1958, has twice been voted the greatest recording ever made — by readers of Gramophone magazine in 1999, and by professional music critics polled by BBC's Music Magazine, in 2011; this is the music heard during the helicopter attack scene in the movie Apocalypse Now. Solti died in 1997.

Here's to you, Georg. It was a good run. One might say you put your own Ring on it.