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.