The Burt Bacharach Discussion Forum

I struck gold !

If only I could "really" play the piano....
Includes this beauty (for which I could never have worked out the chords...) :

Ahh, the memories...this is a great book..I bought a copy at Wallichs Music City in 1970...but its long gone now...

I too acquired this book in the early 70s and still have it. I've learned to play probably in the region of twenty of the songs well enough but the one that has proved to be a bit of an elusive bastard is 'Alfie', and even now it's more of a case of trying to get through it unscathed rather than truly playing it.

I may have talked about this before on here, but you'll be interested to know that back in the day - like during the publication of this book....piano arrangements contained therein
were prepared by others based by a couple of sources..what we call "lead sheets" provided by the publisher, and also "the record" or recordings of the song..
Case in point, my friend Lou Halmy(RIP) who had an office in music preparation hq- Bob Rross music(copyist) was appointed to do a lot of these.This meant that Lou, who had a good ear, would sit in his office - look at the bare boned "lead sheet"(melody chords and words)
and also spin a Dionne Warwick record over and over...sit at his old upright piano, and "create" these piano arrangements that are in this book
I know for a fact that he did the offiical sheet music for "Look of Love" when it came out in 1967. Now, most of the composers of these songs
didn't give a slip about this end of the music biz, and left it to others to create and put out the sheet versions of these tunes...Lou also did many Beach Boy folio piano arrangements for the Beach Boys sheet music back in the day.This has changed somewhat today, with composers giving out a more detailed piano sheet .Just an interesting side note...

As a young buck, I was so inclined and wanted to believe that this sheet music was touched by the hand of the creator(Burt sitting at the piano) feeding us the information on these pages) It turns out "no"

Steve, that`s very interesting news to me. I, too, had always assumed that there was an "official" copy of the composition that I also assumed was written or blessed by the composer.
Never too old to learn.

Blair,
Thank you for your response...The lead sheets(which helped the piano arranger) i think were done by Burts NY copyist "Wedo's"who wrote them down from Burts hand written lead line sketch. I have a copy of a couple of these...then they were "done up" by the copyist...
There came a time when Burt shifted most of his activities to the West Coast when he moved to California...now he is back in Long island...

steveo_1965 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 31, 2022 11:59 am As a young buck, I was so inclined and wanted to believe that this sheet music was touched by the hand of the creator(Burt sitting at the piano) feeding us the information on these pages) It turns out "no"

Steve, my instinct when I started going through the 40 Golden Songs book was that there were a few too many instances of straight major chords being placed where major 7ths should have been for Bacharach to have been directly involved.

Agreed Paul! With the exception of the Promises stuff..by that time the piano-cond pts were out there for reference...and these tunes were a lot more accurately portrayed.