The Burt Bacharach Discussion Forum

This is a pretty trivial bit of information regarding an ancient Bacharach obscurity, but I don't see this information in the forum and thought it worth sharing for the completists out there.

For Mel Tormé's recording "These Desperate Hours", released on the 1999 Rhino CD Mel Torme At The Movies, Rhino lists Burt Bacharach and Wilson Stone as composer and lyricist in the CD liner notes, and the recording and composer credits are likewise listed in Serene Dominic's 2003 book Burt Bacharach: Song By Song.

From what I can tell based on searching Discogs and other online sources, the Rhino CD was the first commercial release of the Mel Tormé recording of "These Desperate Hours", so the composer information was likely based on research by some Rhino employee. Because the Tormé song was identified by someone along the way as a tie-in to the 1955 Paramount movie The Desperate Hours, and Bacharach copyrighted a song titled "The Desperate Hours" in 1955, it was probably easy for a Rhino employee to confuse the two songs.

Bacharach's song was published by Paramount Music Corp., however, so his song was likely the actual promotional tie-in. It was released at the time, and Bacharach and Stone are credited on the record label, along with Paramount Music:

https://www.discogs.com/master/1693796- ... rate-Hours

If you listen to Tormé's song, and compare it to the 1955 recording by Eileen Rodgers and Ray Conniff of Bacharach's "The Desperate Hours", it's obvious in about three seconds that these are two completely different songs:



Here's the Eileen Rodgers song, which has some of the same frantic vibe as Bacharach's 1958 "Hot Spell":



Looking at the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series in Google Books, you will find a 1960 copyright entry for the Mel Tormé song as follows:

"THESE DESPERATE HOURS; w & m Mel Torme, Stanley Styne, & George Duning. Appl. author: Columbia Pictures Corp., employer for hire of George Duning & Stanley Styne. ©Colpix Music, Inc."

It's interesting that "These Desperate Hours" was published by Columbia Pictures Corp., not Paramount, the studio behind the 1955 film.

EDIT: I found the following item in Cashbox Magazine (VOLUME XXII-NUMBER 6 OCTOBER 22, 1960 ):

... George Duning is penning the music and Mel Torme and Stanley Styne the Lyrics for “These Desperate Hours,” song for new teevee series entitled - “DanRaven.”

That would be "Dan Raven", a show that ran during the 1960-1961 season and was produced by Screen Gems, hence the Colpix copyright: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053495/

Here's the copyright entry:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ca ... frontcover

I would guess that the Tormé recording was thus made in 1960, and not in Oct. 1955, per the Serene Dominic book.

Interestingly, in Dominic's interview with Bacharach, BB says "That’s right. We were doing songs like movie promotional songs for hire. It’d be $500 a song. 'Desperate Hours,' I remember that."

If he actually remembered the song, he must not have been in the loop when Tormé's recording was added to the tracklist of Universal Music's 2013 Anyone Who Had A Heart : The Art of The Songwriter.

As a side note, if Bacharach meant "for hire" in the legal sense of "work for hire", it's interesting that he was willing to write songs for a flat fee early on. His copyright entry for "The Desperate Hours" does not include a line like "author: Paramount Pictures Corp., employer for hire of Burt Bacharach and Wilson Stone", as we see in the copyright of "These Desperate Hours", but perhaps such a line is not necessarily legally required when writers are doing work for hire.

So it appears that the Rhino CD got it wrong, and this error made its way into Serene Dominic's "Song By Song" book, and from there, into CD anthologies like El Records Burt Bacharach: The First Book of Songs 1954-58, the new Dream Big – The First Decade Of Songs from El sister label Cherry Red Records, and the previously mentioned Universal anthology.

Oh, and do you want to hear Bacharach's "The Desperate Hours" sung in Finnish? Of course you do!

I think it's fair to say that neither song sounds particularly like a Bacharach composition, but then again the same could probably be said of 90% of his pre-1962 output.

Talking of record label cock-ups, I remember back in the late 80s Connoisseur releasing a double album tribute to Bacharach and David as part of their songbook series which omitted Dionne Warwick's 'Walk On By' in favour of Leroy Van Dyke's recording of a completely different song which just happened to have the same title.



Here's a link to the Connoisseur album in Discogs:
https://www.discogs.com/sell/item/1106592467

pljms wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 2:33 am Talking of record label cock-ups, I remember back in the late 80s Connoisseur releasing a double album tribute to Bacharach and David as part of their songbook series which omitted Dionne Warwick's 'Walk On By' in favour of Leroy Van Dyke's recording of a completely different song which just happened to have the same title.

Doing this little bit of research certainly made me appreciate how hard it must have been for record companies and researchers in the 1980s/90s to track down this kind of all-but-lost ephemera. I know there were networks of record show dealers, and collector magazines like Goldmine and so forth, but even so, uncovering a record like the Eileen Rodgers recording or finding an item buried in a random issue of Cashbox magazine would have been difficult to say the least. Now the internet lets me find this information as quickly as I can put together the right search terms.

The Leroy Van Dyke song is something of a minor country classic, and has turned up on anthologies by Bear Family, Ace, and Time-Life. It came out in 1961, and actually got to #5 on the U.S. Hot 100, so it's conceivable that Hal David was aware of the lyric and decided to write a similar story from a different angle (spurned lover vs. cheating cad).

It doesn't surprise me that much that some bargain basement label in Europe confused the two songs--the label probably wasn't full of record nerd employees like the kind you'd find at Rhino. In any case, the "Walk on By" thing didn't change history, so to speak.

The funny thing about the Rhino slip up is they actually altered the Bacharach canon. There will probably be people in 50 or 100 years still identifying the Torme recording as a Bacharach song.

Jim, you are absolutely right: 2 different songs!!!
I will correct the discography.
Funny that Mel Tormè song is in the new box-set "Burt Bacharach Dream big, The first decade of songs". There is another mistake in the new box-set: the Jay Livingston & Ray Evans song "Another time, another place" credited like a Burt song. This is an old mistake, I found even a single credited to Burt and Hal.

Davide Bonori wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 3:33 am ...There is another mistake in the new box-set: the Jay Livingston & Ray Evans song "Another time, another place" credited like a Burt song.

Thanks for pointing out "Another Time, Another Place". I just got a Bacharach rarities anthology that included that track as recorded by Patti Page, and I hadn't looked into it's history.

Re: the "Dream Big" box, I'm less surprised that a European public domain label would include these tracks without doing any verification than I am that the 2013 career-spanning 6-CD retrospective (all official & properly licensed), released to coincide with his memoir, wouldn't have had a little more fact checking done.

I guess that Eileen Rodgers single was WAY off of anybody's radar and basically unknown to Bacharach collectors. I don't see it on any reissue until a 2015 CD on Jasmine of Rodgers' work, and the Youtube video went up that same year (probably not a coincidence).

Eileen Rodgers was not lucky with Burt songs. The second one she recorded (A bottomless cup) was never issued ...