Rhino's "Look of Love" turns 25

[Jim Dixon]

Here's a notable anniversary--November 3, 1998 was the release date of the original Rhino 3-CD "Look of Love" collection (I know international versions trickled out later), and it was following hard on the heels of the late September release of "Painted from Memory". I'm one of lots of fans for whom this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with Bacharach's music.

For those who have read Serene Dominic's "Burt Bacharach: Song By Song", you may enjoy his review of the boxed set in the Phoenix New Times, where he's already working out some of the stuff that ended up in the book:
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/music/t ... toryPage=1

(One opinion that jumped out at me: Dominic mellowed noticeably on Jack Jones' "Wives and Lovers" between the 1998 album review and the 2003 book. I've always enjoyed "Wives and Lovers" myself, and Jack Jones never struck me as a singer who "reduces words to mere syllables". The Dominic takes that make me scratch my head are not too many--I find him a pretty reliable guide much more often than not. When reading his book today, I sometimes wonder what else he may have changed his opinion on after living with the music for another 20 years.)

Newsweek covered the release of Painted from Memory and The Look of Love in an October article that won't have any real surprises for any fan today:
https://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/ind ... er_5,_1998

I like this no-nonsense quote in Newsweek from Elvis Costello, who was aware that Bacharach was still not quite rehabilitated in the post-1970s pop culture:
"I think Burt's restraint reveals a real depth of feeling," Costello says. "There's a danger in believing one form of music is more valid than another. There were frauds in the Tin Pan Alley era, frauds in the psychedelic era, frauds in the grunge era. The best songwriters are just the best songwriters."

Burt's revival was basically contemporaneous with the revival of Brian Wilson's music (the Pets Sounds boxed set appeared one year before The Look of Love, in November 1997), and was I among the unwashed masses that started paying attention to both around this time. It wasn't a huge leap for me--I wasn't an alt-rock kid trying to go directly from Nirvana to Gene Pitney and Dionne--but for Burt in particular, The Look of Love really unlocked the door and allowed me to see past the common (to Gen Xers) idea of Burt as a guy just writing mellow flugelhorn melodies for Karen Carpenter and B.J. Thomas to sing along with (nothing against Carpenter or Thomas!).

Going through the Discogs website not long ago, I found several mid-1990s single disc anthologies of Bacharach songs by original artists (or mostly original) that seemed to indicate that the revival was "bubbling under" a bit, or at least that older fans were still out there and wanted the hits.

But hats off to Rhino for going way beyond the competition, in terms of size, liner notes and photos, and licensing all the right tracks. I've read (probably in this forum, I can't remember) that the project at Rhino took years to realize, growing in scope from a single disc like the ones linked below that were coming out in the mid-1990s to a 2-disc and finally a 3-disc set.

https://www.discogs.com/master/546334-V ... -Bacharach
https://www.discogs.com/release/8462412 ... -Bacharach
https://www.discogs.com/release/5891699 ... -Bacharach
https://www.discogs.com/release/8559536 ... Collection

[Blair N. Cummings]

And here`s the NYRB take on the three-disc set as well as the (in my view, badly misconceived) Zorn project:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/0 ... id=1502763

[Jim Dixon]

Thanks for the NYRB review; I'd not seen that. From the review:

"he had come to be viewed not only as a last bastion of the Tin Pan Alley tradition of the well-crafted song....but as an involuntary emblem of whatever notion of luxurious glamour the beleaguered epoch could cling to."

I don't know, those glamour-heavy Martini and Rossi ads seemed pretty voluntary to me!


Geffrey O'Brien in his piece was not happy that the marketing department brought in johnny-come-lately's like me!

By a back-derivation typical of pop revivals, the fantasy glamour of the original songs is translated into a description of the era in which they originated, as if life in the early Sixties had been a live-action Dionne Warwick song, with deft periodic accentuation by oboe, xylophone, or celeste. For those who were there the first time around—including those of us who were Bacharach enthusiasts, for whom, before Pet Sounds or Revolver, the 1964 Kapp release Burt Bacharach—Hit Maker! was the cult album of choice—it all has the predictable eeriness of seeing experience transmuted into its movie-of-the-week version, as one moment’s dawning sensibility becomes another’s irresistible marketing opportunity.

Will we stick around, he asks?

The question remains how much the renewed appeal of Bacharach’s work owes to the fortuitous kitschiness of the associations it can evoke, to what extent he endures as an artifact of the martini-and-cigar subculture, a mere strand in the gaudy tapestry of Lounge...

Why yes! Yes we will stick around for someone who is basically the Tom Jobim of the American mid-century. I'm a little less enraptured with mid-century modern than I was in 1998, but my appreciation of Bacharach is quite a bit deeper now. (I'm also still here for Juan Garcia Esquivel, who he lumps in with Ferrante & Teicher as mere kitsch.)

The catch is that, even for someone who was there at the time, the original experience has by now become almost as much a fantasy. The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less and less answerable over a lifetime....Can one hope to hear new and different things over the course of time, or would that interfere with the need to be reassured by an unvarying response?

If you are a musician, you can definitely hear new and different things over the course of time in Bacharach's music and productions. If you can't, you aren't listening very closely.

Lots of chin stroking going on in O'Brien's meditation on Bacharach and being an aging pop music fan...I like it best when he finally digs into the music in sections 6 and 7. I'm sure it was a fun essay for him to write, but if I were his editor, I'd be looking to tighten this up a bit. For an essay so concerned with how things hold up over time, I'm not sure some of this writing has that much to say to people who came to 1960s pop long after the fact.

[carmel62]

Stephen Holden: "He's always been underrated... He's kind of like the 60's Cole Porter, if you can imagine Cole Porter with a beat and a lot of syncopation... His music is on the level of Lennon and Mc Cartney". Enough said.

[Blair N. Cummings]

Well, not quite enough said. This appeared in the Boston Globe once upon a time:
The Beatles are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music...

Well, maybe they weren`t that bad, but for Holden to have written the statement that he did proves that people who are paid to know better either don`t or are still afraid to seem like traitors to their generation.
Hey, I liked the Velvet Underground, the Stones, and the Airplane but I wouldn`t compare them to Miles Davis`s `60s quintet with Shorter et. al. or J. S. Bach.
Enough is enough

[pljms]

The first thing that struck me about this 3 CD collection when it was released was how poorly the Carole Bayer Sager years were represented, with just three of her seven Top 40 hit collaborations with Bacharach included. The compilers left us in no doubt that in their opinion the inclusion of several of Bacharach and David's lesser known gems was much more important and were a better representation of his craft as a songwriter and arranger than hit songs like 'Heartlight' and 'Lover Power', something probably few of us on this forum would dispute.

[carmel62]

Regarding Holden's remark on the Beatles (of which I was unaware), the critic certainly showed incredibly poor judgment, which casts a shadow on his judgment on Bacharach too. Or maybe Holden was just trying to èpater les bourgeois.

[mark]

I still owe a huge debt to Patrick Milligan for sharing his and Alec's working discography with me to post on the site back when Bacharach information was hard to come by. Thanks to him, this humble site took on a bit of legitimacy, certainly more than I ever could have generated on my own. It's crazy to think how much more information we have about Burt, his music and his career than we did back in the fallow mid-90s. And a lot of it came from the folks on this forum.

I also recall Alec putting out a plea to anyone who might have a recording of Burt's Martini & Rossi commercial (which was probably one of my first exposures to Burt). He and Patrick wanted to include it on "Look of Love" as a hidden bonus track, but I don't believe he was able to find it back in that pre-YouTube era.

[pljms]

I've read a lot of absurd things written about the Beatles over the years, both pro and con, but that statement by William F. Buckley which appeared in The Boston Globe in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania and posted on here by Blair is probably the most preposterous of them all.

The quote from Stephen Holden saying that he thought that Bacharach had always been underrated as a songwriter wasn't taken from a written article but was from a television interview which featured during a 1999 profile of Burt for the show 60 Minutes. However, by comparing him in stature to Lennon and McCartney while describing his music as being like "Cole Porter with a beat" shows that he didn't really have much of a clue as to what made Bacharach unique as a composer. Of course he would have known all about Bacharach being underrated because for many years he wrote for Rolling Stone, a magazine that either completely ignored Bacharach or attempted to belittle his achievements by routinely dismissing him as "Easy Listening". Although it led to a few irate comments posted on this forum at the time, the totally arbitrary nature of their '100 Greatest Songwriters' list published several years ago was never going to place Bacharach anywhere near the summit and in fact he wasn't even in the top 30.

[Blair N. Cummings]

Underlying much of the arguments regarding `60s pop is, I think, an undue generosity in bestowing the title of "songwriter" to those rank amateurs who were, first and most importantly, young narcissists who wanted to show off in front girls. While technically meeting the definition of "song" in matching notes to words (or syllables) no rock performers were composing independent creations. They were the raw material of a performance, either in the studio or before an audience. I think it makes more sense to think of the Beatles`, Stones`, Kinks`(et. al.) "songs" as "performances." This gets around the uncomfortable and unfair comparisons of Lennon/McCartney and company to Rodgers/Hart and company. Clearly, two different kinds of creation were being hammered out.
The verbal sophistication of those writing from the 1920s through the 1940s (and halfway through the `60s for still-respectable Broadway musicals) was not a qualification for composition in either the Brill Building or in "Danny`s basement." This was the era in which we were to understand that the new music "spoke to youth in their own language." (It is another - and very important - issue that our "own language" was being deliberately dumbed down by the US school system). So we had some very nice pop and rock confections that were of a piece with the zeitgeist but with a life-expectancy in the weeks or months rather than years or decades. Only Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach took seriously the tradition begun by Kern and Berlin and developed it verbally (in JW`s case) and musically (in both).
(There is a separate issue in the kind of song best exemplified by Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon. While not "in the tradition", these compositions were certainly neither "rock performances". Each demonstrated a command of musical and verbal language that arguably surpassed both categories. I`ve seen the term "art song" applied but that seems to have been claimed - appropriately, I think - by classical lieder and cycles like "Winterreise" and should probably be left alone. I`ll leave it to others to coin a neologism for Paul`s and Joni`s exertions).
In short, there was nothing at all special about Lennon and McCartney. Much of it was enjoyable as much of rock in general was. It was not a "level" to be matched by genuine innovators like Bacharach.

[blueonblue]

A few words from the great Leonard Bernstein regarding The Beatles.......



'blue'

[pljms]

I recently re-read Ian MacDonald's 'Revolution In The Head' and I agree with him that the remarkable thing about the Beatles was that while there's been many popular composers better qualified to write music more sophisticated in form and technique, few if any were capable of displaying feeling and fantasy so direct, spontaneous and original. They showed that technical shortcomings, far from constraining the imagination, could let it expand into areas inaccessible to the trained musician's mind. The one classically trained composer operating at the same time as the Beatles that he made an exception of for not letting his creativity be compromised by his extensive formal education was, you guessed it, Burt Bacharach.

[Jim Dixon]

Irving Berlin never learned to read music, and could only play piano in basically one key (which is why he used a transposing piano, the equivalent of a guitar player using a capo). He also outsourced harmonization (chord changes) at times and, like most of his peers, never did the full orchestral arrangements for his shows. What he and the Beatles shared was a freakish facility to create memorable melody lines that the public loved. The Beatles stand apart from not only the Stones, but most of the bands formed in the immediate wake of their popularity in that they were very conscious of the discipline of professional songwriting and wanted to create their own versions of Brill Building type material. They recorded songs by both Bacharach and Carole King on their first album, loved Holland-Dozier-Holland, and payed close attention to the songwriters behind the American hits they loved. I don't listen to them that much these days, but it's not hard to distinguish between the working methods and traditions of the Beatles ca. 1962-1966 and those of, say, The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, or Deep Purple.

Alec Wilder's "American Popular Song" did a great job of creating the canon and hierarchy of songwriters from 1920-1955, so much so that it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the average song on the radio during these years was as musically and lyrically sophisticated as the work of his "big six" (Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Arlen, Porter). That was...not the case. There were thousands of complete hacks in Tin Pan Alley writing songs that dominated the hit parade, and by the same token, many of the musical theater songs that became the Great American Songbook were not big chart hits at the time, though they did seep into the culture through jazz and cabaret performance. Look at the list of #1 hits of the 1940s on Wikipedia--there's a lot of forgotten schlock on there!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_B ... _the_1940s

[carmel62]

This discussion evoked an important cultural divide, which is the distinction between “high” art and “low” art. Generally high art refers to museum paintings, most classical music and most poetry, for instance paradigmatic and well-known artistic cases as the works of Cézanne, “Hamlet”, “The Waste Land”, “Eroica”, “Swan Lake” etc. Assuming that high art is central, it is natural to think that by contrast low art denotes cases that are not real art. But is low art really non art? Just because high art and low art are contrasting, this doesn't mean we should associate the “high” art\“low” art distinction with the “good” art\“bad” art distinction. Even if high art brings to mind such masterpieces as those quoted above, there is also much high art (paintings, music, poetry) that is often uninspired and minor, derivative and stale. Conversely low art, although it not always merits the status of art, is not all bad. Even if rock music is low art, some songs (for example, by the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix ) are surely successful and important examples of art. Thus we cannot equate high art with good art and low art with bad art.

Some argue that since classical music requires more sophisticated listening than does popular music, it necessarilly requires listeners to possess music-theoretical concepts. This elitistic approach leads to consistently speak of “high” and “higher” levels of musical understanding. Yet, even if we concede that complex formal structures are central to classical music and intended to be objects of appreciative understanding, why would that make classical music more aesthetically valuable than pop music, which does not present these formal difficulties? The answer is likely to be located in the superior value of enjoying such formal structures or of exercising “higher” faculties in understanding such structures and the problems that they address and solve. Yet there are good reasons to defend the artistic value of, say, the vitality and freshness of rock music, the aesthetic interests of which are different from the interests highlighted in classical music, such as complex harmonic development.

[harrymcc]

This year also marks the 25th anniversary of Bacharach's "One Amazing Night" concert. I drove to NYC from Boston, sat in a nosebleed seat beyond a loudmouth who yammered throughout (annoying everyone around him),and then drove back to Boston the same night. Of course, it was all worth it and more.