What the World Needs Now Is . . .

 . . . someone like Burt Bacharach.

I don't think I can say anything about Burt Bacharach, who died last week at the age of 94, that hasn't been already said.  His work speaks for itself - nearly a dozen hit songs from movies, his intricate time signatures, his dark, moody melodies, his long and successful collaboration with lyricist Hal David and singer Dionne Warwick (many of her Bacharach-David hits were also hits for Cilla Black in Britain and for Aretha Franklin in the U.S.), and numerous post-David collaborations with everyone from Carole Bayer Sager (to whom he was married for nine years) to Christopher Cross to Elvis Costello.    

Oh, and a Broadway musical, Promises Promises, based on Billy Wilder's 1960 movie The Apartment.

Bacharach was such a masterful composer, spanning decades and musical genres and particularly helping to define the sixties with Hal David - together, the greatest songwriting duo of the 1960s whose names aren't John Lennon and Paul McCartney - with their mod parlor sound (and sixties recordings of their songs always seem to have a trumpet solo).  Bacharach continued working well into his nineties and wrote enough music into the 2020s to cast a long shadow over popular music . . . the current emptiness and vacuity of which scream for another composer like Bacharach today.   

Below is my favorite recording of a Bacharach-David song, and it's not from Dionne Warwick.  Rather, it's from Herb Alpert, a recording of "This Guy's In Love With You" that topped the Billboard singles chart in America for four weeks in June and July of 1968 - Bacharach and David's first chart-topping single in their home country.

RIP. 

Gold Records

Andrew Gold, who died of a heart attack on June 3 at the age of 59, was one of popular music's busiest ants in a world of rock stars who party like grasshoppers. It is probably regrettable that he will be best remembered for his 1977 hit single "Lonely Boy," which peaked at number seven on the Billboard singles charts 34 years ago this month.

"Lonely Boy" was a miserable excuse for a song, about a kid who leaves home at eighteen years of age after whining about how his parents paid too much attention to his younger sister at his expense. The song ends with the young man's nephew (his sister's son) receiving the kind of attention the young man felt he missed out on in his own childhood. Although Gold used autobiographical details in the song, he insisted that it wasn't about himself, claiming to have had a happy childhood. Some critics were left to wonder about that. (By the way, Gold had two younger sisters.)

But Gold was a lot more than the dude who sang "Lonely Boy." He was also an multi-instrumentalist who, among other things, worked with all but one of the former Beatles (George Harrison was the exception), was a second engineer on Joni Mitchell's 1971 album Blue, worked with the Eagles and Jackson Browne, formed a duo (Wax) with 10cc alumnus (and Yardbirds songwriter) Glenn Gouldmann, played a good deal of the instruments on Art Garfunkel's 1975 album Breakaway (and all of them on Garfunkel's hit cover of the standard "I Only Have Eyes for You," from that same LP), and was in Linda Ronstadt's band from 1973 to 1977, handling most of the arrangements and working in concert with producer Peter Asher.

A consummate professional musician, Gold was literally born into his career. His father, Ernest Gold, was a film score composer, and his mother is noted film vocalist Marni Nixon, who did the singing in Hollywood musicals that talented actresses who were not talented singers would lip-sync to. (As someone who usually worked under the radar, the younger Gold can truly be called his mother's son.) Though Gold was indeed a skilled pro and a reliable session man, his Hollywood professionalism could be a liability as much as an asset. His precise musicianship could sometimes leave the music sounding too polished and bland, smoothing out whatever edge it had. In their book "The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time," Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell singled out Gold as the main culprit who kept Linda Ronstadt from being a serious rock singer, undercutting her with his exact arrangements.

Still, on balance, Gold left a formidable legacy on the many records he produced and/or performed on, even if his best-known work as a frontman may leave something to be desired. But even in that role, Gold could excel. His other big Top 40 hit, the 1978 single "Thank You For Being a Friend," was a nice toe tapper that lives on (albeit in an inferior Sun Belt "countrypolitan" version) as the theme song for the sitcom "The Golden Girls," still in reruns. If that song makes you smile, thank Andrew Gold for that - and seek out his own superior recording. R.I.P.

Guitar Hero

Les Paul, the legendary guitarist and recording technology innovator, died yesterday at 94, and in his long life he created new ways for music to be heard. His Gibson solid-body guitar with electric pickups allowed for a more shimmering, fluid sound, and its controls allowed players to manipulate the sound and make the notes cry or sing by manipulating the treble for more brightness and clarity or deepening the rhythm for a fuller sound. Also, he pioneered multi-track recording, allowing bands to concentrate on each instrument of the arrangement individually and re-record elements of the song, rather than perform a song live in the studio over and over until they got it right. The range of possibilities he created helped spur the rise of the guitar hero in sixties and seventies rock, and many a rocker - Jimmy Page, Joe Walsh, Joe Satriani, Keith Richards - has sung Paul's praises. Or, more appropriately, played them.

Paul was still playing at the Iridium Jazz Club every Monday night in New York as recently as June - he never planned to retire - but pneumonia sidelined him this summer, and he died from complications of the disease. Mondays will still be devoted to guitarists there as a memorial to him. It will be a fitting tribute.

While many veteran rockers and rock fans are eulogizing Paul as one of music's greats, I doubt his death will have much of an impact on the younger generation of hip-hop and dance pop performers.

To them, Paul was probably just another white guy with a guitar.