Read Anyone Who Had a Heart Online
Authors: Burt Bacharach
Elvis Costello:
Burt wanted Johnny Mandell to write the chart for “Painted from Memory.” He talked about David Foster doing some stuff. He talked about Quincy Jones doing some stuff. In the end, I said, “I really think it’s you. You’ve got to do it.” And then once we got in the studio, Burt was in the control room with the 58, a Shure vocal mike, plugged into the board because he speaks so quietly. He was waiting in the chair and we’ve got the flugelhorn players out there and he’s going, “No, no.” He’s written it, mind you, the chart’s out there, and he’s going, “No,” and singing minute phrases that can’t be written down. And he sang it back to them exactly as he heard it. He was just as emphatic about that as the way he wanted me to phrase the melody.
When we recorded
Painted from Memory
, I wound up playing piano on practically every track because it was like, “If it doesn’t work, I’ll take the blame.” After we cut the record, Elvis and I went out to perform it live onstage with a twenty-four-piece orchestra.
Elvis Costello:
It was fantastic being on the road with Burt. We really didn’t make it easy on ourselves, because we opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York. So we weren’t kidding around. And we were not going out there to play the Burt Bacharach/Hal David songbook. We were playing new songs, so it was a big thing to ask people to come see the first rendition of this in a live performance. I opened the show with an acoustic version of “Baby, It’s You” just to kick it off, and then I introduced Burt, who did “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” There weren’t many fast songs on
Painted from Memory
so I did “Alison” as well as “My Little Red Book.”
It was a very demanding schedule for Burt because of his perfectionism in terms of the orchestration. He didn’t delegate. We went to Chicago to play the Chicago Theatre and ran out of time to rehearse on the stage, so he put the string section in the lobby and rehearsed with them with an electric piano in the lobby. It was incredible. He had string players all the way up the stairs. We also played the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles and went to London and did it at the Royal Festival Hall.
When we started doing the interviews for
Painted from Memory
, there were people who didn’t understand who Burt was. They’d come in and say, “Of course, you are the King of Easy Listening. You are in the lounge. You are the elevator music.” And I would go, “What are you talking about?” I remember this one German journalist who was very belligerent and started to lecture Burt for not ever having gotten on the rock-’n’-roll train because the world had been in social uproar and rock ’n’ roll was liberating the kids, man. And Burt very patiently said, “You know, I had just come out of the Army and I had studied with Darius Milhaud and listened to Dizzy Gillespie so Bill Haley and His Comets just didn’t make it for me.” It was such a killer argument.
I really felt like I was blessed to be able to work with Elvis, because he had such a spectacular way of telling stories and tracking down words that said things so differently from anyone else I had ever written with. Both of us were perfectionists but we still wanted to go for feeling in every song. I think that’s what came through on
Painted from Memory
and why people responded to it so positively.
Elvis had never had much use for the Grammy Awards, because when he had been nominated as the Best New Artist in 1979, the award was given to a disco band named A Taste of Honey for a song called “Boogie Oogie Oogie.” I dragged him with me to the ceremony after “God Give Me Strength” was nominated, but we lost to Natalie Cole. A year later, Elvis and I won the Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for “I Still Have That Other Girl.”
I
knew who Mike Myers was from seeing him on
Saturday Night Live
. He had an idea for a movie he wanted me to be in, so I met with him at his house and he turned out to be a huge fan of my music. I never saw the script and it wasn’t a lot of money but I really liked him so I said I would do it, although I don’t know if we even talked about what it was going to be.
I was on my way to Chicago to do a concert so I stopped off in Las Vegas, where Mike was filming. I stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel, and when it came time for me to do my scene, I got on top of this open-top bus going down the Strip at two in the morning.
Mike Myers:
I was driving home from hockey practice in Los Angeles one day shortly after my father had passed away, and “The Look of Love” came on the radio and I instantly felt the character and the movie of Austin Powers enter my brain. Peter Sellers was my dad’s hero and that scene with Peter Sellers and Ursula Andress in
Casino Royale
when “The Look of Love” is playing just delighted my dad because it was a combination of Sellers, James Bond, and Burt Bacharach. For my father, the highest praise he could ever give anybody was “I wish he was English.” And my father used to say of Burt, “He’s one of them great Americans, you know, that you just wish were English. And you feel he is somehow.”
My dad was from Liverpool, and there is a strange Mersey tunnel between the north of England and Burt Bacharach because he’s a sensual guy who writes sensual music and Liverpool is all about being sexy and funny, and having a strong take on the world and being able to sing a song, tell a joke, or tell a story. Oasis are from Liverpool, and they are obsessed with Burt and have his photograph on the cover of their first album. Elvis Costello is from Liverpool and both he and Burt have been in the Austin Powers movies.
The scene with Burt in
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
was in the script from the beginning. If you write it, they will come. We shot all night long on the Strip in Las Vegas and there were some considerations like stoplights that weren’t straight up and down but sort of bow in the center, almost killing Burt and Elizabeth Hurley as they sped by them while he was singing live on top of the bus.
I was doing “What the World Needs Now Is Love” to a prerecorded piano track but I was singing live. We shot it and then they had to reshoot it, and by the time we were finished, it was four in the morning. Then I got on a plane and went to do a show in Chicago.
Mike Myers:
It was all about me being a straight-up fan of Burt, and so for all of us who had the privilege of being there that night, this was one of those can’t-believe moments. The scene runs about a minute and a half in the movie and if that was what began the Burt Bacharach resurgence, I would be completely honored. Because truly he’s the greatest ever.
Nobody thought the movie was going to do anything, but all of a sudden seven-year-olds all over the country were coming up to me and saying, “I just saw you in
Austin Powers
.” About a year after the movie was released, I was in Los Angeles when I got a call from Lilly Tartikoff, the widow of NBC president Brandon Tartikoff. She was running the Fire and Ice Ball at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. It’s a very prestigious benefit for breast and colon cancer research and just about every star in Hollywood was going to be there that night. Lilly said, “Burt, you’ll be the only performer and you don’t have to do your whole show, just fifteen or twenty minutes.”
I said, “Lilly, you know I’ve been to the Beverly Hilton for a lot of charity events. People can’t get out of there quick enough, and most of them like to leave before ten o’clock. They’ll all be looking at their watches while I play so I really don’t feel all that good about doing this.” But she talked me into it.
I was introduced by Antonio Banderas, who did one of the worst introductions ever. I was up there with my band and my singers to make some music and I had picked out a medley of songs I had written for movies because I figured, “Hey, we’re in Hollywood, right?” Before we started to play, I explained what we were going to be doing, and it wasn’t as though I lost the audience at that point because I’d never had them. I could see a lot of people I knew and they were all up talking and networking with one another. Jane was sitting with Terry Semel, the CEO of Warner Bros., who said to her, “These people are making so much noise that Burt is going to blow up.” And about seven minutes into the set, that was exactly what happened.
We were right in the middle of “April Fools” when I cut the band and picked up the microphone and softly said, “Listen, folks. I’m having a really difficult time up here onstage even hearing myself play. The whole band is having a difficult time. I’ve done concerts all over the world and you are the rudest people I’ve ever performed before.”
Everyone shut up and we all went back in and picked up right where we had left off. I got to the end of the set and when I went into the chorus of “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” everyone stood up. I took a bow, quietly said, “Fuck you all,” and walked offstage.
What I was feeling was a combination of real anger and frustration but also self-doubt. Like, I must not be very good. And then I said, “Fuck! I’m just as good as any of those people out in the audience.” But something like that is a real blow to your self-esteem.
Then Jane and I went to Aspen, where she had asked me to do a benefit for a ski and snowboard company that brings disadvantaged kids out there to learn how to ski and snowboard. It was at the St. Regis Hotel. Just like they had done at the Fire and Ice Ball, people started talking while I was trying to play. So I said, “People, if you want to talk, you can talk. But it’s not considerate to me or to other people in the audience who want to hear the music. So if you want to talk, why don’t you just go outside?”
What made it even worse for me was that these two shows were back-to-back. The way I reacted at both of them was completely different from what I would have done when people talked in the audience while I was playing Vegas in the early days. I mean, if I had ever said something like this back then to the customers at the Riviera Hotel, one of the guys who ran the place would have had me killed!
I don’t think it’s ever good to beat up an audience or get angry with them, but when people act this way, they’re being disrespectful to the music itself. Although I really haven’t had that many bad experiences performing in public, I still remember these two shows a lot more clearly than the good ones. However, thanks to Mike Myers, at least my movie career was going great.
Mike Myers:
In terms of putting him in the second Austin Powers movie, it was “More of the same, please. Can I have another helping?”
In the second Austin Powers movie, Elvis Costello and I are doing “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” in an outdoor market that was supposed to be in London, even though they shot it on a back lot in Los Angeles. Elvis is singing and I’m playing piano and I’ve got a little band behind me and Austin Powers walks through the shot.
Mike Myers:
Burt and Elvis Costello were supposed to be the world’s most talented buskers, and it was by design that Elvis looks so funky. Was Burt not in the third one as well? There was an incarnation of it when he was but I watched the movie so many times that I don’t remember what I cut because things fly in and out a million times. I do remember we used “What’s It All About, Austin” over the end credits and Susanna Hoffs really sang the crap out of it.
How people feel about what I write is not something I can control. Before I met Carole, no one was playing my stuff, and then after we split up, I went through another long cold period where nothing I was doing or had ever done seemed to matter to anyone anymore. It’s not like you stop working when that happens, because you don’t. You just keep writing and hope things will change. For reasons I still don’t understand, things started turning around for me after I did the first Austin Powers movie and began working with Elvis.
All of a sudden. Julia Roberts was telling a reporter how the sing-along version of “I Say a Little Prayer for You” had changed the whole tone of
My Best Friend’s Wedding
. The
Atlantic
ran a really serious six-page article about my music and the
New York Times
sent someone to interview me. I hadn’t changed but a lot of people who had never heard my music before now thought it was cool.
D
ick and Lili Zanuck were doing the Academy Awards show and they came to see me perform in Vegas. Then we all went out and had a drink together. They loved the show and asked me how I felt about putting together a medley of Academy Award–winning songs as well as some that had been nominated. They also asked me to serve as the music director for the entire show with Don Was.
For the next three months, all I did was work on a very cohesive fourteen-minute medley of songs with a group of killer singers like Ray Charles, Garth Brooks, Queen Latifah, Isaac Hayes, and Dionne. I wanted the medley to be so seamless that it never felt like we were changing keys at any time. I sketched it out and wrote the arrangement and we were going to have the band onstage to perform it live.
We were looking for a diva and Whitney Houston’s name came up. I had known Whitney since she was a little girl and I loved her voice, but Dick and Lili’s concern was “How straight is she?” Whitney was going to sing at Clive Davis’s Grammy party so I went to see her and she knocked me out. What I didn’t know then about an addict was that you can give them the songs they sing year in and year out like their early hits and they will be perfect. But give them a song like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and they can’t sing it.
I didn’t understand this until Whitney came to my house four nights before the Academy Awards show with Bobby Brown in a caravan of cars. She walked in wearing dark glasses and a baseball hat and Bobby scared the shit out of my kids because he was making these weird gestures like coke addicts do. I started working with Whitney at the piano, and although the key I was playing in was right, she thought it was too high for her to sing.
Whitney was supposed to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “The Way We Were” and then at the end, she and Dionne were going to do “Alfie” together with a great harmonica player and I was going to sing four bars with her as well. When Whitney said the key was too high for her, I had to lower it, which upset the seamless transitions I had written. I had no choice. I lowered the key.
About three weeks before the show, I got a call from my agent, who said, “Don’t quote me on this but there’s a rumor Ray Charles has taken a date to play on the Saturday night before the Oscars.” I said, “That’s our dress rehearsal,” and he said, “Maybe you should talk to Ray.”
I had shown Ray the layout of what he was going to do a couple of months before and he had been amazing because when I played the song for him, he said, “Man, that chord is not the right one.” I said, “I know. I’m just trying a different version to lead into the next song.” But he didn’t really like it that way so I changed it back for him. Even though Ray wanted more than they were willing to pay and was only doing it for the money, he agreed to do the show.
I called him after my agent had talked to me, and I said, “Ray, I heard this rumor you’re taking a date on Saturday night before the show. That’s our dress rehearsal. First of all, is that true?” He said, “Yeah, it’s true.” I said, “Where’s the date?” When he said Germany, I said, “Ray, what if you’re delayed coming back?” That alone was enough to make me a nervous wreck.
The Academy Awards were on Sunday, and on Friday night we had a rehearsal in the Shrine Auditorium. There were about three hundred people in the audience. Whitney came in wearing the baseball cap and sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and it was unrecognizable. There were only twelve bars of it before the next song began but I stopped the band and went over to talk to her.
I said, “Whitney, everybody knows and loves this song, so you’ve got to sing the melody. You’ve got to sing at least most of the melody.” She said, “Okay.” Her next song was the title song from
The Way We Were
, and she wrecked that, too. Then we got to “Alfie,” which should have been a real moment for Dionne and Whitney. Dionne wanted them to sing it in harmony but Whitney rode right over Dionne. I know Dionne really well and I could see how angry and frustrated she was, but Whitney was her niece, so it wasn’t like Dionne could say, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” So that was also a disaster.
We decided to run the whole medley all over again right from the top, and when it came time for Whitney to sing, she didn’t know where she was. She came in on the wrong song and it was obvious to everyone she couldn’t do this. Lili Zanuck came up onstage, and I broke the band and went into a trailer with her and Dick. It was their show, so instead of asking me, “What do you think we should do?” they said, “Fire her ass! Get her out of here! Because if we do this with Whitney, nobody will remember who won for Best Picture. They’ll just remember the train wreck.”
It wasn’t a closed rehearsal and there were some news people there, so they could see how bad this really was. Lili got on the phone at about eleven o’clock that night and called Faith Hill, who was a friend of hers, and said, “If I send a plane for you, can you get here tomorrow?” Faith Hill said yes. She got to L.A. on Saturday afternoon and came over to my house. I gave her the demo of the medley I had cut with my band and my singers, and I played the songs for her on the piano.
She took the demo with her, came into rehearsal the next day, and did the songs perfectly. They got her a dress to wear for the show and she looked gorgeous. But now we had a problem with Garth Brooks, who said, “What do you mean Whitney’s not going on? I want to talk to her before I’m willing to go on to make sure she’s okay and find out why she can’t do the show.” What was really bothering Garth Brooks was that we had replaced Whitney with Faith Hill. If we were going to bring in a country artist, he wanted it to be Trisha Yearwood, who he was crazy about and later married.
They told him he could talk to Whitney but I’m not sure if he ever did, because Whitney herself wasn’t around when she was fired. Instead we told her representative, “You want to do something for Whitney? Get her into a treatment center. You’re not helping her by saying, ‘She’s just marking the song and tomorrow she’ll be fine.’ ”
It was all really harrowing. Ray Charles got back from the date in Germany just in time, so they had to send a police escort for him, but he came through onstage just like he always does. Garth Brooks also sang really great that night, but he only did the show because Dick and Lili had said that if he wanted out, they would replace him with Faith Hill’s husband, Tim McGraw.
Even with everything that had gone on, it was a good medley, so I thought, “This will bring the house down and I’ll get a standing ovation.” When it was over, my son Cristopher stood up with Jane and then some other people also got up because the two of them were standing, but they had already given out so many awards by that point that no one really cared about the music. I had spent three months working on this and it stressed me out so much that I don’t think I did a very good job. We had a small band onstage, with Don Was in the pit conducting a nine- or an eleven-piece band when what we really needed was a big string section and a full orchestra.
What happened with Whitney became a big story. Although it wasn’t true, Whitney’s people told everyone that the reason she didn’t sing that night was that she had a sore throat. I never heard from Whitney again but I found the whole incident really sad. I was also disappointed in myself for not realizing she would have so much difficulty with new material.
Right after the awards show, I went out on the road to tour. I was so stressed out that I was going too fast and doing too much. When I played in Columbus, Ohio, with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, Jane’s family was there. Afterward I got on the tour bus and was having trouble calming down. I kept thinking, “I’ve got to back off and slow down and get off this train.”
Two days later, I got to Indianapolis to play the Indiana Roof Ballroom. I was walking through the venue that afternoon with my son Cristopher and my assistant and road manager, Sue Main, to do the sound check. There was a step down to the dance floor but the place was totally unlit so I couldn’t see it. I went down hard on my left shoulder and heard something crack. I knew right away I had broken it.
Sue Main:
We called the paramedics immediately and put something under Burt’s head and were careful not to move him. The paramedics came and Burt was pissed off because he was wearing one of his favorite T-shirts and they cut it off him. We ended up going to the hospital in the promoter’s car because Burt didn’t want to go in the ambulance.
We had never had to cancel a show before, but we only had a few more hours until this one was scheduled to start at eight o’clock. I spent a lot of time on the phone with our agent while Burt was in the examination room. I was seriously considering canceling the show but Burt kept saying, “No. Don’t do anything yet. Just wait. Let’s just wait.”
They did X-rays but it still wasn’t clear what had happened. Burt was asking the doctor if he could do any more damage to his shoulder by performing that night. He said, “It’s my left shoulder so I can’t conduct, but I can play with my right arm.” He somehow convinced the doctor that he was fine to do the show and the doctor gave him a shot for the pain and some additional pain pills and told Burt, “If it gets really bad, take these. But if you don’t need them, don’t take them.”
We had been at the hospital for so long that we had to go straight back to the venue. We got Burt backstage, where he put on suit pants and a sweatshirt and off he went. No sound check. No rehearsal. Burt walked out and apologized to the audience for coming on almost an hour late and explained he’d had a little fall and had his arm in a sling. Everybody was very appreciative and he went on to do the show in what seemed like a state of euphoria.
Burt was having a great time. He was very funny, laughing and telling jokes. When I got him back to the hotel I said, “Wow. You were amazing. You didn’t seem to be in any pain at all. You were so funny and just . . . so loose.” And he said, “Well, it was that pain pill I took.” It was just Burt being Burt and doing whatever it took to keep from canceling the show.
They sent the X-rays to Los Angeles. My orthopedist read them and said I had a fractured shoulder. Although it never occurred to me at the time, I had gone on and done the show just like Marlene did after she had broken her shoulder in Germany. Unlike her, I’d had some chemical help to get through the pain. Looking back on it now, I realize that it was an accident just waiting to happen.
I thought I could keep going and perform the next date, which was three concerts with the Milwaukee Symphony, but we had to cancel the rest of the tour. When I went for shoulder replacement surgery at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic, they inserted a titanium plate in the joint. I had never been injured like this before and the recovery took a lot longer than I thought it would. The pain was so bad I had to keep taking Vicodin, and then I had to work really hard to get off the stuff. I was seventy-one at the time and for the first time in my life I felt old.
I eventually had to have the surgery redone because the muscle had fallen off the bone. It was a mess but they managed to fix it. In 2007, I was in Aspen around Christmastime when I slipped on some ice on the steps of my house and broke my other shoulder. I had to fly back to Los Angeles to have it replaced as well. I was in the hospital recovering from that surgery when I heard the news about Nikki.