Anyone Who Had a Heart (9 page)

Chapter

8

Land of Make Believe

H
al and I were really starting to hit our stride with the R&B material we were writing, but we also kept coming up with songs like “Wives and Lovers,” a three/four jazz waltz that Jack Jones recorded. I never liked the way he cut it because that wasn’t how I thought the song should sound orchestrally, but Jack did win a Grammy for Best Pop Performance for the song. “Wives and Lovers” was covered by people like Frank Sinatra with the Count Basie Band, Stan Getz, Nancy Wilson, Lena Horne, and Ella Fitzgerald, who cut it with Duke Ellington.

When I heard the version Sinatra had done with Count Basie, I called Quincy Jones, who had produced the session, and said, “Q, how come it’s in four/four? It’s a waltz.” And he said to me, “Burt, the Basie band doesn’t know how to play in three/four.” Some years later, I actually went into the studio and cut the song with Vic Damone and the record was terrible.

In October 1963, Gene Pitney had a hit with “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa,” a song I really liked because as it was getting born and coming together, it became a miniature movie. Hal and I didn’t write a lot of songs together that told stories but whenever we did, it was always an adventure.

Hal David:
In the early days, around the time we did “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa,” I would sometimes write short stories in a black-and-white high school composition notebook and then write lyrics from that. Doing this really helped me because in the beginning, I used to wander all over the place with my work, especially when I was telling a story, and doing this enabled me to keep myself on track.

Hal started out the song with the line “Dearest darling / I had to write / To say / That I won’t be home anymore.” The first note is an A with a G underneath it and I used it to give the opening a sense of dissonance and urgency and pain and anguish so we could tell the story of a guy who meets somebody on the way home and then never gets there. “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa” opens with trumpets with a bit of dissonance and then a dobro slide guitar comes in against the baion beat. A couple of years later, Billy Joe Royal used the same opening almost note for note on “Down in the Boondocks,” which I guess you could call the highest form of flattery.

While Hal and I were writing the song together, I visualized all the various parts. Where the trumpets would come in, where the drums would become more pronounced, where the rhythm section would generate a different kind of intensity, and then the really powerful climax where Gene sings, “And I can never, never, never / Go home again.” I loved orchestrating the song because the story was so dramatic and the orchestration propelled it forward.

Hal and I were also trying to come up with new material for Dionne. While the three of us were rehearsing in my apartment one day for an upcoming recording session, I played her a song that kept changing time signatures, going from four/four to five/four and then with a seven/eight bar at the end on the turnaround. It seemed really natural to me that way and the last thing on my mind was to ever make a song that would be difficult for musicians to play or for an audience to understand.

I played Dionne a little of the song and told her Hal had not yet finished writing the lyrics. She said, “What are you waiting for? Go finish it off!” Hal went into my bedroom while she and I rehearsed another song, and when he came back out, he gave us the finished lyrics for “Anyone Who Had a Heart.”

Before we recorded it, I spent a week working with Dionne and the background singers. We rehearsed every day so everyone would be prepared. For me that was essential because I wanted to leave as little as possible to chance once we actually got into the studio. At night I would go back to my apartment and play mind games with myself by pretending the copyist was coming in the morning so I had to get the arrangement done right away.

In those days if you were sick, there was a forty-eight-hour window during which you could cancel a session without having to pay for the studio time. I had a bad cold but I still wanted to keep the date. Even as we were cutting “Anyone Who Had a Heart” at Bell Sound in the fall of 1963, Hal was still driving himself crazy about the way the accent fell on a word in one of the lines.

Hal David:
I had it almost the way I wanted it and until we went into the recording studio that night, I was trying to change it. The song starts, “Anyone who had a heart could look at me and know that I love you / Anyone who ever dreamed could look at me and know I dream of you.” The accent should not be “dream of you.” The accent should be “dream of
you
.” But I had to have the accent on “of” because that’s where the melody was. I tried to find a way to make the “of” do something but I never could. And maybe it just couldn’t be done. But I worked on that until it was recorded. Then I had to let it go.

Along with Cissy Houston, Dee Dee Warwick, and Myrna Smith, I brought in three white girl singers who were making a lot more money at the time doing jingles than any of us were ever going to see from a record. One of them was Linda November, who could sing all the way up into the stratosphere. She and the other two white girls would walk into the studio, hang up their mink coats, and be ready to go to work. On “Don’t Make Me Over,” I had Cissy, Dee Dee, and Myrna singing in the lower register, with the white girls singing on top of them. If you listen to the record, you can hear the soul on the bottom and the altitude coming from the white girls.

Hal and I cut Dionne doing “Walk on By” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” at the same session, and then argued about which song we should release first. We decided to go with “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” which went to number eight on the pop chart.

A couple of months later, I went to see Dionne perform at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. When she did “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” I could tell the band was struggling. When I went backstage to say hello to her after the show, the band surrounded me and they were all kind of hostile. One of the horn players said, “Why do you make it so difficult for us, man? Why do you have a seven/eight bar in this song?” I said, “Listen, there must be people who understand this music the way it is. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a hit. They get it. So instead of counting, just try to feel it. Sing the lyric on your horn.”

Although I had no idea how it happened at the time, Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles, bought a copy of Dionne’s record of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” while he was in New York and took it back with him to London. He gave it to George Martin, who thought the song would be perfect for Shirley Bassey. Instead, he wound up cutting it at Abbey Road Studios with Cilla Black. The song became a hit in England, and Dionne got really bent out of shape about that.

Dionne Warwick:
I say frequently if the organ player had made a mistake or if I had coughed during the middle of the song, Cilla would have coughed and the organ player would have played a wrong note. That was how verbatim they copied exactly what we had recorded.

Although I knew how Dionne felt about what Cilla had done, neither Hal nor I had any control over who covered what we wrote so there was really nothing either of us could have done about it.

Elvis Costello:
The way music was set up in England back then meant that there were two things that conditioned hearing it differently than in America. One was the needle time restriction, which put a strict limit on the amount of recorded music that could be played per week on the BBC, which was the main source of music other than Radio Luxembourg. This meant that a lot of what was played on the air in England was heard transposed or filtered through dance bands and ensembles that played live on the BBC, including the one my dad sang with.

The second factor was that there were no global releases in those days, so there was a delay of up to six weeks between the release of the record in America and its release in England. A record had time to be a hit in America and then it would be picked up by people in the U.K. who had their ears tuned to the American charts.

I’ve heard Dionne on this subject a lot, and it is true that English artists back then did very consciously go in and copy American recordings note for note. But of course the timbres of the players and in some cases the rhythm sections weren’t quite as groovy. The English brass tone is also very distinctly different, and of course the recording studios were different as well.

I definitely heard “Anyone Who Had a Heart” by Cilla first, and it became a number-one hit in England before Dionne’s version was ever heard there and then I think both versions were in the charts. And then I heard Dusty Springfield’s version after that. In England back then, Burt sometimes had two and even three versions of the same song in the charts at the same time.

They weren’t really like what we would later call soul records, although the original versions were sung by African-American singers. The covers in England were sung predominantly by white singers. But people like Dusty and Cilla were great on those early records. I still really love Cilla’s version of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” because she sounds so desperate in a great way and that’s a very profound song.

At that same session, Dionne also cut “Land of Make Believe,” and her version of it was released early in 1964. Within weeks, the Drifters put it out as the flip side of a single but the song never became a hit for either of them. In April, Hal and I finally got Scepter to put out “Walk on By.” Hal and I were always trying to come up with material for Dionne to record. Like tailors in the apparel business, we were making goods for her to sing.

While I was writing “Walk on By,” I was hearing the whole arrangement. I love flugelhorns and they’re on there and I heard the piano figure being played by two different pianos. We cut “Walk on By” first that night and I had Paul Griffin and Artie Butler playing the same figure on two pianos at the same time. Because they were never exactly in synch with one another, that gave the song a very different, jagged kind of feeling. I let the rhythm section have a certain kind of freedom and they got it really quick because they all knew me and they could read where I was going.

Then we cut “Anyone Who Had a Heart.” The song was challenging but they got it, too, and it was kind of like, “Wow! What have we got here?” Florence Greenberg, who by now really had a track record when it came to
not
knowing when Hal and I had written a hit, put out “Walk on By” as the B-side of a song called “Any Old Time of Day.” Murray the K played both sides on his radio show in New York and then asked his listeners to vote on which one they liked better. They picked “Walk on By,” which went to number six on the pop chart.

Isaac Hayes did an incredible twelve-minute version of the song that I loved, and many years later I got to tell him so when he performed it on one of my television specials. On YouTube you can see President Obama doing about eight seconds of “Walk on By” as a tribute to Dionne during a campaign appearance he made with her in New Jersey. The great thing about it is that he can really sing.

A few months after Hal and I wrote “Walk on By,” Famous Music offered us five thousand dollars to come up with the theme song for the movie
A House Is Not a Home
, starring Shelley Winters. It was based on the life of Polly Adler, who had been a famous madam in New York City during the 1920s. Hal came up with a brilliant lyric that never let you know the song was about a brothel.

I wrote the music for the song in my apartment on East Sixty-First Street and I was so excited about it that I called Hal and played it for him over the phone. Paramount Pictures wanted Brook Benton, who’d already had several number-one hits, to record the song, so I sat down with him in our office to teach it to him. Benton was really difficult to work with because he kept singing the wrong notes in the ascending melody line that goes up chromatically in thirds with the lyric “A chair is just a chair / Even when there’s no one sittin’ there.” There is also a bar change from four/four to three/four in the bridge, so it’s not the easiest song to sing.

Dionne just happened to drop by while I was working with him and watched the whole thing going down. Benton was being a real pain in the ass and at one point he uttered this great line: “I could read music but I don’t want to spoil my soul.” Because the people at Mercury Records knew there had already been a good deal of friction between the two of us, they kept me out of the studio when he cut the song. Alan Lorber, who did the arrangement, wound up producing the session. I thought it was a good record but Benton was still singing the wrong notes.

In self-defense, I took Dionne into the studio and cut “A House Is Not a Home” with her. Two weeks after the Benton version was released, her version came out as the B-side of “You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart).” The two versions compromised one another so neither one went very high on the charts.

“A House Is Not a Home” is still one of my favorite songs, and when Dusty Springfield performed it on one of my television specials, she was great. Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Wonder have also cut it, but the person who really made it a standard was Luther Vandross, who I think did the best version ever.

A month after “A House Is Not a Home” came out, an independent record company called Big Hill released a song Hal and I had written called “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me,” sung by Lou Johnson. I was really impressed with Lou’s talent and I thought I had made a great record with him, but it just hung around on the charts in America. Then Sandie Shaw wound up having a number-one hit with it in England.

Another song I cut with Lou Johnson in 1964 that never became a hit for him was “Kentucky Bluebird.” The original title of the song, for which Hal wrote some incredible lyrics, was “Message to Martha.” I recorded it first with Marlene Dietrich on a four-song EP we did for the German market in 1962 as “Kleine Treue Nachtigall,” which means “Faithful Little Nightingale.”

Four years later, Dionne decided she wanted to record “Message to Martha,” but Hal and I tried to discourage her from doing so because we felt it was a man’s song. At some point, Hal told her the only name that would work as a substitute for “Martha” was “Michael.” Even though Hal also told her he didn’t really like that name, she went ahead and cut it as “Message to Michael” and it became a top-ten hit for her on both the pop and R&B charts.