Burt Bacharach
Make It Easy On Yourself
Having conquered the Brill Building, Broadway and movies, Burt becomes a reluctant pop star.
Record label: A&M
Produced: Burt Bacharach and Phil Ramone
Recorded: A&M Studio, New York; 1968
Released: June 1969
Chart peaks: None (UK) 51 (US)
Personnel: Burt Bacharach (v, ar); Phil Ramone (e); with orchestra
Track listing: Promises, Promises; I’ll Never Fall In Love Again; Knowing When To Leave; Any Day Now; Wanting Things; Whoever You Are I Love You; Make It Easy On Yourself; Do You Know The Way To San Jose; Pacific Coast Highway (S); She’s Gone Away; This Guy’s In Love With You
Running time: 35.32
Current CD: Universal 394188
Further listening: The Look Of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection (1998)
Further reading: The Little Red Book Of Burt Bacharach (Serene Dominic, 2004); www.bacharachonline.com
Download: iTunes
As a composer, producer and arranger of hits by Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Tom Jones, Herb Alpert and scores of other eminent ’60s popsters, it was only a matter of time before Burt Bacharach stepped into the spotlight himself. Especially given his twinkling good looks and soft-spoken charisma. But he insists he had to be coaxed into his star turn.
‘I was very insecure about singing,’ he says. ‘It’s one thing to do it in a live performance onstage. It’s like yesterday’s newspaper. It’s forgotten. It wasn’t so good, okay. But when you go onto tape, it’s there forever. I try to sing the songs not as a singer, but just interpreting it as a composer and interpreting a great lyric that Hal [David] wrote.’
On his second solo LP, he surrounds his voice (the liner notes call it a ‘rumpled, earnest baritone’) with all the energetic components of what became known as the ‘Bacharach Sound’ – honey-dipped flugelhorns, bossa nova sidesticks, breezy flutes, molto fortissimo strings and cooing female voices – and interprets hits such as I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, Promises, Promises and Make It Easy On Yourself.
‘I didn’t want to make the songs the same way as they’d been done,’ Bacharach says, ‘so I’d split vocals and instrumentals and try to make it interesting to me, and hopefully interesting to the listener. For me, it’s about the peaks and valleys of where a record can take you. You can tell a story and be able to be explosive one minute then get quiet as kind of a satisfying resolution.’
His co-producer and engineer Phil Ramone recalls how the dynamics originated from Burt himself: ‘The whole room would come to life with his conducting – the way he would look over at the drummer and with just the flick of his finger, things could happen. Once the groove was happening in the room, forget it, there was nothing like it. And everything, including the strings, responded to the kind of body movement that Burt had. He brings an incredible amount of life to the studio. He’s probably one of the most amazing musicians in the world.’
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Bayou Country
Second album from San Francisco’s own Southern boys.
Record label: Fantasy
Produced: John Fogerty
Recorded: RCA Studios, Los Angeles; late 1968
Released: January 5, 1969 (US) June 1969 (UK)
Chart peaks: None (UK) 7 (US)
Personnel: John Fogerty (g, v); Tom Fogerty (g); Stu Cook (b); Doug ‘Cosmo’ Clifford (d); Hank McGill (e)
Track listing: Born On The Bayou; Bootleg; Graveyard Train; Good Golly Miss Molly; Penthouse; Proud Mary (S); Keep On Chooglin’
Running time: 34.07
Current CD: Comet FANTASY8387
Further listening: Green River (1969); Willy And The Poor Boys (1970); Cosmo’s Factory (1970); The Blue Ridge Rangers – Blue Ridge Rangers (1973), essentially a John Fogerty solo album of country covers, lovingly rendered
Further reading: Bad Moon Rising: The Unofficial Story Of Creedence Clearwater Revival (Hank Bordowitz, 1998); Up Around The Bend: The Oral History Of Creedence Clearwater Revival (Craig Werner, 1998); www.creedence-revisited.com
Download: iTunes
In 1964, the Californian, Berkeley-based jazz label Fantasy decided the time had come to cash in on the beat craze and auditioned local instrumental group Tommy Fogerty And The Blue Velvets. Encouraged by A&R man Hy Weiss to sound more British, they became The Visions and then The Golliwogs, releasing singles on the label’s Scorpio subsidiary without much success. Then in 1966, key personnel John Fogerty and Doug Clifford were drafted. 18 months later, Fogerty returned home determined to quit trying to sound British and do something a little truer to his roots.
‘Rock’n’roll is Southern,’ he says today, ‘and that’s why I’m Southern. Because what I learned from was Southern. I rest my case.’ And there are few Southern rock tracks greater than the joyful, folksy chug of Proud Mary, with its utopian vision of Mississippi river life, the kind of song that sounds as if it has always been there. Freshly discharged from the army, Fogerty wrote the song as an expression of his overwhelming sense of freedom.
The group’s new style needed a new name and they became Creedence Clearwater Revival. A cover version of Dale Hawkins’ Suzie-Q attracted attention as a welcome antidote to the pretensions of acid rock and the sterility of bubblegum pop, and Fantasy switched them to the parent label. John Fogerty has since maintained that he steered the group every inch of the way from that moment on. ‘This stuff is hardly rocket science,’ says bassist Stu Cook, rebutting such claims. ‘It’s not as if we had two and a half brain cells and needed a guiding light to lead us through the key of E. We’d been together 10 years already. We learned how to play together. The Proud Mary bassline is mine for a start –
‘I could go on.’
‘Bayou Country is my favourite album because we had played those songs live and because we were still a band,’ continues Cook. ‘We still had an input at the mix, welcomed or not. Hank McGill got a great sound from my Rickenbacker on tape and it survived all sabotage attempts!’
The album is bookended by the two tracks that opened and closed the band’s sets: Born On The Bayou is a rocking, funky thing that announces Fogerty’s long-running obsession with Southern pop, while Keep On Chooglin’ is a rumbling, good-time salute to blue-collar pleasures. Vocally, Fogerty is superb throughout. His wonderfully rugged rendition of Little Richard’s Good Golly Miss Molly tips a nod to one mentor and the hypnotic Graveyard Train does the same to bluesman Howlin’ Wolf. Bayou Country represents the start of CCR’s golden period.
Crosby, Stills & Nash
Crosby, Stills & Nash
One moment of harmony begot a rollercoaster career.
Record label: Atlantic
Produced: Crosby, Stills And Nash and Bill Halverson
Recorded: