![]() When Bob, for whatever reason, didn’t do it, I was his second choice.”Īctually, he wasn’t. ![]() Burt really admired Bob Dylan and the way he phrased. In subsequent years Burt has denied it, but this is what I understood at the time. “Burt had originally composed the melody to fit Bob Dylan. Thomas, who ended up making it his signature song, says he was not the first in line for the vocal. Hill agreed, so Bacharach and David set about finding the right singer. But that worked almost like a glove fitting. Hal made it make sense overall, though he tried some other ways first because it’s not the most natural way maybe one would think to write that lyric. It must have been born the same time from the movie, and it made sense in my head. “Even though Hal tried to change it, we never came up with a thing that felt as good. “I kept singing that opening phrase,” he says. But this was an instance when Bacharach came up with the title. In the Bacharach and David songwriting partnership, roles were clearly defined. “Raindrops” began in an uncharacteristic way. Though Hill was initially opposed to the idea of a pop song with a lyric, Bacharach talked him into it. Director George Roy Hill wanted something evocative of the period for a particular scene where Newman takes a romantic bike ride with Katherine Ross. In the summer of that year, Bacharach was writing the score for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as 1890s train robbers. But their biggest hit was just around the corner. ![]() ![]() With over 20 Top 40 singles by their vocal muse Dionne Warwick, cover versions of their songs by an A-Z of artists including Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones and Ella Fitzgerald, movie soundtracks, TV specials and a Broadway musical, they’d done it all. Thomas would crackle: "…and make me feel at home, while I miss my baby…while I miss my baby.By late 1969, Burt Bacharach and Hal David were kings of the pop songwriting game. Later, I’d get out the sprinkler and place it on the uneven patio blocks – uneven because I would often pry them up to peer at the ant colonies underneath – and I’d run through the water while my sister hung upside down on the swingset.Īnd from inside the patio doors, the sounds of B.J. I have officially righted a wrong.īut it’s Thomas’s 1975 number-one hit, “Hey, Won’t You Play, Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song” that still echoes within my interior walls with recollections of rides in the Plymouth Gold Duster, my Mom taking me to Sentry where we’d exchange our 8-pack of empty Coke bottles for a new set, and upon our return home, she’d fix me a bowl of graham crackers in milk (yeah, that was my snack of choice, along with apple sauce and cottage cheese with a dash of cinnamon). To date, he’s the recipient of eleven gold records, two platinum records and five Grammy Awards, and he’s sold more than 70 million albums.Ĭlearly, he’s a guy whose name should be known. It reached number one on the U.S., and it wasn’t Thomas’s first or last foray into the pop charts he’d already scored a few hits with “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “Hooked on a Feeling” (the original recording, not the 1974 cover by Blue Suede). For reasons unknown, his name doesn’t get tossed around as often as the aforementioned singers of the 70s, but you’ve undoubtedly heard him, most notably in the 1969 classic movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Lo and behold, it’s not a one-hit wonder at all, and while he may not be a household name to many these days, he’s still around and still singing: B.J. I had no idea where it came from, but I needed to know who the heck sang it. It’s all coming back to me now, Celine.Ībout a month ago, my memory set its needle on the groove of the following lyric: “Hey, won’t you play another somebody done somebody wrong song.” How about “The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence (of The Carol Burnett Show fame), “Killing Me Softly with His Song” by Roberta Flack, or the early hits by Olivia Newton-John, The Carpenters, Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot, Todd Rundgren and Harry Nilsson? My recollection begins around 1973 with “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure, Marvin Hamlisch’s version of Joplin’s “The Entertainer” from The Sting, Sweet’s “Little Willy” and – who could forget? – “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn. At quiet times, typically during the cognitive equivalent of brackish water, when I lie half awake and half asleep, my subconscious sometimes plays a mental jukebox from my youth, delving into snippets of music whose latent melodies bubble to the surface of recognition some forty years later, producing memories of transistor radios crackling with pop songs on 920 AM, WOKY Milwaukee.
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