What the world needs now, many Burt Bacharach fans can agree, is for that deep catalog of songs to not be consigned to history. Stepping up to present much of that material in a new light is a tour dubbed “What the World Needs Now: The Burt Bacharach Songbook Live,” which kicks off this weekend in southern California with Todd Rundgren in the nine-piece ensemble and handling many of the lead vocals on Bacharach/Hal David classics from the ’60s, ’70s and beyond.
Rundgren will not be doing any of his own material when he hits L.A.’s Wiltern on Sunday night, among other dates, but the show may still represent a utopian ideal for many of his fans, who will recognize some of the same gifts for melodic genius evident across his and his hero’s respective catalogs. The group performing the material is led by longtime Bacharach conductor-arranger Rob Shirakbari. It also includes “Voice” alumnus Wendy Moten, veteran Rundren/Utopia associate Kasim Sulton, and Probyn Gregory, Tori Holub, Kenny Dickenson and Elise Trouw. Appearing on select dates, including Saturday’s tour opening at the Ventura Theatre and the following night’s Wiltern show, are Men at Work frontman Colin Hay, Chris Pierce and Lady Blackbird. (The full itinerary and ticket links can be found at the tour’s website, here.)
Rundgren got on a Zoom with Variety from one of the last of his winter solo tour dates in Australia to share his thoughts about Bacharach and why he’s looking forward to honoring him.
We get the impression that, as far as possible tribute shows go, Bacharach might’ve been less of a hard sell than some other people that might’ve been brought to you, because you’ve talked about Bacharach’s impact on you going back decades.
Well, I’m already on record saying that I wouldn’t have done it had it been another artist, because I’ve been out with Ringo, I’ve done Beatle tributes, I’ve done David Bowie tributes; I’m kind of burned out on those. But when the opportunity to do Burt came up, it’s not just about getting to play the music — it’s the karmic aspect of it. When one of your seminal influences is involved, you feel like it’s a certain amount of payback.
For musical artists, we’re basically clever plagiarists, because the palette is so small. In the Western world, we have a 12-tone scale, and most of the time we only use half of it to write a melody. So when someone is an original and they have such an influence on other people’s songwriting and approach to music, you realize that there’s a debt there that you have to satisfy. So it isn’t simply just fun to do the material. It’s like when I was playing with Ringo. I’ve always reminded myself: This is karmic as well as musical, because I might not have been in the music business, but for the Beatles.
From the way you’ve described your early years before, it sounds like you were raised on classical music in the home, and then Bacharach songs were some of the first pop songs you actually remember cottoning to. Is that right?
Well, I of course was into the Beatles. But when I heard “Walk On By” on the radio, there was something about it — the combination of the melody, the chords, the unusual changes and the orchestration. With my early experiences listening to classical music, especially contemporary classics, that’s what my dad liked, it gave me a familiarity and a comfort with listening to those orchestrations. Some people are born to certain things, and I was born to music. It was pretty apparent very early on, because I used to sit with my little 45 RCA player with a stack of Boston Pops classics, and I would just listen to for hours and hours. So I was pretty well indoctrinated by the time I heard “Walk On By” for the first time, when I was taken not just by the song and by the way it was performed, but by the orchestrations as well.
So I bought the record; it was one of the few records that I owned when I was young because of my meager allowance. I had the Beatles’ second American album, and I had Dionne Warwick’s album, and at a certain point I had the Yardbirds’ first American album, because of the guitar playing. But yeah, it was, amongst those records, just hours spent listening to them and reading liner notes and becoming aware… I didn’t know who the producer or the arranger or the songwriter were when I bought the Dionne Warwick record, but by that time, people were becoming more aware of it, and I was very interested in it, because the Beatles made a point of their relationship with George Martin and how essential he was to their process. And so I realized that the producers or songwriters are essential to your experience. That was when I became more aware of Burt Bacharach as a songwriter, arranger and producer.
It’s interesting that there’s a very specific song, “Walk On By,” that was that crucial for you.
Yeah, it was. It wasn’t just the song, as I say. It was the arrangement, and the way it moved from something very small and tight to something big and lush. I loved the dynamic changes, because that’s something that’s signature in modern classical music. Certainly not in baroque classical music, where everything’s played the same volume and tempo and stuff, but modern classical music, ever since Debussy, depended as much on dynamics as anything else. And it was that dynamic element, I think, in the way the orchestration evolved from something kind of small and tight with just a piano a guitar
He had control of so much of the music. He wasn’t just simply writing the songs, he was crafting the arrangements, he was directing the performance. You could say that if he was a singer, he would’ve done it all himself, but Burt was never actually a singer. And that may be to our benefit, because otherwise we wouldn’t know who Dionne Warwick was.
Is there anything in this show that you’re most looking forward to singing?
Oh, there are many tunes that I’m looking forward to, and maybe at least one that I’m very apprehensive of. The biggest issue, of course, is that so much of the material is associated with Dionne Warwick. So it’ll be easy for the female singers to find comfort levels and keys to sing in. It is gonna be a little bit more of a challenge for me and the other guys singing to get up into that range. I’m dueting, I think, with Wendy Moten on “You’ll Never Get to Heaven,” and we haven’t had rehearsals yet, as we speak, but I’m sure finding a key that’s compatible to both of us wil be a challenge.
We’ll get it figured out, you know? I know which songs I’m singing; it’s just the keys tjat may be questionable. But fortunately, the way the show is structured, I don’t sing seven songs in a row. I sing a song or a duet or a small medley or something like that, and then I have time to recover until the next one.
The music director is Rob, who was Burt’s right-hand man, in some ways…
Yeah, his musical director at some point, and I suppose orchestra leader, although I imagine that Burt did a lot of conducting as well, while he was at the piano. … But Rob has spent many years at the feet of the master, so whatever else he brings, he’s extremely valuable in conveying what Burt might have done in any particular situation. Like, if we have to edit or cut something out of a song, how would Burt do it? Because according to Rob, he was not averse to medleys, where you do half of a song and then move on to another song in that sense. There are some instances where edits are necessary or something like that, and Rob’s advice is invaluable about how to do that in the most respectful way.
You have experience singing with an orchestra…
I do have, yeah. We don’t have an orchestra per se for this. We have a band, and the sound will have that orchestral element, but we’re not traveling with a string section or anything like that, which would just blow the budget up. I expect that we’re going to recreate the sound as much as possible with a nuclear unit of keyboard players and horns and that sort of thing.
There will be some familiar faces among the players, including your longtime Utopia bandmate Kasim Sulton.
Kasim’s in the band, and we’ll get an opportunity to do at least one duet.
Can you preview any of the songs you’ll be doing?
Well, I’ll be doing… Of course there’s a lot of heartbreak in the catalog. And that can’t be avoided, so I’ll be doing some of that, of course. But I didn’t want to be the cry baby the entire night, so I also snagged for myself a couple of the more fun songs, like “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” just to keep things light.
What’s your feeling about how easy or difficult Burt’s songs tend to be? Because there tend to be two conflicting schools of thought, as people speak in almost opposite terms of how hummable the songs are — which they of course had to be to command the hit parade, as they did — but then also how challenging and tricky they are. There are those unusual chord progressioins you mentioned. Is it just that the public latches on to a certain part of the song that is easier to grasp than the tune in its entirety, or…?
Since we’re saying this show is the music of Burt Bacharach, it’s easy to discount the contribution of Hal David, but in a sense, we are attributing Hal David as much as we are Burt. Because somehow, Hal and Burt had that mutual understanding of how the words can help convey the music and help you remember what may be an unusual melody or an unusual cadence or something like that, because you internalize the words. Most people are not musicians, so they don’t analyze the music, and in some cases, it only sticks partially in there. But then you add the words and it prompts you — you know, if there are seven syllables, there’s seven notes, that kind of thing. So I think it was that marriage also that helped to sell the material and make the melodies a little easier to grasp.
You are famous as one of the ultimate Do It Yourself musicians. Do you think Bacharach was a palpable influence on you in that?
Well, I’m not sure. I was always fascinated with orchestration, with all of the sonic possibilities of the orchestra, because of the music that I grew up with. My dad insisted on “No, none of that modern pop music.” It was all contemporary classics and show tunes and things like that. So a lot of the music that I listened to growing up was all those full orchestrations, and even when I was very young, I would just sort of fiddle around with a score paper and try and transcribe a fluke part I heard inside of a orchestration. So I was as much influenced by Bernstein as I was by Bacharach, from a harmonic standpoint and from the places that you could go with it.
But there’s no denying that the ability to kind of do it all is appealing, if you want it to not just simply sound a particular way but, for me, make it sound different from other people. There was a point in my career where I had settled in to a certain kind of songwriting, and there were elements of Bacharach and Laura Nyro and Carole King, “Tapestry,” in there. But at a certain point I realized I had a freedom that other musicians didn’t because I was a record producer and I was successful at that. So as a result of that, I would try and do things that other people wouldn’t do or couldn’t do because it might affect their career. And that’s been essentially my modus operandi ever since. So I tend already to think in sometimes orchestral terms and have to sometimes reduce it down, to a certain degree.
Bringing it back to Burt, upon his death last year there was a lot of celebration of him. Do you think he’s gotten his due, into the present day? And with a show like this, is there anything you hope people come out of it with?
Well, his decade was kind of the ‘70s. That’s when everybody wanted to do a Burt Bacharach song. And of course, Dionne Warwick had an endless string of hits. But Burt never wrote a disco song, as far as I know. So as musical styles began to dominate — you know, prog-rock and disco, and punk-rock and emo, and new wave and all that other stuff — Burt’s star in a certain sense faded, except for every once in a while there would be a Burt Bacharach song that everybody was singing. I think that probably by the time he passed on, people were thinking, “Oh, I thought he had passed on a while ago,” you know? Because he hadn’t penetrated the market again in the way that he had so completely in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And there’s a whole generation, or several generations, that never experienced that.
So I’m hoping that there are people, especially in an age when music is so performative and simple-minded in a way… You know, people are writing songs with two chords and three notes. That’s Taylor Swift, you know. I think it’s essential for people to be reminded of the level of craft that can go into popular songwriting, and there’s no better craftsman to demonstrate that than Burt Bacharach.
Just for the record, this tour is all Burt Bacharach material, right? We won’t be hearing any of your own songs sprinkled in there?
No, no, no. I don’t think anyone’s coming to hear that. Although I’m going out on my own tour later in the year, so if people want to hear that, they’ll have the opportunity. I’m gonna do about a six-week tour in June, and then we’re speculating on what I’ll do for the rest of the year. I may do a European tour, and I may tour more in the U.S. before the year is out as well. We’re going to announce pretty soon the (summer) batch of dates, but we didn’t want to interfere with the promotion around the Bacharach thing. We figure in another two weeks, people will have made their decisions, and then we can start talking about my tour.
