In 1964, singer-songwriter Todd Rundgren wasn’t quite 16 years old when a Burt Bacharach song first caught his attention.
“The first thing I heard, or the first thing I reacted to, was ‘Walk On By’ by Dionne Warwick,” Rundgren says on a recent video call from a tour stop in Brisbane, Australia. “It was just a different kind of thing. The sophistication of the orchestration, the unusual changes. Not typical sort of pop changes that were often derived from 12-bar blues sorts of things.
“So I responded to that song, and my response was strong enough that it was one of the few albums that I actually went out and bought new,” he says. “I didn’t have a lot of money. I didn’t get much allowance, maybe a quarter a week or something like that. So to buy an album required some savings or some investment maybe of the birthday money my grandmother would give me.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Rundgren listened to “Make Way For Dionne Warwick” over and over. As the record revolved on the turntable, he studied the fine print on the back of the album and realized that it wasn’t just Warwick’s work for which he’d fallen.
“In the early days of music, most people, most listeners, were not aware of anyone but the artists,” Rundgren says. “You hear Dionne Warwick or the Beatles – I think it was the Beatles that made people aware of George Martin, the producer, the other person who was involved in making their records.
“By that time, those names on the record also started to have some meaning to me,” he says. “It wasn’t just the person on the front cover. It was who’s writing the songs, who’s producing the record, who’s doing the arranging.
“And I realized that this one person, this Burt Bacharach guy, had done all the writing and arranging and produced the record,” Rundgren says. “I suddenly realized that this was a person that, aside from whatever obvious talents, you wanted to keep track of what he was doing.”
On Sunday, March 23, Rundgren will be the featured artist for “What The World Needs Now: The Burt Bacharach Songbook Live” at the Wiltern Theatre, a night of Bacharach songs, which also includes jazz singer Wendy Moten and Rob Shirakbari, the late Bacharach’s longtime musical director and arranger.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Rundgren talked about the appeal of Bacharach’s music to him throughout his own life and career, songs of his own that reflect the influence of Bacharach, and how a decade ago he missed his best chance to meet his musical hero.
Q: You’ve said that after doing tours paying tribute to David Bowie and the Beatles’ “White Album” you were done. So why say yes to this one?
A: If it had been yet another kind of tribute to another pop artist, I probably would not have been interested. But because it was Burt Bacharach, and because of the very early influence he had on me, I felt like there’s a karmic element involved.
In the same way that when I was playing with Ringo [on his All-Starr Band tours], it wasn’t just simply, “I’m playing with Ringo.” There is the karma of having grown up listening to the Beatles, and that reinforcing my desire, in a sense, to become a musician. There isn’t just the musical aspect of it. In some way, you owe it to the other artist because of the influence they’ve had on you.
Q: Why did Dionne, Burt and the song “Walk On By” have such an immediate impact on you?
A: It was a whole different approach to music. My dad didn’t like rock and roll, and he probably didn’t know what the blues was, but he did enjoy contemporary classics and show tunes, and that’s what we heard in the house. So I was more attuned, maybe, than most people who just listened to strictly pop music and used to listening to maybe more sophisticated modalities than were used in typical pop music.
So that caused me to respond to it – aside from the performance of Dionne Warwick herself, you know. How effectively the material and her voice and her delivery all meshed together to create the desired impact.
At the time, I wanted to be a guitar player. We didn’t even have a piano in the house, so when I was in high school [in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania], I would spend my after-class hours in the auditorium, just noodling around on the piano. And it turned out that I kept hearing these other things than the obvious triads and stuff. I was noodling around with major-minor sevenths and that sort of thing.
That was some residual influence I got from listening to Dionne Warwick, listening to that record. I listened to all the songs over and over, and they’re all just a little different, but they all have that signature kind of Bacharach touch to them. So years later, the influence started to reveal itself even though I wasn’t super conscious of it.
Q: When did that influence first surface? When you were in the Nazz? Or went solo? Can you point to an early song that has it?
A: The very first song I wrote was “Hello, It’s Me” [in the Nazz]. Here I am in a band, playing loud guitar, but for some reason, the first song, once I finally got down to writing something, was “Hello, It’s Me.” That has a lot of the signature elements. The unusual form. It doesn’t have a chorus in the way that most songs do, you know.
Even “Hello, it’s me” is only said once in the entire song. I think I had a different title for it when I wrote it, but it just became “Hello, It’s Me” because that was the first line. That was the B-side to the Nazz’s first single, and ironically enough, radio was not interested in “Open My Eyes,” our first A-side. They were more interested in the B-side, which was “Hello, It’s Me,” albeit a more dirge-y version [than the later solo hit version].
Q: When I saw this Bacharach show announced, the first of your songs that popped into my head was “Can We Still Be Friends.” I’m sure there are others you might see as influenced by Burt.
A: I think there are a few others. When I started writing for the Nazz, a lot of that was guitar music and we were imitating like the Yardbirds or incorporating a little bit of the Beach Boys and the Beatles. But then I got highly influenced by Laura Nyro at that point. And there’s a thread [between Nyro and Bacharach] that’s very similar.
Her original influences were all these original R&B songs. I didn’t realize at the time that Burt Bacharach had been a songwriter previous to Dionne Warwick, and had done a lot of R&B songs that I was familiar with like “Any Day Now” and songs by the Shirelles and stuff.
I think at that point it was kind of like a snowballing effect because Laura Nyro had a lot of the same characteristics. Writing very sophisticated things but tempos would change, the actual feel would change, sometimes going from major to minor. Things that most songwriters wouldn’t, either because it wasn’t part of their style, or they avoided it because they thought it wasn’t commercial.
Q: And “Can We Still Be Friends”?
A: Yeah, you could say that a song of a song like “Can We Still Be Friends,” because of the reliance on these weird suspensions and passing chords and stuff like that. That was another sort of skill that Burt Bacharach had. It’s not just the melody. It’s how you get from one place to another place in a song without simply just pasting verses and choruses and bridges together.
It was that flow. And also, in a way, the lyrical tendency to tell a story or to develop the lyric throughout the song rather than just simply repeating everything over and over again. That’s as much Hal David as it is Burt Bacharach. I tend to point out doing publicity for this tour that we’re also, in a way, tributing Hal David, because most of Burt’s most successful years his principal lyricist was Hal David.
Q: Did you ever meet Burt anywhere along the line?
A: I did not, unfortunately. I had a fleeting opportunity. I was unaware he was in the audience at one of my gigs about 10 years or so ago. We were doing a show that I call An Unpredictable Evening, which had some of my material in it, but also all kinds of material from all different eras and styles. Essentially, it was musical adventuring. I would just tell the band the first song we were doing and then I’d start calling out songs.
We were at place called the Belly Up [in Solana Beach] near where Burt lived and he came to see the gig. And it was reported to me afterwards that he left [without coming backstage] because he wanted to hear “Hello, It’s Me,” and we didn’t play it. I would have played it all frickin’ night if I had known that Burt was there and wanted to hear it.
Q: You’ll be back to L.A. soon to rehearse for the tour. Do you know how the sets will be structured yet?
A: We’ve been tossing around various things, like trying to find keys, changes to arrangements, different running orders, and stuff like that. We have to play through them and see what they feel like, what they sound like. It may be that we’ll play the first gig or two and decide that we have to change the running order. There is no precedent for it.
I know that I’m doing probably seven songs solo, and participating in maybe another four songs with other artists, duets or little trade-off things. I do a verse, you do a verse. They gave me first crack at a list of songs and I got most all of them. I did go to some lengths to claim a lot of songs in the Burt Bacharach canon. There’s a lot of heartbreak in there, a lot of failed relationships and infidelity. [He laughs]
So much of the songs are tearjerkers in a way. But I didn’t want to be Mr. Sad Sack for the whole thing so I also claimed, “What’s New Pussycat?” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” so I get a chance to lighten it up at certain moments as well.