Hal David, legendary songwriter dies at 91

[Huh?]

RIP Mr David.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/arts/music/hal-david-oscar-and-grammy-winning-songwriter-is-dead-at-91.html?pagewanted=all

[Huh?]

Man....what a catalog!! I grew up on his music and thinking about his songs, I cannot think of one I don't like. Just as he is quoted as saying, I have long thought that style of writing is definitely a lost art.

[rasputin1963]

Man, when HIS ilk goes.... One grapples to imagine who might replace him.

 

Hal's great knack was to write lyrics which sounded conversational, prosy, and down-to-earth. Bacharach's melodies, and Hal's phrases, were attempts to capture how people really speak... the prosaic words they choose, and the curious rhythms and irregular phrases of natural speech. This is what made the Dionne Warwick hits of the early-to-mid 60's sound so different. Only Lorenz Hart, before him, could write lyrics like that.

 

Songwriters like Hal had one foot in Classical and Tin Pan Alley... and the other foot in Rock, Jazz, Gospel and Latin. This is one reason why the songs of the 60's were so very rich and sophisticated, and why you hear them over the speakers when you push your trolley through the grocery store. (Fate should be so kind to the oeuvre of Rihanna and LudaCris) These were songwriters who actually knew what they were doing; there was structure, rhyme, reason, history and method to their writing.

 

Five years ago, my dear L.A. amigo, Robert Pingel, unearthed every single song that Hal ever wrote... recorded.... including facsimiles of the 45 sleeve art and the sheet music imagery. He then presented this huge collection of song memorabilia to Hal himself, who was a friend. Hal was astonished, because, contrary to what one might think, he did not have copies of all his own recorded songs! In the 50's and 60's, men and women of The Brill Building just wrote loads of songs every single week... Some would hit, others not, but they wasted no time in mourning the ones that didn't catch fire. Some of the songs in the Pingel collection Hal had forgotten he'd written.... some will note that Hal's brother, Mack David, was a huge songwriter of the Big Band 1940's and "adult pop" 1950's (Mack wrote the English lyrics to "La Vie En Rose" by Gilbert Becaud, among other things.)

 

By every single account, Hal was a super-nice man, and eminently approachable to fans, musicians and songwriters, 'til the day he died. May he RIP.

 

One thrill of my little life was accompanying the great LA chanteuse, Joanie Sommers, as she sang the Hal David song, "Johnny Get Angry", which had hit big for her in 1962. (-;

 

[video=youtube;pI_nk0L-cF4]

 

Here's a great Burt/Hal tune that shows off the "prosey, conversational" tone of hal's lyric-writing style... (Some of you might know that Bacharach has zealously stripped YouTube of all his songs, especially the vintage Dionne stuff; so when they DO appear on YT, they are "pirates", and will stay up only until Burt's company gets wind of it.)

 

[video=youtube;_lxHHRsvbZA]

[Lee Knight]

 

Man, when HIS ilk goes.... One grapples to imagine who might replace him. Hal's great knack was to write lyrics which sounded conversational, prosy, and down-to-earth. Bacharach's melodies, and Hal's phrases, were attempts to capture how people really speak... the prosaic words they choose, and the curious rhythms and irregular phrases of natural speech. This is what made the Dionne Warwick hits of the early-to-mid 60's sound so different. Only Lorenz Hart, before him, could write lyrics like that. Songwriters like Hal had one foot in Classical and Tin Pan Alley... and the other foot in Rock, Jazz, Gospel and Latin. This is one reason why the songs of the 60's were so very rich and sophisticated, and why you hear them over the speakers when you push your trolley through the grocery store. (Fate should be so kind to the oeuvre of Rihanna and LudaCris) These were songwriters who actually knew what they were doing; there was structure, rhyme, reason, history and method to their writing.

 

 

Beautifully said.

 

David had a way of his very simple words being like articulation from the lips of doubled flugelhorns. So to speak.

 

Do you know the way to San Jose

 

Just reading that line ^ doesn't tell us much. But we all know that melody. The way that David chose words, was in making sure that natural prosody furthered both the melody and allowed the singer to really dig in with meaning and articulation. Like those famous Bacharach horn motifs.

 

One lesss.... bell-to-anw...wer...

 

That ^ creates an immediate teeter-totter between the concepts of a) less work that one less bell implies, and b) the loneliness it promises.

 

He wasn't just tossing out rhymes here.

 

There is... al-ways some^thing^ there... to remind-me.

 

The words and their articulations. He was great. If you look at him from a Dylan perspective, you'll miss his genius, if you go more Sondheim, it becomes clear.

[rasputin1963]

 

Beautifully said. David had a way of his very simple words being like articulation from the lips of doubled flugelhorns. So to speak. The words and their articulations. He was great. If you look at him from a Dylan perspective, you'll miss his genius, if you go more Sondheim, it becomes clear.

 

 

I do love 1960's Dylan. I think "Like A Rolling Stone" is one of the greatest pop poems ever written.

 

The lyric most quoted by reviewers when they single out the most "Hal" of Hal David lyrics must be:

 

You get enough germs to catch pneumonia,

Then, when you do, he'll never phone ya.

[Vito Corleone]

I heard an interview with David years ago where he talked about how when writing with Bacharach sometimes the lyrics would come first and sometimes the music would. Interesting. Every other songwriting partnership I can think of did it always one way or the other.

[Vito Corleone]

 

 

 

I always loved that lyric! Pop genius.

[Lee Knight]

 

 

 

I LOVE Dylan! I wasn't using Dylan as the lesser artist. Just pointing out the different angles they both, he and David, approached a lyric from. Hal David didn't really approach a lyric from a poetic point of view. He seemed to want to be invisible. To make the articulations of the singer and the contour of a melody be the star. Dylan the lyricist, could steal the show with his words. Not so with David. And that was his skill. To further the melody and singer.

[Huh?]

Really nice post Ras. I actually thought you might be the first to respond.

 

Growing up in the 60's I was heavy into The Beatles and Stones going into Hendrix who was my all time fave and then a list too long to write of rock, psychedelic, blues, metal bands etc etc etc on to today. The thing is though.......the David/Bacharach stuff was also happening at the same time and I liked it. That music was woven into the very tapestry of the 60's, especially being as some of it was in popular movies.

 

You would have that stuff in the same radio playlists where I grew up. Even so, the songs were cool, I wasn't offended by them. Songs like Wichita Lineman and other Jimmy Webb songs come to mind also. I can go from Voodoo Chile to Wichita Lineman or Do You Know The Way To San Jose, Close To You etc....quite easily.

 

I just do not see that anymore. Of course, I'm not really looking either........but still.......those songs were hard to miss as they were in constant rotation. I am forced to listen to my kids' music today and the craft is just not there like it was. I really believe that. It's well done music in many cases but the depth of the craft is missing.

 

When you say you accompanied Joanie Sommers.....in what capacity? Were/are you a harmony vocalist or a musician sideman?

[rasputin1963]

 

When you say you accompanied Joanie Sommers.....in what capacity? Were/are you a harmony vocalist or a musician sideman?

 

 

Nothing glam! I was introduced to her in 1990 at a Beverly Hills nightclub by actress Connie Stevens, whom I'd met when I had been playing piano and singing aboard Royal Caribbean Cruise ships. The TV actors, movie stars and musicians and comics whom we associate with the pre-psychedelic 1960's all know each other as friends in the LA area. When I met Joanie Sommers that evening, I quickly searched the club to see if they had a piano.... they did! I dragged Joanie to that piano and insisted that she sing "Johnny Get Angry", which had been a longtime favorite record of mine. We were all sipping wine, so it all just flowed spontaneously. Joanie has this very unique, smokey, pussycat timbre to her voice, and when she began that song... I (and all around us) were transfixed. She was impressed that I knew the arrangement of that record like the back of my hand; I was 27 years old, and, at the time, maybe a little young to be familiar with a lot of pre-psychedelic era pop. Just one of life's fun, thrilling little moments.

[rasputin1963]

 

I just do not see that anymore. Of course, I'm not really looking either........but still.......those songs were hard to miss as they were in constant rotation. I am forced to listen to my kids' music today and the craft is just not there like it was. I really believe that. It's well done music in many cases but the depth of the craft is missing.

 

 

All here know that I can very tiresomely launch into a soapbox rant on this very subject. Suffice it to say: a pop song runs about three minutes... not even long enough to finish a cigarette. That three minutes can be structured in an infinite amount of ways, but there have been folks along the way who have figured out--- almost scientifically--- how to make every millisecond of that time count, IF MAXIMUM LISTENER MEMORABILITY is to the be the goal. The "rules" we're talking about involve ASSERTING A THEME, then VARYING THAT THEME in a number of clever ways which the listener will appreciate, if only subconsciously. "Theme and Variations" was what Mozart and Gluck and Bach and Haydn were all about. It's a very primal form of aesthetic pleasure.

 

THEME: "Deedle-dum."

 

VARIATIONS: "Deedle-Do, Deedle-dah, Deedle-day"

 

Combine melodic Theme and Variations..... with the great Greek poetic tropes (e.g. rhyme, Greek "feet", metaphor, simile, alliteration, hyperbole, bathos, metonymy, allusion, etc.) and, let's face it, you have a toolbox of some EXTREMELY PERSUASIVE, EXTREMELY CHARMING, EXTREMELY HYPNOTIC, EXTREMELY MEMORABLE tricks. They were powerful 500 years ago, and they're just as powerful now. If you're going to be a brain surgeon, then you want to be the very best one you can be, and you'll be employing knowledge and "tricks" that others before you have discovered.

 

Why a songwriter would wish to jettison this wealth of knowledge, and "reinvent the wheel", I don't fully understand. We start to develop a spurious nostalgia, and, like Marie Antoinette donning a tatty shepherdess's dress and tripping through the rustic Petit Trianon, start imagining that the unstructured ramblings of ghetto sidewalk denizens are more "authentic" or "true" or "rootsy" or "sincere" than those of trained songwriters. It's like entrusting your brain surgery to the bagboy at the Safeway, with the idea that he is more "real people" than those snooty hospital surgeons.

 

In America, we now appreciate that American Rock has much to do with our post-WWII affluence; suddenly you have teenagers with disposable money to spend, so we created the myth of the "rebel without a cause"... the disaffected young person who distrusts and rejects aspects of his parents' values. A whole Bernaysian industry of consumer goods, including pop records and pop radio, grew up from this new affluence. We imagine that the teenage rebel has a more "authentic" and "sincere" voice than that of his parents. But this disaffectation has, in the shadow of Rap/Hip-Hop, taken on an unguided life of its own, and now the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

 

[/rant]

[Huh?]

I thought perhaps you had played on the session. Nice story though.

 

As to your other post.... one of the things I struggle with is....... just as I and millions of others gravitated to the sounds of the post WWII rockers and felt my parents and their friends were just out of touch due to their age.......... I wonder if that is just me now. I do try to fight that. I don't want to be like my dad in that respect. Although he loved CCR....... he had that going for him.

[rasputin1963]

 

I don't want to be like my dad in that respect. Although he loved CCR....... he had that going for him.

 

 

I think today's young people have ears which "latch onto" different criteria than did mine (and surely others) in the 1960's, 70's and 80's. The idea that an arrangement might be beautiful, or that lyrics might be sophisticated, or that a singer is saying something profoundly true, never seems to enter into the equation for young listeners nowadays. MTV has changed the criteria they look for in a song. Sexual and aggressive posturing seems to be a big theme nowadays. But as anyone who's taken Psych 101 knows, strong assertions very often IMPLY THEIR PROFOUND LACK... There must be a lot of young people who feel as if they're worthless and sexually undesirable. Was it "ever thus" ?

 

Is this a legacy perhaps of the managerial "Be Something" 1980's? The idea that there were "successes" in life, and they sure-as-{censored} aren't you...?

[nat whilk II]

Mingus had some interesting things to say along this issue - and this partial quote is dated from 1971 so he's reacting to exactly the big shift that David is talking about:

 

these are from the liner notes to Let My Children Hear Music -

 

 

For God's sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good I don't mean that today's music is bad because it is loud. I mean the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music. Nothing is simple. It's as if people came to Manhattan and acted like it was still full of trees and grass and Indians instead of concrete and tall buildings. It's like a tailor cutting clothes without knowing the design, It's like living in a vacuum and not paying attention to anything that came before you.

 

 

and, interestingly, he also makes a few points about the limits of musical knowledge:

 

 

I used to work with Tatum, and Tatum knew every tune written, including the classics, and I think it got in the way of his composition, because he wasn't a Bud Powell. He wasn't as melodically inventive as Bud. He was technically flashy and he knew so much music and so much theory that he couldn't come up with anything wrong; it was just exercising his theory. But as far as making that original melodic concept, as Bird and Bud did, Art didn't do this for me in a linear sense.

 

 

Here's a link to the whole thing for anyone interested - Mingus can be cantankerous and not all that consistent in some of his ideas at times - still, what he says couldn't be more relevant IMO -

 

http://mingusmingusmingus.com/Mingus/what_is_a_jazz_composer.html

 

nat whilk ii

[Huh?]

......he knew so much music and so much theory that he couldn't come up with anything wrong

 

THAT.......is awesome!