"... learn what you can, get it all together, and go out and do it"
By Robert Windeler
DIONNE WARWICKE, who comes from a family of gospel singers, has been singing seriously since the age of six. She is now thirty-two, which means that she has had more than a quarter of a century of musical experience. It includes her tripartite collaboration with composer Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David, which dates back to her last year in high school. Since then she has won international acclaim and numerous gold records.
For the last ten years she has made many appearances at night clubs and big hotels in Las Vegas and elsewhere. On the opening night of a recent engagement at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, I found her to be a confident, self possessed lady, with a few prematurely grey strands in her faultlessly coiffed hair. Gone is the endearing little girl uncertainty of only a few years ago. Dionne Warwicke now almost takes her success for granted, surrounded as she is by professional competence and by the unselfconscious love and respect of her large and warm family.
After the show, other stars came to her dressing room to pay their respects and congratulate her on another flawless opening. They were given champagne and hospitality, but the really important people were Dionne's mother from back East, her aunt (who sings as one of her backup group, the Blossoms), her husband, and her sister Dee Dee-also a singer, but one with a slightly more rhythm-and-blues and gospel sound. Dionne's five-year old son darted in and out of his mother's dressing room, and there were more minions about-agents, managers, press agents-than most artists have, which reminded the rest of us that she is now an acknowledged superstar.
But she is a superstar with an ambition that has nothing to do with performing for the public: she wants to finish the education that was interrupted by her meeting Hal David and Burt Bacharach. They first entered her life in 1959, when she was a senior in high school. "Burt had written Mexican Divorce with Bob Hilliard," she said, "and my sister and I were doing background singing at the studios in New York-for the Drifters, among others.
I used to sing too loudly for a backup, and so I was noticed." (Her singing had been noticed ever since she was in the first grade and joined the choir at her grandfather's church in East Orange, New Jersey: "I played the piano for the church and then became choir director and used to sing all around, for many organizations.") At first Dionne did all the demo records for Bacharach
and David. "I applied to college because I wanted to get my education and be able to teach, but they kept trying to talk me into recording." Dionne entered Hart College, a part of the University of Hartford, where she has since been studying off and on (when her career permitted) and where, almost fifteen years later, she is determined to receive her doctor's degree in music. And when the show-biz glitter has finally dimmed, she will teach-as Dr. Warwicke.
Bacharach did, of course, talk her into a recording career, which began her long detour from the educational field. He was involved not only in composing but also in arranging and producing records. He and Hal David took Dionne to Scepter Records and wrote a song for her de but-Don't Make Me Over, an instant international hit.
"Then they wrote Reach Out and There's Always Some thing There to Remind Me for me," she said. "I stayed away from full-time work in the music business as long as I could, but finally I left school." Thereafter, throughout the 1960's, Bacharach and David wrote much of their material expressly for Dionne, and most of what she sang was theirs. Anyone Who Had a Heart further established her as a pre-eminent recording artist, and the song not only became part of the repertoires of Petula Clark and Marlene Dietrich but was re corded by many other artists as well. Miss Dietrich, for whom Bacharach was then conducting, was so impressed with Dionne that she personally introduced her at the Olympia Theatre in Paris in December of 1961 That appearance launched Dionne in Europe, and for the next year and a half she toured England and the Continent. At that time her Walk On By became a top-ten record throughout the world. In 1965 and 1966 she began appearing regularly on American television and sold out Philharmonic Hall in New York. In 1966 the trade journal Cashbox voted her the number one rhythm-and-blues singer and the number two pop singer.
A distinctive sound was now emerging, and a Bacharach-David-Warwicke song could be recognized after only a couple of bars. Of the gold records she began receiving regularly for singles and albums, all were for recordings of songs by Bacharach and David except one, The Theme from the Valley of the Dolls, by Andre and Dory Previn. Among the songs that made the Warwicke sound and style more familiar to the public were I Say a Little Prayer, Alfie, Do You Know the Way to San Jose?, and Wishin' and Hopin'. In 1969 Bacharach and David wrote a Broadway show, Promises, Promises, which did not star Dionne, but her recordings were the ones that made the show's best songs into hits: Go While the Going Is Good, Knowing When to Leave, What Do You Get When You Fall in Love?, and the title song.
Dionne says of the trio's working methods: "I never give them any help during the actual writing of a song.
They often say, and it is true, that I change melodies many times, mostly by a note-an E or a C to a G. And if I ever feel that a lyric isn't quite right, I'll tell Hal, and he'll change it. Hal has changed whole verses for me be cause they weren't comfortable. We all work together during the recording of a song. But Hal is the lyricist, Burt the composer and arranger, and I am the interpreter.
I can never get away from that. Occasionally Burt has urged me to branch out and do the work of other composers. And now I do. But I am so terribly sure of that relationship with Burt and Hal that there is no problem at all if I go off in another direction- or if they do." Bacharach is the one who found the background voices-"three white girls, and three black"--and the rhythm section for Dionne's trademark sound. "Burt's a taskmaster," she says, "hard and rough. He tries to get the highest level of performance from anybody he works with." Of Hal David she says, "For a long time I thought he was the only lyricist worthy of being called a poet." She voiced only one regret about her long association with the composer and lyricist: "I'm sorry I let Jackie De Shannon have What the World Needs Now Is Love. Burt and Hal brought it to me first, of course, but at the time it was written it didn't sound the way it sounds today-which is like a natural million seller. I should have known that it would be changed in the recording process, but I really felt it wasn't for me. So Jackie had the million-selling single. I recorded it later, on an album, and we used exactly the same arrangement Jackie had." In her show at the Riviera Hotel only half the program was made up of Bacharach-David songs. There were two by Carole King, two by John Lennon, one each by Leon Russell and Jacques Brel, and another by Aretha Franklin. "She's soul sister number one, two, three, four, and five," says Dionne. "I think every black lady would consider herself a soul sister, but not every one of us has the gifts to be a songwriter. I unfortunately just don't seem to have any talent as a writer-or at least I haven't been able to express it so far.
"I do know that most writers feel they are the best people to express their own feelings. We seem to be in a rather cultish time, the mushrooming of the singer-song writer, whether male or female. Some are good, a lot not that good, but I don't feel left out because I don't write my own songs. Carole King has a great many feelings we all share, and she expresses them very well. I've thought that since she was writing for the Shirelles." As for the future, Dionne is planning to add a gospel medley to her night-club act, and of course get that degree.
"I've never been as excited about anything. I do a good deal less traveling now than ever before-thank God by choice. I can devote more time to my husband and son--they're very important people in my life." Home is still New Jersey, but her career requires that she live part of the time in Los Angeles.
Her change from the Scepter label, which launched her and was her recording home for nine years, to Warner Brothers was painful, but she felt it had to be done. "If you have worn a size-five dress all your life and suddenly you're a size seven, you've got to go get a size-seven dress. I have no regrets other than that I wish Scepter could have been a little bigger. But they've been tremendously helpful to me, and they are still." Dionne has made a film, and although it was not a pleasant experience, she may want to do one again. "It was called Slaves--and that's what we were. I was five months pregnant, it was made on a low budget and shot in July and August in Shreveport, Louisiana. It had every thing working against it. I'd love to do a Broadway play, but you have to be very careful and you must know it's absolutely right for you." About three years ago she felt it was right for her to add a final "e" to her name because a numerologist told her it would be a lot luckier. And she's an astrology buff--Sagittarius, with Taurus rising and her moon in Taurus, but what she really believes is: "You've got to learn what you can, get it all together, and go out and do it."
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Also see:
APROPOS BOB DYLAN--Like Rip Van Winkle, returning, he found the world changed. DON HECKMAN