“I actually did stop it from coming out,” Bacharach recalls.
1 on January 3, 1970, and stayed there for four weeks straight.īut the single version of “Raindrops” almost didn’t get released. Released in October 1969 to coincide with the movie, “Raindrops” climbed to No. A song that conjured up turn-of-the-century quaintness seemed like a longshot for the charts, especially alongside heavy fare like “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin and “Come Together” by the Beatles. The ukulele intro and tack piano arrangement from the soundtrack version remained. Two weeks later a single version of song for radio was recut at A&R Studios in New York, this one with a more full-throated performance from Thomas. Laryngitic performance aside, Thomas says, “There’s maybe only two or three times in my career when I felt like I’d recorded a hit record, no doubt, and that was one of them.”
An exec from 20th Century Fox at the recording session congratulated Thomas on how much his raspy voice sounded like Paul Newman’s. He struggled through five takes before Bacharach was satisfied. “I had come off a two-week tour and had laryngitis and was barely able to eke out the thing for the soundtrack,” Thomas recalls. The day before he was to record the song, a road-weary Thomas was warned by his doctor not to sing. Burt said okay, really out of necessity.” And you’d think Ray Stevens would have jumped on a Burt Bacharach song. According to singer Steve Tyrell, who was then an A&R exec at Scepter Records, “They offered the song to Ray Stevens. 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.
RAINDROPS KEEP FALLING ON MY HEAD B.J.THOMAS MOVIE
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. By late 1969, Burt Bacharach and Hal David were kings of the pop songwriting game.
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