Michael Phillips: Burt Bacharach wrote the songs the world needed then. And now

It’s the one sincere moment in the entire “Austin Powers” franchise.

Straight to camera, the international man of mystery announces: “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Burt Bacharach!” Mike Myers and Elizabeth Hurley, atop a double-decker London-meets-Vegas tour bus heading down the Strip, dance to the strains of “What the World Needs Now is Love,” one of so many Bacharach/Hal David hits, with Bacharach at the piano obliging the audience with the first of three cameos in the Powers comedies.

That same song, which really is a lament for the scarcity of love’s sweetness, sealed the deal in the final minutes of “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” the pathbreaking Paul Mazursky smash from 1969. There, in the shining Jackie DeShannon rendition, it’s heartbreaking — a sober-up reckoning that concludes the story of two Los Angeles couples’ experiment in what Amy Landecker, in the Coen brothers’ masterwork “A Serious Man,” called “the new freedoms.”

Bacharach died Wednesday at the age of 94. Song by mysteriously beguiling song, he and lyricist David built a cultural bridge for the 1960s, a decade gloriously divisive in its musical flowering.

Their work showcasing Warwick, chief among the popular singers buoyed by their exquisite hummability, spanned that divide, effortlessly. Bacharach and David brought Eisenhower-era, Brill Building-bred commercial songwriting skills to go with Bacharach’s ear for what sounded right, and easy, but also fresh and genuinely sexy. Squares liked their songs. Hippies liked their songs. Black, brown, white. Everyone liked their songs.

In the spirit of Austin Powers, I’d like to thank my mother for buying Bacharach’s albums back in the late ‘60s, thereby introducing me to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” and “Walk on By” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” In those days, scarce indeed was the low-slung living room mahogany hi-fi, with the tiny rectangular speakers hidden behind quaintly ridiculous fake curtains, that wasn’t within easy reach of a Bacharach LP.

“I’ll Never Fall Love Again” came from Bacharach’s sole (and hit) Broadway score, “Promises, Promises” (1968). Like “Hair,” but nothing like “Hair,” it sent a lot of beautiful pop craftsmanship to the top of the charts. A year later, Bacharach returned to the movies — his songs having already toned up everything from “What’s New, Pussycat?” (a uniquely bombastic three-quarter-time oompah come-on, which helped sell a pretty wormy sex farce) to “After the Fox” a year later. The biggie came in 1969: “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” for which the team wrote “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” Bacharach and David won an Oscar for that song, Bacharach for the score.

They did not win any Oscars for the musical version of “Lost Horizon” (1973), a heaping helping of flopdom I had the mixed blessing of seeing on eighth-grade field trip. That one (the movie, that is, not the field trip) undid the Bacharach/David partnership.

But there were decades more to come, full of new collaborations for Bacharach, a few hits, and a late-flowering interest in political and social subject matter. One tune, “Live to See Another Day,” was written to commemorate school shooting survivors in the wake of Sandy Hook.

Much has been made of the breezy, easy-listening, apolitical vibe of the golden Bacharach/David years, whether in seduction mode (”The Look of Love”) or a purer, higher realm of desire (”Close to You,” “Alfie”). Easy listening? True, I suppose.

And false. Bacharach may have been a uniter, not a divider, but surely it’s easy to hear the complexity underneath that ease. The unpredictability and the equally wondrous rightness of so many of his key melodies are what keep them evergreen. That transcends hummability; lots of songwriters can write hummability. Andrew Lloyd Webber has built an empire on it.

As for “apolitical”: Yes, I guess. On the other hand, both lyrics and music in a song such as “What the World Needs Now” carry the unmistakable echo of their times, the Vietnam War, the war at home.

This country, now and forever, resides on a metaphorical Division Street. More often than not, a songwriter who sets out to work both sides and the middle of that street comes off like a poseur — a pleaser without much personality. Not Bacharach. Maybe his public image misled some people. He was, as fellow genius tunesmith Sammy Cahn often said, the first songwriter he knew who didn’t look like a dentist. But the next time you hear “Walk on By” or “Make It Easy on Yourself,” ask yourself: Is the world a little sweeter for those songs having been written, or isn’t it?

Ladies and gentlemen: Mr. Burt Bacharach.

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