The Music Man

THE COMPOSER OF HUNDREDS OF POP SONGS, HE KNEW WHAT THE WORLD NEEDED, NOW AND ALWAYS-UNFORGETTABLE MELODIES

- TOM GLIATTO

Without songwriter Burt Bacharach, we wouldn’t have dozens of indelible tunes—“Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Alfie” (his favorite)—and we wouldn’t have Mike Myers’s Austin Powers films. The actor was driving one day when he heard “The Look of Love,” the achingly seductive ballad introduced in the 1967 James Bond parody Casino Royale. To Myers, the song evoked the sexy, swinging era for which the handsome Bacharach had been a poster boy (lyricist Sammy Cahn called him “the only songwriter who doesn’t look like a dentist”). The idea of a comedy about a groovy British spy came to Myers in a flash, and he knew he wanted Bacharach for a cameo: In the 1997 film he turns up on top of a bus, playing the piano and singing his 1965 classic “What the World Needs Now Is Love.”

After that, “7-year-olds all over the country were coming up to me and saying, ‘I just saw you in Austin Powers,’” Bacharach wrote in his 2013 memoir, Anyone Who Had a Heart.