Anyone Who Had a Heart Read Online Free
Author: Burt Bacharach
could see them but they couldn’t see me.
At midnight, people would start blowing on little tin horns and throwing confetti in the air. Lots of people would be kissing each other but no girl ever kissed me. Why I chose to do this, not just once but year after year after year, I have no idea. I guess I just wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. I thought, “This is what you do on New Year’s Eve. You go to Times Square and maybe something wonderful will happen.” But it never did and then I would get on the subway and ride back home by myself. For me as a kid, New Year’s Eve was all about expectations, but no matter how many times I went to Times Square, the night never lived up to any of mine.
In terms of music, my big breakthrough came when I was fifteen years old and started using a fake ID to sneak into little jazz clubs like the Three Deuces and the Spotlight on Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan. Sometimes there would be more people onstage than in the audience. Dizzy Gillespie was the guy I loved the most and he became my hero. I worshipped him because everything he did was so cool and I loved the way he looked onstage playing that funny-looking trumpet of his. One night I saw him standing out on the street with a monkey on his shoulder, so I went right home and asked my mother and father if I could get a monkey, too, but of course they said no.
It wasn’t just Dizzy, either. I’d go to Birdland to watch the Count Basie Band, with Sonny Payne on drums, and they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around—it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way.
Using the name Happy Baxter, which was as close as I could get to Bacharach without sounding Jewish, I formed a band with four other guys my age and we played a couple of high school dances in Forest Hills. What I liked best about playing in public was that I got to meet girls who would never have talked to me for any other reason. I remember playing a Saturday-night dance at a Catholic church in Forest Hills where there must have been twenty pretty girls hanging around the piano. As a teenager, I thought a lot about girls, so when it came to deciding to become a musician, that night definitely made an impression on me.
There wasn’t much talent in the band but we did have a good drummer, Norman Feld, and a saxophone player named Jack Conn, whose father had cofounded the big music publishing company Bregman, Vocco, & Conn. Jack would get us arrangements for free. We would rehearse at his house and also go to the Nola rehearsal studio, right off Broadway on Fifty-Fourth Street, where the woman at the front desk would let us rehearse for free. Sometimes there would be jam sessions going on with the top names in jazz. One night when the piano player didn’t show up, a great clarinet player named Eddie Barefield, who had worked with Bennie Moten and Fletcher Henderson, let me sit in with him and some top guys.
Even though I was now a lot more serious about music, I still got minimal action in high school. I thought I had gotten laid in Rego Park one night with a girl who went to school with me but it wasn’t even close to going all the way. There was another girl I knew who had colossal tits and the two of us would go up on the roof of her building and I would dry-hump her and come just like that! I actually got laid for the first time during the summer after my junior year in high school when my father got me on this USO tour with a collection of vaudeville musicians who couldn’t get work anywhere else.
It was a variety show, and the tap dancer Hal Le Roy was the big star. Roy Smeck played banjo and I was the boogie-woogie piano player, as well as by far the youngest guy on the tour. We all traveled
At midnight, people would start blowing on little tin horns and throwing confetti in the air. Lots of people would be kissing each other but no girl ever kissed me. Why I chose to do this, not just once but year after year after year, I have no idea. I guess I just wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. I thought, “This is what you do on New Year’s Eve. You go to Times Square and maybe something wonderful will happen.” But it never did and then I would get on the subway and ride back home by myself. For me as a kid, New Year’s Eve was all about expectations, but no matter how many times I went to Times Square, the night never lived up to any of mine.
In terms of music, my big breakthrough came when I was fifteen years old and started using a fake ID to sneak into little jazz clubs like the Three Deuces and the Spotlight on Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan. Sometimes there would be more people onstage than in the audience. Dizzy Gillespie was the guy I loved the most and he became my hero. I worshipped him because everything he did was so cool and I loved the way he looked onstage playing that funny-looking trumpet of his. One night I saw him standing out on the street with a monkey on his shoulder, so I went right home and asked my mother and father if I could get a monkey, too, but of course they said no.
It wasn’t just Dizzy, either. I’d go to Birdland to watch the Count Basie Band, with Sonny Payne on drums, and they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around—it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way.
Using the name Happy Baxter, which was as close as I could get to Bacharach without sounding Jewish, I formed a band with four other guys my age and we played a couple of high school dances in Forest Hills. What I liked best about playing in public was that I got to meet girls who would never have talked to me for any other reason. I remember playing a Saturday-night dance at a Catholic church in Forest Hills where there must have been twenty pretty girls hanging around the piano. As a teenager, I thought a lot about girls, so when it came to deciding to become a musician, that night definitely made an impression on me.
There wasn’t much talent in the band but we did have a good drummer, Norman Feld, and a saxophone player named Jack Conn, whose father had cofounded the big music publishing company Bregman, Vocco, & Conn. Jack would get us arrangements for free. We would rehearse at his house and also go to the Nola rehearsal studio, right off Broadway on Fifty-Fourth Street, where the woman at the front desk would let us rehearse for free. Sometimes there would be jam sessions going on with the top names in jazz. One night when the piano player didn’t show up, a great clarinet player named Eddie Barefield, who had worked with Bennie Moten and Fletcher Henderson, let me sit in with him and some top guys.
Even though I was now a lot more serious about music, I still got minimal action in high school. I thought I had gotten laid in Rego Park one night with a girl who went to school with me but it wasn’t even close to going all the way. There was another girl I knew who had colossal tits and the two of us would go up on the roof of her building and I would dry-hump her and come just like that! I actually got laid for the first time during the summer after my junior year in high school when my father got me on this USO tour with a collection of vaudeville musicians who couldn’t get work anywhere else.
It was a variety show, and the tap dancer Hal Le Roy was the big star. Roy Smeck played banjo and I was the boogie-woogie piano player, as well as by far the youngest guy on the tour. We all traveled
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