The Casino File
By Chuck Darrow
For decades, legendary composer Burt Bacharach was a popular attraction in Atlantic City’s gaming halls. Whether appearing by himself or with Dionne Warwick—whose recordings of such beloved pop tunes as “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” “Walk on By” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” helped make Bacharach and his primary lyricist, Hal David, household names—he was a regular at such properties as Caesars Atlantic City, Harrah’s Resort Atlantic City and the long-gone Trump Plaza Hotel-Casino.
The six-time Grammy winner (and three-time Oscar champ) died in 2023 at age 94, but his music will come alive Saturday at Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa as classic-rock titan Todd Rundgren heads up a program dubbed “What the World Needs Now—The Burt Bacharach Songbook Live in Concert.”
While Rundgren is the show’s headliner (he’ll be joined by Wendy Moten, a former runner-up on “The Voice”), the driving force behind it is multi-instrumentalist Rob Shirakbari, who for years served as Bacharach’s musical director (a position in which he still functions for Warwick). According to the 61-year-old music-biz veteran from Arkansas, creating a tribute to his late boss was all but inevitable.
“I think it was maybe always in the back of my head to do something,” he offered during a recent Zoom chat from his London home. “When Burt passed, I knew that even though I hadn’t been working with him for a few years at that point, I was gonna at least let a year go by.
“And then people started [saying], ‘Hey, are you gonna do something?’”
Eventually, he continued, he decided the time was right for such a project, and reached out to producer Angelo Bundini, who has staged the acclaimed (and still-touring) “Celebrating David Bowie” extravaganza which featured Rundgren when it debuted in 2017. From the jump, Shirakbari knew his tribute had to be more than just a “greatest hits” recital.
“I wanted to approach it with a new, fresh perspective and go through the catalog in a deeper way than I was really able to do with either Burt or Dionne when I was doing shows for them.
“There was always kind of a limit to the amount of material they would want to do in a show. So that always left a lot of great songs on the table.”
Shirakbari, who has also collaborated with a Who’s Who of pop megastars from Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis to Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin to Elton John and Adele, added he was also motivated by the fear that other, less-qualified or less-invested parties might undertake such a project.
“I think some of it is a bit out of defense as well, because I really love the catalog and I wanted to do honor to Burt and the songs.
“I’ve seen so many people get it wrong. And I thought eventually, someone’s gonna do this and they’re probably not gonna do it particularly well; it’s music that you can get wrong.
“I see that quite a bit, so I thought, I need to do this because I’ve spent 40 years with [Bacharach and Warwick] separately and together and all that sort of…rubbed off on me. It’s sort of in my DNA. I can’t help but hear things [the way Bacharach did them]. And having seen the way Burt worked firsthand for so many years in the studio, and on stage–how he dealt with singers, how he rehearsed an orchestra, how he played–I just thought that, for whatever reason, it’s kinda fallen to me to lead this.”
As for Rundgren, doing another tribute tour (he also participated in a Beatles’ “White Album” extravaganza with, among others, Christopher Cross and former Monkees’ drummer Mickey Dolenz in 2019) was definitely not on his to-do list.
“I swore that I was done with tribute tours,” he said in a press release. “But there is too much Bacharach in my blood to let the opportunity to explore the depth and breadth of this libretto pass by.
“It may be that I not only owe a debt for his great influence; I squandered an opportunity to meet the Master when I failed to play ‘Hello It’s Me’ the time he quietly joined the audience solely to hear it. It may also be that I would feel unbearable envy for whomever was lucky enough to perform the music that meant so much to me.
“I can’t think of another artist whose tribute could make me break my vow and rise to the challenge of audience expectations around the greatest songwriter of my lifetime.”
According to Shirakbari, “What the World Needs Now” will not be a one-and-done affair.
“We will keep sort of reinventing and revisiting it,” he promised. “And so, every tour will be unique. If somebody sees us and we come back in a year or two with another, it’ll be a whole different configuration.”
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com.
An Atlantic City connection
Fun fact: Although Bacharach was born and raised in Kansas City, Mo., he has a bigtime familial connection to Our Town:
A cousin of his, Harry Bacharach, served two terms as mayor of the city. Not surprisingly, Bacharach Boulevard is named after him.
Frampton finale
Just a reminder that Saturday’s show at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City will be your last chance to see classic-rock giant Peter Frampton in concert.
The guitar-slinging singer-songwriter, whose 1976 “Frampton Comes Alive” album made him one of that decade’s biggest rock stars, has been diagnosed with inclusion body myositis, which, according to mda.org, is an inflammation of the distal (far from the body center) flexor muscles, including the wrists and fingers. This, of course, can severely impede the ability to play guitar.
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com.
Chuck Darrow has spent more than 40 years writing about Atlantic City casinos.
