Dionne Warwick
The Complete Scepter Singles 1962-1973
REAL GONE
With Burt Bacharach’s passage this past February and the immediate follow-up of the Bacharach & Costello deluxe box set, the most obvious thing to consider was where Dionne Warwick stood within this sorrowful death march’s continuum. And though she’s thankfully still touring (and tweeting) and including new twists on the vintage wine of her time with melodicist Burt and lyricist Hal David in her set, the best place in which to hear that elegantly husky contralto and its supine-yet-alluring phrasing is in the singles she crafted during her early days on the Scepter label.
Unlike how the olds remember her from radio, and how the constants of modern-day remastering take the guts out of even the most yearning or lurid songs, Warwick’s actual singles have a certain raw quality to them—even when highly orchestrated—that allows each ballad or quick-step soliloquy an edginess that you didn’t realize was ever there. And fierceness when you consider how Warwick lent an attitude-laden forcefulness to being all-but-fucked-over when it came to (nearly) being left out of the dynamic Bachrach/David material and its resulting first single, 1962’s “Don’t Make Me Over.” When she shouts out “Accept me for what I am” at that recording’s close, Warwick is made over as a diva with studied phrasing and haughty comportment. That gutsiness gets carried over to the sprightly likes of “Walk on By” (move it, please, ex-lover) and the grandiloquent balladry and selfless pleas of “A House Is Not a Home” (please be in love with me still when I return) and “I Say a Little Prayer.”
Yes, Warwick/Bacharach/David familiars such as these fill the Complete Scepter Singles collection, facing you forever with the fact that nothing in the present day will ever be as sophisticated as that trio’s heroic efforts. Yet this collection also allows you the insight of clever B-sides (1963’s “Please Make Him Love Me”) and early 1970s fare such as her take on The Walker Brothers’ hit “Make It Easy on Yourself,” which happens to be far more dramatic than the pseudo-bros’ original—a charge that takes real effort and guts.
