The Dionne Warwick Experience

I can't seem to get enough of the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David these days. The most prolific and one of the best interpreters of Bacharach-David songs is Dionne Warwick. I had a 2-lp record of Dionne Warwick singing Bacharach-David songs called Go With Love. It's a compilation album released by Columbia House for members of its record club. My copy played like, as vinyl listeners call it, Rice Krispies (i.e., "snap, crackle, and pop!"). I also had a lot of Warwick's proper albums released by the Scepter label in the 60s, each of which contained a handful of Bacharach-David songs. But the Scepter albums were poorly pressed on noisy vinyl and the sound quality was equally poor. So I was on the hunt for another compilation album of Warwick singing Bacharach. I thought I found it in the 2-LP The Dionne Warwick Story, her smiling face on the cover looking up at me from the dollar bin got me all excited. It had a great song list. But when I took it home and played it, it turned out to be a live album. Yuck. I wanted the studio versions.

Well, when you look hard enough, sometimes you find what you're looking for. Today I hit pay dirt when I came across another copy of Go With Love. That's not so unusual. What was amazing was the copy I found was still sealed. It was an album from probably the 70s that was, for all intents and purposes, brand new. It plays beautifully on quiet vinyl and with better sound quality than the Scepter albums. It's the best three dollars I've spent this year. That's my Dionne Warwick Experience. (Side note: I think The Dionne Warwick Experience would be a great name for a punk band. Okay, maybe not.)