Bette Midler (20 page)

When Drew waltzed over to Bette—in the middle of the party—and announced that he did
NOT
like her new single, she was a bit miffed. This was not the night for someone to pick a fight with Bette, but she decided to let it ride. She simply went to another part of the party to cool out, but the anger proceeded to build up in her, and she really became enraged over the fact that this man would have nerve enough to ruin her New Year’s celebration by insulting her. She marched back over to him and, according to her, “My heart was pounding and I was so livid! The whole evening was just so: uggggh! So I grabbed the record from his hand, broke it across my knee, and smacked him across the face.” She stormed off in a huff after telling him that if he didn’t like the song, “Don’t play it!” Bette Midler’s records were promptly banned from all of the RKO radio stations that Drew programmed. “What can I say? I’m sorry it happened, but that’s show biz,” she commented later, but the damage was already done (
68
).

Alas, the evening was far from over. More surprises were in store. When Bette returned to her hotel, she decided to knock on Russo’s hotel room door, only to find that he had staged a suicide attempt. Said Midler, “Aaron was back at the hotel, on the floor. He’d taken a bunch of pills, trying to pass out and scare me, because I had a date with someone else that night. He was in love with me and didn’t want me to be with anyone else” (
30
).

“When I got back to the hotel, I rang up to his room and banged on the door. ‘Aaron, Aaron, open up!’ I said. And from the inside, from this cavern, I heard, ‘Aaaahhhhhhh . . . aaaaahhhhhhhh.’ He wouldn’t let me in, so I had to run downstairs and get the concierge. I mean, my dear, this was drama. When we opened the door, there Aaron was, all two hundred pounds of him, in his bathrobe, flat on the floor, with just
me and this pissant concierge to drag him onto the bed. Lord, what a night that was!” (
30
).

For Bette, the year 1976 wasn’t exactly off to a roaring start. Things proceeded to get even worse when her long-awaited third album,
Songs for the New Depression
, was released later that month, and the critics across the country unanimously hated it. Worse yet, almost no one bought it.

The albums
The Divine Miss M
and
Bette Midler
had been such delightful hits and had come out in such rapid succession in 1972 and 1973. Yet it seemed like it took “forever” for her third one to be released in January of 1976. And by the time it appeared in record stores, the momentum created by its predecessors was all but lost. Although it did have a brief moment in the sun—making it to Number 27 on the album chart in
Billboard
—it was perceived as a “dud.” What went wrong?

Instead of
Songs for the New Depression
emerging as a bigger and better Bette, she seemed to be all over the place, stylistically. While her first albums had been widely varied—and hung together through it—this album is somehow uneven and disjointed.

Part of the problem was clearly the fact that Barry Manilow was gone from the proceedings, and so were his snappy musical arrangements. Instead, three separate producers contributed to it: Moogy Klingman, Arif Mardin, and—via a pair of unreleased cuts from the
Divine Miss M
album—Joel Dorn. It was like an audible patchwork quilt of styles from beginning to end. Furthermore, Bette took the two Dorn productions and added her own touches; she is credited as coproducer of those cuts.

The album opens with a disco version of the Frank Sinatra hit “Strangers in the Night.” Although technically good, the song—produced by Mardin—can’t seem to decide whether it is trying to be serious or a tongue-in-cheek parody. And it doesn’t succeed on either level. If she had only given it some of that wise-cracking Miss M fire and campiness, it might have much more fun. Not even Luther Van-dross, singing his heart out in the background chorus, seemed to help this song.

When Bette sang her version of Phoebe Snow’s touching “I Don’t Want the Night to End” in her
Clams on the Half-Shell Revue
, it was a wonderful and bittersweet performance. However, here, her studio-recorded version of the song comes across as hollow and stiff. The original song and Bette’s live performance of it both had several effective
lines of opening lyrics about standing under the gaslights and crying over the fact that jazz legend Charlie Parker had died. For some reason, on this album the beginning of the song is chopped off, and here it seems to lose all its meaning and its poignancy in the truncation. Todd Rundgren is featured on guitar on this song.

The satirical song “Mr. Rockefeller,” which was comical as a stage piece in
Clams
, is neither tuneful nor amusing here. Meant to come across as a mock-the-rich political statement—and written by Bette and Jerry Blatt—this studio version of the song is more annoying than fun. It was better as a stage piece.

The biggest highlight on the first half of the album is the leftover Joel Dorn production of “Old Cape Cod.” This faithful version of the old Patti Page classic achieves the same campy time-warp effect that Midler had created with the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.

Next came Midler’s odd duet with Bob Dylan, on his quirky composition “Buckets of Rain.” Unfortunately, their voices simply don’t work at all well together on this song. This uninspiring cut ends with a garbled bit of in-studio chat between Bette and Bob. In it, Midler takes a jab at Paul Simon—for having stripped her off “Gone at Last” on his 1975 Number 1 album,
Still Crazy after All These Years
. Furthermore, the Simon and Snow duet became a Top 40 hit on the singles chart. Bette’s muttered jab at Simon on “Buckets of Rain” comes across as more mean spirited than funny. The next song is the one-minute-and-37-second ballad called “Love Says It’s Waiting.” While it is beautiful sounding, it is so brief that it seems like a snippet of undeveloped musical filler.

The second half of the album contains much more lunacy and passion and is far superior to the first half. Bette sings a touching and beautiful version of Tom Waits’s song of the sea “Shiver Me Timbers,” which finally finds her much more emotionally connected to the lyrics she is singing. This melancholy song segues right into a bit of inspired insanity composed by Midler and Moogy Klingman, entitled “Samedi et Vendredi.” The song’s chorus, sung in French—
“Bievenus a mes cauchemars”
—literally interprets as “Welcome to my nightmare.” It is a loopy phone book of celebrity names—from the Jackson Five to Mamie Eisenhower—all of whom dance through the mind of slumbering Midler, set to a samba beat.

For a bit of drama, the songs “No Jestering,” with its bouncy reggae rhythms, and “Tragedy,” effectively shift the album’s gears to more of a serious love song mode. “No Jestering” has a nice relaxed sound to it,
with guitar work by Todd Rundgren. However, the album’s most satisfying
high
point comes on “Marahuana.” With the vocal chorus sung by the all-male trio of Gotham, Bette is—at long last—heard on this album at her outrageous best. On the song, Midler lyrically begs for a joint of “grass” so that she can forget the lover who has broken her heart. This reworking of the original 1972 production by Joel Dorn is the most fun cut on the whole album. It was a song that she used in her act back in her Continental Baths days and was originally featured in the 1934 film
Murder of the Vanities
.

Finally, the album ends on a touching note, with Bette singing Klingman’s beautiful composition “Let Me Just Follow Behind.” On that cut she had Rick Derringer on pedal steel guitar, Todd Rundgren singing background voices, and Moogy Klingman on piano and harmonium.

The problem with
Songs for the New Depression
seems to be that Midler can’t decide where she is going with any of the songs. With the exception of “Marahauna,” “Cape Cod,” and “Shiver Me Timbers,” little of it contains either the joy or the passion found on her first two albums.

After she performed David Bowie’s “Young American” in her
Clams on the Half-Shell Revue
, why was it skipped over here, since it was such a hip show-stopper on Broadway? And what happened to the beginning of “I Don’t Want the Night to End”? Why was that deleted, since the missing section contained the whole meaning of the song?

There also seems to be an underlying theme on this album, of trying to vocally homogenize Bette’s vocals into something more melodic and less frantic. With the exception of her bitching about Paul Simon, there were no ragged and passionate rough edges to be found on
Depression
. While her singing is technically good on this album, much of it unfortunately comes across as lifeless. What this album seems to beg for is a bit of trashiness—an old ’60s girl group song—or a dash of lusty craziness. Unfortunately, none is to be found here.

David Tipmore’s review of the album in the
Village Voice
was typical of the criticism she received. According to him, “Her formerly characteristic voice sounds like a blended quartet of Barbra Streisand, Janis Ian, Phoebe Sow, and Melissa Manchester. . . . On
New Depression
we discover that this quartet can sing jazz, folk, pop, rock, reggae. We see an industrious show of ‘versatility’: Campy Low-Rent Gal (‘Marahuana’), Mistress of Song (‘Love Says It’s Waiting’), Real Hip Chick (“Buckets of Rain’), Sensitive Interpreter of the Ballad (‘I Don’t Want
the Night to End,’ ‘Shiver Me Timbers,’ ‘Let Me Just Follow Behind’), Female Impersonator (‘Old Cape Cod’), Ironic Social Commentator (‘Rockefeller’), New Songwriter in Her Own Right (‘Samedi et Vendredi’), and Experimenter with Foreign Rhythms (‘No Jestering’). This extensive posturing makes Midler sound absolutely unavailable: distant, electronic, hoarse, and scared. She does not sound at home, as she did in
Clams on the Half Shell. . . . [Songs for] the New Depression
is the first record I have ever heard which aims for an Academy Award. And as such, the record is a big mistake” (
69
).

As she later explained, “I want to sing things that I really like to sing and express this very particular point of view I have about life and the confusion of it. My whole style is based on chaos, which is what I think life is: a constant process of dementia, and learning to laugh at it. All right:
Songs for the New Depression
was a funny little record, but I liked it. It’s certainly not like a recording anyone else would make” (
8
).

Gary Herb explained how Gotham ended up singing the backgrounds on “Marahuana.” “There was a benefit show for AMDA (American Musical & Dramatic Academy) that they do every year, this was a few years ago, and this was done at Avery Fisher Hall, and it was for Ira Gershwin. The Harlettes were scattered around town—I don’t know. And Bette called us up and said, ‘Can you sing with me for this one-night thing at Avery Fisher Hall?’ So, anyway, to make a long story short, since we sang with her that day, she was in the middle of recording that album, and called us and asked us if we would do the backup singing on that one song. And that’s how that came about” (
66
).

With Bette in a position to have worked on
Songs for the New Depression
with any number of record producers, how did she end up in the recording studio with Moogy Klingman? In the year 2002, he explains, “At some point I gave Bette tapes of my songs, and she had recorded another one of my songs. For her first album she also recorded one of my songs called ‘Mr. Freedom and I.’ She recorded it for her first album or her second album. But it was in that period she never put it on a record, but I went over [to her apartment] with her, and she gave me a copy of it. It sounded pretty good. Barry did the arrangement. So one day I was out walking and I bumped into her on the street, and she was with S. J. Perelman who was a famous writer—a humorist like from the
’30s and the ’40s, and he was wearing his funny glasses. And he had a funny mustache. He just looked like a guy from that era, too. He had to go, and I walked her home, and she lived down in the Village. I walked her home to her place on Barrow Street, and then we talked, and she told me she was having trouble on the third album. She had been like trying to work with different producers, she was off the road. She was having a block trying to record. Nick and Valerie produced a cut with her . . . Hal Davis. . . . She did like all these big producers. Now I had produced my two albums—I coproduced with Todd Rundgren, and I produced a James Cotton album, and I had a recording studio in my loft that I co-owned with Todd at the time, too. So I was in a good position to say, ‘Bette, if you want to come over sometime, we’ll work on some songs, and record them. And, we’ll just do it, and I won’t charge you anything, unless you decide to use them, and we’ll just see how it goes.’ So she came over one day, and we started writing a couple of songs together” (
36
).

Being with Moogy in his studio, Bette found her “recording block” to be subsiding. Recalls Moogy, “In 1974 we started working together, and she had
Clams on the Half-Shell
on Broadway, so we were working on and off while she was doing
Clams
. The first song that we did was called ‘Mr. Rockefeller.’ And she had the words and melody and I put chords to it. Jerry Blatt helped her with the lyrics. I actually kinda wrote the music. I didn’t take a writing credit on it. I mean, I didn’t ‘write’ the music, maybe I just put the chords to her melodies, which is what I do a lot with people. But in retrospect, I probably wrote that music. She had words, and we worked together—with her and Blatt and we came up with ‘Mr. Rockefeller,’ which I recorded in my studio. Then she liked a song that was off of my second album, which was unreleased here, it came out in Europe on EMI, but wasn’t released here—called ‘Let Me Just Follow Behind.’ So, we recorded a track of that. And, then we did a third song” (
36
).