Bette Midler (21 page)

Since she had temporarily broken off contact with Aaron Russo, Bette was free to experiment musically and to create the kind of music she wanted. According to Klingman, “When I was hanging out with her, she would come over every day without any makeup on, and she’d wear a bandanna on her head, like a cleaning lady bandanna. She’d be in a plain shirt and dungarees, and little shoes, no heels, and no make-up. And this cleaning lady bandanna on her head, so you could never see her hair, and she was unrecognizable. We could go anywhere, and nobody
recognized her. She was completely invisible. Unless she did her ‘Bette Midler drag, she was an invisible person. She could go anywhere and do anything. She was just working on her record, she wasn’t partying hard. . . . We were very close for a while, because we were working night and day on this record, and we would hang out and we would go see shows. We were close. I thought that I was ‘in,’ that she was gonna let me finish the album I started” (
36
).

One of the most entertaining stories from the
Songs for the New Depression
sessions involved Bette’s duet with Bob Dylan. At face value, one might assume that they had met at some celebrity event, and she had asked him to record a track with her. In actuality, it grew out of a chance meeting between Moogy and Bob, at a folk music hang-out in the Village. “We had a night off from recording,” says Klingman, “and I was at a bar, and Bob Dylan walked in, which was pretty funny. [It was] The Tin Angel on Bleecker Street, it was right next to the Bitter End—and it became the Other End. So, he walks in, and he’s with a bunch of people. I got this idea, because I knew Bette really admired Bob Dylan: ‘Why don’t I set up this duet?’ So, I walked up to David Blue, who was with him, who I knew, because he was a folk singer and friend of Bob’s. So I told this to David Blue, and I went back to where I was sitting, and then David Blue said, ‘OK, Bob said he’ll do it.’ I said, ‘He’ll do it?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Great, when does he want to do it?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ So, I walked over to Bob, and he was really drunk. And said, ‘So Bob, you gonna really do it?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Well, when do
you
want to do it?’ And he said, ‘When do you want it? Just tell me where to be and when.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ll do it tomorrow night at my studio, I have a recording studio.’ And he said, ‘Great man, all right—I’ll do it! Great!’ So, I gave the address to David Blue, and Bob was kinda drunk, and he sounded sarcastic—like he was goofing on me—like he didn’t believe I was working with Bette Midler and he was goofing on me” (
36
).

Moogy wasn’t at all positive that this planned session wasn’t a big joke or an idle promise made by Bob in a drunken haze. “So, I went home and I didn’t tell anybody,’ says Klingman. ‘I didn’t set up a recording session, the next day was a day off. So, I was sitting at home alone at 9:00 [at night], and Bob Dylan rings the doorbell. So, he comes upstairs to my studio, with Roger McGuinn from the Byrds, and we’re just hanging out. And I said, ‘Everyone’s on their way over.’ So, I go and I hit the phones, and I call Bette, and she’s home. And I said, ‘Bob Dylan’s
here. Come on over, let’s do this duet.’ And she said, ‘Great.’ I made like 500 calls, and I got a band to come over, and an engineer to come over, and everyone was there like in an hour. I had to entertain Dylan for an hour in my living room, playing my songs, or me imitating him—whatever we did” (
36
).

How they hit upon performing Dylan’s composition “Buckets of Rain” was a decision made on the spot. Reveals Moogy, “Well, it was funny, because Dylan originally wanted to record ‘(You Got to Have) Friends.’ And we rehearsed it. And again, I thought he was goofing. He said, ‘No man, “You gotta have friends. . . .’ ” And, Bette didn’t really want to do it, and I didn’t really want to do it. With him doing it, it kinda sounded like a joke: Bob Dylan singing ‘(You Got to Have) Friends’ with Bette Midler? And, worse than sounding like a joke, I figured it could really be detrimental for his career—like him doing ‘Friends’ would turn him into a MOR [middle of the road] act, and his fans would go nuts. So I stopped, and I said, ‘Let’s do one of yours, instead of one of mine.’ Here’s one for the history books: I stopped Bob Dylan from recording one of my songs! So, he said, ‘OK,’ so we recorded ‘Buckets of Rain,’ which was off of his most recent album,
Blood on the Tracks
. So he rewrote it, rewrote some of the words, he was just a wild guy: very Dylan-esque. And we recorded that one. Bette really liked him a lot, and he was supposed to do more songs. So, the next few nights we were waiting for Dylan to come back, or he would tell us to meet him somewhere, and we’d go meet him at rehearsal for his band, and he would ignore us. And after four or five nights, we realized he was never coming back to the studio. So, instead, we had this one song, ‘Buckets of Rain.’ And, when Ahmet Ertegun found out about it, he called me the next day to his office, and he said, ‘Wow, this is the greatest thing. You got Bob Dylan on my label, at Atlantic Records!’ And he was insanely happy. But he wanted to rerecord the rhythm section, so he came in with different bass players and drummers to give the rhythm section different beats that didn’t really fit with the vocals. But this is what he wanted to do, and he ran the company. So we did the sessions, with him coproducing with me, but he didn’t put his name on it for credit. So, he really took that out of my hands—my Dylan song—and kinda made it something less than what it was or what it could have been. He had the guy from Average White Band playing on it, and he had him do a double time country feel to a half time rock feel, and it didn’t really fit—in my opinion” (
36
). According to Klingman, there is still a tape floating
around somewhere, of Midler and Dylan rehearsing “Friends” as a duet.

Originally, the
Songs for the New Depression
album was supposed to have a new direction to it. This was going to be the album that really showed off her creativity. “There was this whole idea that she was going to become more of an artist like Joni Mitchell—more of a singer/songwriter type, which she could have done,” Klingman reveals. “There was a whole concept of turning her career around . . . into something different, and doing something really big. Like we had—one side of the album was going to be [exotic] songs—we had a song that was from Rio, we had a samba song, just all these different genres, but either written or co-written by her basically. We wrote this one song—Dave Brubeck’s ‘Blue Rondo ala Turk.’ Me and Jerry Blatt, we wrote the words. I still get royalties, and to my knowledge it was not released anywhere. We recorded it for months, because she sang all the parts. She sang all the chords. It’s Dave Brubeck’s [jazz instrumental classic] ‘Blue Rondo ala Turk,’ with lyrics for the whole song: ‘He was a fool, a perfectly unimportant person, nobody liked him, he dibba dabba doo . . .’ It all had words and they were really funny words. We wrote the whole thing. And, she recorded it and it took just a long time, because she wanted to do all the different vocal parts. And then it just came out amazingly good. You know—unbelievable” (
36
).

Moogy estimates that there are at least eleven finished and unreleased tracks in the Atlantic Records vaults from these sessions: “Well, about eleven songs. I wrote them down once. ‘Young Americans’ was one. A song I wrote with her called ‘Oh Jerusalem,’ which was done with just two pianos and her singing it—which was a really good ballad. A song I wrote with her called ‘Hey Bobby,’ that was like a love song to Bobby DiNiro that we worked on for months and really had potential to be a hit single. Another one we co-wrote together was a song that she wrote called ‘Vacation in Rio,’ that I kinda put music to—but she had the writer’s credit on that one. Right there were two songs that we had co-written, and one song that she was taking the full credit on. Then there was a song called ‘I Had to Resort to Beauty,’ that she wrote, which we recorded with an old-time orchestra at a hotel, just for authentic sound—like a 1930s ditty—really funny. ‘I Had to Resort to Beauty,’ she wrote it with Jerry Blatt” (
36
).

The tracks that did get released on
Songs for the New Depression
vocally sounded overly perfected. There were no rough corners, and
some the edginess of her previous albums was missing. Why was this? Klingman claims, “She was a workaholic, she would do her vocals, and then she would redo them, and then she would redo them again. It was just endless recording sessions. . . . it was just endlessly worked over, and worked over, and worked over. She insisted on redoing all of her vocals over and over again, and you’d have to choose, you’d have five tracks of vocals, you’d have to pick the best of each track and assemble a vocal track, and have four more open tracks, and she would go back and do four more lead vocals that would take a long time to punch them in. It was a lot of hard work. . . . She had me record a bunch of versions of ‘Strangers in the Night’ disco-style. Like the last thing I ever wanted to do in my life is record ‘Strangers in the Night’ as a disco song. And she had me record three different versions of it, some of them came out pretty well, before just taking the whole thing to Arif Mardin and having him record a version of it” (
36
).

According to Moogy, after months and months of work, Aaron Russo returned on the scene, and suddenly Moogy was out: “She worked really hard in the studio, and what happened was, her manager, Aaron was away. They had a big blow-out fight and she hadn’t seen him for a year or a year and a half. When I was working with her, he wasn’t around for a year. And then he came in, and the only way he felt secure around me, was to get me out of it. He had to push me out of the whole thing, because he figured that I could become his ultimate threat. I was producing her album, I was writing songs for her, I was going to be her new musical director” (
36
).

With regard to the song “I Don’t Want the Night to End,” Klingman laments, “It had this great intro, and they cut the intro. . . . They did a lot of stuff. They remixed stuff, they redid stuff, and then they gave me the album credit, ‘cuz they knew it was such a messed-up record. ‘Marihuana’ was a song she had done years ago, and she turned it into a grab bag, instead of being a concept album that would have blown people’s minds. She would have written so many of the songs on it, and done so many accomplished things on it vocally. . . . Of the stuff that I did with her, that was put out, some of it was pretty good. Some of it wasn’t so good. My version of ‘Strangers in the Night’ was replaced by Arif Mardin’s version, which wasn’t so good. My version of Dylan and her doing the duet, with the original band at the session, was good, and ultimately the version where they replaced the rhythm section wasn’t so good” (
36
).

To this day, Klingman laments, “The stuff that was left off of the album was better than the stuff that was put on the album. It has never seen the light of day. I’m still thinking of calling up Atlantic, and saying, ‘Let me go through your tapes man, I know you got another album here.’ The real album never came out. It is the missing album. They should read your book and demand that these other ten or eleven cuts come out. There is no reason why Atlantic shouldn’t put them out either. I am sure they have them in the vaults, and she is not on Atlantic anymore. This stuff was really good, and this is the missing Bette Midler album” (
36
).

According to him, Midler later regretted what happened with her third album. “She did one interview years and years later where she said,
‘Songs for the New Depression
when we started recording it, I had the feeling that this was the best recording of my life, and that we were doing something really great. Then outside forces came in and made me doubt that, and we kinda ruined that record.’ She kinda laid it out there, and that she was really insecure about it, and in retrospect, how good all that material was” (
36
).

What they were left with was an album that no one who was involved with it liked or was 100 percent happy with. “Then they threw out ten or twelve of the songs that we had recorded, and put on some older Joel Dorn stuff. So, the thing had a very disjointed feel, and a very confused feel. There was one reviewer that wrote, how he suspects that her insecurities drove her to rerecord and pull things from all sources. And, obviously, she was very nervous,” recalls Moogy Klingman (
36
).

February 1976 wasn’t a much better month for Bette than January had been. When the “Depression Tour” rolled into Buffalo, New York, three members of her band and four of her technicians were busted for drug possession. Aaron Russo’s comments to the
New York Post
under the headline “Bette: Shuffle Off in Buffalo” only made matters worse. “Most towns are liberal in this day and age, and really don’t care if they see a musician who seems to be a little high,” he bellowed at the conservative city. “But Buffalo is in the midst of this silly anti-vice crusade. They’re against pinball machines here. The other day they busted three people at a bus stop for reading pornographic magazines. So you can see what’s happening!” (
70
). Midler was fortunately not available
for comment. Although she was not busted, the incident reflected poorly upon her.