Mister D: In this excerpt from an interview with Miss M she talks about the recording sessions for “Depression” and basically how it broke her spirit for future recordings on a few subsequent albums. This is from the book “Icons” written by Denise Worrell. If you haven’t signed the petition to get her songs released, then this is only more incentive to do so…get with the program:
“The second record, Bette Midler, came out and sold well, but I made the mistake of reading the reviews and I never really was the same again. Some of the reviews said I wasn’t a good singer and they were really cruel. I felt horrible. I had made some mistakes, but I didn’t think they were worthy of such scathing comment. I decided that I was really a soprano. I’m not a soprano, I’m an alto. I decided I should write my own music, so I wrote a whole record in 1974. The label heard it and they got really upset and didn’t want me to put it out. They went back into old tracks I had cut for my first two albums and slapped them onto a third record. That was the beginning of the end of my interest in a recording career. The worst part of it was they convinced me at the time that I had to chase the charts. I really couldn’t chase the charts because I was too idiosyncratic, too eccentric for the charts. I wasn’t mainstream, and they tried to push me into the mainstream and I couldn’t do it. …
I tried, and that was the heartbreak of it, that I was trying. I couldn’t really stand up to those assholes. I wanted to please, and when I couldn’t please, I lost interest. But rather than stand up for myself, I made a couple of records that were really not very good. You get into the studio with those twenty-four/forty-eight tracks, and by the time they’re done with you, it’s not even a human being who is singing anymore. It’s a machine. My voice is a very warm voice, and what I have to say, what I have to sell or what I am about, is human emotion, either raw or somewhat refined or humorous, but always human. After a while my records sounded like a machine was singing on them. I cut a record here and I cut a record there and I guess it was apparent that I wasn’t all that interested because people stopped buying them. …”
Don’t Be A DeadHead….Be A BetteHead!!!!!…..Love Mister D
