Photo: BaltoBoy Steve Weiner
A far cry from a swan song
Midler’s hard at work singing, dancing and cracking wise
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Provo.com
BY RICK MASSIMO
Journal Pop Music Writer
After the late-summer mini-barrage of retirement tours to hit Providence in the past month-plus, it’s logical to see that Bette Midler is on the road and wonder whether this is it.
“I’m not retiring,” she says in a phone interview, “and you can’t make me!”
Informed that Cher, Gloria Estefan and Barry Manilow have all done swan-song shows in Providence since mid-August, she explodes.
“They’re all retiring? My God, there’s not going to be anyone left! [Although] Cher’s been retiring for five years, babe.”
Kidding aside (maybe not in Cher’s case), Midler says she understands the impulse to pack it in.
“[Touring is] very hard work. It’s hard, hard, hard. No matter who you are, and how you travel, it’s very hard. Getting the things up, getting up for the show yourself, being in physical condition so that you don’t lose your energy, you don’t lose your voice, you don’t lose your wind, it is so hard. And when you get to a certain age, you say to yourself, ‘What do I need this for?’ ”
So what does Midler need this for?
“I did this beautiful show, and I just want everyone to see it. I worked two years on it, and I have a great staff. I have (choreographer) Toni Basil, I have (director) Richard J. Alexander, I have (writer) Eric Kornfeld, and they’re all fabulous, and I want to make sure they get a job after this is over.”
The show, Midler says, is “very elaborate, and I am elaborate in it.” It’s full of her trademark singing, dancing and wisecracks, and it’s set on Coney Island at the end of the 19th century.
The theme, Midler says, is “the amusement park of life, and/or death. . . . Freaks of nature, amusements dark and terrible. Life as a funhouse, and everything wrapped around that.”
Midler says the show has her hits, such as “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “Wind Beneath My Wings” and “The Rose,” as well as new songs for her, such as “Skylark,” “Stuff Like That There” and “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
“People do like to hear the hits,” she says, “and they do like to catch up with you and know what it was that happened to you.”
As for her latest album, Bette Midler Sings the Rosemary Clooney Songbook, she promises to fit in “as much as I can. It’s hard to know, because if you sing that, something else has to go. I love it, but I’m not so sure about the crowds. A lot of people bought it, but I’m not so sure.”
Her favorites off that album, she says, are the ballads, and there are only so many that can go into a live show.
Enthralled by Clooney
Midler says Clooney was one of her earliest favorites and influences.
“I met her on numerous occasions. I went to her house and she cooked pasta for me. She was one of the sweetest people I ever met in my life.
“And that voice! That voice was coming out at me in the late ’40s and the early ’50s, and I never really got over it. It was just such an emblematic voice. It was a sound that really distilled the times that I was living in. It was gentle, genteel, warm. It had so much hope and promise in it. I just really adored her.”
But the album, she says, was producer Manilow’s idea.
“I guess he lies awake nights. He told me he had a dream. Of course, what can you say when someone tells you he had a dream except say, ‘OK.’ And it was all his idea — he did all the charts, he hired the band, he booked the room, he did everything.”
Manilow, of course, was Midler’s piano player and musical director very early in both of their careers. Working with him again was fun.
“It took seven days to do. And in my life I’ve never done anything in seven days.
“He’s a curious person — his own music and the music he does for others are not really the same thing. He’s kind of like an archivist. He knows a lot about music, and he can break it down . . . He’s a terrific arranger.
“And he’s nice! He’s a nice guy! I like nice people in my life; I don’t need to be beaten up, which has happened to me many times. He knows how to get good work out of me.”
One Clooney classic they left off the album was “Blues in the Night,” though she might try it on the road.
“I didn’t really kill it,” Midler says. “The song is a very odd song. It’s not really the blues and it’s not really a torch song. It’s a little too white to be the blues and a little too dark to be a torch song. I just didn’t kill it.”
‘You never know’
Midler says that while she’s not retiring (“It’s foolish to say farewell, because you never know what life is going to hand you”), she also doesn’t know what’s next.
“I have nothing to announce. I’m just trying to get through my 32 shows in an elegant and timely fashion, retain my health and my voice, keep everyone around me from going mad and entertain the hordes.”
After that?
“Take a rest, and try to see what happened to [the audiences] and to me. Then look around for the music. Really, the only thing that I find inspiring is music and dance.
“I don’t go to movies — hardly at all anymore. Watch television? Hardly at all. I read the newspapers and obsess about the state of the world, the environment, all that, to a terrible, terrible degree — to a degree that it’s really almost ruined my life.
“And as far as art is concerned, the idea of wonderful music that gives people hope, or amuses them, or entertains them — I think that that’s really all I can do. That that’s what I’m sent for and that’s what I do.
“That’s my calling, and it’s the heart of my reason to go on. And if I can find that inspiration, it’s great.
“And if I can’t find it, then it really will be time to pack it in.”
