Mitch Cohen“There is danger now for any woman musical comedy star that she will begin to give her screaming fans what they want, not realizing how much malice and how much bad taste are mixed with their worship.”
auline Kael wrote that about Barbra Streisand, but it is a warning with particular relevance to Bette Midler. The promise was a woman with humor, intensity, and the widest possible pop music range, and you can still hear that women on Live At Last; she’s hip enough to include both Tom Waits and Bertold Brecht in her repertoire and to resurrect frivolous Hit Parade antiques with vivacity and affection. Her ideas about the unity of pop experience are good, and her oddball medleys well executed. She’s also one-of-the-guys bawdy-funny, and this is the first album to capture that. But she settles for too little, pandering to the easily won-over audience, camping it up, playing a 1970’s floozie-bitch for easy laughs. The possibility is – and at least she seems aware of it: a section of her act is devoted to a fantasy of becoming a “Vicki Eydie” lounge singer doing a “global revue”- that image and schmaltz win overtake her, and make her no more than a joke.
Live At Last is a very accurate document; this is what Midler is: alternately flippant and histrionic, a crowd-pleaser. Miss Personality with a bleat of a voice that, depending on material and mood, can be effective or irritating. She’s often breathlessly busy on the fast numbers, and mannered on the slow ones, but there is a middle ground –on “Shiver Me Timbers” and parts of The Story Of Nanette song cycle – and it’s there that Midler does her best serious work. The four sides, recorded at a Cleveland engagement (there’s one studio track with a bad case of cutes), give her room to show off the range of her merchandise. Her taste runs to the sentimental, the dramatic, and the quaint, and her song choices vary widely. Brecht & Weill, Leiber & Stoller and Dietz & Schwartz, all brilliant composing teams. have to share time with Klingman & Linhart, perpetrators of the wretched “Friends,” Midler’s theme song and albatross.
Except on novelty numbers, Midler is a barely adequate singer, but she barrels through dirty blues, cabaret, rook, ballads and big band songs – we’re spared her desecration of Dylan and girl groups – on pure energy. Even with the visual element missing, you can hear how hard she works. Energy along with hoked-up emotion, however, added to an already exaggerated show-biz style, could push her irrevocably into the wrong direction, the one suggested by the resemblance of the LP’s cover picture to the Jayne Mansfield shot on Hollywood Babylon: a sexual caricature, amusing to gays who like cartoon women with their nerve ends exposed. Was it only a few years ago that some of our saner critics were comparing her to the Beatles? Will she now be satisfied to be a Jewish Liza Minnelli with funnier lines, better song selection and bigger tits?
Peter Reilly: Stereo Review
Bette Midler’s new two-disc album “Live at Last,” recorded by Atlantic at the Cleveland Music Hall, is a gorgeous, fun-fun-funny evening with a lady who takes justifiable pride in defining what she has to offer as “trash with flash.” It’s all here – the uncalled-for grossiosity (to coin a Midlerism), the campy strut, the sea-salty delivery, the really bad jokes fired off with the nervous chutzpah of a Catskill comedian, and the impish desire to offend, one at a time or all together, just about everyone – but paradoxically it all comes nicely together as elegant, super professional entertainment by a star performer.
Midler has always kidded around a lot, in her relentlessly self-deprecating way, about “The Divine Miss M” and being a living legend, but now she honest-to-god is a star, and for reasons that don’t have much to do with her early cult success. It’s all in her oddly cockeyed vibes, I think, and what those vibes communicate to an audience: the warmth that she generates, enormous and all-encompassing; the lonely spinster At Last Let Loose that lies just below the surface of even her most outrageous moments, making them endearing rather than vulgar or grubby; and, most of all, the need she has for that audience and for its approval. There is about her an indefinable humanity, the brave and spunky vulnerability of Little Orphan Annie (“Who’s the little chatterbox, the one with pretty auburn locks .. .”) without, thank God, ah the sanctimony.
ONCE in the course of this splendid evening she reveals herself in an affecting way that few performers can manage. In introducing Tom Waite’s Shiver Me Timbers in what sounds like a more-or-less ad-lib way – “This is a song about trying to get someplace, get out of it … just get away” – she utters the last three words with a sigh of such yearning that it just about tears you up with its realness. That stunning moment happens in the middle of side two. Up until then she’s been wonderfully entertaining, throwing one-liners, parodies, and patented outrageousness around with the abandon of a Mardi Gras drag queen-playing, in short, the Midler(s) we all know: the female Milton Eerie with the rapid-fire delivery (“I’m so organic that last week I ate an Earth Shoe”), the superb parodist of her own late-Sixties generation (“Sometimes I feel so heavy … so heavy and so laid back”), and the world’s foremost campereuse imitating Eartha Kitt imitating Nellie Lutcher in Hurry On Down.
After Shiver Me Timbers, however, the atmosphere changes: the girlish show-off departs, leaving behind a very womanly artist-performer. What follows is a fourteen-minute tour de force of performing brilliance, a one-act musical playlet called The Vicki Eydie Show. In it Midler plays the role of one Ms. Vicki Eydie, a female Pal Joey with a balcon like two dirigibles that are twins, an ego to match, and no more musical talent than it takes to power a calliope. Ms. Eydie sweeps onto the door of the Motor Lodge she’s appearing at and proceeds to give an interpretation of Around the World that features such treasures as her rendition of Istanbul (“Yes, Vicki Eydie goes preposterous on the Bosphorus”- Ms. Eydie always speaks of herself in the third person), Fiesta in
Rio, a South Sea / Hawaiian War Chant in which she bamboozles her audience into the most hilarious “audience participation” gig since John Mitchell’s appearance before the Watergate committee, and a smasheroo windup with The Lullaby of Broadway. It is the kind of sadly accurate, too-true comic vision out of which legends really are made, and Midler is simply superb, working with sureness in a style that owes more to the theater of the absurd than it does to the stale popcorn of camp.
After such a coup, Midler can do no wrong, and of course she doesn’t in performances of such things as Delta Dawn, Long John Blues, The Story of Nanette (a collage of songs about boozers that runs a bit dry toward the end), a gloriously ribald reprise of Those Wonderful Sophie Tucker Jokes, and a finale that includes her inimitable Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. It is roses all the way, and all on an energy level – high and unrelenting – that should leave no one feeling short-changed.
As if the live performances were not enough, there is a bonus in the “Intermission” on side three, a studio-recorded hit single called You’re Moving Out Today that Midler wrote in collaboration with Carole Sager and Bruce Roberts. It is the most amusing / touching song since Second Hand Rose, and it is as irresistible as its singer. “Live at Last,” funny, warm, and – every once in a while – heart-breaking, is certain to be the watershed album in Midler’s career. She is quite simply where the musical audience is at right now – or at least that portion of it that pays for its entertainment. Hownice that they can get so much for their money .
Robert Hillburn
“Live At Last finally documents on record the captivating spirit and enormous talent that Midler has long exhibited on stage. “
Frank Rose: The Village Voice
“This double album catches Bette at the best when she is working a crowd, milking it for laughter, delight and applause. Her singing here has a limpid, liquid quality that never made it onto her previous recordings. She sounds spontaneous – eager and breathless . . . one-half dewy-eyed ingénue, one-half master of boogie. She is screamingly funny. Her timing is perfect, her ability to play off herself unfailing – no need for a straight man here. The set is sensational.”
Robert Cristagau
Her fans may find some of the material on this live double-LP repetitious–I could do without five minutes of “Delta Dawn” myself–and her overripe singing will offend those she offends anyway. But she’s never recorded fifteen of these twenty-five songs, a few repeats are enhanced by the particulars of this performance, and others gather meaning in theatrical context. A typical stroke: prefacing the glorious tearjerker “Hello in There” with campy, occasionally unkind patter about ladies with fried eggs on their heads, so that the song’s romanticized heroine and the weird and depressing fried egg ladies both seem to have something in common with Bette, and therefore with each other. A-
James Spada
“As Peter Reily predicted, the album became “the watershed album in Midler’s career.” It is the one record on which every facet of Bette Midler’s incredibly multidimensional appeal is captured, and in it’s broad spectrum it my indeed rank as one of the two of three finest live albums ever recorded.”
Joe Viglione: All Music Guide
The double-LP live album phenomenon was utilized in 1973 on Around the World With Three Dog Night to collect loads of hits and release them in another format. Three years later, Bob Seger’s Live Bullet, J. Geils Band’s Blow Your Face Out, and Frampton Comes Alive solidified the double disc as a way to bring important rock artists to the forefront. Come 1977, the Rolling Stones’ Love You Live failed to live up to their single disc Get Your Ya Ya’s Out or any of the brilliant bootleg performances of theirs proliferating. In the middle of all this arrives the very strong in-concert artist, Bette Midler, with her fourth album for Atlantic. This undated (probably 1976) performance from the Cleveland Music Hall, Cleveland, OH, does a decent job of capturing the magic of Midler. Having a show stretched across four sides was essential for this performer; the brilliance of her rendition of the Supremes’ 1970 hit “Up the Ladder to the Roof” takes it out of the Motown context and brings it to Midler’s Andrews Sisters world of girl group devotion. Segueing into a driving “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” answers the question asked in the opening medley of her signature tune, “Friends,” with Ringo Starr’s “Oh My My,” Midler being astonished that anyone would ask the question if she can boogie. Another live LP, Divine Madness, was released only three years after this when she was riding her fame from the film The Rose, and that single disc concentrated on the comedienne’s song performances (“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” gets reprised there), while 1985’s single disc Mud Will Be Flung Tonight gave the fans her funny bits; thankfully with four sides of music and fun, Live at Last is allowed to run the gamut. With an adult contemporary (dare it be said, Vegas-style) act like Bette Midler, the sad thing is that bootlegs and live tapes don’t proliferate. It’s a shame, as she has lots to offer on every show, and when you think about it, only one double-live disc in a career this rich and this lengthy is unfair to both the artist and her fans. There are some brilliant moments here; along with “Up the Ladder to the Roof,” her version of Johnny Mercer’s “I’m Drinking Again” is better than the studio take on her self-titled second disc. “Delta Dawn” is wonderful, as are the up-tempo “Do You Wanna Dance” and John Prine’s “Hello in There.” Midler performs Neil Young’s “Birds,” tells raunchy jokes so cliché that they depend upon her brilliant delivery, and has her personality captured in audio form splendidly. There’s a very interesting “intermission” which features a Tom Dowd studio production of “You’re Moving out Today,” a tune written by Bruce Roberts, Midler, and Carole Bayer Sager, who simultaneously released a studio version the same year. It was a neat trick sliding it onto this release. Live at Last has lots to offer and has yet to be appreciated as the pure document that it is. Atlantic should be given a thumbs up for giving their performer the chance to artistically breathe here. A similarly misunderstood Top 40 artist from this era was the Guess Who, and it took 30 years for that group’s pivotal 1972 Live at the Paramount album to get the full treatment. Luckily for fans of Midler, she — and they — were spared the indignity that may have cost the Guess Who serious FM radio time. Classic stuff exists in the grooves of Live at Last. [The label did release a single-disc promo-only version to radio which contained highlights.]
Valerie Potter: Q Magazine
Bette Midler correctly informs the Live At Last audience that she has been “blessed with brains, talent and gorgeous tits”. She omits to mention her beautifully expressive voice, equally at ease belting out In The Mood or breathing Tom Waits’s ethereal Shiver Me Timbers, and this 1977 release showcases her aptitude for mixing straightforward songs, comic skits and vulgar jokes with dizzying speed and effortless timing.
Bette Midler
“I have never been prouder or anything I did in my whole life than I am of that single [You’re Moving Out Today]. It’s scary and exciting, and it’s all the nicest things you hope will happen. You ring up the record company and ask, ‘Oh, how’s my little record doing?’ And you look at the charts, and it’s really great. I tell ya, it’s like the pros.”