My Imagination (Running Away With Me)." The highlight, however, is the cover of Patty Griffin's "Moses," on which Midler stretches into Sheryl Crow territory and comes out with a winning pop tune that manages to have a gospel flourish. More than anything else, as the title suggests,
Bette is Midler just being herself. (RS 854)
RICHARD ABOWITZ
Bette Midler asks the question, what were co-producers Barry Manilow and Arif Mardin thinking about while she was singing "I Shall Be Released"? It's hard to believe they were listening to Bette for they are too knowledgeable and sophisticated to have approved of any singing so unmusical, so embarrassingly flat, so brazenly insensitive. But if they knew her performance was inadequate, then what was the explanation for Mardin and Lew Hahn's mixing the vocal so prominently that even the most casual listener will have to notice its shortcomings? Perhaps they were having a joke at her expense. Or, more likely, perhaps she liked her work and no one had the nerve or desire to contradict her eminence. Whatever the reasons, Bette Midler's recorded performance of "I Shall Be Released" is the single worst performance of a Bob Dylan song I have ever heard.
Unlike The Divine Miss M, Bette Midler contains the artifacts of a style without nuance, content or intelligence. The debut album also contained its share of pure posturing but was held together by a core of performances rendered with an engagingly intense naivete. "Delta Dawn," "Friends," "Hello In There," and her exceptionally original reworking of "Do You Want to Dance" all demanded that she be taken seriously. They also provided a good balance to the rest of the album's re-creation of her stage act, with its emphasis on oldies and Forties romps.
On Bette Midler, she has dispensed with the serious core of the last album—the new material by young songwriters and the sensitive reworking of contemporary standards—and has simply recorded new additions to, and some leftovers from, her concert act. Onstage, she doesn't so much sing as she acts. But, in the studio this time around, she barely sings either.
Bette Midler has failed to absorb the first principle of recording: that the studio is not merely an extension of the stage, but an entirely separate arena for a different sort of creation. She could have surmised as much if she had realized that one of her most popular concert numbers, "Leader of the Pack," was clearly the least effective cut on her debut LP. It did not warrant its current successors: a desecration of "Da Doo Ron Ron" and a horrendous "Higher And Higher," which contains a series of nonmusical crescendos, devoid of rhythmic sense. Only "Uptown" begins to work and then because, as with "Do You Want to Dance," she has thoroughly recast it and taken it as seriously as it deserves.
The campy re-creation of Andrews Sisters harmony is fun in concert and was good for a one-shot novelty recording, "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." But the song's commercial success didn't warrant new recordings of "Lullabye Of Broadway" and "In The Mood." She has neither the stylishness nor the voice for such comparatively difficult singing and it shows.
On uptempo material she may be able to bull her way through uncritical listeners with her shee
Bette Midler doesn't have Peggy Lee's cool, understated elegance -- or her ability to infuse a single syllable with sex -- but then who does? Midler comes at these classic songs with both guns blazing, with no hidden tragedies or sex innuendos, just full-on, brassy Bette, proving she's got pipes no one can mess with.
