Bette’s the Biggest

Bette Midler’s gonna be the biggest Star around, that’s what Peter says. I mean she wasn’t even through her second song — a steamy version of Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues”: “He’s a deepsea diver with a stroke that could not go wrong” etc. — and Peter is turning to me and announcing in that don’t-contradict-me tone of his that she’s got it; she’s a Star. (And Star should be capitalized, he advises. I don’t know whether it should be all the time, but in this case maybe it should even have quotes around it to give it a sort or tacky/Taki prominence like those names scribbled in subways: “The Big Timers”

— which is appropriate cause Bette dedicated one of her first songs to New York’s graffiti star Taki 183; I bet he is hot, she said.)

Ok so I can go along with that. Bette Midler is a star, even a “Star,” not just another singer, certainly not just another Chick Singer. She comes out on stage in Central Park to cheers and extended applause from an already crazed group of admirers and there’s something special there. Not just in the cheers but in the comic book way she acknowledges them, bending from the waist in this wacky way and not just smiling but laughing like a comedienne

— Lucy or Imogene Coca maybe, one of those crazy women with big, wide mouths who could really laugh.

She’s wearing pleated black pants that fit her around the ass but then go straight to the floor and a tomato red blouse that doesn’t even seem to meet in the front, just hugs her breasts on either side of a cleavage to the waist. Her hair is reddish, frizzed and curled at the ends, and she’s always primping it like a stylized Mae West tramp — just a few quick fluffs from underneath to emphasize her lines.

She isn’t pretty but then neither was Mae West who is probably her closest equivalent. Both have that brassy, full-red-lipped come-on, both are quite purposely vulgar and exaggerated without actually being excessive. Only where the Mae West pose was one of ultimate languor (“Beulah, peel me a grape”), Midler’s style is pure energy — an exhilarating, surprisingly varied roller coaster ride. So it isn’t hard to accept her as somehow bigger than life, as a Star. But two more songs and Peter is getting even more serious. Bette Midler’s the Next Big Star, he says. I mean popular. An international household word. Like Frank Sinatra when he was big, Elvis and the Beatles. No, I said. No, I can’t go that far.

But maybe I can. Bette Midler’s concert in Central Park was one of the most extraordinary and satisfying performances I’ve seen by anyone. I never thought I’d say that. I saw her for the first time a few months back when she was at the Bitter End. Tom, whose taste in music I value above all others’, was with me and we felt she was too campy for her own good but fun and well we really weren’t sure about much else. Outside we ran into Bob Christgau, very excited, raving about Midler for the better part of a walk across town while Tom and I exchanged these Oh-come-on glances with each other. Since we hadn’t come to any conclusions about Bette Midler, we preversely began moving in the opposite direction from those Bob had already jumped to and I’ve sort of

clung to that Yeah-well-she’s-ok position ever since.

Until last night. When Peter, whose taste in cultural phenomena I value above all others’, started barraging me with pronouncements , very nearly identical to Christgau’s, I had to admit he had something there. Midler is still very campy (she developed her act performing at a slick Manhattan steam bath) but where her act seemed to overshadow her singing at the Bitter End, in the park she had time to stretch out and strike a balance. Lots of times, her approach to material or the material itself is so stylized (“Leader of the Pack,” for instance, or an irresistibly trashy South Sea islands movie song about a moon) that you’re not really sure whether she’s a good singer or she just puts on a good show. Actually, it’s both. More than practically anyone I can think of, Bette Midler is an entertainer — she talks, she tells actual jokes, she runs around stage, she dances and she sings. She is not laid back.

Her repertoire of songs is perhaps the most unusual around. At first it might seem gimmicky to do Michael Jackson’s “I Wanna Be Where You Are,” then a lovely Billie Holiday number, “Am I Blue?” then the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love,” but because it’s all tied together by one sensibility, it all fits. It’s as exciting and revealing as going to someone’s house and listening to all their favorite songs.

Midler may not connect up every time, but her taste is so fine and so wide-ranging — some of her other material is borrowed from Tracy Nelson, the Contours, Leon Russell, John Prine and the Band — that she very quickly establishes a certain level of respect for her songs and you find yourself listening to unfamiliar numbers with incredible concentration. Even familiar material is transformed. She closed her set with a version of “I Shall Be Released” that had me sitting open-mouthed with wonder. With just a few word changes, Midler makes it into a powerful, angry woman’s song: “They say every woman needs protection/They say that every woman must fall/Yet I swear I see my reflection/Somewhere so high above this wall.” Aretha Franklin does this at times: completely elucidates a song in her own way, so that you listen to it as if for the first time and seem to understand it in a new way. I didn’t expect it from Bette Midler, and though she’d already won me over with “I Wanna Be Where You Are” and then “Leader of the Pack,” the revelation of “I Shall Be Released” clinched it for me.

To return to Peter’s predictions: He’s convinced Bette Midler is the next great Star not only because she’s Talented and has a great Personality (that quality everyone was so obsessed with in the fifties) but because the time is right for a woman singer to become as famous and sensational as Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger. Janis came close, but she was a Rock Star and Midler sort of cuts across all fields. Plus Midler is not a sex object; she’s sexy, raunchy even, but she plays with sex and makes fun of sex in a camp way. She plays her role of gutsy tramp with such exaggeration that it disappears. Most of my reservations about the Next Great Star theory center around the fact that her style is so campy and her taste so ultra-hip that even if she makes it beyond the largely faggot cult following she has in New York — and I doubt she’ll have much trouble doing that — what are they gonna think of her out in Des Moines? Are they really ready for this in Fort Lauderdale? What about Midler’s backup group? - three girls ia real sleazy tight black knit dresses, fourties strapless, who do fabulous girl-group routines and sing their hearts out - she calls them Red Light District. Will Bette Midler win the hearts and minds of the people away from James Taylor, John & Yoko and Alice Cooper? Maybe Peter is right and Bob is right and the time is right. I’m ready.