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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.”
 Pauline 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."
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