Robert Cristagau
Although it helps that she gets stronger material than usual from yet another phalanx of International Pop Music Community pros, what makes this Bette's best studio album in a decade is a Habana production number set in Miami, a newly written Sophie Tucker song about a driving wheel, and not-quite-comic readings of Marshall Crenshaw and Jagger-Richard. What makes it not good enough is the curse of Broadway rock and roll--the beat is conceived as decoration or signal rather than the meaning of life, or even music. B-

Charlotte Dillon: All Music Guide
Bette Midler is a gifted entertainer, whether acting or singing. On this 1983 album, No Frills, she showcases numbers that take flavorings from pop, disco, and rock & roll. Midler has a way of making any song she sings her own, but some of the tracks on this recording might stir memories of other artists. Aaron Neville and Linda Rondstat did an admired version of "All I Need to Know." "Beast of Burden" became a hit for the Rolling Stones. Other songs on No Frills that deserve a mention include "My Eye on You," "Favorite Waste of Time," and "Only in Miami." The latter is a Latin-type number she did before the style became popular in the American market. Though this album isn't one of her very best, it's still a great recording to add to any music collection that belongs to a Bette Midler fan.

Jess Cagle: Entertainment Weekly
She needed a hit after the movie Jinxed!, and this spawned two: the harmony-rich ''Favorite Waste of Time'' and ''Beast of Burden,'' a good- natured ode to masochism by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. B

Stephen Holden: Rolling Stone Magazine
Bette Midler's notoriously expensive and time-consuming studio albums are attempts to prove that she's as good a singer as she is an entertainer. This means staying on pitch, manufacturing different "commercial"-sounding voices to fit all occasions and downplaying her celebrated humor.

On No Frills-which she recorded with Chuck Plotkin, Bruce Springsteen's behind-the-scenes engineering whiz - Midler realizes her ambitions too well. Though her singing is good, the album is afflicted with artistic quadrophenia, as the Divine Miss M adopts four distinct personas-a lost little girl, a Janis Joplin-like tough mama, a gospelish balladeer and a Latin lounge singer-that don't seem connected to one another.

No Frills nevertheless contains three memorable performances. Done with a sly, sassy insouciance, Marshall Crenshaw's "Favorite Waste of Time" may be Midler's finest rock performance ever. On the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden," she projects an interestingly huffy theatricality. And she infuses the Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil-Tom Snow ballad "All I Need to Know" with a smoky, oratorical fervor.

But for a project of this magnitude, too many of the songs fall short of the singer. Instead of silly pop smut ("Let Me Drive"), tepid technopop ("Is It Love") and preciously arty nostalgia ("Soda and a Souvenir," "Come Back Jimmy Dean"), Midler should have gone for the moon and stuck with songs that measure up to her own gigantic talents.

D.L. Mabery
When Bette Midler stormed straight from the Continental Bath houses to the radio airwaves with "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," her sassy, larger than-life persona was impossible to ignore. This racey redhead acted out her songs with extreme pathos as much as she sang them.

In the recording studio, however, that brassy, trashy persona has been impossible to pin down with any great success. Bette's first album, The Divine Miss M, turned out to be what was hoped for: A show-stopper tear jerker ("Hello In There"), a show-stopper fervent ballad-cum-testimonial ("Delta Dawn"), a couple of show-stopper oldie remakes ("Leader of the Pack" and "Chapel of Love"), and a show-stopping show stopper ("Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy").

That album also set down Midler's recording premise. Clearly, here was a woman with too much energy, and not enough vinyl to represent it. How do you get the ambience of a cabaret inside a record jacket?

It wasn't until the double live recording, Live At Last that the essence of the whole Bette Midler emerged on record. Here were the Diva's comic and interpretative gifts, the passion and the pain, the magic and the timing.

With the possible exception of Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler is the only modern performer one can name capable of taking an audience from shameful tears with Tom Waits' "Shiver Me Timbers" to hysterical laughter with Sophie Tucker jokes in a matter of seconds and a shift of those gorgeous hips. And do it without being kitschy.

The subsequent studio recordings were misguided affairs as everyone involved vainly attempted to make hit records. There were grandiose productions and obligatory disco, which did little to enhance Midler's talent and now sound dismally dated.

Taking a desperately-needed hiatus from recording while working in front of the camera lens, Miss M was given a tangible medium to channel some of the theatrical flourishes that would always be lost on her albums. The Bette Midler persona split: Here was a singer, and there was an actress.

Which brings us up to date with No Frills (Atlantic Records). For the first time in her recording career the overblown, bratty character who exists only for the moment was left elsewhere. For the better half of the record, Midler has given 100 percent to singing as a songstress and not as an actress.

No Frills is an album that gets on with the purpose of music, without all the ornamentation one might expect from its creator. And there is so much great stuff on No Frills it is hard to know where to begin.

Bette has wisely chosen material from the stable of up-to-the-moment pop 'n' rockers like Moon Martin, Marshall Crenshaw and Nick Gilder. And it is on the rock numbers where Midler comes into her own as an impressive voice.

Midler has always been terrific with the sexual innuendos, and "Let Me Drive" carries enough to make Prince blush. Here Bette milks the automobile metaphor for all it's got.

"Baby I love your body as much as your automobile, but I need more than a tune-up," Bette breathlessly tells her boy. "Let me drive. I want to feel the power come alive. Let me behind the wheel; I want to know how your hot rod feels."

Midler coyly cruises the lyrics around the track without overdriving them to camp. With its pounding, wood-block beat and orgasmic saxophone bleatings on the final verses, "Let Me Drive" has everything that it takes to be a hot, sensual dance floor hit.

Moon Martin's murky, echo-guitar pop song about fallible infatuation, "My Eye On You," follows hot on the wheels of "Let Me Drive." Playing it straight, Midler hits a vocal pinnacle on the song's bridge, crying "Boy I do - I got my eye on you!"

Midler manipulates Marshall Crenshaw's "Favorite Waste of Time" into a wonderful dippy flirtation, and bottles "Is It Love" like a fizzy syntho-soda pop. And the frumpy "Only In Miami" has that Caribbean breeze without worrying where the grass skirts fit into the-mix.

But the real tour de-force on No Frills - and I'm not using the phrase frivolously - is the way Midler owns the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden." Somehow when Mick sang "I'll never be your beast of burden," you never quite believed him; it sounded too much like a cultivated and faddish pose of the Penthouse chic.

In the Divine Miss Bette's hands, the song's themes of sexual politics and emotional fascism crystallize, and the singer uses the song as a defiant banner.

A stripped-down, fire cracker four-piece band of two guitars (Danny Kortchmar, Mark Goldenberg), drums (Jim Keltner), and bass (Tim Drummond) takes "The Beast" by its horns and rocks like the apocalypse. And how. Midler slaps things into place, demanding, "Now write this down! I'll never be your beast of burden!" Mick seems positively wimpy by comparison.

Midler's re-write of the third verse is a minor triumph alone, giving the song an entirely different dimension than Jagger's "I'm so masochistic I could die" sentiment:

My little sister is a pretty, pretty girl; She loves to ride, and she loves to crawl. They love to take her out behind the garden wall. And when they are done, they just throw her away, and she don't have an awful lot to say, it hurts her so bad.

Seldom does a cover version surpass the original, but Midler has created a muscular and confident piece of pure rock 'n' roll with her reading of "Beast of Burden." She's marked a new standard that all others must be measured against.

"Beast of Burden" is understandably one of Bette's "De Tour" moments to be captured on Kodak. She has also reportedly added Jonathan King's Sixties hit "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" and Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood" to her repertoire.

No doubt about it, superwoman Bette Midler can accomplish most anything on stage. With No Frills she has indicated that she is likewise able to concoct a smart little record. When her "De Tour" dead ends at Northrop this weekend, die-hard fans will have the familiar rush of the red-headed blur. And in the next three years that we have to wait for another tour, No Frills will snap you right out of any of your doldrums.