March 21, 2004
Bette Caught Bowling Again...
By Michael Klein
Philadelphia Inquirer
Inquirer Columnist
So Bette Midler's not the best bowler in the world, but she comes to the alley with her own ball. Miss M - in these parts for a weekend show in Atlantic City - threw a little party Thursday at Playdrome in Cherry Hill. Pastries were provided by nearby Miel Patisserie.
I will never forget it.. you know (AC Review 3/20/03)
Photo: JJ
Richie B., BetteHead Divine!
I will never forget it.. you know
(AC Review 3/20/03)
As we I sat down with my friend, (a virgin bettehead), I knew something special was going to happen. Our seats were terrific 7th row, center floor. The Boardwalk Hall, a rather old arena with beautiful architecture from the 40’s was filled with 14, 000. Being that it was in Atlantic City, I couldn’t help but notice many of the prime seats went to “high rollers” who really did not have much of clue about the Divine.Miss M.
The front row boasted a woman in a low cut pink dress, (think Janet /-J-Lo)..Bette would later refer to her as frozen and assuming she was from Sweden.
The show started a little late, close to 8:30. When Bette came down off her horse she was greeted by her first of many standing ovations, (from the 3row back). She opened with. “Kiss My Brass”, “Big Noise from Winnetka”, and “Stuff Like That There”.
Bette made her usual remarks about the audience, (“Wildwood show me you mullets”); Her take on our adminstration, proclaiming her Queen could be a way to make the world a safer place. Her observations on Xtina, Britney and Janet. (“the one with 2 knobs to expose.”) on Gay Marriage…”who would have thought it would replace disco?”
A few more jokes including how amazed she was to see gamblers hooked up to oxygen tanks and the slot machines while smoking human time bombs. “ Fuck” seemed to become Bette favorite word. In fact, she mentioned how her bawdiness got her daughter into a private school. She then began to talk about birds, how few there were few in NYC and how much she would love to see a variety of birds, segue in “Skylark”. Then the song, as she put it. “started it all”. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”. Singing in front of giant images of Bette in the 70’s synchronized to her magical voice.
Next came her putdown of her ill-fated TV show, complete with Judge Judy sentencing Bette. She lamented by singing,” I’m Sorry”, referring to the TV flop, “Nobody but the Jews” an altered version of the TV theme song. Followed by remarks that Anna Nicole was still on the air. Then came the Rosemary Clooney tribute “ Come on to my House” and “Tenderly”
Riding around in a swan she sang, “Chapel of Love”, with screens acknowledging Hollywood divorcees, and of course remarks on Benifer, and his (Ben) new film “Jersey Girl” (hope it is better than “Gigli” and Liza with and X noting that their will be no sex tape of Minnelli and David G.)
One of the 3 screens had technical trouble, but the audience ate it up. She continued with the rest of the set list listed on this site, and got an incredible standing ovation after “A Man loves a Women”. Then came the Soph Jokes. Ending up in a tent and poking her head out of the top. The crew played a joke on her by removing the top of the tent (which was to be her hat) and dangling above her. Bette, noting that it was the end of the tour, so it was time for the crew to begin (here they come), “their jokes”. She reminded them, that she pays their salary.
Ending the first half, barefooted, with “Shiver me Timbers, she sailed away on the carousel horse that brought her to the stage.
Second act opened with Delores Delago on B’way. The songs where switched around, but basically remained the same. As she descended from the atop the a staircase singing “Hello Dolly”, (on a motorized chair lift) she remarked, “let's see you do this, Cher.. Another standing ovation. (sans the first three rows).
Then she got serious with her Mister Rogers Segment/ “I Like To Be Told” and a tribute to 9/11, “September”, “From A Distance”, (which she sang during both “Bush wars”). Another standing ovation, which this time included the first 3 rows. They must have woke up.
Bette then dedicated the “Wind Beneath My Wings” to her entire crew, introducing everyone in her band (commenting on the recent firing of one of the band member’s other half). Then singling out musical arranger Bette Susan, production supervisor Richard-Jay Alexander, writers Eric Kornfeld, BruceV, and a litany of others who made this 45 city tour such a wonderful experience. Another standing ovation. My personal favorite "Do You Want to Dance" followed.
The video montage of “the Rose then filled the screen, with Rose being advised not to say “motherfukers." Enter Bette, saying “hello motherfuckers”…and "Keep On Rockin".
More thank you’s, followed by, “with the sun’s love..in the spring becomes…The Rose..”
Everyone was on their feet. She encored with “Friends” and brought the entire crew, staff, Toni Basil (choreographer and hat extraordinaire), Eric Kornfield, Richard, onstage..They all sang along.. It was a the ultimate moment and the realization that this was, in fact the end of what will go down in history as Bette Midler’s most successful and entertaining tour she and the thousands who saw it, have had the extreme pleasure to experience.
Now let’s hope she will bring it back long enough to film this incredible fete!
Bette Donates Tour Proceeds To Cleveland Charity
Hard times don't sap generosity
03/20/04
Leila Atassi
Plain Dealer Reporter
Despite a static economy, Clevelanders' generosity continues to grow.
Plain Dealer readers' donations to the 2003 "Holiday Spirit: A Community Fund" reached a record high of $263,300 - an increase of more than 5 percent over the past year's total.
The program, which is coordinated by The Plain Dealer and offers financial assistance to local social services agencies, had help from a couple of celebrities for this past year's campaign. Pianist Jim Brickman, a Cleveland native, was heard in commercials on nine radio stations asking Clevelanders to donate to the fund. Also, singer Bette Midler donated $13,000 - $1 per ticket sold for her Jan. 5 "Kiss My Brass" concert.
Holiday Spirit received nearly 100 applications for the 2003 program. Although the effort was just shy of reaching its $265,000 goal, the campaign was able to provide 39 social services agencies with a maximum of $10,000 each. Readers were introduced to the chosen charities through stories published in The Plain Dealer between Thanksgiving and January.
The Economics of Touring
Photo: BaltoBoy Steve
Acts travel road to recovery
Profitable tours amp up a troubled biz
Variety
By PHIL GALLO
With record sales dipping every year and film box office flat in 2003, one area of entertainment is showing a boffo rise: North American concert revenue shot up 20% to $2.5 billion.
The concert business has had a brilliant 21st century, with improved grosses each of the past four years, and there are signs that 2004 could be the biggest 12-month period yet.
The first quarter of the year, normally a fallow period for touring, is going gangbusters, with several of last year's holdovers: Every week, Bette Midler, Rod Stewart and Shania Twain are doing $1 million, as is the double bill of Aerosmith and Kiss; and Toby Keith (the top country attraction in 2002) is doing about a half-million.
As the movie business continues to shun a 12-month calendar, and the record industry continues to swamp the fourth quarter with high-profile releases, concert acts are willing to make the drive from Omaha, Neb., to Des Moines, Iowa, to Chicago in the dead of winter, a period usually reserved for club acts trying to break through.
New tours of large theaters that started in January and February include David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Neil Young, Kid Rock and Josh Groban; Metallica and a pairing of Alan Jackson & Martina McBride started arena tours in late January; late winter-early spring will see Britney Spears and Prince in arenas; and the Eagles will spend May in tertiary markets such as Bismarck, N.D., Rapid City, S.D., and Casper, Wyo.
Playing to about 20,000 people a night this summer will be perennial cash cows Ozzfest and the Dave Matthews Band, plus a double bill of No Doubt and Blink-182, Rush's 30th anniversary tour and a new alt-metal package of Linkin Park, Korn and Snoop Dogg on multi-month outings.
The Dead will tour the country for a few months, appearing at June's Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee, and Sting and Annie Lennox will play to 15,000-plus from June through September, as will k.d. lang, who's appearing with local symphony orchestras, and opener Rufus Wainwright.
And the prospect of a U2 tour late in the year following the release of their next album has promoters salivating, as does rumored runs from Madonna and Van Halen with Sammy Hagar.
As House of Blues Concerts exec VP Alex Hodges planned the summer season for L.A.'s Universal Amphitheater, he found more holds on dates than ever.
"Touring has increased in importance for artists to gain respect," he says. "There's more demand for agents to get in a position to get the best-possible dates, so I think we're getting a bit ahead in the game."
Industry leader Clear Channel is the first to tell anyone its business is being run smarter and more efficiently. The concert biz is not just about selling tickets: Promoters are developing new levels of sponsorships, creating secondary revenue streams and effectively making live entertainment on par with a sports playoff game.
A number of experiments have fizzled or run out of steam, and there are still some sales techniques that aren't necessarily artist-friendly -- like putting a summer's worth of concerts on sale on one day.
"The front of the season can get hard," notes Bert Hollman, who, since 1991, has managed the Allman Brothers Band, a consistent breadwinner among acts that make their living during the summer. "You force a fan to decide between one show or the other. It sucks a lot of money out a market."
Still, the concert business has set an agenda of getting back to the basics of developing acts from the club level to arenas and filling amphitheaters with acts that deliver a consistent bang for the buck.
Promoters across the country predict a continuing economic recovery, and say bands are pricing themselves according to their fan bases -- and have nothing too unreasonable on their contract riders.
"We went through a number of years when artists were very aggressive with their prices," says Clear Channel music prexy Don Law. "That has begun to quiet down."
Boston-based Law and L.A.'s Hodges have been in the concert biz for more than 30 years. Both have watched the industry transform from a regional business to a national one over the last decade and, after an influx of acts that debuted as superstars (Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin, 'N Sync, Eminem), a return to building careers from the ground up.
"Radio doesn't work anymore, and the video generation has proven false," Law says. "The acts with great videos often have no live act at all. And playing live is more important than ever.
At the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, the music business exploded, Law remembers. "There has never been another time when we've seen so many great acts. One week it would be the Who doing 'Tommy' for an audience of 750, and the next week Led Zeppelin came in. People forget that it was week after week like that."
Over the past 10 years, hype has been accompanied by saturation strategies that, when successful, have made million-sellers of acts that would have needed several years of touring to achieve those results decades earlier.
Says Clear Channel Entertainment Chairman and CEO Brian Becker: "The good news is that artists are getting wide exposure quickly. But it also gives a false indication of staying power."
While the stars of the last two decades have burned bright for far shorter spans than their brethren from the '60s and '70s, there are aspects of the concert business as old as rock 'n' roll itself. One is how much promoters earn.
For their first tour of the U.S., the Beatles' price was $7,000 against 60% of the gross. Knowing the Fab Four could do only a 35-minute show, promoters would have to hire a collection of opening acts to pad the event's running time, which pushed the point of profitability to about $25,000 (Variety, Feb. 12, 1964). "Sometimes you have to get out a magnifying glass to the promoters' percentage," Law says.
That limits the number of baby bands a promoter can take a risk on. And nurturing such bands traditionally has been seen by promoters as a building block to a shared success.
So in the wake of the instant superstar acts of the late 1990s, which released albums and within a year filled 60,000 seats only to struggle to attract 12,000 fans per city the next, record companies suddenly find themselves concerned with developing acts the old-fashioned way -- a repetitive cycle of recording followed by touring.
And that's music to promoters' ears.
The logic is that acts and their management stay loyal to the promoters who stuck with them from their early days onward, although no band has ever signed a contract giving a promoter rights to future tours based on early support.
"The business used to be 80% relationships and 20% business, and now that has flipped," says Kevin Morrow, senior VP of House of Blues Concerts.
Acts at amphitheaters, theaters that seat more than 3,000 and arenas generally take home about 65% of the gross. There are cases, such as Bruce Springsteen's Dodger Stadium concert last year, in which the act received the entire door and the promoter's profit came from jacked-up parking and concessions prices.
Generally, the promoter draws a profit on the difference between production and administrative costs vs. the gross, taking home the first 10% and then splitting the remainder with the act, which gets 80%-90%.
To bulk up coffers, promoters have made several attempts to generate income that the musicians can't touch -- most notably venue fees, and by getting corporate entities to sponsor buildings or series.
Clear Channel will take the sponsorship one step further this summer, offering blocks of tickets promoters don't expect to sell at outdoor venues, and pitch them to mobile phone companies and the like.
While venues base ticket prices on anticipated attendance, outdoor summer shows often have lawn seats in abundant supply that local promoters don't worry about selling. Becker says there's an opportunity to convert "unsold inventory" into a profit center while putting the onus of getting the tickets into consumers hands on a third party.
"Sponsors have learned how (the concert business) works and how fans respond -- they're sensitive to not blanketing the stage" with signage, says Morrow of House of Blues, the country's second-largest concert promotion company.
Adds Morrow, who has recently worked with Grey Goose vodka, Sony PlayStation, Volkswagen, Discover Card and Coors: "Half the tours you see wouldn't go out without sponsorship. As labels consolidate and there's less and less tour support, we bring together an act and a company looking to do a media spend."
For example, the Greek Theater, a 6,000-seat outdoor venue in Los Angeles run by the Nederlander org, has five sponsors for the venue. Tours, of course, have their own separate sponsors; the first announced show at the Greek is the Honda Civic-sponsored tour of Dashboard Confessional and Thrice.
As much as sponsorship has been accepted, promoters continue to fight the ill will generated by fees associated with tickets.
"As an industry, we have made mistakes," proffers Clear Channel's Becker. "One is how we position ourselves to the public. I wish I could turn back time and (not introduce fees). If I have scenario A in which a ticket is $40 and the artist gets $33, I would prefer it to saying a ticket is $33, which the artist gets, and then there's a $3 fee and $2 fee and another $3 fee.
"Forty bucks I understand. When you're told the price of admission, example A is legitimate. In B, the economics of the producer, presenter and artist come into play. It's irrelevant where the money is going. There are three questions for any show: Did fans get what they paid for? Was the artist compensated? Did the presenter get a fair return?"
Ever-present on the current touring scene has been the issue of Clear Channel exerting monopolistic control over not only the airwaves -- it owns 1,200 radio stations -- but also concert venues. No artist, though, has attempted to fight CC the way Pearl Jam battled Ticketmaster in the early 1990s, when the band, objecting to Ticketmaster's surcharges, refused to let the ticketing giant sell its concerts.
Neil Young's tours for his album "Greendale" last summer and this winter were booked by Clear Channel, and at one point in his show, complete with a stage play with about 30 actors, he even takes a dig at the corporate giant.
"The economics of the business are all pretty insane," says Young's manager, Elliot Roberts, suggesting that the music industry is run by one behemoth after another, which has cut into the quality of the music. "So Clear Channel owns all the venues. It is just another big company -- it's history repeating itself."
And as long as most artists see full venues and healthy paydays, complaints will be kept to a minimum.
Divine Talent (Thanks to Terri from experiencethedivine.com for this!
Photo: BaltoBoy Steve
Divine Talent: Bette Midler remains a woman of outrageous fortune Lori Hoffman Atlantic City Weekly
My fascination with Bette Midler began when I was a senior in high school. This amazing personality showed up on late night TV with Johnny Carson. She called herself The Divine Miss M, dressed in outrageous campy attire, her breasts prominently accentuated.
Her self-defined persona was, "Trash with flash, sleaze with ease." Her songs were from the '40s, '50s and '60s with a few contemporary tunes in the mix. Midler's singing was divine, from a nifty "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" to the plaintive wail of "Hello In There," and the sexy romantic spin she put on the old '60s chestnut, "Do You Wanna Dance?"
However, it was her overall persona - her comic banter with Carson, and her tales about her childhood in Hawaii ("We were the only Jewish family in a Samoan neighborhood"), and performing at the Continental Baths before nearly naked gay men - that sealed my fate as a Divine devotee.
Somehow I talked my father into taking me to Philadelphia in December 1972 to see Bette Midler's debut in town at the Bijou Café. We didn't have tickets to the sold-out show and the line went for a block down Lombard Street. Thank God my dad did indignant bluster better than anyone I know. We sneaked by the first check point, then dad poured it on at the door, explaining that his name was on the list, that he was from the press, covering the show. Well he was from the press; he was a sportswriter, but it worked.
We found a spot in the 250-seat capacity room that seemed to have double that on hand. There was barely room to breath, let alone move. She did the songs noted above and more with her pianist-conductor Barry Manilow and her trio of singers, the Harlettes, which at that point in time, included Melissa Manchester. It would be the last time she ever played a room this intimate. Her cult following was about to explode into a legion of fans across the globe.
Now, 32 years later, Bette Midler is back on tour. Following on the heels of her latest CD, Bette Midler Sings the Rosemary Clooney Songbook, produced by Manilow, Midler's Kiss My Brass Tour is coming to Boardwalk Hall March 20. It will be her third visit to our shores. Back in 1999, I watched her ring in the New Year at the Taj.
Midler's career has had low points and high points. She made her major film debut channeling the spirit of a self-destructive rock diva ala Janis Joplin in The Rose and picked up an Oscar nomination. More importantly, she earned respect as an actress beyond her brassy comedic personality. However, despite the overwhelming acclaim, her film career came in fits and starts over the next three decades. If you're a man, you can get away with not being movie star beautiful. If you're a woman and you're not a kid, you'd better be funny.
She was funny, and when she wasn't earning accolades on Broadway and elsewhere for her brassy live shows, she found work in a series of popular comedies in the 1980s-Outrageous Fortune, Down and Out In Beverly Hills, Ruthless People and Big Business. The popular soap opera Beaches gave her career a boost and a new signature song, "Wind Beneath My Wings."
In 1991 she reunited with her director from The Rose, Mark Rydell. For The Boys was an underrated drama about a showbiz couple who entertain the troops. Midler and James Caan were terrific, but the film was a box office flop.
She did have a major hit opposite Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn in The First Wives Club (1996) about three women tossed aside by their husbands who unite successfully to seek revenge. It didn't lead to more film roles.
TV always beckons. She did a fabulous turn as Mama Rose in a TV version of Gypsy and then went the sitcom route in 2000. Even this Midler fan couldn't watch Bette more than a couple of times. It was bad but as always Bette bounced back.
Her recent well-received Clooney CD is a prime example. Working again with old pal Manilow, the album is a beautifully crafted tribute, with Midler paying more of a homage to the style of Clooney, treading lightly with her own fingerprints on the material. The songs range from "Mambo Italiano" to a jazzy rendition of "Come On-A My House," a lovely "You'll Never Know" and even "White Christmas."
Now, at age 58, she is back on the road, winning acclaim once more for her one-of-a-kind "trash with flash" persona. Her Portland, Ore. show evoked this response, "Midler hit on all cylinders with a high-energy, often bombastic show, with swinging tunes such as her trademark 'Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,' performed with a video of herself from the '70s' She really poured on the gaudy Broadway-meets-Vegas style with a faux-Broadway revue, with her as diva Delores Delgado, a tacky-fun mermaid who spewed tasteless fish jokes over a medley of reworked Broadway tunes and silly wheelchair choreography."
Three decades later, the essence of Bette Midler's appeal remains a constant in the universe.