Bathhouse Betty
| Bathhouse Betty | ||||
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| Studio album by Bette Midler | ||||
| Released | September 15, 1998 | |||
| Recorded | 1997–98 | |||
| Genre | Pop | |||
| Length | 44:58 48:27 (Japan) |
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| Label | Warner Bros. | |||
| Producer | Arif Mardin, David Foster, Ted Templeman, Brock Walsh, Marc Shaiman, Chuckii Booker | |||
| Bette Midler chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Bathhouse Betty | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |
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| Robert Christgau |
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Bathhouse Betty is the ninth studio album by the American singer Bette Midler, released in 1998. Bathhouse Betty was Midler's debut album for Warner Bros. Records, after having parted ways with sister label Atlantic Records in 1995 following the moderate commercial success of her later-platinum certified album Bette of Roses.
The title of the album, Bathhouse Betty, refers to Midler's early career when she performed her cabaret shows at gay bathhouses like the Continental Baths in New York which led to her becoming a gay icon with a loyal LGBT following ever since. When Midler promoted the album she said in an interview "Despite the way things turned out [with the AIDS crisis], I'm still proud of those days [when I got my start singing at the gay bathhouses]. I feel like I was at the forefront of the gay liberation movement, and I hope I did my part to help it move forward. So, I kind of wear the label of 'Bathhouse Betty' with pride."
Released some twenty-five years after Midler's breakthrough with the album The Divine Miss M, Bathhouse Betty was musically a comeback and a return to her roots and her high camp Mae-West-meets-the-Andrews-Sisters stage persona of the same name. The second single "I'm Beautiful Dammitt!"—in fact not an original but a remake of a song by house music group Uncanny Alliance—even opens with the spoken line "This is the Divine Miss M and I'm here to share with you some rare and stimulating insight about my cosmic fabulosity!" and effectively set the tone for the following album.
"Ukulele Lady", a tribute to Midler's native Hawaii which she had first performed live in the 1997 TV special Diva Las Vegas, is an old evergreen written by Gus Kahn and Richard A. Whiting, published in 1925 and first made famous by Vaughn De Leath—and later covered by among others Miss Piggy on The Muppet Show. Other cover versions on Bathhouse Betty include early girl group classics like Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles' debut single "I Sold My Heart to the Junkman" and 1950's R&B chanteuse Big Maybelle's "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show", the latter featuring swing-rock band Royal Crown Revue. Contemporary covers include Ben Folds' tragicomic "Boxing", an imagined monologue by Muhammad Ali, originally featured on Ben Folds Five's 1995 self-titled debut album, Dave Frishberg's "I'm Hip" and Dick Gallagher and Mark Waldrop's "Laughing Matters", taken from Howard Crabtree's 1996 gay musical revue When Pigs Fly. "Big Socks", an original written and produced by Chuckii Booker, is a tongue-in-cheek contemporary R&B track whose lyrics debate the supposed correlation between the size of men's feet and other body parts; "Don't brag about your body, baby, and say that you're packin' a lot, 'cause all I see besides your big feet is that you got big socks."
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