1973 • Behind the Songs
A Broadway audition, a bathhouse stage, and a song about the people who carry you.
Every singer needs a song that sounds like an introduction, and for Bette Midler that song was “Friends.” Released as a single in 1973 from her debut album The Divine Miss M, it was the first Bette Midler record most of America ever heard: a warm, piano-driven pledge of loyalty that arrived before the feather boas, before the Academy Award nominations, before “the Divine Miss M” became a household phrase. It climbed only to number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100, but it did something more valuable than selling in blockbuster quantities. It told the audience exactly who she was and where she came from — a club singer carried to the microphone by the people around her.
The song came from inside her own circle. “Friends” was written by Buzzy Linhart together with Mark “Moogy” Klingman, and Linhart was one of Midler’s closest friends. The story, as it has been told, is that Midler first heard the song while Linhart and Klingman were rehearsing material for an audition for a Broadway show called “Mirror Cracked.” She asked if she could sing it. Soon after, the two writers came to catch her act at the Continental Baths in New York City — the bathhouse nightclub where she was building her reputation in the early 1970s — and what they heard convinced them. The song went onto the debut album, and Linhart himself later cut his own rock version under the title “(You Got to Have) Friends,” as if to underline that the sentiment belonged to everybody.
She recorded it in 1972 at Atlantic Recording Studios in New York, during the sessions for The Divine Miss M. The album was her first for Atlantic Records, and it was overseen by two men who understood both halves of her act: Ahmet Ertegun, the label’s co-founder, and Barry Manilow, then still better known as a writer of commercial jingles and as Midler’s own piano accompanist in the clubs than as a solo star. The pairing mattered. Ertegun brought the institutional weight of Atlantic’s rhythm-and-blues history; Manilow brought the cabaret instincts of a man who had watched the act take shape night after night from the piano bench. Between them, they knew how to frame a voice like hers — brassy enough for the back row, tender enough for the lyric.
Issued as a single in 1973 with “Chapel of Love” on the flip side, “Friends” made a modest but genuine impression on the charts. It peaked at number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and rose to number 9 on the Adult Contemporary chart, where its unhurried warmth sat comfortably among the era’s soft-pop ballads. Cash Box listed it at number 40 as well, and in Canada the single reached number 57 on the Top Singles chart and number 17 on the Adult Contemporary ranking. These were not the numbers of a phenomenon, but for a debut single by a club singer with no prior radio profile, they amounted to a foothold — evidence, delivered in weekly increments, that the bathhouse act could travel beyond Manhattan.
The album around the single did much of the persuading. The Divine Miss M, released in 1972, introduced Midler as a kind of living jukebox of twentieth-century American song — girl-group classics, wartime swing, and blues standards, all filtered through a winking, big-hearted persona that could sell both the joke and the ache. “Friends” was one of the few freshly written songs on the record, and its placement among the lovingly revived oldies gave it a particular charge. The covers proved she knew the tradition; “Friends” proved she had a present tense, too — a song that sounded as though it had been written for her, because in the most literal sense, it had been written around her.
Put the record on and the first thing you notice is how unhurried it is. The arrangement leans on piano and a gently gospel-tinged swell of backing voices, leaving the middle of the track wide open for Midler herself. She sings it straight — no camp, no mugging, none of the Divine Miss M mischief that the press was already writing about. The restraint is the point. When she leans into the chorus, the lyric’s plainspoken gratitude does the emotional work, and the backing voices answer her the way a roomful of friends would: present, unshowy, all-in by the final refrain. It is not hard to picture the Continental Baths crowd hearing this in 1972 and recognizing it as a mission statement.
The song refused to stay put. Barry Manilow — who had been at the piano for its creation, in every sense — cut “Friends” for his own self-titled debut album in 1973, bringing the tune full circle. Then it started turning up in unexpected places: over the final scene and end credits of the 1973 film The Last of Sheila; on the children’s television series Zoom during the 1974–75 season; on The Muppet Show in 1976, performed by guest star Candice Bergen; in a 1985 episode of the detective series Hardcastle and McCormick; and, most improbably of all, in the 2001 animated hit Shrek, where Donkey — voiced by Eddie Murphy — sings it. Few debut singles enjoy that kind of afterlife, hopping from murder mysteries to Muppets to ogres without losing their sincerity.
What endures is the song’s function in Midler’s story. Long after she had bigger hits, bigger rooms, and a film career, “Friends” remained the thesis statement of the act: a performer whose bond with her audience was always personal before it was spectacular. The lyric never names names, and that is its genius — every listener gets to fill in their own Linhart, their own Klingman, their own Manilow at the piano. It is a song about the people who carry you, written by two of the people who carried her, and sung by a woman who, at every step afterward, seemed determined never to forget it.