Bette Midler – The Rose

Written In 45 Minutes To Sound Like Bob Seger, Rejected As “Not Rock And Roll” — Then It Won The Grammy

Bette Midler didn’t write “The Rose.” She fought for it. Released as a single in early 1980 from the soundtrack of her debut film, the song had already been turned down, tossed in a reject pile, and nearly forgotten before it ever reached her ears. That it exists at all is the result of two acts of stubbornness — one from a music supervisor who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and one from a star who trusted her instincts when nobody else did.

The single peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent five consecutive weeks at number one on the Adult Contemporary chart, earning Midler her first Gold single in the US. It also became a number one hit in Australia and charted in the top ten across Canada and New Zealand. At the 1981 Grammy Awards, Midler took home Best Female Pop Vocal Performance — beating Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer. That’s not a bad result for a song the producers never wanted.

The song’s unlikely author was Amanda McBroom, an aspiring singer-songwriter whose manager had nudged her to write some “Bob Seger-type tunes” to land a record deal. Driving home one afternoon, she heard Leo Sayer’s cover of “Magdalena” on the radio — a song that called love “a razor.” She disagreed with that completely, and by the time she screeched into her driveway, the words to “The Rose” were already forming. She sat down at the piano and had a finished song in 45 minutes. When she played it back, she noticed it had no bridge and no hook. She couldn’t think of anything to add, so she left it as it was. She was right.

When McBroom heard that a film loosely based on Janis Joplin’s life was looking for a title song — the movie had originally been planned as a Joplin biopic called Pearl, until Joplin’s family denied rights — she submitted it through a friend. Nearly 30,000 songs were sent to music supervisor Paul Rothchild, who had actually produced Joplin himself. He whittled the stack to thirty candidates for Midler to consider. Midler chose seven. Producers still loathed “The Rose,” calling it dull and far too slow for a rock film. They rejected it outright. Rothchild fished it out of the bin and mailed it directly to Midler anyway. She loved it immediately and lobbied hard to include it over the objections of everyone around her. McBroom even ended up singing backing vocals on the finished recording.

There are actually two distinct mixes. The single features a full orchestral arrangement, while the version closing the film strips everything back to piano and vocals, giving it an almost unbearable intimacy. “The Rose” was left off Midler’s concurrent studio album Thighs and Whispers — the song belonged to the film, and to the film alone.

The Oscar nomination that should have followed never came. AMPAS required that nominated songs be written expressly for the film in question. When McBroom was asked directly, she told the truth — she’d written it two years before she’d ever heard of the movie. The Golden Globes had no such rule, and McBroom won Best Original Song there. Conway Twitty covered it in 1983 and scored his 30th US country number one. Irish group Westlife took it to the top of the UK charts decades later. Napoleon Dynamite used a soundalike recording in its most memorable scene because the Midler original would have cost too much for the film’s tiny budget.

Midler once reflected simply: “It was the song that changed everything for me.” She was right on both counts — it transformed her from a cult figure into a mainstream star, and it gave McBroom, a songwriter who almost never considered herself one, a song that has outlasted almost everything else from its era. Written to sound like Bob Seger. Sounds like nothing else on earth.