Do You Want to Dance

When I was a young man, probably in my late 20’s with no money and no job, but plenty of hope and ambition, I interviewed everyone I could get my hands on hoping to place freelance articles anywhere I could. I interviewed Bruce Jenner in San Jose when he was Bruce and before he won the Olympic decathlon, and Clifford Ray who played center for the Warriors at Lois the Pie Queen in Oakland – could that even happen now, a freelancer interviewing a Warriors star at a local restaurant?

So, I connected with Bobby Freeman who wrote and recorded that great great song Do You Want to Dance (1958). Bobby, God love him, agreed to meet me. His song had reached No. 5 on the Billboard Top 100 list

This is where the story gets sad and gets very deep. Bobby was a San Francisco native. We met in North Beach one afternoon because even though he was famous he wasn’t rich, and he was keeping body and soul together playing backup to striptease women at one of those joints on Broadway in North Beach.

Bobby was swell to me. He was so glad to be remembered, and I was so glad to remember him. We had coffee. He told me the great bongo sound on that record came from cardboard boxes because they didn’t have bongo drums.

And then he told me this, Oh God. Someone said Bette Midler was sitting at an outdoor café nearby, and Bobby, proud of what he wrote, decided to go up to her. Why? Because in 1972 she had recorded a slow-dance, sexy, sultry, hold-her-close-and-smell-her-hair version of Do You Want to Dance.

He politely introduced himself to Bette, and said he wrote the song she did such a beautiful job with. She looked at him, Bobby told me, and said she didn’t believe him. Didn’t believe he wrote Do You Want to Dance. She thought he was a bum on the street.

Bobby, who was down on his luck, slinked away feeling like nobody, feeling denied, eliminated. This is what Bobby told me years ago, and if Bette remembers it differently, I apologize because I really like Bette Midler and admire her. So did Bobby Freeman. He died in 2017.