Barry Manilow

by Patricia Butler

  The never-ending cheap shots can be particularly devastating to a performer whose sense of self may already be hanging by some pretty weak threads. And it does seem that Barry Manilow has spent a lifetime trying to please people, first by not making an effort to connect with his father so as not to upset his family, then by being the perfect, enabling son to a suicidal, alcoholic mother, then, ultimately, by allowing Clive Davis to steer his career into the bubble gum and Clearasil scented waters of pop stardom. In fact, it would seem from Manilow’s own accounts over the years that he has been the perfect go-along guy, a rudderless ship tossed on the turbulent seas of commercial success and market demands though he himself, he has said, “was never one to make waves.”

  But, unfortunately, it’s more often than not Barry Manilow who causes the most trouble for Barry Manilow. An incident with Philadelphia disc jockey Ed Sciaky is one of the earliest examples.

  “I’m going to be the biggest star …”

  Ed Sciaky has been a fixture on the Philadelphia radio scene since his student days at Temple University’s radio station WRTI-FM in 1966. He joined WMMR in 1970, quickly becoming a rock and roll guru, recognising new talent and helping to launch the careers of scores of artists, including Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Barry Manilow.

  “I met Barry around December 13, 1972,” Sciaky recalls. “He was playing piano for Bette Midler at the Bijou Café. I missed the opening night because I had to go to New York to see the American debut of Genesis at Avery Fisher Hall, but I saw the next three nights, 13, 14, 15 – I don’t know why I remember the dates, but I do. Bette was awesome, and the Bijou was this little tiny club at Broad and Lombard; my wife Judy and I lived at 17th and Lombard. Barry was just hanging around the bar at the Bijou and I guess I introduced myself, having seen him play or whatever. I don’t remember the details of the conversation but, in any case, he ended up coming over to our apartment after one of the shows one night. I don’t know whether we discussed it beforehand or when he got to our place, but he was very interested in a record I had called ‘Beach Boys Stack-a-Tracks’, which was a weird record that Capital put out of Beach Boys backing tracks, with no vocals, so I guess you could sing along with it or something. It’s a weird record. Being an arranger and all, Barry found this of interest. So that’s how we met and became friends over the years.”

  When Bette’s tour came back through Philadelphia during the Thanksgiving holiday of November 1973, Barry and Ed again hooked up. “It was Thanksgiving night or the night after Thanksgiving,” Sciaky recalls. “Barry said, ‘I would love a home cooked meal.’ And he came over and had leftover turkey, and loved it.” Barry continued to keep in touch with Ed. While Barry and Ron Dante were working on Barry’s first album for Bell Records back in New York, Barry sent a reel-to-reel tape with four of the album’s songs to Ed. “He was so thrilled to make that first record,” says Sciaky. “He sent me a tape with a note that said, ‘Hot off the presses, for Ed and Judy!’ It was very sweet of him to do that. There are very few artists that have ever sent me a tape like that, just so thrilled and proud to actually be making a record.”

  When the record came out, Barry returned to Philadelphia in March 1974 to promote it, playing the Bijou Café, this time as the headliner rather than Bette’s accompanist. “We lived our lives at the Bijou Café,” recalls Sciaky. “I spent a lot of my life watching these artists perform. If Barry did twelve shows in a week at the Bijou, I was there for twelve shows. In fact I’ll never forget the week he did twelve shows, and the opening act was Andy Kaufman. That was unbelievable, because Andy Kaufman was insane, and did twelve completely different shows over the six days. Every single show was something completely different. The audience had no clue, they hated him, they booed him. He’d get up and read Moby Dick. It was insane. His whole thing was to get the audience to hate him. So the Barry audience definitely hated him.”

  During his run in Philadelphia, Ed had Barry on his radio show. “I was working at WMMR then, which was a hip, album rock station,” Sciaky continues. “This was Barry’s first-ever radio interview in the world, he claimed, promoting his record. Because at this point, who was he? He was nobody. He was Bette Midler’s piano player. And I took a liking to this song ‘Could It Be Magic’ and played it on my show. I was music director of the station, I could play whatever I wanted, and I thought that was a great piece, ‘Could It Be Magic’. And the record label’s pushing a piece of crap called ‘Sweetwater Jones’ from the record, which was bullshit. So I had Barry on my show, and he brought a tape of his commercial jingles; we played that. It was great.”

  It was clear to Ed that, with his first solo album, Barry hadn’t quite figured out who or what he wanted to be. “If you look at his first record,” says Sciaky, “on the back of it he’s wearing a Screw T-Shirt – Screw magazine, which is a New York sex newspaper. I mean that cover was removed from that album and is not to be seen since. Basically he envisioned himself a rock type performer, a singer/ songwriter type performer, an Elton John, Billy Joel kind of a performer.”

  While Sciaky was ecstatic about ‘Could It Be Magic’ on the first album, which went nowhere, Barry’s next album, Barry Manilow II came as somewhat of a disappointment. “He got into this produced thing with ‘Mandy’ which I honestly didn’t care for,” Sciaky explains. “He didn’t write the song – I guess it was a good song because it was a hit and it did what it was supposed to do. But I didn’t like where it was going to take him and obviously it took him there.” Just as he had been effusive with his praise for ‘Could It Be Magic’, Sciaky didn’t hesitate to tell Barry that he thought Barry had sold out with ‘Mandy’.

  “Clive Davis got him into this produced sound, which he became known for, for better or worse,” says Sciaky. “I mean it made him a gigantic star, one of the all-time biggest. I think he’s done great things, but I think some of the stuff he’s done has been rightfully categorised as formulaic, through no fault of his own, basically. He got pushed into that super-produced thing, the way they produced his voice, and the way they produced the band. I mean it was in some ways terrific pop music, but it veered away from the kind of serious singer-songwriter he’d hoped to be. So, obviously this is no secret, he didn’t get that kind of ‘credibility’ as a serious rock artist. Obviously he became a brand name of a particular kind of pop music regarded by many as schlock. And I think some of that was deserved and some of that was not deserved. That’s where his tastes were and that’s where the production led him and so on.” It was a disappointment for Sciaky, who told Barry he thought this new commercial direction he was taking with his career would prove to be a mistake. “Maybe not enough people would tell him when they didn’t like something he did,” says Sciaky. “I have a feeling most people around him were just, Oh, Barry, you’re the greatest! Everything you do is gold!” At the time it was something that Barry seemed eager to believe.

  Ed had also befriended two other little known performers – Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. Like Barry, both Bruce, a New Jersey native, and Billy, a native New Yorker, had spent time at Ed and Judy Sciaky’s home, enjoying home cooked meals and sometimes sleeping on their couch due to lack of funds for hotel accommodation. It was an odd confluence of events that brought Bruce, Billy, and Barry together one night, with Ed at the vortex.

  “Bruce shows up at WMMR, unannounced,” Sciaky recalls, “walks in and goes on the air with me, just hanging out. He’s on his way to Texas or something, or on his way home from Texas. Meanwhile Tony Visconti is listening to the radio and hears this and calls me and says, ‘I heard Bruce is there. Can you get him to come to the studio because David is recording one of his songs.’” Tony Visconti was David Bowie’s producer. Bowie was at Sigma Sound recording Springsteen’s song ‘It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City’. Bruce, however, had headed back to New Jersey immediately after speaking with Ed on the air, so Ed promised Visconti he would call Bruce the next day after he’d had time to reach home and see if he couldn’t get
Springsteen back to Philadelphia. As promised, Ed placed the call to Bruce the next day. “I said, can you come down here because David Bowie would like you to come to the studio, he wants to meet you,” says Sciaky. Bruce agreed, but then missed his bus and had to wait for the next one, which didn’t get him into Philadelphia until midnight.

  “We pick him up at the bus station at midnight and we take him to the studio,” Sciaky continues, “and we hang out with Bowie all night. One of the following nights we took Bruce to the Spectrum to see David Bowie, at his show, then we immediately left there and went to the Academy of Music where Billy Joel was headlining with Janis Ian opening. They were doing two shows, like 7:00 and 10:30 or something; we made it to the second show. So we go backstage after the show and Billy says, ‘Let’s go get something to eat.’ Janis disappears, but Billy and Bruce and [Judy and I] go across the street to the Eagle II Diner, on Broad Street. And in there happens to be Barry Manilow; he had been to the concert. He’s promoting ‘Mandy’ on WIT, on their Leukaemia-thon. So he’s there. So we said, ‘Well Barry, why don’t you join us?’ So that’s how we had Barry Manilow, Bruce Springsteen, and Billy Joel sitting together having late dinner at one o’clock in the morning in the diner on Broad Street in Philadelphia. And that is where Barry said, ‘I will be the biggest star at this table.’”

  It was a shocking thing to say, not only in retrospect, but at the moment the words were uttered as well. Indeed, Manilow would tone down the incident considerably when retelling it in his 1987 biography, Sweet Life, even though Ed and Judy Sciaky reminded him exactly what happened, specifically for the book. Explains Sciaky, “Years later, Barry called us, he wanted us to come to Atlantic City to be interviewed because he didn’t remember the incident exactly and he wanted us to refresh his memory. So we go down to Atlantic City where he’s playing a casino – this is years later – and we refresh his memory. But what he writes is, ‘I said I was making the most commercial music of anyone at the table.’ But that is not what he said. What he said was, ‘I will be the biggest star at this table,’ in those words. He doesn’t remember saying it, and he reworded it for his book. I guess he didn’t want to come off that smacked ass.”

  Though he put the less “smacked ass” version in his book, Barry later spoke publicly of Ed Sciaky’s version of the incident. “Sciaky reminds me that I made an asshole of myself then,” Manilow told Rolling Stone senior writer Bill Zehme in 1990. “Apparently at one point I said, ‘Out of all three of us, just watch, I’m going to be the biggest star at this table.’ Ed says he winced, and his wife began to gag. I don’t remember this, but if I said it at all, it was because, of the three of us, I was making the most blatantly commercial music. I respected their music more than my own and said, ‘Hah! Just watch!’ But it just came out wrong, and they never forgot it. To this day, Billy Joel gets pissed off when people mention my name – and I have always been such an incredible fan of his.”

  But Sciaky is more philosophical about the incident, and less judgmental of Manilow’s pronouncement than Manilow himself seems to be. “Really, it was just a statement,” Sciaky says, “and what he meant was, yeah, he’s making the most commercial music. Because Bruce Springsteen [at that time] is shit – he’s got two records out that haven’t sold shit, and he’s a rock weird guy, totally scruffy – he couldn’t afford a hotel room, he was sleeping on our sofa. And Billy Joel had one hit with ‘Piano Man’ and then had a follow-up album, Street Life Serenade, which was a flop. And Barry has ‘Mandy’ happening and figures he’s going to be a big Top 40 star. So, you know, actually he was probably right depending on how you measure stardom. I mean I’m sure there was a time when Barry was the biggest star of the three, you know. But it depends on how you measure stardom. Radio play? Total records sold? Total concert tickets sold? Barry was a big radio artist; Billy was that also, but sold albums like crazy, not necessarily singles, and Bruce didn’t sell singles really, but did sell some records, but mainly was a concert attraction. So they actually had completely different niches; you wouldn’t confuse them. If anything, Billy is sort of halfway between Barry and Bruce. But they’re not the same. Years later, imagine my surprise when there was a magazine – you know one of these fanzine things that come out, these special editions? – there was a magazine called Barry Manilow, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel Magazine. I swear to god! I’ve got it somewhere. It’s shocking! It was just articles about the three of them. It’s so bizarre! Who would put those three together? It’s insane!”

  Sciaky also doesn’t think the statement had the long-term negative impact on Bruce and especially Billy that Barry seems to fear it did, though Joel certainly wasn’t happy about it at the time. “It’s hard for me to put myself in their shoes,” says Sciaky, of the assumed impact of Barry’s statement on the other two artists. “But they were basically all unknown artists. Billy Joel did have a hit with ‘Piano Man’ a year previous, and Bruce had nothing – remember this is before Born To Run, this is the end of 1974; he’s lucky Columbia didn’t drop him … so he was in this nowhere period there. But I don’t think he knew who Barry Manilow was at that point; I don’t think Billy knew either. [Barry] was just a friend of ours who had a record or something.”

  Still, Sciaky admits, the statement certainly charmed no one at the table, and, at the time, especially angered Joel, who at that moment was probably the most successful of the three. “Bruce and Billy were taken aback by it,” says Sciaky. “Bruce is very shy, really. He’s nothing like he is onstage, he’s a shy guy. I don’t know what he thought. I know that Billy was a little pissed off. And years later, Barry was on some awards show, and he went out of his way to praise Billy Joel. I don’t know if he was giving him an award or he was just mentioning that he had won an award, but he went out of his way to say, ‘I just want to mention how great I think Billy Joel is.’ I think he was sort of apologising to Billy.”

  But Joel doesn’t seem to have held a grudge. Says Sciaky, “I think one of the best things Barry ever did was a song called ‘Some Kind Of Friend’, which was on one of his middle period albums.” In fact, Manilow himself has said of the 1983 release, “Up tempo! Aggressive! Rock ‘n’ Roll! Finally!” Sciaky continues, “I played that for Billy Joel and he said, ‘This is great, who is this?’ I said, ‘It’s Barry!’ He was shocked and delighted.”

  When told of the Manilow-Springsteen-Joel incident, former Rolling Stone writer and editor Ben Fong-Torres doesn’t fault Manilow for what he sees as simply a show of bravura in the face of professional intimidation when Manilow found himself sitting down with two other up-and-coming musicians in front of an influential rock deejay like Ed Sciaky. “The kind of bravado that he hopes is going to be able to make it sound like he’s cocky, or that he fears nobody, and that gives him an edge that he feels he needs to have as part of his image,” speculates Fong-Torres. “There’s a lot of stuff going on in the creation and the architecture of a show business venture. So I don’t begrudge him for taking that tack and just trying. Because Eddie Murphy did the same thing in some magazine – was it TV Guide? – where he said he was bigger than The Beatles. And The Beatles said they were bigger than Jesus – twice. And there was a band that I reported on in Rolling Stone, way back, called Bread, who groused that they were not being paid the same amount of respect as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And Credence Clearwater Revival didn’t help themselves any, despite their great music, when they did a press junket and party in the Bay area in which one of the undercurrents was that they felt like, with all of their hits over the years, they were still not being seen on the same level as The Beatles. So they complained about it in public, and it was pretty obvious what they were after. And when that happens, then, the critics just pile on you. And so that may well be what’s gone on, too, in Mr Manilow’s career.”

  “I’ve got a swell idea. Let’s put on a show!”

  It’s this sort of personal insecurity masked by professional hubris that often drives Barry Manilow’s many critics
into a frenzy. One good example was Manilow’s first proposed foray into acting.

  “Back in 1980 or 81, Barry was salivating at the thought of being an actor and doing movies,” says Lee Gurst. “He wanted movies more than just about anything else you could think of.” To this end, Barry began taking classes from renowned acting coach Nina Foch. These classes were not only in anticipation of a new facet of Barry’s career, but also to help him perform better during his live shows. After observing Foch’s class, Manilow told the teacher that while he would like to join, he didn’t think he was capable of publicly expressing the kind of emotion he’d seen Nina’s other students offering during the class. “What are you saying?” she reportedly asked Manilow. “You do that and more every night. The only difference is that you have a band behind you.”

  Reassured, Manilow began a series of increasingly frequent sessions with Foch. “Taking acting technique classes from Nina Foch was a turning point in my life,” Manilow later wrote. “Although it was difficult and awkward in the beginning, I soon began to get the hang of it. Soon I was studying with her privately nearly every day.”

  An opportunity for Barry to flex these newly toned acting muscles beyond the concert stage soon presented itself, and in a big way. “There was actually negotiation about his doing a movie with Frank Sinatra, a musical,” says Lee Gurst. “And it would have included certainly a large number of songs which Barry was going to write.” It would seem an incredible opportunity for Barry, to not only make his acting debut, but with an Academy Award winning actor and a musical legend. But, again, Manilow’s hubris got in the way.