Barry Manilow

by Patricia Butler

  “Everybody hates me …”

  HerbBernstein is in a unique position to judge Barry Manilow’s work, having enjoyed the unusual privilege of first seeing Barry’s talent as a high school student, when Bernstein was working as a gym teacher and coach at Brooklyn’s Eastern District High School, and then later viewing Manilow’s progress after both Bernstein and Manilow had left EDHS and each entered varying, but often overlapping, phases of the music business, each, at different times, working as performer, composer, arranger, producer and accompanist.

  “I love his work,” says Bernstein. “I think he’s very, very musical. But unfortunately music changes. Everything that’s so good a couple of years later is suddenly corny. But I love some of the stuff he’s done. Very musical, very melodic. I guess by today’s standards, with everything being so hip and rap, it’s a little bit corny, but not to me. I love what he does.”

  Ed Sciaky says that his friends are astonished when he tells them the best concert he saw in 2000 was Barry Manilow’s. But Manilow is, as Rolling Stone magazine dubbed him, “the showman of Our Generation”, though which generation writer Bill Zehme was referring to is unclear. “I saw a concert at the Uris Theater quite a few years ago, and it was wonderful,” says HerbBernstein. “He started with just his little group out front, and then the curtain opened and suddenly exposed a 40-piece orchestra. He’s a real showman, he’s got all the shtick. And I love that. Like Elton John, Billy Joel – they’re real showmen. And some of the others, they’re recording acts and they don’t have a clue onstage other than singing their hits and that’s it. But every time I see Barry in person the place is mobbed. He’s still a big draw, does great business wherever he works. He knows how to put a show together, he knows how to hit his audience. He knows how to pace a show. Almost like the old-time show business. I love what he does.”

  Bernstein discounts anything the critics might have to say against Manilow. “Everyone’s a critic,” he says. “If someone’s successful, there’s a reason for it. I see Barry’s shows, I see the people reacting, I see him mobbed. I mean wherever he’s appearing, they’re sold out. So who are these guys knocking it? They’re probably losers who never made it, critics who were singers before they became critics and couldn’t make it, and they love to come with their clipboards and criticise. I really have very little patience for these kind of people. I’ve worked with acts where they got four standing ovations and I read the reviews and you would swear they’d bombed. I have very little regard for critics.”

  Manilow himself, after years of ducking the shots volleyed his way, and occasionally volleying a few back, seems to have made some kind of peace with the situation, choosing more often than not to join in the fun rather than fight it. On the popular, long-running (1988 to 1998) television comedy Murphy Brown, Barry became a running gag late in the show’s run when the character Murphy Brown, played by actress Candice Bergen, gives birth to a son who can be soothed only by the sound of Barry Manilow songs. Though the butt of the joke on the show for a year, Manilow gamely appeared on the 1993 episode marking the child’s first birthday, performing the Manilow-Panzer tune, ‘I Am Your Child’. More recently Manilow made an appearance on the television show Ally McBeal, again gamely going along with his role as punchline. Does Manilow’s willingness to participate in his own denigration denote a surrender to those who would reduce him to punchline status? Or does it merely mark Manilow’s realisation that, after a career that is longer in years than the lives of many of his peers, he really has nothing to prove to anyone? As Ed Sciaky puts it, “What does Barry care? He’s got fans all over the world who love him.”

  And when it comes right down to it, it’s the audience that makes or breaks a performer’s career, not the critics, and certainly not the cynics. HerbBernstein likes to tell a story about the late comedian Totie Fields that illustrates the point.

  “Totie Fields was working at a room here in New York – it’s no longer in existence – called the Band Box in what was at the time the Americana Hotel. She performed there and the critics said she was dirty, she’s not very funny, she’s fat – every slander you could think of. And I remember she said to me, ‘You know Herb, no one likes me except the audience.’”

  When all is said and done, this may well prove to be a fitting epitaph for Barry Manilow: After a lifetime of singing to the world, no one liked him – except the millions who did.

  15 When asked by the Duke to play the Palace’s house organ, Barry played the McDonald’s jingle. Take that, Paul Simon.

  16 Elton John tells a story that illustrates the point. One day one of his framed gold records fell off the wall, the glass in the frame shattering. Since the exposed record did have grooves, just like a normal LP, Elton decided to see what would happen if he tried to play the record. When he put the album on the turntable and lowered the needle, he discovered that his gold record was actually a gilded Barry Manilow album.

  Epilogue

  Ultimate Manilow

  Driving from my home in Evanston, Illinois to Milwaukee the first weekend in March 2002, I had a strong sense of deja vu. It was almost exactly two years ago that I was making this same trip after my editor at Omnibus Press approached me with the idea of writing a biography of Barry Manilow. Luckily the Manilow Live! tour was going to be in Milwaukee around that time, so I had made the drive up to catch successive shows in Milwaukee and Madison while I tried to decide if I wanted to commit a year or two of my life to writing about Barry Manilow. At the time the book seemed an almost ridiculous venture. Wasn’t Barry Manilow that guy we all danced to back in high school? The one who moaned sweet and low about weekends in New England while kids like me, landlocked in America’s heartland, clung to each other in sweaty ecstasy, hormones shifting into overdrive with every key change? Yeah, that was the guy. And here I was, two years later, book completed, making my way back to Milwaukee to see him again.

  Since the initial publication of this book in November, 2001, Barry Manilow has, to the surprise of many, once again managed to become a chart-topping pop artist. “You can’t get away from me,” Manilow joked at a recent concert. “I’m like Starbucks – I’m on every corner.”

  Indeed, for the first time in more years than some of his fans have been alive, Barry Manilow has earned a gold record with the Arista collection Ultimate Manilow, which debuted at an astonishing number three slot on Billboard’s album charts. (“It’s between Creed and Ludicrus – how perfect is that?” said Manilow during a recent concert appearance, adding, “I guess it’s better than being between The Barenaked Ladies and The Butthole Surfers. But I’m happy to be anywhere, ladies and gentlemen.”) The album is anticipated to go platinum. While UltimateManilow brings together twenty of Manilow’s familiar hits from the past, his nearly simultaneous release of the original album Here At The Mayflower marks not only his first collection of all-original compositions in 15 years, but also his jump from long-time home Arista Records to the Concord label. This album, too, charted, reaching number five among independent albums, making it a major success for the comparatively tiny record company.

  So, much had changed in that short time since my first trek to see Manilow in Milwaukee, and these changes were reflected in the concert I attended on March 3. Though the venue was smaller than the one in which he’d performed in Milwaukee two years previously, nearly every seat Riverside Theater was filled, no small feat considering the furious blizzard which had been raging outside all day. The crowd seemed pretty much the same, though, made up mostly of well-dressed white women of a certain age, some with husbands in reluctant tow. An elderly gentleman in the row in front of me brought a book, which he read, with the aid of a tiny flashlight, throughout the concert.

  In my notebook from that first Milwaukee concert, I’d written of Manilow’s entrance, “Jesus Christ should have such production values for the second coming.” Indeed, in that earlier concert the build-up to Manilow’s appearance had been a tooth-rattling, bone-shaking cacophony of
music, lights, video clips, smoke, and probably a few mirrors, too, had one cared to look. He was then a man, I thought at the time, trying just too damn hard. By contrast, the March 2002 concert opening was far more low-keyed than those of previous years, comparable, say, to the difference between a full body cavity search and a friendly handshake.

  But what had changed from the time I first saw him in Milwaukee to this more recent concert? Why did he then feel it necessary to try to shake people into submission, while now he greeted us with something more akin to a delicately murmured, “Why, how good of you to come. Tea?” Was it Manilow himself who’d changed? Or was it simply that Manilow had remained fixed, waiting for the world to come back around to him again? As he told the New York Times, “I was always cool. Everyone else is just catching up now.”

  As I sat in Milwaukee, watching Manilow run through what I know is very well-rehearsed “spontaneous” chatter with the audience (referring to his early appearance: “I looked like Britney Spearsbefore the boob job,” a line he would use, verbatim, in a radio interview three weeks later), I couldn’t help but think about the similarities between Manilow’s early success and his current resurgence in popularity.

  It was a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America that embraced Manilow then, a weary world longing for escape. Could it be merely coincidence that a post-9/11 world reacts to Manilow in exactly the same way?

  Indeed, and not surprisingly, Manilow has turned on the patriotism during the Barry Manilow Live 2002! tour. “If you take away something from tonight’s show, it would be don’t be afraid to do what you love to do,” Manilow exhorted the Milwaukee audience, going on to give thanks for a country in which citizens are free to do just that. I have to admit I groaned a bit as ‘America the Beautiful’ segued into the Manilow paean to patriotism ‘Let Freedom Ring’. But my groans gave way to an involuntary shout of laughter as an enormous American flag unfurled at the back of the stage, while red, white, and blue streamers were shot out of cannons over the audience, and an entire choir joined Barry on stage to go out with the rousing ‘It’s a Miracle’. It was the worst kind of emotional manipulation, no doubt about it. But you know what? No one heard my cynical laughter, because the audience was too busy standing, whistling, clapping, stomping, even crying in response to this finale. The floor was literally vibrating beneath my feet as the audience expressed its unconditional love and approval of their fair-haired Brooklyn boy. I could’ve laughed at the spectacle until I fell dead in the aisle, I realised, and it wouldn’t have made one bit of difference. My cynicism be damned – this guy knows his audience, and has known them all along.

  Of course Manilow had already been incredibly busy before I saw him that night in Milwaukee. The release of the new albums in November 2001 had been heralded with appearances on what seemed to be every TV show, radio show, newspaper and magazine (“Looks Like He Made It!” they all seem to be headlined) in the world. Radio station KOST in the Los Angeles/Orange County area credits Manilow with helping them jump from number five to number two in the ratings. “KOST had one of the hottest tickets in town,” said Station Manager Jhani Kaye of their ‘Lovesongs on the Coast’ concert with Manilow at The Grove in Anaheim. “Everyonewas calling 24/7 to see how they could obtain tickets to the show.” They would have had to be mighty quick to snag a ticket. Manilow’s concerts during this tour, much like the last, have sold out, sometimes in a matter of hours.

  In addition to his usual heavy concert schedule, Manilow has also made time for numerous charity events, his usual efforts on behalf of AIDS-related charities now expanded to include 9/11 related benefits as well. Another 9/11-influenced appearance was Manilow’s performance of ‘Let Freedom Ring’ at Super Bowl XVI, along with Patti LaBelle, Wynonna, and many others. “The lineup of musical acts at this year’s Super Bowl is so long,” wrote one newspaper reporter, “that you might think the football game was the sideshow.”

  While Manilow’s seeming comeback caught many off guard, not everyone is surprised to see Manilow back in the limelight again. Chuck Taylor, Senior Editor of Features at Billboard magazine in New York, for one, finds Manilow’s reappearance on the Billboard charts to be as natural as growing up and growing old.

  “By the turn of the new millennium, most record labels were focused on three things: mechanized youth pop, hip/hop, and hard rock,” writes Taylor. “Celine Dion was having a baby, so about the only thing out there for adults in 2001 was Enya and Sade. And they were both huge. The record industry seems to forget that today’s 45–50-year-olds were raised on rock’n’roll, that they grew up with music as a soundtrack to their lives. This demographic was hungry for new music, and all that was hitting the record racks was Ja Rule and Linkin Park and ‘N Sync. Along comes this guy they remember being embarrassed about liking when they were 15 or 20 – but now they’re grown up and don’t give a damn about what anyone thinks – and boom, Barry Manilow debuts at number three on the Billboard album charts.”

  But it couldn’t be simply a dearth of age appropriate artists that put Manilow back on the charts. “Melody, melody, melody,” explains Taylor. “It’s been the secret to success for any artist that’s been around longer than whatever pop’s latest trend is. Manilow is quintessential melody and those songs play out as well today as they did when we were dancing to them at the prom 25 years ago.”

  Manilow himself would seem to agree. During a March 21, 2002 interview with Terry Gross on National Public Radio’s program Fresh Air, Manilow responded to Gross’s question about his reactionto the constant needling he’s received from the critics over the years, saying, “It never really stopped me mostly because I believe in what I do. I listen to these songs – ‘Trying To Get The Feeling’, ‘This One’s For You’, ‘When October Goes’ – and I say, ‘I like them. I think they sound great. My band likes them, the audiences like them, so I just keep going. I just keep doing what I love doing, and hope there’s an audience out there for it.”

  And quite obviously there is. “It’s fascinating that Arista scored one of its most noteworthy successes of 2002 with a Barry Manilow collection,” says Chuck Taylor, “since by that time, the label’s new chief, L.A. Reid, had repositioned the company completely away from pop, capitalizing on the R&B/hip-hop mindset of the day. In fact, his only real breakthrough act at the time was Pink – whose potential longevity I liken to a bee’s life – and here comes, of all people, Manilow to put the label back in the headlines.” But, of course, by that time Manilow had already made the leap from Arista to Concord, with Ultimate Manilow being merely a leftover contractual commitment to his old label. “L.A. Reid had to have been horrified,” continues Taylor, “and surely, Clive Davis had the last, awfully hearty laugh.”

  But, of course, it’s Davis that Barry both credits for his success and blames for the fact that it’s only now that he’s been able to release an album of original material. “When I was on Arista, I was following Clive Davis’s lead,” Manilow told NPR’s Terri Gross. And it was Davis who led Manilow from one spectacular hit to another. But as the hits began to dwindle, the market to change, and Manilow to grow restless to get back to doing his own material, Davis, again and again, persuaded Manilow to postpone these ambitions. “He said he didn’t know what to do with an album of pop songs coming from somebody like me,” says Manilow. “So he kept advising me not to do it that year … He kept advising me to do event albums, which were a swing album, a big band album, a Christmas album, a tribute to Frank Sinatra, just cover songs from all sorts of eras, a show tune album. It didn’t bother me at all because that was the kind of music I grew up with, and I felt honored to be able to sing those songs that I loved so much. So I didn’t release an album of original materials for all those years because of that. But I did have a good time making those cover albums.”

  So it’s ironic that after all that time of following Clive’s advice,with the result being reviews ranging from the tepid to the outright hostile, Manilow is finally garnering his greatest critica
l success with the kind of album he wanted to do all along. “This Mayflower album has really been quite an experience,” Manilow says, “mostly because it’s such an original album, it’s so dear to me, but most of all because it’s getting such a spectacularly positive reaction from all of the people who hear it.”

  Says Billboard’s Taylor, “It’s interesting to note that the music journalists that are around in 2002 are the ones that were listening to Barry Manilow back in the Seventies. So the press you read about him now has a reminiscent spirit about it, if not being outright kind and heralding the guy’s talent. That has to be incredibly satisfying for Barry, considering it only took about 30 years for the press to give him a compliment.”

  But Barry Manilow has finally reached a place where he can afford to be generous toward his past detractors. “I forgave them, the little creeps, for making my life miserable all those years,” he says wryly of his tormentors. “I continue to get the opportunity to make the music I love to make, so that’s the best revenge.” And, with concert dates schedule worldwide throughout 2002, Barry Manilow will continue to exact this very special brand of revenge for the foreseeable future.

  The world has been through quite a lot since I finished this book. As we emerge from the disquieting aftermath of terror and sudden, shocking loss, we can’t help but look to an old familiar friend for comfort. Is it any wonder that Barry Manilow is there to help us through? And he was right there, all along.