Barry Manilow
Barry Manilow is an American singer and songwriter with a career spanning over sixty years. His hit recordings include "Could It Be Magic", "Looks Like We Made It", "Mandy", "I Write the Songs", "Ready to Take a Chance Again", "Can't Smile Without You", "Weekend in New England", and "Copacabana ".
Manilow has recorded and released 51 Top 40 singles on the Adult Contemporary Chart, including 13 that hit number one, 28 that appeared within the top ten, and 36 that reached the top twenty. He has released 13 platinum and six multi-platinum albums. Although not a favorite artist of music critics, Manilow has been praised by his peers in the recording industry. In the 1970s, Frank Sinatra predicted: "He's next."
As well as producing and arranging albums for himself and other artists, Manilow has written and performed songs for musicals, films, and commercials for corporations such as McDonald's, Pepsi Cola, and Band-Aid. He has been nominated for a Grammy Award as a producer, arranger and performer fifteen times from 1973 to 2015. He has also produced Grammy-nominated albums for Bette Midler, Dionne Warwick, Nancy Wilson, and Sarah Vaughan. Manilow has sold more than 85 million records as a solo artist worldwide, making him one of the world's bestselling artists.
Early life
Barry Manilow was born Barry Alan Pincus on June 17, 1943 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. He is the son of Harold Kelliher, a truck driver of Irish descent, and Edna Manilow. Barry's mother made his father change his name to Pincus, the name of a Jewish uncle of his father from the 1800s. Barry's parents divorced when he was a baby, and his mother's family allowed no further contact between Barry and his father. Barry's maternal grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants, and his paternal grandfather was Jewish, while his grandmother was a Catholic of Irish descent. His Irish roots trace back to Limerick, Ireland. Barry's grandfather had his surname changed to Manilow a few weeks before Barry's bar mitzvah.Manilow grew up in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn and graduated in 1961 from the now-defunct Eastern District High School. In high school, he met Susan Deixler, and they later married for a short time. He enrolled in the City College of New York, where he briefly studied before entering the New York College of Music. He also worked at CBS to pay his expenses while he was a student. Afterward he studied musical theater at Juilliard Performing Arts School.
Career
1960s
In 1964, Manilow met Bro Herrod, a CBS director, who asked him to arrange some songs for a musical adaptation of the melodrama, The Drunkard. Instead, Manilow wrote an entire original score. Herrod used Manilow's composition in the Off Broadway musical, which had an eight-year run at New York's 13th Street Repertory Theatre.During this time, Manilow began work as a commercial jingle writer and singer, which continued through the remainder of the 1960s. He performed many of the TV jingles he composed, including State Farm Insurance or Band-Aid, for which he adopted a childlike voice and wrote the music. His singing-only credits include commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pepsi, McDonald's, and Dr Pepper. Manilow was awarded an Honorary Clio at the 50th Anniversary Clio Awards in Las Vegas in 2009 for his 1960s work as a jingle writer and singer. When accepting the award, he said he learned the most about making pop music by working for three or four years as a writer in the jingle industry.
By 1967, Manilow was the musical director for the WCBS-TV series Callback, which premiered on January 27, 1968. He next conducted and arranged for Ed Sullivan's production company, arranging a new theme for The Late Show, while writing, producing, and singing his radio and television jingles. At the same time, he and Jeanne Lucas performed as a duo for a two-season run at Julius Monk's Upstairs at the Downstairs club in New York.
By 1969, Manilow was signed by Columbia/CBS Music vice-president and recording artist Tony Orlando, who went on to co-write with and produce Manilow and a group of studio musicians under the name "Featherbed" on Columbia Pictures's newly acquired Bell Records label."
1970s
Manilow recorded and accompanied artists on the piano for auditions and performances in the first two years of the 1970s. He recorded four tracks as Featherbed, produced by Tony Orlando on Bell Records. Three of the tracks were "Morning", a ballad; "Amy", a psychedelic-influenced pop song; and an early, uptempo version of his own co-composition "Could It Be Magic". The fourth tune recorded was "Rosalie Rosie," which was to be the flip side of "Could It Be Magic", but Bell Records went with "Morning" as the flip for Featherbed's second release instead. Neither of two singles released impacted the charts.Bette Midler saw Manilow's act in 1971 and chose him as her pianist at the Continental Baths in New York City that year, and subsequently as a producer on both her debut and second record albums, The Divine Miss M and Bette Midler. He also acted as her musical director on the tour mounted for her first album. In 1973, Manilow was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for his production role on The Divine Miss M at the 16th Grammy Awards. Manilow worked with Midler from 1971 to 1975.
After the Featherbed singles failed to impact on the music charts, in July 1973, Bell Records released the album Barry Manilow, which offered an eclectic mix of piano-driven pop and guitar-driven rock music, including a song called "I Am Your Child", which Manilow had composed with Marty Panzer.
Among other songs on the album were Jon Hendricks' vocalese jazz standard "Cloudburst", most successfully recorded by his group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross in 1959, and a slower-tempo version of "Could It Be Magic". The latter's music was based on Chopin's "Prelude in C Minor" and provided Donna Summer with one of her first hits. It was also covered by Take That in the 1990s, as an upbeat disco song.
In 1974, former CBS Records chief Clive Davis became temporary president of Bell with the goal of revitalizing Columbia Pictures's music division. With a $10 million investment by CPI, and a reorganization of the various Columbia Pictures legacy labels, Davis introduced Columbia Pictures' new record division, Arista, in November 1974, with Davis himself owning 20% of the venture. Bell had its final number 1 hit in January 1975 with Manilow's breakthrough 1974 release of the single "Mandy", followed shortly by the label's final hit, as well as its final single, "Look in My Eyes Pretty Woman" by Tony Orlando and Dawn, after which the more successful Bell albums were reissued on Arista. The final releases using the Bell imprint have the designation "Bell Records, Distributed by Arista Records, 1776 Broadway, New York, New York 10019" around the rim of the label.
Davis' reorganization efforts continued to bear fruit in 1974, with the release of Manilow's second album, Barry Manilow II, with "Mandy" as the lead single. Manilow had not wanted to record the song, which had originally been titled "Brandy" when recorded by its co-writer Scott English, but the song was included at Davis's insistence. The title was changed to "Mandy" during the recording session on August 20, 1974, because there had already been a song called "Brandy " performed by Looking Glass and released in 1972 on Davis's Epic label.
"Mandy" was the start of a string of hit singles and albums that lasted through the early 1980s, coming from the multi-platinum and multi-hit albums Tryin' to Get the Feeling, This One's for You, Even Now, and One Voice. Following the success of Barry Manilow II, the first Bell Records album was remixed and reissued on Arista Records as Barry Manilow I. When Manilow went on his first tour, he included in his show what he called "A V.S.M.", or "A Very Strange Medley", a sampling of some of the commercial jingles that he had written, composed, and/or sung in the 1960s. The medley appeared later on his triple-platinum 1977 album Barry Manilow Live.
Beginning with Manilow's March 22, 1975, appearance on American Bandstand to promote the second album, a productive friendship with Dick Clark started. Among their projects together were numerous appearances by Manilow on Clark's productions of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, singing his original seasonal favorite "It's Just Another New Year's Eve", American Bandstand anniversary shows, American Music Awards performances, and the 1985 television movie Copacabana, starring Manilow and executive produced by Clark.
Despite being a songwriter in his own right, several of Manilow's commercial successes were songs written by others. In addition to "Mandy", written by Scott English and Richard Kerr, other hits he did not write or compose include "Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again", "Weekend in New England", "Ships", "Looks Like We Made It", "Can't Smile Without You" and "Ready to Take a Chance Again". His number 1 hit "I Write the Songs" was composed by Bruce Johnston of The Beach Boys. According to album liner notes, Manilow did, however, perform co-production as well as arrangement duties on all the above tracks along with Ron Dante, most famous for his vocals on records by The Archies.
Manilow's breakthrough in Britain came with the release of Even Now, the first of many top-20 albums on that side of the Atlantic, which contained four singles that became major hits in the US. This was quickly followed by Manilow Magic The Best Of Barry Manilow, also known as Greatest Hits. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, ABC aired four variety television specials starring Manilow, who served as an executive producer. The Barry Manilow Special with Penny Marshall as his guest premiered on March 2, 1977, to an audience of 37 million. The special was nominated for four Emmys at the 29th Primetime Emmy Awards and won in the category of Outstanding Special–Comedy, Variety or Music. The Second Barry Manilow Special in 1978, with Ray Charles as his guest, was also nominated for four Emmys at the 30th Primetime Emmy Awards.
Manilow's "Ready to Take a Chance Again" originated in the film Foul Play, which also featured "Copacabana", from his fourth studio album Even Now. "Ready to Take a Chance Again" and its songwriters Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel were nominated that year for the "Best Original Song" Oscar at the 51st Academy Awards. On February 11, 1979, a concert from Manilow's sold-out dates from his Even Now Tour at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles aired on the HBO series Standing Room Only, which was the first pay-television show to pose a serious threat to network primetime specials for ratings. From the same tour in 1978, a one-hour special from Manilow's sold-out concert at the Royal Albert Hall aired in the UK.
On May 23, 1979, ABC aired The Third Barry Manilow Special, with John Denver as his guest. This special was nominated for two Emmy awards at the 31st Primetime Emmy Awards and won for Outstanding Choreography. Also in 1979, Manilow produced Dionne Warwick's "comeback" album Dionne, her first to go platinum. He scored a top ten hit of his own, in the fall of 1979, with the song "Ships" from the album One Voice.