Playgirl 1983 Interview With Barry Manilow

Source: http://scootertalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/playgirl-march-1993-cover-blurb-barry.html

PLAYGIRL
March 1983

Cover Blurb: BARRY MANILOW: POURS HIS HEART OUT

Barry Manilow: King Of Schmaltz,
With A Touch Of Class !

By Henry Schipper

It's an hour before show time at the Omni, Atlanta's classy new 14,000-seat entertainment arena, and Barry Manilow is in his dressing room, psyching himself up for another night on stage. A rail-thin fellow with a nose-heavy Brooklyn face that few would recognize in a crowd, he needs to spend this hour alone in his dressing room before the show, charging himself full of the energy and charisma needed to pull off the pop-star role.

"I have to make myself bigger," he had told me in his hotel room a few hours earlier, trying to explain the technique that facilitates the nightly metamorphosis. "I pump myself up like I'm pumpin' air into a tire. I couldn't go out there otherwise. I don't think anyone would notice me."

Manilow is, of course, noticed immediately by the sellout crowd of suddenly shrieking, bouquet-tossing fans as he strides across the runway and onto the circular, revolving stage. This is their Barry, no doubt about it, the one they know and love and came to see, the golden boy of Beautiful Music, whose songs like Mandy, Could It Be Magic and Tryin' To Get The Feeling Again have filled the airwaves since the early seventies.

In person, Manilow seems the living image of his misty album covers and pinup posters and the soaring, tidal wave sound. His voice billows to the far reaches of the Omni, and beyond. His long arms open to include the most distant fans. His smile is beatific, an intimate, majestic welcome. Barry, his music and his fans are one.

And then something strange begins to happen. After the opening number, and between every song, Manilow talks to the crowd, not quiet pastel talk that sets the ballad mood, but loud, palsy-walsy hamming that almost immediately breaks the spell. He clowns, wiggling an index finger high above the piano keys with a look of goofy staginess. He kvetches -- "So whaddaya want me to sing, already?" He cheerleads -- "I can see we got a HOT one tonight," skipping around, clapping, finishing every second song with a punch in the air and a look of toy challenge. He slips in a few mild but jarringly incongruous off-color cracks -- "I got a special surprise for you tonight; ya want me to whip it out?" He slaps himself upside the head -- "Gee, did I really say that?"

One can feel the letdown, the confusion, the loss of electricity in the crowd, but Manilow persists with this yucksterish spiel until it becomes apparent that this, and not the splendiferous superstar role, is what his hour of pumping was all about, that Manilow was pumping himself up into this kibbitzing Brooklynesque character, a larger-than-life version of his actual self with which to communicate with a coliseum full of people.

"Don't get me wrong, it's definitely me out there," Manilow would later tell me, concerned that I had misunderstood his earlier comment about preparing himself for the concert role. "I don't turn myself into this totally different person when I go on stage. I just make myself bigger, broader. That's just a larger version of me you see."

I met with the smaller, life-size version of Barry Manilow in his Los Angeles office a week after the Atlanta show. True to his word, he is much more like his gabby concert self than his exalted, love-entranced image. His energy is staticky, New Yorkish. He flops down in a cushy chair, throws one leg across the other, spreads his arms as he speaks, rearranges himself constantly. Manilow listens closely, with quick interest and no trace of guardedness or reserve.

He is wearing a billowy pastel-pink shirt and neatly creased jeans that accentuate his extremely long, extremely thin legs. He looks interesting -- not so pretty as his album covers but much more real. A chronic anxiety hovers about his looming blue eyes. The face is funny, thin, with orange-tinged hair carefully arrayed across his forehead and a dominant, low-hanging nose -- an ill-proportioned face that shifts at times into strikingly handsome place and reminds one, of all people, of Yve Montand.

The walls of Manilow's office are decorated with innumerable magazine covers celebrating his enormous success. Manilow has had no fewer than 27 consecutive top-40 hits since Mandy, his first release in 1974. All 10 of his albums have gone platinum, selling over a million copies. Most of them have sold 2, 3 and even 4 times that number.

In England, as well as in America, he has been a fabulously popular star. In 1978, some tens of thousands of ticket orders poured in within 24 hours of an announced performance at the 8,000-seat Royal Albert Hall; and, a few weeks later, a Manilow recording of the concert premiered at the top of the charts.

While Manilow's popularity, which peaked in the mid-seventies, has undoubtedly tailed off some in recent years, with his last two albums selling a mere million copies each, he has nonetheless held on to legions of fans who have remained loyal to him through the succeeding challenges of disco and New Wave.

At the time of our interview he was at the midway point of an 80-city tour, playing to sold-out 15,000-plus houses in such havens of Manilow-mania as Boise, Idaho, and Billings, Montana, venues where more hard-core rock or New Wave acts fear to tread.

But despite his huge success, and no doubt largely because of it, Manilow has never been treated kindly by critics, most of whom routinely deride his work as gushy and simpy, a soaring, orchestral, grandiose kind of emotional Muzak -- in a word, schmaltz.

"Sometimes I think I'm not cocky enough for them," Manilow tells me, speculating on the subject with an air of helpless self-acceptance. "I don't put up enough walls. I just throw it out there without couching it at all. I yell, 'I MISS YOU. COME HOME.' I don't think the critics are comfortable with that. They'd rather hear some guy sing, 'Take it or leave it.'

"I've never been fashionable. All those people at the Omni are closet cases, closet Manilow fans. I've never heard anyone say they like my music." A trace of a blush surfaces as Manilow laughs. "And yet, we're the biggest act on the road. I have this image of people closing the doors and pulling the blinds and then putting my records on really soft, or putting earphones on so no one will know they're listening to me."

Manilow assesses his critics and fans without harshness. If he is a touch defensive, it is a quiet, puzzled defensiveness that occasionally sharpens into a kind of amazed pique. Manilow, a born musician who was improvising at the piano as soon as he could walk, and listening to jazz radio under his pillow before he started junior high, is genuinely fond of his music -- as music -- and it perplexes and offends him to be dispatched as a romantic vulgarian.

"I never think of my music as romantic. I think if I thought of it that way it would come off even more cloying and saccharine than the critics already say it does. I think of it as passion. I think of it as reality. I try to give these songs as much dignity as I can. I try to pump them full of class.

"I never imagined I would wind up being thought of as the King of Schmaltz. I mean, me, who came out of loving Laura Nyro and Edgar Winter and Joni Mitchell. I wasn't a hippie, but I was real close, you know. I was such a snob when it came to pop music. I was so insulted when they began calling me that."

Considering Manilow's fair-haired, treacly image and middle-American appeal, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that he was born and raised in the rough-and-tumble bowels of Brooklyn, New York -- Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to be exact -- a lower-middle-class neighborhood he now compares to Dresden after the Second World War.

The son of working-class Jewish parents who divorced when he was 2, Manilow was largely brought up by grandparents until he was 13, with his mother living in Manhattan and managing a toy factory to provide for them all. Things became easier when she remarried, but not much. Although Manilow was passionate about music and obviously gifted, he could not afford further study beyond high school. As a child, he never even daydreamed of one day finding fame and fortune as a musician or of pursuing any kind of musical career.

"You must realize where all this started," he says, with a gesture that includes the magazine covers on his left and a wedding-cake-white piano on his right. "This is not a silver-spoon-in-the-mouth story. I come from nothing, from very poor people who said, 'You go do your thing but hey, we gotta survive.' 'You can't go to college. I'm sorry Barry,' my mother said. 'You have to go out and earn your living now.' There was no money to send me to Juilliard.

"I was musical. Everyone knew it, even me. I knew I was the most musical person I'd ever met. I could always sit at a piano and play anything. I understood everything musically. But it never occurred to me to make my living at it. After high school I got married [to a high school sweetheart from whom he separated after a year and a half. Manilow is currently single and unattached], went to New York City and got a job in the mailroom at CBS. You come from where I come from and you don't go into show business. You need that Friday-afternoon check. You need that security. I mean, the last thing on my mind at the time was music."

As fate would have it, however, the mailroom at CBS, where every second worker was an aspiring entertainer, and where pianos beckoned on every floor, was a hothouse of musical activity. Before he knew what was happening, Manilow found himself accompanying countless singers at auditions and in great demand as a musical coach. He had started working toward a degree in advertising at City College ("it was the first subject listed in the catalog; it seemed like a safe, secure career"), but his heart was elsewhere.

Finally, after much indecision, he summoned the courage to go for the music and passed an entrance exam at the New York College of Music. The school, which later merged with Juilliard, threw Manilow even more completely into New York's vast, multifaceted musical scene. His former CBS employers called him back to direct the music for a local television series. He began a lucrative sideline writing commercial jingles (You Deserve a Break Today; State Farm Is There; Join The Pepsi People are all his).

Then, in the spring of 1972, Manilow got a call from an agent who wanted to know if he would be interested in something different, accompanying singers at an offbeat sort of venue -- a gay steam house-nightclub called the Continental Baths. Manilow agreed and soon found himself paired with an up-and-coming young singer who was making a name for herself as the most outrageous chanteuse in town -- Bette Midler. Despite their obvious differences, Manilow and Midler had much in common.

"'Two Jewish egomaniacs,' that's how she describes it," Manilow says, smiling broadly at the memory of those days. "It seemed like it would never work -- Bette's so wild and I'm so clean-cut. But that was exactly what we both needed. I needed someone to bring me out, and she needed someone to hold her back and organize her. She says she always relaxes when she's with me. And I always laugh when I'm with her. I didn't have any problem with her sense of humor. I find it very, very warm. I laughed at everything she did. I tell you, I was the laughing piano man."

And also, before long, the singing piano man. When the unlikely duo began to tour, Manilow who was working on his first album, opened the act with some of his own songs. One of them, Mandy, was released as a single. It became the monster hit of 1974, not only launching his enormously successful solo career, but turning him into an overnight pop idol as well, a male torch singer whose fans were literally fainting in the aisles. The transition, he recalls, was not entirely happy.

"Suddenly my life was out of control. Success literally exploded over me, wrenching me out of what had been a normal life and thrusting me into something quite different. My roots were pulled up, out of New York, out of my apartment and into Beverly Hills, limousines, hotel rooms, running around with bands. The first three or four years after Mandy were insane, with records going gold every 10 minutes and awards falling left and right. For a while I was just throwing on tuxedos without knowing who to thank for which one. Of course, it was all very flattering, but on another level it was terrifying."

Manilow pauses, his eyes narrowing with a kind of tense vulnerability. "Why, why were they acting so -- fanatically? I remember one night I was in a bathroom in Memphis, listening to a tribute to me on the radio while I was shaving, thanking me for making so many people so happy, and I started to cry. I was really out there. People were acting like I was the Second Coming, and it was very difficult to deal with."

If Manilow still suffers any confusion over the unreal extravagance of his success, he doesn't show it. He seems perfectly self-possessed and on excellent, grateful terms not only with stardom, but with the music that made it all happen. He's not fussy about fine lines between classical, avant-garde, real rock 'n' roll and middle-of-the-road. Or commercials, for that matter.

"God, I learned a lot writing jingles. I'm telling you it was the best training ground, competing to write these 30-second pop songs. That's really the college. That's really where I learned it."

Is there any difference between a pop song and a commercial, other than the fact that one is longer?

Manilow expels an uncomfortable sigh. "I would say that there . . . gee, I could get myself in a lot of trouble here but, . . . there's not a bit of a difference."

Are pop songs little more than three-minute commercials about love?

"Oh God, I would hate to say that. Because there are classics. You can't consider All the Way [a vintage Sammy Cahn song] a commercial, but there are parts of it, the basic structure - -" Manilow begins to sing the tune: "And when somebody loves you/It's no good unless she loves you -- CHEVROLET! -- couldn't you imagine someone singing that right back to you? I don't know. Hey Jude -- is that a commercial? I dunno. I dunno. If someone told me to write a song about a car called Jude, would I write Hey Jude? I doubt it. I mean, that's genius we're talking about. But is it just a bigger commercial? It's simple, it's broad, you can sing it right back. There are similarities."

Music is music. The components are essentially the same. If it moves you, it's valid. And Manilow's songs, commercially tinged or not, do move people. And yet, some sadness comes through when Manilow concedes that much of what he writes is not truly satisfying on a personal musical level, since it is largely conceived with an eye toward topping the charts, and that a price has been paid in terms of his own musical freedom and creative processes.

"Every year it gets harder and harder to write what feels good. Every time I sit down to write the fall crop I promise myself I won't be affected by the fact that I have to have a hit. It starts off alright, but then as soon as I feel I'm onto something I hear a little buzz in the back of my head that gets louder and louder and says, 'This could be a hit. Why don't you make it into that, go after the hook,' and I start to push it. I don't know how to stop that now. It just gets more and more difficult to do.

"But there are still a few songs that are just my babies, that come from the heart. I always slip one or two on every album. That's why I write the hits, because I want the stuff I care deeply about to get out there. I'd hate to be Stephen Sondheim. How frustrated he must be. He writes such great songs, but they don't sell."

Yes, but at least Sondheim has the artistic satisfaction.

"Oh, I find good in all the music I do, even the dumb ones," Manilow says, sounding like an indulgent poppa. "I always put in something that I know is fine, a subtle chord change or an unexpected solo."

Isn't that a meager, compensatory kind of satisfaction -- slipping in a bit of musical expertise on songs otherwise contrived for the market?

"Well . . .? So . . .?" Manilow replies, his voice trailing but stubborn. "So sometimes, sometimes you've got to roll with it. They can't all be gems, y'know."

The remark is not cynical. It really isn't. Manilow would obviously still like to write wandering original songs without aborting them into pop hits, but he accepts the compromises and frustrations with the unkvetching thankful pragmatism of one who came from nothing, never expected much, and who knows better than to knock the gift horse of his career. Indeed, there is a personal integrity in this acceptance, so honest and ingenuous that he seems to suffer no jadedness nor corruption as a result. Somehow, it all seems negligible in the context of the great good fortune of his career.

"Who would have thought, who would have predicted, that I would wind up where I am? I backed into the whole thing. It was all a beautiful, lovely accident," he marvels.

"No, I don't feel cynical. If I ever became cynical I would lose the whole thing. I would lose the career. I just know it," Manilow adds, with a shuddering, curiously romantic expression that seems to say that only true believers are blessed with magic, and let the compromises be damned.

Originally posted 2/10/2007 08:21:00 AM