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| April 18, 2002 | The Ledger Online
(Lakeland, FL) | "Writes Songs, And Knows How To Sing Them" by Bill Dean, review of Barry's concert at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, FL (April 16, 2002) |
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| The girls in the 10th row didn't get what they really wanted Tuesday night. That was for Barry Manilow to pick "Mary" out of the audience and sing "Can't Smile Without You" to her. Tuesday at Clearwater's Ruth Eckerd Hall, the four bounced up and down all night, each holding a sign that, read together, said "Barry" "Pick" "Mary." Mary's sign, held in outstretched hands overhead, was a singular red arrow pointing downward -- to her. The crown prince of 1970s pop-ballads no doubt saw the signs, but passed Tuesday night on what's become a singular moment on recent tours: Picking a lucky gal out of the crowd to serenade with the song. But forget that omission. Mary and pals -- along with the 2,146 others who packed Tuesday's sold-out show -- gleefully enjoyed just about everything else the singer/pianist had in store for them. That included all his other major hits -- "Mandy," "Looks Like We Made It" and "I Write the Songs" among others -- a winning set of tunes from his new concept album, and a patriotic finish that would've made Colin Powell proud. [Barry] combines humor (self-effacing and otherwise) and a completely natural style as musical actor/storyteller that works every time. As he told the audience, he was just a kid from Brooklyn, N.Y., who honed his craft by overdubbing his own demos until "Mandy" landed him on "American Bandstand" in 1974. "I had long, blond hair down to my shoulders, beads and bell-bottoms," he said from behind the piano. "I looked like Britney Spears ... before the (breast surgery)." Decked out in a three-piece, dark suit and backed by a 15-piece band including a nine-member horn section, he alternated easily between career anecdotes, belting out upbeat numbers ("Copacabana," "It's a Miracle") and singing those ballads that rescued him from writing jingles for Coca-Cola and Stridex ("Give your face something to smile about!"). Along with "Even Now" and "This One's For You," the latter included several off his latest album, "Here at the Mayflower," in which each song tells the story of different occupants at the fictionalized apartment building. And that was Manilow at his most relaxed and captivating moments: recounting the love of an elderly couple in "Apartment 6C: Not What You See" or a doomed big-mouth in "Elevator Operator: Freddie Said." The show ended with the patriotic "Let Freedom Ring" and uplifting "It's a Miracle" -- both sung with a 21-voice youth chorus onstage and a large American flag as a backdrop. Introducing them, Manilow implored the audience to "Do what you love to do with your life." While Mary and her three friends didn't get everything they wanted, it was clear Tuesday that Manilow has done exactly that. And for that, Mary and everyone else, was happy. |
| April 18, 2002 | Atlanta Journal-Constitution | "Thursday Peach Buzz: No static for Manilow this time around" by Richard L. Eldredge, interview promoting Barry's appearances at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, GA (April 18-19, 2002) |
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| Thanks to "Ultimate Manilow," a mega-selling, greatest hits package released by Arista Records, his former label, singer-songwriter Barry Manilow won't be getting summer vacation this year. "The Atlanta tour dates were supposed to be it, but this resurgence thing has been beyond belief," Manilow told Buzz Wednesday from Florida. "I didn't even pull a Celine Dion and take two years off to have a baby. I haven't gone anywhere and still the sales figures are mind-boggling." The CD is currently perched at the No. 6 position on Billboard's Top Internet Albums sales chart. The singer's theory? Listeners wanted a familiar friend singing old favorites in the months following Sept. 11, when "Ultimate" came out with a big TV advertising blitz. "I'm feeling it in the rooms whether I'm performing in stadiums or theaters like the Fox. There's a comfort factor and I'm grateful." On this tour, Manilow is also introducing fans to tunes from his new studio album, "Here at the Mayflower," a smart, critically acclaimed, song cycle about folks living in a New York tenement. "As you know, the critics and I have never had the closest of relationships," cracks Manilow, "but I haven't gotten one single lousy review on this album. I think I'm dreaming." When he finishes his tour, Manilow will head into the studio with old pal and new Concord Records label mate, jazz vocalist Diane Schuur, to produce "Midnight Paradise Cafe," a sort-of prequel to his 1984 jazz project, "2 a.m. Paradise Cafe." The original "Cafe" featured many of his musical idols, including Sarah Vaughn, Mel Torme and Gerry Mulligan who have all now passed away. "It was just a euphoric experience," says Manilow of the sessions. While the singer admits he enjoyed participating in the highly addictive VH-1 "Behind The Music" focusing on friend and former employer Bette Midler, fans shouldn't expect an edition devoted to him. Says Manilow: "They've called and asked every other year but they want drama and headlines. Mine would be boring as ..." |
| April 17, 2002 | St. Petersburg Times | "Manilow tells his stories expertly" by Gina Vivinetto, review of Barry's concert at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, FL (April 16, 2002) |
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| Barry Manilow's sold-out Ruth Eckerd Hall performance Tuesday reminded 2,150 fans why the singer's music endures: It's the stories. Manilow, 55, whose first love was the theatre, scored dozens of Top 40 hits in the 1970s with tunes about poor heartbroken "Mandy," that couple spending the "Weekend (together) in New England" and, most famously, Rico and Lola, kicking up their heels and getting into trouble at the "Copacabana." Manilow brought all those numbers and more in a dazzling two-hour show that included polished pop, ballads, jazzy tunes and much Broadway fare, including originals from Manilow's upcoming musical Harmony. The singer, dressed in an impeccable navy pin-striped suit, kicked things off with a dance house version of "I'm Comin' Back," complete with staccato hip-hop drumbeats and strobe lights. His huge band included a horn section that punched up that number and many more. Next came a zesty medley celebrating hope and resilience -- two of Manilow's favorite themes -- that included "Ready To Take A Chance Again" and "Daybreak." Certainly no one could accuse Manilow of being glum; his tunes could make a pessimist jump up with pom poms at the thought of a new day. Many fans did jump up, dancing, as Manilow dished the more bouncy songs, including the rollicking "Bandstand Boogie," an ode to Dick Clark, rock 'n' roll and sheer teen verve. Manilow offered clever quips between songs, explaining to the younger fans that television's American Bandstand was essentially "MTV without the belly buttons and the dirty words." The wind chime sap of "Looks Like We Made It" was forgiven if just for Manilow's heartfelt delivery. He's a consummate showman, and he knows every trick in the book. Manilow's expressive face has a naive sheen one minute, and the next, he's all ribald and not above toying with a bit of saucy innuendo. He's fun to watch. Manilow shuffles, preens and occasionally lapses into eyebrow-raising white guy dancing and clapping. All of it is endearing. He finally slowed down, sitting at the baby grand to perform "Mandy." Manilow asked the house to turn the air conditioning down. "Humidity," Manilow joked. "Good for the voice, bad for the hair." Later, while using a handkerchief: "Sorry. Gotta blow my nose. With this nose, it may take a second. Talk amongst yourselves." Act II brought more fun, with Manilow devoting much of it to songs from last year's Here At The Mayflower, which he described as a concept album about the behind-the-scenes lives of folks living at a fictitious apartment building. Manilow, in a fresh suit, treated fans to the zingy bebop shuffle of "Freddie Said." But it was "Not What You See," a tender song about Esther and Joe, the Mayflower's oldest couple, octogenarians, whose bodies may be crumbling, but their hearts still flutter at the thought of each other. "Copacabana" -- of course he sang it -- never sounded so good, filled with Latin beats, blasting saxophones and trumpets, and Manilow's over-the-top delivery. Fans stood up to boogie, encouraged more by a glittery disco ball that was lowered from the ceiling mid-song. Manilow finished with "I Write The Songs," which, ironically, he did not write, before a rousing encore that featured the patriotic "Let Freedom Ring." |
| April 15, 2002 | The Florida Times-Union | "Barry Manilow plays T-U Center" by Nick Marino, review of Barry's concert at the Times-Union Center in Jacksonville, FL (April 14, 2002) |
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| Barry Manilow [has] two popular records out right now -- Ultimate Manilow and Here At The Mayflower -- thus explaining the demand for his Live 2002! tour, which hit the Times-Union Center Sunday night. Manilow stuck mostly to songs from those two records, which turned out to be a smart formula considering that Ultimate chronicles 20 of his biggest hits and Mayflower is probably the singers' best-reviewed album of new material in his nearly 30-year career. Manilow's lyrics, some of which he wrote and some of which he didn't, stuck mostly to his favorite topic -- relationships, especially those that have persevered through some unspecified hardship. People find comfort in Manilow's music, and it's easy to understand why: His stories dwell on love's redemption, without ever forcing you to consider what exactly love is being redeemed from. An astonishing amount of his catalog runs on this gasoline -- there's "Looks Like We Made It," "Ready To Take A Chance Again," "I Made It Through The Rain" and "Daybreak" just for starters... What's interesting about Manilow is that his best stuff actually gets his lapels dirty. The Mayflower song "Not What You See" is an uncommonly poignant meditation on aging that fairly riveted Sunday's audience. In it, Manilow sang a defiant 80-year-old's oral history of love, complete with all the lusty details that have made his long marriage cause for celebration. Manilow also performed two promising songs from his forthcoming Broadway musical Harmony, including a buoyant tune about staying optimistic in 1930s Germany. Not an easy thing to do. Harmony's love theme made the case for marriage. Getting married, it conceded, is a big risk. But to not get married is to leave yourself open to a lifetime of wondering what might have been. And then where would that lead you? Right back into one of Manilow's conventional songs, where hindsight is 20/20 and everyone's learned from their mistakes and the future is bright as the new morning sun. Those sentiments are all nice, and Manilow's most sympathetic fans are lucky to have him to deliver them so faithfully. For those who view his career with more detachment, it's encouraging to hear his newest record and Broadway project tackling more complicated subjects. Perhaps, after 27 years singing about other people's cloudbursts, Manilow himself has found redemption. |
| April 15, 2002 | Halls Shopper News
(Knoxville, TN) | "In Ohio with Manilow" by Jack Mabe, review of Barry's concert at Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, OH (April 2002) |
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| There was a considerable sprinkling of young people in the crowd, continuing a trend I noticed in New York in February. And why not? Good love songs never really go out of style, and [Barry] Manilow's latest album, a greatest hits collection titled "Ultimate Manilow," recently hit No. 3 on the Billboard charts, his highest charting album in years. It's an even more amazing feat when you stop to think that the last big hit on the disc came out the year Reagan was reelected. But there he was, sounding great, singing his heart out for two hours. The hits were all there, of course, but the highlights this night were the tunes from his last studio album, "Here at the Mayflower." Especially delicious were the heartbreaking "Not What You See," the disco-tinged "They Dance" and the uptempo "Come Monday" A special treat was his first encore, the rarely performed and never recorded "We Live on Borrowed Time" ... Manilow ended with a choir and the patriotic "Let Freedom Ring," which has become a staple of his shows since Sept. 11. He may not have really written all of the songs that make the whole world sing, but even now, nearly 30 years after "Mandy," Barry Manilow shows no signs of slowing down. On this, a perfect weekend in Cincinnati, he made 2,500 fans forget about life for a while and muse instead about love and harmony. Thanks, Barry. |
| April 12, 2002 | Hernando Today - Online | "Manilow deserves critical respect" by Michael D. Bates, promoting Barry's concert at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, FL (April 16, 2002) |
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| Give Barry Manilow credit. In his 30-plus year musical career he's produced 31 albums, had a Broadway show based on his hit song, "Copacabana," acted in numerous television shows, and wrote more TV commercial jingles than anyone would care to mention. The guy's got more money than he'll ever need. He's made his mark in music and established himself as a bonafide star ("legend" in the eyes of his multitudinous fans). He's received Grammy, Emmy and Tony awards and has been nominated for an Academy Award. So what's he doing still touring? And what business does he have writing more than a dozen new songs for yet another album? ("Here at The Mayflower," debuted late last year and is Barry's first compilation of all new original pop songs in years). Who cares? As long as he still has that voice and that penchant for writing great pop hooks, he's still in demand. If you have not heard any songs from "Here at the Mayflower," you're missing out on what I consider some of the finest songwriting I have heard in years from Barry. It's one of those concept albums, where each song is linked via a thematic hook. In this case, the songs are vignettes from each apartment dweller at the fictitious Mayflower hotel. Each tenant - from the down-and-out guy looking back at his past to the high-on-life hopeful looking for a break - has a story to tell. Barry infuses each person's story into a musical tapestry that resonates long after the song is over. Critics pan Barry Manilow for his over-the-top pop treatments. That's too bad. There's a place for every kind of music, be it rap, hip-hop, disco or the disposable pop currently peddled by the most recent 16-year-old flavor of the week. It's become hip to diss Manilow simply because it's always been done. Anything he puts out is automatically panned by critics who probably don't even bother to listen to the songs. Must be the same old thing, critics say, especially the younger ones who believe anything from the 1970s is not worthy of "serious music." They're afraid to buck the trend and praise a new Manilow album simply because they fear they won't be taken seriously by the musical elite. But tell the millions of fans who get teary-eyed when listening to a Manilow ballad that their music is crap. As long as a song means something to someone - no matter what genre - it serves a purpose. And Manilow has served that purpose for three decades - and continues to do so. I've seen Barry Manilow three times in concert; each time I am impressed by the energy of the show and the respect he gives his audience. Each show reverberates with a freshness. Unlike other aging pop singers, who simply show up and go through the motions, Barry makes it all feel like the first time. He doesn't cheat his fans. Barry recently set a sales record with the release of "Ultimate Manilow," a comprehensive single-CD collection of his top hits of all time. Twenty-seven years after "Mandy," the album won the highest chart debut of his career. "This is truly an astonishing feat and I'm thrilled to see that Barry Manilow is getting the recognition he deserves," said "L.A." Reid, president and CEO of Arista Records. To which I completely concur. |
| April 12, 2002 | The Florida Times-Union | "Barry Manilow perseveres Love him or hate him ..." by Nick Marino, interview with Barry promoting his concert at the Times-Union Center in Jacksonville, FL (April 14, 2002) |
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| "Walking from the wings to the center of the stage and greeting an audience and singing behind a stand-mike, I may as well have been on Mars," Barry Manilow said in an interview to preview his performance Sunday in Jacksonville. "It was just the worst, most uncomfortable place I could ever imagine being. And yet, from the very moment I did it, the audiences loved it. They never didn't like it, from the very first time I did it." At age 55, [Barry's] enjoying a popularity boom. He's written a forthcoming Broadway musical and is producing Diane Schuur's next album. His own 2001 record, Here At The Mayflower, drew unusually favorable reviews from cantankerous rock critics, and his 2002 greatest hits record, Ultimate Manilow, debuted at Billboard's No. 3 spot. Times-Union (TU): You're as hot right now as you've ever been with Ultimate Manilow. How did that happen? Barry Manilow (BM): I think it's a combination of a lot of things. No. 1, I was out there promoting the Mayflower album, so I was in the world. I was on Entertainment Tonight. I was there. And the Mayflower album was getting really good reviews and really good response, so that was helpful. And Arista took advantage of that, which they should, and they released this greatest hits album and it just exploded. I got a feeling it's a new generation that is discovering this category of music for the first time. That's what I think. I mean, those are the people who go into record stores. I don't think the fans who have been with me for all these years need another version of "Copacabana." I can't imagine them running into the stores to buy another version of "Mandy." I think it's a generation that didn't get it the first time. I mean, I look out at the crowds nightly, and they seem to be getting younger. Unless I'm nuts, unless everybody's had facelifts, they seem to be getting younger out there. TU: On one hand you have fans who love you to death; on the other, you are one of the most mocked artists in history. BM: I don't know how it happened, and I don't know why. I've always wanted that kind of career. I don't mind being first; I don't mind being third. But I hate being second. Second is kind of boring. It's somewhere in the middle. I like either being loved or hated. I've always wanted that career. I've always wanted to stir it up -- and I've got it. I've got that kind of career. When you mention my name, people go to battle for me or against me. I don't know what the problem has been, honestly. I don't know what the problem has been except that there was a couple years where I was annoyingly popular, like Celine [Dion] and like Michael Bolton and like Richard Marx and like Lionel Richie and like Michael Jackson. When you get that popular, I guess you've got to get ready to get killed. TU: Did you find that the years that you were annoyingly popular were your happiest years, when you felt the most confident and successful in your career? BM: No, I think those were the most unhappy years. I didn't feel like I was in charge. I felt like I was running to catch up. I felt like it was happening to somebody else and I felt like I didn't have the reins. I wasn't really in control of my career. TU: At what point did you realize that the two camps -- the people who loved you and the people who hated you -- were forming? BM: Right after "Mandy." Before "Mandy," I was the guy that people were pointing to to check out. I had nothing but good reviews. I was the guy that people were saying, "You gotta check this guy out." I was at the Troubadour in L.A. and I was at the Bottom Line in New York, and it was lines around the block. They all wanted to check me out ... it was very hip. Very, very hip. And then Clive found "Mandy" for me, and I found myself in this pop music singles world. And from then on in, it was a struggle. TU: When you're writing for someone else, do you ever write a few lines and think, "I want that for myself"? BM: No ... I did everything I have ever wanted to do in the world of music on [Mayflower]. I have hinted at them for the last 20 years, from a showtune album to a big-band album to all the pop albums. But on this album, I was able to do a little bit of all the things I've loved about music and lyric writing and performing. I didn't want to release this album. I loved it so much, I didn't want to go through all the critics telling me how it stinks. And by the way, that hasn't happened. This is like the most positively reviewed album I've ever had in my career. |
| April 12, 2002 | South Florida Sun-Sentinel | "Manilow shows classic style" by Sean Piccoli, review of Barry's concert at Sunrise Musical Theatre in Sunrise, FL (April 11, 2002) |
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| One of the earliest headliners at Sunrise Musical Theatre, pop crooner Barry Manilow, returned on Thursday to help bring down the curtain. Manilow and a 15-piece band played the first of three nights that may well be Sunrise's final paid pop concerts. When he finishes on Saturday, the 3,900-set auditorium, opened in 1976, officially changes hands and becomes a house of worship ... "We've had some great times in the old place," Manilow said near the start of a two-hour set. "Wonderful times in this old room." Manilow did his eager best to revive the memory with a brightly hued, sentimental program of his pop hits. Though he brought along material from a new album, Here at the Mayflower, his approach to performing was classic showbiz: clean readings and cheerful interpretations of his most familiar songs, some wrapped in nostalgic stories and light comic routines. Manilow dressed the part as well, jacket buttoned and tie knotted ... The band's arrangements were equally neatnick, crisp and straight forward and designed to give Manilow's blemish-free voice room to roam and emote. The crowd [gave] Manilow their full-throated support. It was an audience that included the singer's older, die hard fans and an unexpected number of younger spectators who would have come by Manilow through their parents. Manilow treated them to a sometimes schmaltzy song and dance routine in which he did all of the dancing and between songs lead the audience through personal highlights of a life devoted completely to entertainment. Describing his first appearance on network television in 1975 on American Bandstand to play "Mandy", he said he appeared to the nation in long, blonde hair and platform shoes. "I looked like Brittany Spears," he said. It seemed to be Manilow's way of out maneuvering his legion of critics, inoculating himself with a laugh at his own expense and bringing his fans in on the jokes. It was arguably one of the most entertaining elements of his pe
rformance. Manilow's perseverance in the face of withering career-long criticism for schmaltzy music has become almost heroic. At a time when "cool" is manufactured and cloned for the purpose of selling everything from pop music to Pop Tarts, Manilow's resolute lack of cool was refreshing and appropriate for the retirement of a venue that opened it's doors in the age before irony. |
| April 10, 2002 | The Jewish Star Times | "Manilow finds his Jewish soul in 'Harmony': Singer in concert at Sunrise Musical Theatre from April 11-13" by Marvin Glassman, promoting Barry's appearances at the Sunrise Musical Theatre in Sunrise, FL (April 11-13, 2002) |
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| There are entertainers who hold a special place in the Jewish community because of their unique statements about their identities. That was the case for Barbra Streisand in making the film Yentl and for Neil Diamond in his remake of The Jazz Singer. Then there is Barry Manilow. [He] wants to be known more as the composer who wrote a great musical set in the Holocaust, Harmony, based on the true story of the Comedian Harmonists, a group of young, German Jewish and gentile performers, who gained fame in Germany in the 1920s before becoming a threat to the Nazis in the [1930s]. "Despite what happened, the story is uplifting. The tragic part of their story moves me because I'm Jewish and because my relatives went through the Holocaust ... What is ironic is that I have been turned off from Judaism for years, believing in the simple concept that if I wasn't good, God would punish me. I feel different now. What we learned from the 9/11 tragedy and Harmony is that we all should be tolerant, accepting of ourselves and feel uplifted. It is the best way to fight tyranny. The best part of my success in my career is uplifting people's spirits with my music." [Manilow] was raised by his mother and his grandparents ... "We were very poor but I never knew it. I was given a secure upbringing and I always felt loved and wanted. Gramma and Grandpa taught me Jewish traditions and raised me to be polite, caring and sensitive, a gentleman." ... Manilow got started in music on the accordion but found his talent on the piano. "I hated the accordion. It seems that every Jewish kid has to play one. But when I played the piano, I knew the music would be my passion and my ticket out of Brooklyn." [Although] he has never performed in Israel, Manilow was voted as the No. 1 performer there in 1980. He sang "It's A Miracle" at a televised special of performers honoring Israel in 1978, and performed at a benefit in Washington for then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his wife in 1983. Manilow is involved in humanitarian efforts, such as the Starlight Foundation for terminally ill children and has contributed to the Simon Wiesenthal Institute in Los Angeles. B'nai B'rith International honored Manilow for his humanitarian efforts in 1978. Proceeds will be donated from his current concert tour to the Families for Freedom in New York in the aftermath of the recent terrorist bombings there. [ For more, see article for the Washington Jewish Week, "He wants musical set in Shoah to be his legacy" by Marvin Glassman (April 4, 2002) ]
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| April 9, 2002 | The Miami Herald | "Manilow proves his mettle" by Howard Cohen, in promotion of Barry's concerts at Sunrise Musical Theatre in Sunrise, FL (April 11-13, 2002) |
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| Barry Manilow [made] it through and he's hot again. In an era of either sullen rock, party rap or perky teen pop, Ultimate Manilow, a collection of his hits from 1974 to 1984, released to fulfill a contract with his former label, Arista, debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 two months ago. This is the highest entry of his four-decade career and his best Billboard showing since 1978's Even Now LP. "None of us expected that," an obviously pleased Manilow says on the phone from his California home. "Arista released greatest hits [albums] before and none of them have done that kind of thing. When people asked me at first, I attributed it to the younger generation going into record stores and going onto the Internet. They didn't live through it the first time. I can't imagine people who have been with me needing another version of 'Mandy.'" That's why Manilow invested so much effort into the finely crafted Here at the Mayflower, a project he has been contemplating for 20 years. Using computers, Manilow arranged and recorded all of the album's parts alone in his studio. The eclectic conceptual CD, released in November, is named for an apartment building near his childhood home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Each song peeks into an apartment to tell a fictional tale about its tenant. Mayflower's snappy first single, Turn the Radio Up, recalls his '70s hit "Daybreak" and hit the Top 25 of Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart. After a quarter-century with Arista, Manilow, 55, has landed in an unlikely place: the small independent jazz label, Concord. By selling 130,000 copies of Mayflower, so far, Manilow is already the label's top seller. "I just liked them and I wanted to be around them," Manilow says. "They spoke music and they didn't care about Britney Spears. They talked standards and arranging and production and spoke to me about artists I admired. I don't know how you sell records anymore. 'Clive [Davis] kept trying to get me to not release an original album. I had Mayflower in my hip pocket but he kept telling me not to do it because radio had changed so much. If I gave him an original pop album he says he couldn't sell it. What he wanted was 'event' albums." Manilow shifted his attention to jazz, swing, Broadway and even Sinatra tunes. One of these releases, 2:00 AM Paradise Caf�, released in 1984, boasted appearances by jazz luminaries Sarah Vaughan, Mel Torm� and Gerry Mulligan and the entire album was recorded in one take. "With that caliber of musicians you can do it," Manilow says. Manilow also wrote and produced an album for Nancy Wilson, setting music to unearthed Johnny Mercer lyrics Mercer's widow handed him. Later this year Manilow will do similar duty when he completes work on the next Diane Schuur CD. He's producing and writing songs for the jazz vocalist, whom he sees as his generation's Ella Fitzgerald. Says Manilow, "She's a fantastic singer, our Ella." |
| April 7, 2002 | The Cincinnati Enquirer | "Performance pure Manilow" by Jay Webber, review of Barry's concert at the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, OH (Thursday, April 4, 2002) |
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| Barry Manilow [packed] the Aronoff Center for the first of a three-night stay, performing some of his best new material in years. Mr. Manilow's concerts in recent years have been successful ... A terrific entertainer with a wildly devoted fan base, Mr. Manilow made the shows work despite the lack of surprise. This year, however, he spent nearly half the evening spotlighting his latest release, Here at the Mayflower. The Mayflower is named after an apartment complex, and each song on the CD tells a tale of a different resident. The songs were prefaced with brief backgrounds and often presented in a one-man-show theatrical style. The result was refreshing, with great storytelling and a variety that ranged from the be-bop "Freddie Said" and straight-forward "They Dance!" to the crooned "Now What You See." Mr. Manilow, of course, knows his audience. His fans are comfortable with the routine and love those sweeping ballads which have maintained his popularity nearly 30 years. Much of the remainder of the two-set, two-hour show was filled with hits or snippets of those [hits]. The best of the old stuff was the back-to-back heartbreakers "Even Now" and "Mandy"... |
| April 7, 2002 | The Washington Post | "The Songs Barry Manilow Wishes He Had Written" by David Segal |
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| Barry Manilow's mother, Edna, married for the second time when her only son was 13 years old. Her new husband, an Irish truck driver, brought to the union a love for jazz giants and Broadway shows, as well as a stack of extraordinary albums and a barely concealed contempt for Barry's instrument of choice and repetoire. "Without Willie Murphy I'd still be playing 'Hava Nagila' on the accordion," Manilow says. "He was one of the most sophisticated men I've ever met. He was one of those people who never went to college, couldn't afford to. He went into the Army and wound up working at the Schaefer brewery." Murphy tossed out the accordion and bought his stepson a smallish piano. And he introduced Manilow to the musicals "Carousel" and "The Most Happy Fella," and jazz musicians like Billy Strayhorn and Gerry Mulligan, and vocalists like Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. The effect on young Barry in the early '60s was like a blowtorch to tinder. Up to that moment, he was mostly indifferent to music. After that moment, he could think of nothing else, and his tastes never wandered far, even during the boom years of rock. "Pop stuff made no imprint on me. I just wasn't impressed by four chords. Elvis didn't do it for me. But jazz and Broadway tunes had such substance and such intelligence and such soul that it was something I could connect to." It might seem odd that one of the most popular artists of his generation didn't start with an appetite for pop and, it turns out, has never developed one. But Manilow swears that his decade-long reign over Top 40 radio was just about the last thing he imagined for himself. He wrote few of the songs that he made famous, and regards some of them only slightly more charitably than his critics do. The artists and bands who shared the airwaves with him from 1975 to 1985 bored him no end, and as a kid in Brooklyn when he watched "American Bandstand" -- whose theme music he eventually added lyrics to and sang -- his interest was feigned. So there is little pop on his list of 10 best-loved and most influential songs, which he's been asked by The Post to compile and which he is now listening to on a boombox in Minneapolis, a city where he's about to play the second of two sold-out shows. Aside from the Beatles, there's not a rock band in the bunch. With few exceptions, these are Willie Murphy selections. Manilow's days of consuming culture of any kind ended a long time ago. "The year that 'Laverne and Shirley' went off the air, I stopped listening and watching," says Manilow with a laugh, sitting at a round table in the Marquette Hotel's executive lounge. Manilow is a slightly weathered 55-year-old, his once-long blond hair now a close-cut rinse of highlights, his skin a sunlamp shade of orange-brown. There are wrinkles under his unretouched eyes and he's wearing a black Gap sweat shirt, black pants and black leather shoes. He's as skinny as ever. There is a gravity about him that seems surprising, given his reputation for onstage goofiness. In the next hour and a half, chatting as he listens to his favorite songs, he seems pretty reserved, despite breaking briefly into the occasional chorus. Mostly he comes off like a well-adjusted regular guy, prone to Yiddishisms and self-deprecating jokes, who just happened to be one of the biggest moneymakers in the history of pop. His place in that history is now being reconsidered. "Ultimate Manilow," a greatest-hits package, startled the record industry last month by climbing to No. 3 on Billboard's album chart. A tour that will bring him to MCI Center tonight is drawing huge and ecstatic crowds. More than that, the anti-Manilow fervor that dogged his career for years is waning ... "It's nicer than being called a [freaking] idiot," he says. "But I think I was annoyingly popular in the '70s. Everybody gets it who is that popular. Michael Jackson got it and Celine Dion got it and Michael Bolton got it and all of us who've been there when the public embraces you and radio embraces you, the critics say you stink. But I didn't believe it, I didn't believe I stunk. I was always surprised how mean-spirited people could be, to be so insulting. But," he adds, chuckling, "I forgave them." His fans never heeded the naysayers and, to judge from the crowd at the Orpheum in downtown Minneapolis later this night, they are still in love. The show starts with a 45-minute marathon of Manilow hits, the opening bars of which earn a blissful murmur of "awwws" ... It's mostly women, mostly bunched in the 40-to-55 range. Manilow arrives in a restrained-for-him blue three-piece suit, and starts the night with a message to the husbands who've been herded here by their wives. "It's Friday night, date night," he says, just before breaking in to "Looks Like We Made It." "For you gentlemen who were dragged here tonight, you're going to thank me in the long run." Manilow, who was married briefly at 21 and has never had kids -- "I'm not the marrying type," he explains -- seems an improbable sex symbol, in part because he lacks the edge of aloof restraint typical of heartthrobs. But there's an air of lusty delirium in this audience, and his shticky banter is designed in part to goose the pheromones out there. "I've done this 5,000 times with 5,000 women," he says after inviting a lady onstage to duet on "Can't Smile Without You." In the second hour, he digs into this new album, "Here at the Mayflower," and that's when he shines. Nobody in the crowd knows these numbers, and Manilow doesn't just sing them -- he sells them, like a door-to-door vacuum guy who comes to your home, demonstrates the merchandise and wins you over with gawky charm and brazen tugs at your heartstrings. He acts as much as he sings, imploring with his hands and, at one point, getting into senior-citizen character with a frumpy hat and scarf. When he's done with a ballad, he shakes his head and rolls his eyes like a lumberjack awed by the effort it took to lift a log. For some of the slower, more sentimental numbers, there are standing ovations, which are almost unheard of when artists unveil new material. Through it all, there's never a worry that he might seem overeager or unhip. His charm is precisely that he carries on the way audience members would if they were somehow to find themselves onstage before a huge crowd, singing show tunes. His lack of cool is part of the show, a bond with his fans. "He's such a dork," said one of them, clapping heartily after "Even Now." Two seats over, 24-year-old Marjorie Heap is spending the night crying, dancing and waving. "I took some flak for coming here," she says. "There are some older ladies at work who envy me, but I don't know many people my age who like him ... Coolness is in the eye of the beholder," Marjorie says cheerfully. "It's all opinion. I find him cool. But I'm an accountant, so there you go." Back when Manilow was known as Barry Alan Pincus, he couldn't afford sheet music. So when he decided to learn Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life," he had to do it by ear. He remembers playing the song on Willie Murphy's turntable, then sitting at his piano and straining to decode Strayhorn's remarkably complicated arrangement. It was the first song he "crawled into," as he puts it, and though it took a while, he eventually figured it out. "Those are the most sophisticated chords to any song ever written," Manilow says, as a recording of the song starts on a portable CD player that's parked on a coffee table. "I don't know how he gets back to the beginning. He just goes rambling through a myriad of key changes and somehow winds up in the right place. I don't know how you do that." Strayhorn, an acclaimed jazz composer and sometime Duke Ellington collaborator, was among the first artists who won over 13-year-old Barry. Others included Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal, who wrote "I'll Be Seeing You," and Harold Arlen, a composer who trained in Harlem's Cotton Club and went on to write many of Manilow's favorite tunes, including "Come Rain or Come Shine." Frank Sinatra's version is on the CD player, though to Manilow the singer isn't as important as the song. "It was a white man's blues. I just knew that it had a lot of soul to it, and then I found out it was written by a Jewish piano player from New York. I've never written anything that I think comes close, that I could actually handle without feeling like an idiot. You'd think Sinatra would have trouble with the blues, but not with a song like this. Something in those chord changes, something in the melody." Working through his stepfather's collection, Manilow fell in love with George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," the score of which he studies whenever he feels low on inspiration, and Frank Loesser's "The Most Happy Fella." At night he'd press a tiny radio to his ears to listen to a show deejayed by Symphony Sid, who played the cream of jazz artists, like Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. "Cloudburst" is a typical LH&R tune; it reworks a jazz standard by replacing instrumental solos with dense, scatlike lyrics, turning the singer into a kind of human saxophone. Mostly, young Barry was focused on arrangements. He fell hard for Judy Garland's version of "Carolina in the Morning" by studying how the tune was orchestrated. "Fast-forward to the end of this," he says as the song plays, "and you'll hear every one of my singles. The key changes, the huge endings. I just ripped it off for songs like 'Can't Smile Without You.'" After high school, little contemporary music made a dent on Manilow's musical education. Among the exceptions were Laura Nyro, whose lyrics Manilow would marvel at and whose tempos seemed both innovative and bewildering. "The tempos just stopped and started and stopped and started and her voice went from the bottom to the top and she broke all the rules, and yet somehow it all hung together," Manilow says, as "Eli's Coming" plays in the background. And he was captivated by the Beatles -- in particular, "Hey Jude." "It has a great build," he says as Paul McCartney sings the first verse. "Listen to where it starts and then think about where it ends, to this anthemic ending. I like it when a song starts someplace and ends up somewhere else. The first record I ever made, 'Could It Be Magic,' was totally modeled on 'Hey Jude.'" After attending what became known as the Juilliard School of Music, Manilow in the mid-60s took a job at CBS, stacking films, carrying the mail and running errands. Whenever possible, he'd sneak a seat at one of the pianos at the company's many rehearsal halls; eventually, enough people heard and liked his work for him to start a side business as an accompanist. That led to jobs with a variety of local singers, which led in turn to a three-year stint writing jingles for TV commercials. His first was for Dodge, then came tunes for State Farm Insurance, Band-Aids and vocal gigs for Dr. Pepper and Kentucky Fried Chicken, to name a few. He never wrote the words -- those were supplied by the agency -- but some of the music he created is still heard on TV. Forget about residuals; after earning $500 for writing the State Farm hook, he never saw another dime from it. At the time, Manilow had little interest in a recording career, even after he landed a job conducting and arranging for Bette Midler, then an up-and-coming singer. When Bell Records, a division of CBS Records, invited him in 1972 to record an album, he figured nothing would come of it. "I didn't want to get up onstage and entertain the public, but how could you turn it down? I thought I'd go into the studio, put these songs on a record and that'd be the end of it." The deal, though, was that Manilow had to play concerts to support the album. Reluctantly and with more than a little stage fright, he opened the second half of Midler's shows. "And I was really awful, but the audiences didn't think I was awful. They loved it. I mean they loved it, and I could not figure out what on earth they were loving. Believe me, Bette and I were stunned and totally confused, and when that tour ended I figured that would be it." The man who proved him wrong was Clive Davis, a producer and label executive with an almost supernatural ear for hits. "I wouldn't have had a pop career without Clive Davis," he says. "My first song was an eight-minute ballad based on a Chopin prelude and that's the direction I would have gone." Davis came across the rough draft of Manilow's second album the year he took control of Bell Records, soon renamed Arista. Davis thought the album was strong but lacked a single, so he found an up-tempo tune called "Brandy" and urged his new protege to record it. Manilow didn't love the tune, and as a songwriter hated the idea of covering someone else's material. But soon he'd retooled it, slowed the tempo, added a key change and altered the name, since there was another hit then called "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" (by Looking Glass, 1972). In 1975, "Mandy" caught on in a way that Manilow never dreamed. "It was totally surreal. You must realize that I didn't prepare for this at all." Eleven Top 10 singles would follow in the next five years including "Weekend in New England," "This One's for You" and "Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again." Many of the singles were written by others -- including, weirdly enough, "I Write the Songs," one of the dozens of tunes that Davis had discovered. Manilow felt somewhat alienated from his working persona during this era. The material wasn't always to his taste. He did get some of his own work onto singles -- including "Copacabana" and "I Made It Through the Rain" -- but more often he was performing songs he had reconstituted and complicated. His joy at the time was in locating the spirit of Willie Murphy's music in the songs he was polishing. Listen to "You'll Never Walk Alone," from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel," and you'll hear the origins of "Looks Like We Made It," he says. "A song like 'Can't Smile Without You' is four chords and a kindergarten lyric. It's not what I would have done, but when I found the 'Carolina in the Morning' in it and the vaudevilleness of it, with four key changes and a big ending that I could imagine with a top hat and a cane -- okay, I could produce that record, I could get behind it." Today, Manilow is one of the most profitably repackaged artists in history. "Mandy" alone has appeared on six albums, by conservative count. And yet "Ultimate," which offers "Mandy" yet again, was in high enough demand that for a week it was wedged on the charts between rockers Creed and the rapper Ludacris. ("How perfect is that?" he asks.) By his own standards, Manilow's own creations will always come up short. He set out to be Billy Strayhorn and ended up as someone else -- someone much richer and far more famous, but someone whom Willie Murphy would never have bothered to buy and someone whom Barry Alan Pincus wouldn't have deigned to dissect. Which is why, even today, his success still fills him with a sense of uneasy wonder. "I work with these great musicians year after year -- that's who I relate to. They couldn't sell out Radio City for a five-night stand. I have trouble figuring out why me and not them," he says, laughing. "Really. But somebody's got to be in that dressing room, and it might as well be me." |
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