Rolling Stone Magazine - Part 2

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Feats: Twenty-five Barry Manilow singles have, in consecutive order, reached the Top Forty. To date, no one else has ever managed this.

In 1978 five of his albums logged in at once on the charts - a record equaled only by Sinatra and Mathis.

In Great Britain, where he is uniformly adored, only he has received three platinum albums inside one twelve-month period - the Beatles never did this.

He owns an Emmy, a Tony, a Grammy (Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male, for "Copacabana"), accolades aplenty.

He is revered - worshiped even - in Japan, in Germany, in Latin America, in many places where irony is incomprehensible.

Ultimately, he knows why he succeeds. In part, it is the same reason he is also ridiculed:

"I'll tell you what you see," he says of his performance persona, eschewing
all coyness. "You see passion. I read an article someplace that said the true artist is an artist that can convey his passion across the footlights. The quality doesn't even matter - just so that you displayed the passion.

"For instance, Springsteen is not my cup of tea, but I get it. I understand what he's doing. He gets me because he is so passionate. At the very least, what you could say about me is that I am trying to convey my passion and that's what's working. Not the fact that I sing so well, because I don't sing so well. Not the fact that I write so well, because Billy Joel writes better pop stuff than I do. Not the fact that I can perform well, either. It's that I believe in what I do, and you get it. Now, some people don't get it! But my guts go out there onstage, take it or leave it. And that's very uncomfortable for a lot of people to witness, especially to be coming from a man."

His heart has been broken three times. If this is significant, it is only because heartbreak is his racket. A master of mushcraft (because someone has to be),
he gilds heartbreak, inlays it with bathos and life-shattering key changes.

Onstage he will ruefully announce, "For a guy who makes his living singing romantic songs, my romantic life has been for shit."

He will then lament his one-and-a-half-year marriage, which ended while in his early twenties, telling audiences, "I thought it was going to last forever."
(This constitutes one heartbreak; the other two he never tells me.)

But, in truth, marriage gives him the willies. "I don't believe in marriage," he says, citing the rubble of his own divorce and that of his parents, who parted during his infancy (he's seen his father, a truck driver, only a few times since).

"I haven't seen really happy (marriages). Either people are together because they have to be or they're miserable together and cheating or whatever."

And, anyway, relationship-wise, he thinks he's defective merchandise.
"I'm tough to live with because I'm tough on myself," he says, plaintively.

"I was uncomfortable being married. As soon as I signed the papers. I thought, now I have to be here. It's a good thing Linda is such a free spirit. We do live together - for five years now - but we're not tied together every night. We are lovers together, we're friends, and we're separate. And that's the way I like it.

"The few times I was ever really tied to someone, I was impossible to live with.
I'm just not made to be committed to one person. I need independence.
I need to have room, not clinging. If I know that I have a tender distance, then I'm all right. Maybe I'll get better at that, the more I get to like myself..."

Like so - and not surprisingly - he speaks the lingo of shrinkage fluently. He is one well-therapized customer, one who gives excellent couch, a behemoth among codependents.

That is, he aims to please all interplanetary life - which, as you might imagine, can at times be a tad futile if you happen to be Barry Manilow.

So, like a mule driver, he Works on Himself.

"I don't know who I am, but what I want to do is love him," he says. "I want to be able to say that I'm proud of this guy that I've become."
Or, "Wouldn't it be nice to trust yourself? To say, 'This is it, this is me.'"

Indeed, the first time he trusted himself, he unspooled his greatest musical achievement - a jazz album called 2:00 AM Paradise Cafe, released in 1984.
Lean, bluesy and heartfelt, the record boasts a peerless supporting cast, including Mel Tormé, Sarah Vaughan and Gerry Mulligan.

"Come on, can you imagine?" Manilow says, still aflutter with the memory.

"I was a wreck. I can't even talk about it without getting emotional. I gave myself permission to not worry about where the thing was gonna land. I took away all the police that I have in my head that say, 'Oh, no, that's not going to sell,' or 'No, all the people in Cleveland who love your pop stuff will not connect with that jazzy stuff. As soon as I allowed myself to stop being attached to the results, I wrote Paradise Cafe in one week. It was the most thrilling thing I've done."

I saw him turn black one day. Since he is perhaps the whitest of white musicians who breathe, this seemed noteworthy. It happened, albeit briefly, in a Hollywood rehearsal studio, where he and his tour band - an extremely facile group of players and singers - were attempting a new, heavily gospel-flavored arrange-ment of his bouncy early hit "It's a Miracle."

At the piano, he was released: he swayed, he soared, he became Andrae Crouch. It was as though a revival meeting had erupted, so exhilarating and soulful was this rendering. He had broken form entirely.

Afterward, he shook his head unhappily. "The only thing bothering me," he told everyone, "is that it feels like church. I don't want it to feel like church. It's
dishonest. It's not me. I do like the excitement. But how could we do this in, like, Kansas City? Don't you think people in the audience will say, 'What the hell is he doing?' It's too broad. Maybe I can square it up a little bit."

"Barry, it just shows another side of you," protested the keyboard player.
"You shouldn't feel you can't surprise people."

Debra Byrd, his longtime backup singer, who also happens to be black, seconded this: "You know, if you believe it, they'll believe it," she said. 'Its all in the approach. If you wanted to, you could put on a black bustier and writhe around in front of a black idol, too."

Unconvinced, he tamed the arrangement. "It didn't come from here," he later told me, pounding his chest for emphasis. "It just felt weird."

On meeting Madonna: "I saw her in the lobby at a Laura Nyro concert. She was
with Warren Beatty and Sandra Bernhard. I told her I liked her latest song, 'Cherish,' a lot: And she said (non-plussed), 'Not my favorite.' I said, Well, I like it.' She said, 'Thank you.'

She's an intriguing girl. I can see why she's a star. There'd be no place for her if
she weren't a star. You can't picture Madonna working as a secretary. She has convinced me that she is talented."

"Have you ever seen a thousand naked men with party hats on? It was insane."
We now engage in some Manilore, shocking in substance:

The preceding quote, excerpted from his 1987 (unghosted) memoir, Sweet Life: Adventures on the Way to Paradise, conjures his first impression of the Seventies, his decade of emergence.

Indeed, this would be his moment of epiphany. The night was New Year's Eve 1970, and the place was the Continental Baths, New York's then notorious gay-sauna-replete-with-entertainment-policy.

Up to this point, Barry Manilow could have been characterized as quite the singular nerd: a scrawny, numbingly self-conscious, Brooklyn-bred nascent lounge lizard who favored tight black suits and lugged a briefcase to gigs.
He had just started doing weekend piano accompaniment at the Baths - a job from hunger - wherein he nervously played show tunes for guys in towels.

On this particular evening, however, all that would change. On this night, he would finally embrace the rightful liberty that is afforded in show business.
Which is to say, he took off his clothes in public.

"All during the show, people kept passing drinks and joints up to me" he writes. (Drinks! Joints!) After midnight, nude men and women alike flounced in the house pool and, showing no regard for "my Jewish middle-class uptightness," beckoned
him in.

"I looked at myself with my nice black suit still on" he continues. "I was thinking I'd love to lose my inhibitions and jump in with the rest of them, but it goes against everything in me.

But metaphor waits for no man: After a protracted inner dialogue, he shed the suit and, cheered on by a chorus chlorinated in sexual ambiguity, got wet.
And so he writes. "'Welcome to the seventies!' I yelled as I hit the water."

He looks at tapes of himself conducting the business of his life during said decade. Invariably, he blanches and mumbles, "Gee, somebody smack this guy."
When flipping through old photographs of himself, he will ask aloud, "Who dressed this man?"

He sees elevator shoes and fat bell-bottoms and constricting blouses ablaze in rhinestones. He sees fakery and goosery. He never knew who to be onstage;
always he chose to be someone else.

"You get up there with the lights and the sound and the makeup, and your first
instinct is to be a phony," he says.

"Have you ever seen those old TV specials? Come on - this is an idiot on television! This is just a jerk. But I thought this was the way I was supposed to be: campy, giggly, charming, cute, silly, entertaining, goofy. By the fourth special, I was convinced I was a sex symbol.

"Oh, boy, this was Manilow Run Amuck! It's very, very difficult when you've got
millions of people applauding you and girls screaming nonstop. You say, 'Well,
maybe I should wear tight pants.' But I'm telling you now - I shouldn't! I ain't got it. I look at this and I cringe."

He has the career he never wanted. He never wanted to be Liberace; he wanted to be Hoagy Carmichael. His is the soul of an old jazzbo. He fantasizes about wearing berets and noodling on battered uprights in smoky Parisian dives.

His curse was his ear; he hears sweet. Sweet sells. It sells hamburgers and acne pads; so he became a jingle virtuoso, and he was assigned posterity by playing or singing or writing hummable odes for McDonald's and Stri-Dex and other sundries.

As an arranger, he packed resonance into a microcosm, he stoked swoons into
simple charts.

At the Baths, it fell to him to refine the raw tumult of Bette Midler, then an unwieldy chanteuse of epic potential. She ensnared him, took him on the road; he gave her context, created her in a sense. Their union begat vinyl; he coproduced her first and best recordings.

Then he won his own contract from Bell Records, which later became Arista, which released his first single, a song about a dog called Brandy that was retitled "Mandy" that quickly hit Number One, which firmly established Manilow as a frontman, thereby shackling him with the career he never wanted.

"Being the overambitious Jew that I am - this overachieving Brooklyn guy - I went for it," he says now.

"I said, 'Come on! Let's go!' I didn't like it, I didn't want it, I wasn't comfortable with it. But I figured, 'Who can turn down this opportunity?' I knew that it was too much. That there was no build. That I had no hope. It exploded with such ferocity that I have spent the last ten years trying to pick up the pieces."

Terrified of where he found himself, he lost himself. He'd gotten too big for his
sequins. Bad behavior surfaced.

"I didn't know what to do to alleviate the agony of this pressure," he recalls. "At that point, most people turn to drugs, and I can understand it, believe me. Not that I ever considered it. Instead, I hollered. I was abusive: bratty, throwing tantrums, being selfish, temperamental, inconsiderate. I was pretty much of a total asshole.

"I really believed that I was better than others, but in my heart I knew I wasn't. And the danger was that the people around you want to keep their jobs, so they indulge you. I could have gotten anything I wanted. I've watched the Anita Bakers and the - I don't want to mention names - but I see what they are going through. I've been there. All I can do is say a prayer for them and hope they get through this. My assholiness ran out after only a couple of years, thank God."

"Shouldn't PRINCE meet the Jewish Prince?" He meant it as a joke, but the
prospect of this apocalyptic confrontation brought me to Minnesota one chilly week.

The Manilow contingent had set aground on purple soil. Paisley Park, seat of the lovesexy empire, had been commandeered by Manilow, who decided to shore up his huge stage show on Prince's huge sound stage - for a fee. Logistics dictated as much.

His tour, then on hiatus, was to resume days later in nearby St. Paul. And so he infiltrated the mammoth white fortress, where doves fly in cages or are etched into stained-glass windows.

But, alas, the tiny host remained sealed in his upstairs lair. "I think he should come and greet me," said Manilow, with mock indignation. "It would be the hospitable thing to do: Prince meets the Jewish Prince."

During breaks, we wandered the corridors together, hoping for a glimpse. He is, it turns out, in awe of Prince.

"I heard this place was in trouble," he said, meaning the vast complex. "Not a
money-making enterprise, I heard." He reminisced about a Prince concert he'd seen in Los Angeles. "He was amazing," he said.

"I remember asking a promoter who worked with him, 'What's Prince like?' She said, 'Never met him.' I said, 'Never met him?' She said, 'No, he came in a box.' He came to his shows in a box! They wheeled him off the truck and all the way to the stage in a box! Did the show, got back in the box, wheeled him back to the truck, and he was gone!
Now that's a star! It never got that bad for me. I never had a box!"

Now and again, he will register at hotels under Elvis's old pseudonym, John Burrows. He hides only a little these days. Unlike Elvis, his fandemonium, while widespread and fervent, is not unmanageable. (Many of his most ardent fans, shamed by peers, keep their fealty secret - a prominent exception being Arsenio Hall, who defiantly gushes whenever Manilow visits his show.)

Like Elvis, however, he is pursued by a sisterhood possessed. Women who live for Barry Manilow don't want hanks of his hair or bed-linen tatters; they want inspiration. For them, he is an example. Says his friend and manager Garry Kief:

"When you've had the shit kicked out of you for fifteen years and you can still
breathe, maybe you finally start to believe that there is a God. People see that and respond to it."

He is, in effect, a patron saint of misfits and lonely hearts everywhere.

"We're all lonely in our lives," Manilow says, not making too much of this. But his music evinces hope, urging the downtrodden that, like him, they too can Make It Through the Rain.

Indeed, self-improvement is the nutmeat of his largely autobiographical stage show - which is more theater experience, less pop recital.

One elaborate, leg-kicking production number called "God Bless the Other 99" celebrates the bravado of those in life who try and invariably fail: "I learned more from failure than I learned from success,' he belts, a Busby Berkeley sage.
Another tune - "Please Don't Be Scared" - is a stirring paean to survival instincts.
He sprinkles concerts with cozy aphorisms like "You can give in, you can give out, but you can't give up."

It is like a motivational workshop for the chronically intimidated - only with better choreography.

"We all need somebody to say these things," he says, accepting the mantle.
"So if I've been chosen to do this, if that's what they want to hear - I'll do it. I'll tell 'em what I know so far. I've done everything else. I can't be doing it for the Number One records anymore, ever again. It's not satisfying. Nice, but un-satisfying I don't know - I feel better when I feel I'm giving to somebody. It's corny. But it's me."

Late one freezing night in St. Paul, a gaggle of women lingered outside the stage
door of the Ordway Music Theater, where they had just watched their shaman give a benefit performance. Most of them had seen the show several times before in various corners of the continent; this time they paid up to $250 apiece, mingling among Minnesotans in formal wear, to see it again.

They'd come from parts unknown and, their teeth chattering in the nippiness, bore such gifts as Mylar balloons and ruggelach cake. Upon exit, Manilow hurried over to them, took their cold hands and warmed them in his own.

"Thank you for waiting out here," he told them and fussed about their health. "You gotta get out of this wind!"

The next morning at a record signing in downtown Minneapolis, hundreds of women - and some self-conscious men - filed in serpentine fashion past a table where he bestowed his signature upon anything placed before him.

The ladies, aged mid-twenties to late forties, in varying physical contours, proffered mash notes and confessional platitudes. "I'm laid off right now, so 'Please Don't Be Scared' means a lot to me," said one.
Another echoed this, mentioning her sister's several suicide attempts.
"I work in a prison," yet another told him, "and you're my sanity."

Through all of this, he listened, served up perfunctory messages of goodwill, politely declined kiss requests (how to accommodate one and not incite a mob scene?) and kept on writing his name.

"I love you, too," he would say to those who needed to hear it. He said it more than once that day.

"I think he's a sad guy," he was saying one night in his St. Paul hotel suite.
Conversation had turned to Elton John, the only performer with whom Barry Manilow shared majority ownership, of the Seventies.

"We didn't know each other back then," he continued. "He's not a friend or anything. I've since bumped into him at a party now and then, or backstage when he came to see me or I went to see him. He's a survivor, but all the interviews I've ever read about him are sad interviews. He seems sad. I wish the best for him. I wish he could pull himself together. He's a talented guy, a wonderful singer, a good songwriter, a fancy dresser. Snappy, dapper dresser!
I just wish he was not sad. But I think he brings it on him-self. It seems to me that some of these people, they can do it, they can help them-selves, but they just..."

He stopped, tossed up his hand and grinned stupidly. He sees the pain the way
others see carpet lint. It is what he does. He can't help himself.

"Here I am, being the self-help guru again," he said, chuckling. "But what I'm
learning is that you don't have to be a victim, you know? You can take your life into your hands and you can just change things if you open your eyes. I think Elton needs a little nudge, that's all."

He shrugged and smiled and shrugged some more. It is what he does.