Journale 20

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Teen Beat - 1977

Barry Manilow, a dynamite and all around beautiful guy, is having his first TV special on ABC March 2nd. Barry agreed to meet the press to talk about this exciting event in his life and TEEN BEAT was on the scene... TB: Can you tell us something about your special? BM: This will be my very first special and it's very personal. It's in no way typical of TV specials. Many specials have been offered to me in the past but I waited until I was given the opportunity to do what I wanted to do. What I've done is take the music that everyone likes and use it in some interesting settings. Part of the show will be parts of a concert I did in Chicago for 18,000 people. Penny Marshall and my back-up group, Lady Flash are the only guests. TB: Did you choose Penny as your guests? BM: Yes, I choose Penny. She seemed like someone I could get along with, someone I could make mistakes with. She reminds me of a lot of people I went to high school with back in Brooklyn. TB: Sometimes concerts on television don't come across well. Will yours? BM: Yes, definitely. The enthusiasm of the crowds is what really makes it work. Everyone was so excited! TB: If your special is a success and you're offered a series what will you do? BM: I'd turn it down. I don't think I'd have enough to say every week. TB: How do you go about writing a song? BM: I work through lyrics. I don't think enough people are writing songs that way these days. On my special I'm dedicating "This One's For You" to my grandfather who died 3 years ago. It's originally a love song from a man to a woman, but I think it works very well between any two people who love each other. TB: Do your songs make you emotional? BM: Yes, always - the lyrics are always meaningful to me. I've sung "Could It Be Magic" so many times - hundreds and hundreds - and I still get involved everytime I perform it. I would be gypping myself and my audience if I didn't. It wouldn't work. I'll stop doing a song if it stops meaning anything to me. TB: What does it feel like to be on stage performing? BM: It feels like I'm floating! TB: What are your goals outside of music? BM: To improve myself. A few years ago I decided that I'd better stop smoking and I did. It was really hard to do but I was thrilled - even more thrilled, in fact, than when I got my first gold record. Smoking was one of my biggest flaws... TB: What are your other flaws? BM: I was afraid you'd ask that! I'm a perfectionist. I think I ask too much of myself and those I work with. I have to learn to relax a little. TB: You've been working so hard lately with your touring and special. Do you ever feel like going off and hiding somewhere? BM: No, not really. But I will take some time off in April to rethink everything. I don't think I'll be keeping up the pace that I have now. But I don't want to stop doing music if that's what you mean! I also might do some TV and maybe movies - just making records could get boring. TB: What do you think of your fans? BM: I really love them. When they come to a concert they're so excited... many of them are TEEN BEAT readers. It's really the greatest thing ever - I'm so glad that my fans are there... TB: Do you get a lot of fan mail? BM: Yes, about 3,000 letters a week. I read a lot of it - probably more than you think. I try to answer a lot of the letters. Sometimes what my fans think influences songs I'll do or what I'll put on an album. TB: On one of your albums you dedicate a song to Linda and Bagel. We know Bagel's your dog - who's Linda? BM: Linda's my lady. TB: Is it true that you were married once? Did your career have anything to do with your divorce? BM: Yes, I was married for about a year. 'It's either heart or art' as the saying goes. It's hard. You've got to throw everything into a career. Right now I'm really involved with my music and I'm enjoying every second of my success. I'm having the greatest time of my entire life! TB: What do you do when you're not working? BM: Well I play backgammon with Linda and spend time with my group - they've become my family. I don't go to parties much because I'm not comfortable at them. People gape at me and ask stupid questions. TB: Do you have any advice for our readers who would like to get into show business? BM: Don't do it unless you have something to say. You've got to do it for yourself - not for applause - not for glamour - for yourself. I decided to get into music fulltime 10 years ago. When I started out I didn't care about being successful. It never entered my mind. I had to do it for myself. Once you decide what you want you've got to go out and do it! Just make sure you have something to say!

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Everybody knows seven is supposed to be a lucky number. A pair of sevens? That's twice as lucky. Just ask Barry Manilow - 1977 was an incredibly lucky year for him! As last summer's temperatures climbed up over the 100 mark, five of Manilow's albums sped to the top of the record charts. Suddenly, Manilow became one of the hottest acts in show business. Up until three years ago, Barry Manilow was practically unknown, even though he had been working in show business for several years. Barry began making music as a kid, trading his accordion for piano lessons when he was 13. He kept playing and practicing, even while studying advertising in college. The music world quickly lured Barry away from a career in advertising. He started out as a pianist playing in countless cocktail lounges. Then he got a job as music director on a TV show called Callback. "I had to play every style of music from rock, jazz, opera, blues, to honky-tonk. You name it, I had to play it," he told Dynamite. Later when the Ed Sullivan Show needed a music director Barry landed the job, even though he was still in his early twenties. "I'd introduce myself as the new music director and they'd say, 'Go out get some Cokes, kid.' " Around this time Barry began writing and singing the jingles on commercials for everything from burgers and fried chicken to pimple remedies and insurance. (Now Barry sings the jingles as part of his show!) Playing piano for Bette Midler gave Barry an opportunity to introduce his music to large audiences. When he had enough material to record an album of his own, he showcased his songs during a part of Midler's shows. "That set-up was like singing in the middle of World War II," he said. "I had to follow an act I helped make unfollowable. I expected the audience to leave for refreshments when I came on." But they didn't. In fact, audiences liked Barry so much that his single "Mandy" hit the number one spot. "Mandy" was soon followed by "It's a Miracle" and "I Write the Songs." After this early success, Manilow grew even more determined to make it as a solo performer. "I've got to finish what I've started," he told Dynamite at that time. "I've got to keep writing songs and running around like crazy. I'll see how far I get and then I'll have to stop and think." Manilow did just that, and this year it paid off big. His most recent album, "Barry Manilow Live," stayed at the top of the charts all summer. Young and old fans couldn't get enough of Manilow's music, so they started buying his other albums. Soon every Manilow record was on the bestseller list. Today Barry Manilow is the country's top-selling pop singer. But even with all his success, Barry does not plan to slow down his pace. There will be more TV specials this year and a new album should be released next month. But why should he stop now? Barry Manilow has made it! By Chip Lovitt

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After Dark - 1976

Barry Manilow: WRITING THE SONGS TO GET THAT COULD-IT-BE-MAGIC FEELING AGAIN Guitar-toting, jean-jacketed Bruce Springsteen or no, the seventies are not shaping up as another age of rock. The strangle hold that rock music had on the ears, and hearts, of the listening public in the sixties is loosening, or loosened. The Beatles have gone their separate, unexciting ways; the Rolling Stones roll less and less; Joplin and Hendrix are dead. True, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Laura Nyro, and Janis lan are all making comebacks, but this time out they're doing it as very fine, very laidback songwriters, almost the "good gray poets" of their generation as opposed to the cult figures they once were. The "decadent" rock of the first years of the seventies, an early symptom of rock decline, has gone the way of all decadence. David Bowie is staging avant-garde art concerts, the New York Dolls have gone limp, and Alice Cooper is busy making TV specials with Vincent Price. And hustling up tickets to Bing Crosby concerts. Rock enthusiasts may not be happy about it, but American popular music is shedding its rock hide and becoming "popular," rather than amplified esoteric, once again. Everyone may not feel totally at home with the people's choice of John Denver or Olivia Newton-John or the Captain and Tennille, but that's the way it is. The generation that was buying revolution and liberation in the sixties is facing inflation ans recession in the seventies and is, along with a new generation for whom Dylan and Joplin are only myths, or less, making its own stars. Rock has become one possible element of the music we hear around us, subsumed into an overall pop style that can be equal parts rag, blues, jazz, swing, boogie, rock 'n' roll, rhythm and blues, country, or that new arrival, disco. There's a more total sound - pluralistic and eclectic - than there has been since the forties. For those who found the rock domination of the record industry something bordering on fascism, it's a breath of fresh air. The performer largely responsible for opening up the window of all of American pop was Bette Midler. This started in the early seventies with the first recessions. Heavy rock still saturated the FM airwaves, but there, wherever we turned, was Bette, live and in person, to remind us that, yeah, rock was terrific, but what was wrong with "Lullabye of Broadway" or "Boogie Woogie Bugler Boy" and "In the Mood," or get-up-and-dance-sit-down-and-bawl rock 'n' roll or even Brecht-Weill, The Wizard of Oz, Johnny Mercer, or Hoagy Carmichael? With the help of the people around her, Bette took the first giant steps towards hauling America's rich musical past out of the closet, and, mirabile dictu, the kids liked it! It seems only natural that a man who is emerging as one of the major songwriter-performers of the new-sound seventies should have been closely associated with Midler. Before becoming one of today's top recording artists, Barry Manilow served as Bette's music director for many a year and tour, and much of the wonderful, kicky, style-happy beauty of her first two albums is a direct result of Manilow the arranger having "painted a picture" orchestrally for each particular number. Manilow has, over the past two years or so, taken pop-rock eclecticism a few steps further than the unpredictable Miss M and into a commercial realm that is the native element of all pop music, past and present. Unlike Bette, Barry has had more than one hit single: "Mandy," "It's a Miracle," "Could It Be Magic?" and, this year, "I Write the Songs" and Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again." All have topped the charts and had solid runs, but rock critics have come down on Manilow for having made it to the Top Ten. "Mandy" and "Could It Be Magic?" (the last inspired by Chopin's Prelude in C-Minor, of all beautiful things) were, in their opinion, soft rock, a little too pretty, maybe nothing more than new, better-tasting bubblegum. However, the critics were missing the point. It was just this sort of soft, contemorary pop-rock for which the critics' darling Bette had, despite the raunch, been laying the groundwork, and for which the public, beset by inflation and Watergate and everything else, felt a hunger. Barry Manilow is a commercial artist, no doubt about it; but the three albums he has released so far prove that, in the right hands, commercial art can be as legitimate and inspired an art form as any. Some poets are made for private reading - others, for public listening. On his records, Manilow, his lyricists, his co-producer, and engineers consistently go for a pop song that will have both commercial and artistic value. Aside from the cuts that are bright, slaphappy celebrations of a particular musical-cultural style-"Avenue C" or "Bandstand Boogie" (with a particularly smart lyric by Bruce Sussman) - Manilow's songs deal with human emotions, the whole range of them, from the razor-sharp, love-withdrawal anger of 'I Wanna Be Somebody's Baby" (lyric by Enoch Anderson) to the wrenchingly ironic story-song of "Sandra," a liquor-nipping housewife who "Don't even know what she's missin' / And that's how she knows / What she missed"; from a quiet reassurance of love in "Sure As I'm Standin' Here" (lyric by Adrienne Anderson) to Manilow and Marty Panzer's sweetly eloquent tribute to their trade, "Beautiful Music."

Not mentioning one other zinger with a lyric by Enoch Anderson, "What's a Nice Boy like Me" (Doin' by the dance floor after hours / Dozin' over rows of / Whiskey Sours?") - boy, did they get that one right, right down to Manilow's dizzying disco tune and arrangement. With each song there is an attempt to capture a moment of emotion or reflection never before caught on records - not in this sophisticated a pop musical style, and rarely from as lyrically intelligent an angle. All this mastery of what might rightly be called the "pop art song," and a wall full of gold records too for singles "Mandy" and "I Write the Songs" and albums "Barry Manilow II" and "Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again." How, in the relatively short space of two years, has Barry Manilow done it? In a talk we had recently at his home in Lower Manhattan, Manilow himself - tall, sexy-skinny, generously exaggerated nose and mouth topped by sloe-eyed blue eyes and the trademark shoulder-length blond-red shag - doesn't seem to know either. He's a little put off by all the fame. However, clues to his success are apparent in his manner-friendly, talkative, obviously a highly energetic person who is, though, in almost total control of his energies - and in his instantly identifiable devotion, and attachment, to making music. Manilow even discusses his background (born in Brooklyn 29 years ago) and upbringing (public high school, some formal training) in musical terms. "It was the Andrews Sisters when I was three years old, with my mother bopping around the house. Folk songs when they gave me accordion lessons. When my stepfather came into the picture, it was Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer, all the jazz greats. Then it was show music. Then rock 'n' roll began to creep in. But for a while, I never paid much attention to it. I really did not like 'Rock around the Clock.' " Manilow smokes as we talk; despite his high-charged manner, he has put me almost immediately at ease. It's his openness and his rough charm, but mostly his own happiness in talking at length about the love of his life, music, that does it. "I think the Beatles finally convinced me there was something going on in rock. I said, 'Hold it, would you run that by me again?' After that, rock got better -better than the same old four chords, which never really turned me on. And Laura Nyro's "Eli" album - that was a great influence on my songwriting." Barry says he didn't really want to go into music "because of the risk," but when he did, he decided to go into it as an arranger. "When I listened to piece of music, I would get into the arrangement, not the singer. I would get completely off on the string parts, or I'd be asking myself, 'Why was he using a tympani roll there?' " Before he went into show business, though, Manilow worked the nine-to-five mines, "in the CBS mailroom, working my way up to film editing, while I went to school at night. Then I quit CBS for show business. I went out on the road playing for a singer. When I got back to New York after six months, CBS called me to be music director for 'Callback,' a weekly series that showcased young talent. I'd been vocal coaching and playing piano for everyone in New York, so I jumped at the offer. It was going to give me a chance to do arrangements. I did sixteen of them a week, from honky-tonk to opera to rock 'n' roll to legit Broadway stuff, sitting down, writing out parts for this little band I had. I learned more about arranging there than ever before - and about editing songs for time and commercial breaks and being tight. 'Callback' was on the air for two seasons and won an Emmy citation. I came out with quite a lot of knowledge. "Then I got a call from the Ed Sullivan people, asking me to be music director for a series of new pilots they were doing after the Sullivan show went off the air. That was my big network conducting debut." Without a pause, Manilow goes on to talk about what was probably one of the most crucial events of his professional life. "At the same time, I was still coaching singers all over the place." He grins. "I was the piano player in New York, very cheap, playing for anybody who wanted me, I got a call from the Continental Baths - they needed a sub for their piano player. I'd never been there before - it was, well, Turkish baths for men, and there would be girl singers singing there; it was really a mind blower. But I had the best time - it was the freest audience I ever worked with." "The player I was subbing for - Billy Cunningham, who's music directing Let My People Come now - was going on to something else and asked me if I wanted the job. I said, fine, because I was giving up the coaching business, and the Continental was paying me $125 for the hour. Great!" "And that's how I met Bette. She'd appeared there before and done very well, so they asked her back. Usually a singer got two rehearsals at the Baths, on a Thursday afternoon and the Saturday afternoon before the show. Well, Bette called for an extra rehearsal. 'Hello? This is Bette Midler. I want another reheasal on Tuesday.' 'oh, yeah? Who's gonna pay for it?' 'Oh, Steve [Ostrow, manager of the Continental] will pay.' 'Okay, come on over.' and she did, and it was death." "I thought I was hot shit, just coming back from the Sullivan gig, and she had just come back from killin' em as an opening act at Mr. Kelly's, so she thought she was hot stuff, so here were two egos bumping into each other with no reason to do it because both of us were nobodies. Well, Bette did not impress me at my house that afternoon, and I did not impress her. We met again Thursday at the Baths - same thing. Saturday afternoon - we didn't have a good time."

"Then Saturday night she came on and I had never seen anything like it. I was crying during the ballads, laughing at her jokes, playing my ass off at the piano! I was feeling this energy four feet from me - a comet, a meteor. I went back-stage and said, 'Whaa, wah, wow, how, how did you do that? What did you do?' And she said, 'Oh, really, did you like it?' at the time, I was getting into my own writing and starting to get into commercials [gaining fame at one point for singing McDonald's jingles]. I didn't want to play for another singer who was starting off all over again! But I stayed with her." "It's hard to turn Bette Midler down. You say no, she'll say yes." And, he adds wryly, "You say yes, she'll say no." Barry was "dabbling" in songwriting at the time - "my friends loved them. At least they wouldn't go to sleep" - and when Bette moved to the "Upstairs at the Downstairs," he got a chance to dabble in performing. "They wanted us to open for her with a cocktail-music segment. I said, 'The only way I'll do it is if I can sing some of these songs I wrote.' The bass player, Michael Federal, was also a singer. Michael and I and Kevin Elman, the drummer, put together a twenty-minute opening act, mostly my tunes. Michael would sing, or I'd sing, or we'd duet. The audience didn't throw tomatoes or talk; they would actually sit and listen to us." "But I was happy as Bette's arranger. We would do 'The Tonight Show,' and Bette would need a chart. I would get off on doing the string parts, the horns, I loved it. Then we went on the road, and I opened for her again." "After a couple of Carson shows and the tour, we went back to the "Upstairs," and it was sold out - an explosion had hit the city. Atlantic Records came down and gave her the contract for the first album. She went into the studio with Joel Dorn - it took about six months - and they decided it wasn't exactly ready. They asked me to come in and do the kind of thing I was doing for her live." "The credit was as producer - I had never been in a recording studio outside of the commercials! Orchestrating and producing an album? They hired some people to come and assist, but basically I called the shots. I was scared shitless. It was real scary the first time I heard my entire orchestration on 'Superstar' coming back over the speakers. Scary, but a real opportunity." "Around this time I met Ron Dante, my co-producer now. We met at a jingles session - me and Ronny and Melissa Manchester and Valerie Simpson, who wrote 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough.' What a quartet! We were doing vocals on a sodapop commercial that never got sold." "Ronny and I went out to lunch. I asked him to come back and listen to some rough cuts on Bette's album. He was freaked out! I showed him a song I'd written, 'Sweet Life,' on the first album. He said, 'Why don't we get some money and go in a studio and produce you as a singer?' It could've turned at that moment; I could've said, 'Ronny, why don't you go in and sing "Sweet Life" and we'll do the record for you."

"But it seemed like a nice way to get back into the studio again, with the strings and the horns. We found five thousand dollars, split the expenses, and made three demos. Bell Records bought me doing these singles. I said, 'Incredible! Great! "Sweet Life," "I Am Your Child," and "Sweetfather Jones". They said, 'We'll give you an album deal if you promise to go out on the road.' I said no. I did it twice in my life, so I was not going to do it three times. But the album was tempting..." At that point, Bette called to say she was going on tour again, when her album was finished. They worked out an arrangement where Barry would have a spot to sing in her act, pushing his album, while music directing for Midler. "I opened the second act, the suicide spot of the world. It was a big tour - in front of eight thousand people in an outdoor state-fair pavillion, for instance. I'd come out, unbilled, unannounced, to sing three original songs no one had ever heard before. We'd programmed it so Bette would end her first act with 'Do You Wanna Dance?,' a killer number the way she did it then. They'd be screaming and on their feet. She'd run offstage, and I would know the next thing they're gonna see is me. So there was a lot of throwing up backstage, a lot of getting very, very sick." "Barry Manilow I" came out in the middle of the tour and sold only 35,000 albums. However, disc jockeys were picking up on "Could It Be Magic?" and so were audiences. "We played the Red Rock Amphitheatre in Colorado, a theater carved right into this mountain, with only the mountain as backdrop. I sang 'Magic' and they went bananas - even with this long Chopin prelude and its being so different from Bette's act. That was my first standing ovation ever." The tour wound up at the Palace in New York, a historic moment in show-biz history. Manilow recalls, "We had been on the road for four and a half years. I didn't blame Bette for saying, 'Good night, folks, I'm going out to lunch!'" "At that point, I really went out on my own, with my group this time, playing all the same clubs - Paul's Mall, the Bijou in Philadelphia, the Great American Music Hall in Atlanta. All the rock 'n' roll clubs, and I was not a rock 'n' roller. I didn't yet have a real hit record. I took all the money from the commercials and put it into the tour. It was rough." "But little by little, it began to take off. Then I came back to New York and made another album. That was the time when Clive Davis took over as president of Bell Records and made it Arista". Davis was "cleaning house," dropping most artists, but Barry and Melissa Manchester remained under contract. "Clive showed me 'Mandy'-'Brandy,' as it was called originally. I recorded it, and I went out on the road again." "We got to L.A. to play the Troubadour, and by this time people had begun to hear of me, because I'd been plugging along all this time, you know, and 'Mandy' was climbing to number one. We were selling out - then I got word I was on the verge of bankruptcy. I literally could not afford to get me and the group back." But they made it. On the way back home, Barry picked up some good concert dates, and his popularity rose. "Bette called to say that she was going out again, but this time I could not go. 'It's a Miracle' had gone Top Ten, and Clive had been getting reactions from disc jockeys and the public about 'Could It Be Magic?' It had always gotten the best reaction of anything I'd ever done, people were always moved by it. Clive said, 'Why don't you pull it from the first album and edit it down to a single? If nothing happens, at least you'll have a third album out by then. Little by little it made headway until it also made Top Ten." Manilow is strong on giving credit where credit is due. "Clive has been very instrumental in this whole thing. He's a legend and a genius. I didn't have any track record, but he kept me on the label. I don't know why. But he's got the ears of the world. I don't know how he hears a hit, but if you play him two hundred records, he'll pick the one." Barry glows, too, on the subject of his lyricists, Enoch Anderson, Marty Panzer (whom he's known since high-school days), and Adrienne Anderson. "The people that I've chosen to work with are the ones who can give me words that I would like to hear coming out of my mouth. It's only going to work if I can believe in what I'm saying. When Nick [Anderson] sent me 'I Wanna Be Somebody's Baby,' it was right on the money - a spectacular lyric. And 'Sandra' - I'd never heard anything quite like it, so well put. Marty knows me inside out - he writes 'I Am Your Child,' it works. Then, 'Could It Be Magic?' - I wrote that lyric myself; some of it worked, some didn't so I gave it to Adrienne Anderson. She changed the verses around and made it into something that sounded better." On the co-producer of his albums, Ron Dante: "An unsung hero, folks. People never ask me enough about him, and I never give him enough credit, but, really, he's my right hand. If I've got gold albums and singles, it's half him. He's quite a find." "Another unsung hero: my manager, Miles Lourie. He has been with me six years, before Bette. He's the one who has done it all with the career." Accolades from stars to their "other halves" are commonplace in show business, but with Manilow you get the feeling he really means it, and feels it. Underneath a cool, intelligent demeanor, the man is passionate in the intensity of his emotions. Another subject he is more openly emotional about is the controversy raised in the music press over his latest hit single, "I Write the Songs." "It has been strange lately. People come up to me and say, 'How can you live with yourself by singing "I am Music and I write the songs"?' I say, 'Wait a minute. I'm not saying I am music. I'm playing a character in that song, Music, all the music of all those years!' But I nearly made a call to Bruce Johnston, a real pro who wrote the song, and said, 'Maybe we should sing "It is music, that writes the songs". "I just read in this music column in the Sunday News, 'On the Record,' a question posed to disc jockeys: 'What do you think of today's lyrics?' One deejay answered that he thinks lyricists of the sixties are making comebacks with really good lyrics - Paul Simon and Bob Dylan - and I agree. I really respect and admire Paul Simon integrity. He has got such class. Then this disc jockey says that some of the pop artists today are writing real trash, like 'I Write the Songs.' Who wants to hear a guy singing that he writes every song ever written? I thought, oh, no, man. A disc jockey, he's playin' the song every day and he still hasn't figured out what it means! Then it dawns on me that this song has sold close to two million records, and it has been number one on the charts. If everyone who heard it thought I was on this ego trip, they wouldn't have bought it!" This brings us back to a few points made previously in this piece. Where the poetic subtleties of so many rock lyrics are feasts for the ears of so many rock aficionados, the theatrical subtleties of Manilow's work - this is a Muse singing about the love of music, not a rock bard singing about his emotional-intellectual life-escape them. However, they don't escape the record-buying public, steeped in a long American tradition of romantic dreams and the theatrical, larger-than-life expression of those dreams. Not to stretch a point, but-look at Mount Rushmore, look at the Statue of Liberty. Their utter, innocent romantic grandeur is very much a part of the national character and very much part of the artistic motive of "I WRITE the Songs" and "Could It Be Magic?" That's why Barry Manilow is a very popular singer. And this is one way to end a piece on the man. A better way is to close with a potpourri of reflections from Barry himself, given after the official interview is over and after I've run out of tape and had to borrow one from Barry, and its nearing four o'clock, when his hot back-up trio, the Lady Flash, will be coming over to rehearse. His music as a kind of contemporary synthesis of the many and changing musical styles of past and present? "I was raised on everything - it's my background. When it first came time to record, I said, "What do I want to do?' I went back to my roots - maybe that's what will be considered new... The Grammy's this year? They should have photographed my legs shaking. That audience - it was like performing at Sam Goody's. I was looking out at all the album covers I'd ever seen in my life."

"If 'Mandy' had won, it would have been a surprice to me. 'Love Will Keep Us Together' was, in fact, the biggest record of the year. I'll probably wind up dabbing in theater again. [Manilow did the score for an off-Broadway show, The Drunkhard, when he was nineteen.] But my experience in theater was - there are so many egos, and the hassles, and most of the time it never works anyway. If Company folded in a year! I saw it seven times. But people were walking out before the end - I can't understand that! I'd say, wait a minute, you haven't even heard 'The Ladies Who Lunch,' how can you leave?" Sondheim! As a musican and lyricist... Barry Manilow, pop rock star, then quotes a lyric from the current Pacific Overtures word for word. "They're trying to move on, Prince and Sondheim, in the musical. It's great. In my next album, I may move on, too, do a whole instrumental thing. This fourth album is all my own material. It's really nice pop album, a step further than the last one. But you never know. I always love the struggle that comes with changing..." Manilow has just been signed by ABC-TV for his own special next year, along with Olivia Newton-John and others. "That's really exciting. I tell ya, I didn't expect that so soon. I'm brand new at this thing. I didn't think I was there yet. Am I there? Well, no shiny linoleum floors, anyway. And the network isn't insisting on Bob Hope as a guest star, so I've got some plans on how to do it." How did he feel about winning After Dark's Ruby Award, presented in the past to Bette Midler, Lucille Ball, Ann-Margaret, Ruby Keeler, and Dorothy Collins? "I'm very flattered. After Dark has been on my side all the way, mentioning me from the "Upstairs at the Downstairs" on. From the very beginning, they were the only magazine that noticed me. It's a surprise that they consider me big enough to get it after the legends who've gotten it before - Lucille Ball, Bette..." "Bette's my favorite entertainer. She still is, after all those years, all those fights, all the laughter and screaming. I also tend to like rhythm-and-blues people - the Spinners are my favorite group, very favorite, as far as records -and Earth, Wind and Fire, groups like that. I really do admire them, and really wish I could get there. But I keep getting pulled in another direction by my own head. There are just so many riffs I can invent. I want to do more than that, say more than that, more than just toe-tapping. I want to take my listeners on little trips, take them places that other songs don't..." Keep takin' us, Barry.

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