Barry Manilow Informations

Barry Manilow (born Barry Alan Pincus, June 17, 1943) is an American singer-songwriter, arranger, musician and producer with a career that has spanned more than 50 years. His hit recordings include "Could It Be Magic", "Mandy", "I Write the Songs" "Can't Smile Without You", and "Copacabana (At the Copa)".

He recorded and released 46 Top 40 singles on the Adult Contemporary Chart, including 13 that hit number one and 28 of which appeared within the top ten, and has released many multi-platinum albums. Although not a favorite artist of music critics, Manilow has been praised by entertainers including Frank Sinatra, who was quoted in the 1970s as saying, "He's next." In 1988, Bob Dylan stopped Manilow at a party, hugged him and said, "Don't stop what you're doing, man. We're all inspired by you."

As well as producing and arranging albums for himself and other artists, Manilow has written and performed songs for musicals, films, and commercials for corporations such as McDonald's, Pepsi-Cola, and Band-Aid, from the 1960s. He has been nominated for a Grammy Award (winning once) as a producer, arranger and performer a total of fifteen times (and in every decade) from 1973 to 2015. He has also produced Grammy-nominated albums for Bette Midler, Dionne Warwick, Nancy Wilson and Sarah Vaughan. Manilow has sold more than 75 million records as a solo artist worldwide, making him one of the world's best-selling artists.

Manilow was born Barry Alan Pincus on June 17, 1943, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Edna Manilow and Harold Pincus (who went by his own stepfather's surname, "Keliher"). His father was born to a Jewish father and an Irish-American Catholic mother, while his maternal grandparents were of Russian Jewish background.

Manilow grew up in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, and graduated in 1961 from Eastern District High School, which closed in 1995. During high school, he met Susan Deixler, who would later become his wife. He enrolled in the City College of New York, where he briefly studied before entering the New York College of Music. He also worked at CBS while he was a student in order to pay his expenses. He later studied Musical Theater at the Juilliard performing arts school.

In 1964, Manilow met Bro Herrod, a CBS director, who asked him to arrange some songs for a musical adaptation of the melodrama The Drunkard. Instead, Manilow wrote an entire original score. Herrod used Manilow's composition in the Off Broadway musical, which had an eight-year run at New York's 13th Street Theatre. Manilow then earned money by working as a pianist, producer and arranger.

During this time, he began work as a commercial jingle writer and singer, which continued through the remainder of the 1960s. Many of the TV jingles he composed he would also perform, including State Farm Insurance ("Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there") or Band-Aid ("I am stuck on Band-Aid, 'cause Band-Aid's stuck on me!"), for which he adopted a childlike voice and wrote the music (Donald B Wood wrote the lyrics). His singing-only credits include commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pepsi ("all across the nation, it's the Pepsi generation"), McDonald's ("you deserve a break today"), and Dr Pepper. Manilow was awarded an Honorary Clio at the 50th Anniversary Clio Awards in Las Vegas in 2009 for his 1960s work as a jingle writer. When accepting the award, he stated that he learned the most about making pop music by working for three or four years as a writer in the jingle industry.

By 1967, Manilow was the musical director for the WCBS-TV series Callback, which premiered on January 27, 1968. He next conducted and arranged for Ed Sullivan's production company, arranging a new theme for The Late Show, while writing, producing, and singing his radio and television jingles. At the same time, he and Jeanne Lucas performed as a duo for a two-season run at Julius Monk's Upstairs at the Downstairs club in New York.

By 1969, Manilow was signed by Columbia/CBS Music vice-president and recording artist, Tony Orlando, who went on to co-write with and produce Manilow and a group of studio musicians under the name "Featherbed" on the Columbia Pictures' newly acquired Bell Records label."

Manilow recorded and accompanied artists on the piano for auditions and performances in the first two years of the 1970s. He recorded four tracks as Featherbed, produced by Tony Orlando on Bell Records. Three of the tracks—"Morning", a ballad; "Amy", a psychedelic-influenced pop song; and an early, uptempo version of his own composition with Orlando as co-writer, "Could It Be Magic." A fourth tune recorded was "Rosalie Rosie", which was to be the flip side of "Could It Be Magic", but Bell Records went with "Morning" as the flip for Featherbed's second release instead. Neither of two singles released impacted on the charts.

Bette Midler caught Manilow's act in 1971 and chose the young musician as her pianist at the Continental Baths in New York City that year, and subsequently as a producer on both her debut and sophomore record albums The Divine Miss M (1972) and Bette Midler (1973). as well as act as her musical director on the eventual tour mounted for the former. In 1973, Manilow was nominated for the Album Of The Year Grammy Award for his production role on 'The Divine Miss M'. Manilow worked with Midler from 1971 to 1975.

After the Featherbed singles failed to impact on the music charts, in July 1973, Bell Records released the album, Barry Manilow, which offered an eclectic mix of piano-driven pop and guitar-driven rock music, including a song called "I Am Your Child", which Manilow had composed with Marty Panzer for the 1972 Vietnam War drama Parades.

Among other songs on the album were Jon Hendricks' vocalese jazz standard "Cloudburst", most successfully recorded by his group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross in 1959, and a slower-tempo version of "Could It Be Magic." The latter's music was based on Chopin's "Prelude in C Minor, Opus 28, Number 20", and provided Donna Summer with one of her first hits. (It was also covered by Take That in the 1990s, as an up-beat disco version of the song. Take That have since performed Manilow's original version in their Beautiful World Tour.)

In 1974, Clive Davis became temporary president of Bell with the goal of revitalizing Columbia Pictures's music division. With a $10 million investment by CPI, and a reorganization of the various Columbia Pictures legacy labels (Colpix, Colgems, and Bell), Davis introduced Columbia Pictures's new record division, Arista, in November 1974 with Davis himself owning 20% of the new venture. Bell had its final #1 hit in January 1975 with Manilow's breakthrough number-one hit, "Mandy" (Bell 45,613), followed shortly by the label's final hit, as well as its final single, "Look in My Eyes Pretty Woman" by Tony Orlando and Dawn (Bell 45,620—US #11) after which the more successful Bell albums were reissued on Arista. The very last releases utilizing the Bell imprint have the designation "Bell Records, Distributed by Arista Records, 1776 Broadway, New York, New York 10019" around the rim of the label.

Davis' reorganization efforts continued to bear fruit in 1974, with the release of Manilow's second album, Barry Manilow II, with "Mandy" as the lead single. Manilow had not wanted to record the song, which had originally been titled "Brandy" when originally recorded by its co-writer Scott English, but the song was included at the insistence of Davis. The name was changed to "Mandy" during the actual recording session on August 20, 1974, due to the fact that there had already been a song called "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" performed by Looking Glass and released in 1972 on Davis' Epic label.

"Mandy" was the start of a string of hit singles and albums that lasted through the early 1980s, coming from the multi-platinum and multi-hit albums Tryin' to Get the Feeling, This One's for You, Even Now, and One Voice. Following the success of Barry Manilow II, the first Bell Records album was remixed and reissued on Arista Records as Barry Manilow I. When Manilow went on his first tour, he included in his show what he called "A V.S.M.", or "A Very Strange Medley", a sampling of some of the commercial jingles that he had written, composed, and/or sung in the 1960s. The medley appeared later on his quadruple-platinum 1977 album Barry Manilow Live.

Beginning with Manilow's March 22, 1975, appearance on American Bandstand to promote the second album, a productive friendship with Dick Clark started. Among their projects together were numerous appearances by Manilow on Clark's productions of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, singing his original seasonal favorite "It's Just Another New Year's Eve"; American Bandstand anniversary shows; American Music Awards performances; and the 1985 television movie Copacabana, starring Manilow and executive produced by Clark.

Despite being a songwriter in his own right, several of Manilow's commercial successes were songs written by others. In addition to "Mandy", other hits that he did not write or compose include "Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again" (by David Pomeranz), "Weekend in New England" (by Randy Edelman), "Ships" (by Ian Hunter), "Looks Like We Made It" (by Richard Kerr and Will Jennings), "Can't Smile Without You" and "Ready to Take a Chance Again" (by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel). His #1 hit "I Write the Songs" was composed by Bruce Johnston of The Beach Boys. According to album liner notes, Manilow did, however, perform co-production as well as arrangement duties on all the above tracks along with Ron Dante, most famous for his vocals on records by The Archies.

Manilow's breakthrough in Britain came with the release of Even Now, the first of many top-20 albums on that side of the Atlantic, which contained four singles that became major hits in the US. This was quickly followed by Manilow Magic – The Best Of Barry Manilow, also known as Greatest Hits. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, ABC aired four variety television specials starring Manilow, who served as an executive producer. The Barry Manilow Special with Penny Marshall as his guest premiered on March 2, 1977, to an audience of 37 million. The special was nominated for four Emmys and won in the category of "Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Special."The Second Barry Manilow Special in 1978, with Ray Charles as his guest, was also nominated for four Emmys.

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