BARRY’S TOWN
Brooklyn-born Manilow on his musical highs and lows
IN 1976, just as his career as a pop superstar was taking off, Barry Manilow moved into an apartment in the San Remo on Central Park West.
His neighbor was Broadway’s Fred Ebb, the lyricist who, with composer John Kander, wrote “Cabaret” and “Chicago.” Through the wall in one of his bathrooms, Manilow could hear Kander and Ebb banging out new songs on the piano. One day, a riff Kander was playing caught his attention.
“Listen to this,” Manilow said to a friend. “I think they’re writing something, and it sounds pretty good.” What they were writing was “New York, New York.”
Manilow gives the song his own swinging flourish on his new album, “This Is My Town: Songs of New York,” out Friday from Verve Records. Born and raised in Brooklyn, the former Barry Pincus, now 73, assembled and arranged the collection as a tribute to his hometown.
Not all are as famous as “New York, New York.” A haunting rendition of “Lonely Town,” from Leonard Bernstein’s 1944 musical “On the Town,” stands out, as does a silky arrangement of “Lovin’ at Birdland.”
“My instinct is not to go commercial,” says Manilow, who to date has sold 80 million records worldwide. (His instinct seems to have failed him.)
“I developed a taste for the off-center stuff when I played piano in cabarets in New York in the early ’70s,” he tells The Post. “The good singers never sang what everybody else was doing on TV or radio.
“I cannot spot a hit song even if I write it,” he adds. “That is not my strength at all. I think the only song I heard that I knew would be a hit was ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’ — and who couldn’t pick that one?”
Manilow made headlines recently, acknowledging publicly his nearly 40-year romantic relationship with his manager, Garry Kief. It wasn’t exactly a secret — tabloids reported their marriage in 2014 — but Manilow was reluctant to join the parade of celebrities who’ve proudly come out. That’s partly because he feared he’d alienate his millions of female fans, but also because he’s intensely private.
“What you have to understand about Barry,” says a longtime friend, “is that he’s the guy at the piano who looks after the singer. He loves composing. He loves arranging. The fact that he became a superstar surprised him.”
Manilow’s early and now-legendary partnership was with Bette Midler at the Continental Baths in the Ansonia Hotel. Midler heard about him through friends in the cabaret world, and asked him to back her up.
“She was loud, she was brash, she was Bette,” says Manilow. “But I didn’t understand her talent in rehearsals. She walked through every song. It wasn’t great. And then this hurricane came out of the dressing room and all these guys sitting around in towels at the baths went nuts.”
Manilow became a star in his own right when record producer Clive Davis signed him for a new company called Arista Records in 1974.
His early years at the label were rocky.
“Clive and I fought all the time,” says Manilow. “I was a songwriter and he kept shtupping me with other people’s material.
“The only reason we stayed together was that I was a producer and arranger and he would let me make the songs my own. So I listened to [a] terrible demo of ‘I Write the Songs’ until I figured out it was an anthem, an anthem to the spirit of music, and that’s how I arranged it.”
“I Write the Songs” went to No. 1, as did “Mandy,” “Looks Like We Made It” and “Even Now.” There were a dozen No. 1 hits in all, plus 27 that appeared in the top 10 on various Billboard charts.
The last was 1983’s “Read ’em and Weep.” And then Manilow told Davis, “I’m done. I don’t know what else to do in the pop music world. I’ve used every arranger’s trick in the trade.”
R&B had come in, making stars of Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson. Manilow’s Top-40 era was over.
“I’d been around so long, there was a backlash,” he says. “It wasn’t fun, but I can’t say it was the dark night of my soul. I was ready for something else.” Since then, he’s released a batch of acclaimed, if not No. 1, albums featuring show tunes, big band hits, Sinatra covers.
He can still sell out a 20,000-seat stadium, and while he tries to slip in some of his more obscure or arty songs, “I can’t do it very often or I lose the audience,” he says. “They want the songs they grew up with, the ones I did with Clive. They never tire of them. They sing them louder than I do.”