July 17–24, 1997

music

Can't Live Without You

Confessions of a Barry Manilow Fan. Yikes.

By Robert Drake

Some people are pederasts, others murderers or adulterers.

Not me.

I'm a Barry Manilow fan.

—-

It all began in 1977. I was a 15-year-old faggot living in Charleston, WV. Several of my days were spent obsessing over which Bay City Roller I liked best (Les) and lusting after Bobby Sherman. It was the year I bought my first record, Barry Manilow's Live, slipped it home and got special permission from my mom to listen to it on my father's stereo. With headphones, of course.

Demonizing Barry Manilow is popular sport among those desperate to appear cool. His box-set CDs were glibly referred to as "coasters" by disc jockeys in 1993. Even in the '70s there were jealous pedants who called him "Very Vanilla." My peers called him "fag" in a boy-jock way that meant nothing. He is reviled by many simply because he became too famous, too fast. His popularity of the '70s, like a freak cultural cancer, turned on itself in the late '80s and early '90s. What made him so popular — and what transformed me so utterly as a boy of 15 — was his unabashed genuine embrace of the sentimental in popular music.

Who can forget the surrender to sorrow and hope of "Weekend In New England" ("With you I could bring out all the love that I have/ With you there's a heaven so earth ain't so bad"), or the oft-misinterpreted-as-egotism musical tidal wave that closes "I Write The Songs." The Manilow trademark became, in a sense, this passion, deployed as a rampant key change, that spun the song toward a crescendo of honesty.

When I put on those headphones in 1977 and Manilow's voice entered my head, I was changed. Manilow sang of being different, of being alone — and that being alone was not just OK, it was cool. Manilow sang of survival. I was an isolated gay teen who found, in Barry Manilow's musical presence, a metaphysical big brother.

Manilow's musical rarity was his ability to make the individual listening feel not as though they were passively taking in the tune of a song but that they were in a conversation with the singer. Art, instead of being a barrier between the artist and the audience, became a bridge.

If anything did Barry Manilow's career in, it was the dark cynicism of the '80s. Surrendering to love, in the dawn of the AIDS era, was no longer cool but a guilty pleasure, a regretful crime. In the '70s it was hip to think that everything was fabulous; in the '80s it was hip to proclaim that everything sucked.

But Manilow persevered in that cold decade and started a career as a dance-music artist. The seeds of it could be found in the 1976 hit "Copacabana (At the Copa)" and continued to build steadily with embarrassingly puerile hits such as "You're Looking Hot Tonight" and "I'm Your Man."

In the early '90s, boy-band Take That recorded Manilow's 1973 hit "Could It Be Magic" as a dance single that soared to the top of the charts in England; Manilow responded with his own uptempo cover, produced by Trevor Horn. It also charted well. This summer Manilow reaches perhaps the apogee of his dance music career with I'd Really Love to See You Tonight as produced by Tony Moran. A remake of the old England Dan and John Ford Coley standard (the non-dance version is available on Manilow's recently released Summer of '78 ) has proved a hit overseas and in the United States.

It's an unexpected rebirth, but a welcome one. As a longstanding FOB, I'll take what I can get.

Barry Manilow will be performing on Wednesday, July 23 at the Blockbuster-Sony E-Centre, Camden, NJ, (609) 365-1445.