Before the ballads, Barry Manilow wrote the jingle about being stuck on Band-Aid
Throughout the late 1960s a young Brooklyn musician paid his bills singing advertising slogans. He wrote the tune and supplied a childlike voice for a bandage brand, composed the State Farm good-neighbour line, and sang for Pepsi and McDonald's. Decades later Barry Manilow received an honorary Clio for that jingle work.
Born Barry Alan Pincus on June 17, 1943, he grew up in Williamsburg, raised by his mother's family once his parents split during his infancy; his grandfather switched the surname to Manilow shortly before Barry's bar mitzvah. He studied at the New York College of Music and later Juilliard, working at CBS to cover costs. Asked in 1964 to arrange a few songs for an adaptation of the melodrama The Drunkard, he wrote a whole original score, and the show ran off Broadway for eight years.
A key break came in 1971, when Bette Midler hired him as her pianist at the Continental Baths. He went on to produce her first two albums and earned an Album of the Year nomination for The Divine Miss M. His own early singles as Featherbed, produced by Tony Orlando, went nowhere.
Success arrived almost against his will. Clive Davis, reshaping Bell into Arista, insisted he record a song originally called Brandy; renamed Mandy at an August 1974 session to avoid confusion with an existing hit, it topped the charts in January 1975. Many later smashes came from other writers, including I Write the Songs, penned by Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys. A 1977 television special with Penny Marshall drew 37 million viewers.
Critics rarely warmed to him, but Frank Sinatra predicted in the 1970s that he was next. Manilow has sold over 85 million records, earned 15 Grammy nominations spread across every decade from 1973 to 2015, and produced albums for Dionne Warwick and Sarah Vaughan. His adult contemporary tally includes 13 number ones.
Source: Barry Manilow
