BARRY MANILOW
Barry Manilow (born Barry Alan Pincus; June 17, 1943) is an American singer-songwriter, arranger, musician, and producer with a career that has spanned over 50 years. He has recorded and released 47 Top 40 singles, including 12 that hit number one and 27 of which appeared within the top ten, and has released many multi-platinum albums. He is ranked as the top Adult Contemporary chart artist of all time, according to R&R (Radio & Records) and Billboard magazines, and Rolling Stone crowned him “a giant among entertainers . . . the showman of our generation”. From February 2005 to December 2009, he was the headliner at the Las Vegas Hilton, performing hundreds of shows before ending his relationship with the hotel. Since March 2010, he has headlined at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. He has sold more than 80 million records worldwide, making him one of the world’s best-selling artists of all time. (More from Wikipedia)
In the Chris Estey interview, Kim Fowley describes his early show-biz work in his usual name-dropping and self-promoting fashion (not that there is anything wrong with that): “[M]y first major job in the business was working in the publicity, and press, and background music, media, for Doris Day’s production company; and I was the boy genius in the office. The two movies that I worked on were Please Don’t Eat The Daisies and Pillow Talk. I brought Bruce Johnston in as a songwriter, and stayed with him his entire career. He wrote ‘I Want to Teach the World to Sing . . . ’, whatever that was, the Barry Manilow classic [‘I Write The Songs’]. And then all those songs for the Beach Boys, I can’t remember all the titles.”
(January 2015/1)
