I was not a cool kid. I wore glasses, had curly hair, zero athletic ability, and studied classical piano. I was a walking recipe for schoolyard ostracizing.
Music was my refuge and songs, the place where I took solace.
My brother, four years older, was listening to The Beatles and Beach Boys, Buddy Holly and a plethora of doo-wop groups. But this was the 70’s and I was listening to WABC radio and Cousin Brucie, when I wasn’t practicing Bach, Beethoven and Chopin.
When I was still in single digits, the song “Mandy” came out. But it wasn’t until a year later, in 1975 that a song opening and closing with a Chopin Prelude I was learning at the time, emerged on pop radio and forever changed my life.
First of all, I would like to repeat that a song opening and closing with a Chopin Prelude was a SINGLE ON POP RADIO. If you want to know why I am the way I am musically, there’s your first clue right there – the melding of pop and classical as marketable, commercial and even, sigh, popular.
By the time “I Write the Songs” hit the airwaves, I had started writing songs, and whether mine would make the whole world sing or not, the trajectory of my life was set. I was ten.
I spent hours at the piano learning to play and sing the songs on the albums I was listening to, the sadder the better.
The soundtrack of my New York youth was forged by Barry Manilow melodies, whether his own or the others he made famous.
Youth eventually transitions to adulthood, landscapes change, and tastes evolve. The sound of acoustic guitars and pianos gave way to synthesizers. And the sweeping melodies I had come to know and love were replaced by the much more limited ones needed for dancers who could barely sing to perform in MTV videos.
Barry’s sound changed, too in the 80’s, and it’s possible there might have even been eyeliner detected on an album cover, I can’t say for certain. What I can say is no matter what murky musical waters the 80’s saw artists wade into, when it came to Barry, I went willingly.
It wasn’t until the 90’s Showstoppers album that I first got to go to a Manilow concert with my friend, Anthony. And so it would be with him, again, and his husband now, that I went last week, 30+ years later.
When you’re young, you have no sense of how fleeting life is. It seemed I had forever before me, at that first concert of his. I was in the moment, but I hadn’t yet learned to savor it, because there would always be another concert, another tour.
By the mid-90’s, I found my songwriting mecca in Nashville, where the country music of the day hearkened back to the pop music of the 70’s, with melodies and meaningful lyrics. I was all in and moved there.
Not long after, I went with my friend, Beth to hear Barry at Starwood Amphitheatre in Tennessee.
In Nashville, both my writing and performing blossomed. But it wouldn’t be a country or even a straight ahead adult pop song that would be my big break. It would be a Radio Disney tween confection called "I Don't Think About It" that finally gave me a #1 song in Billboard. (My collaborator, Sue Fabisch…also a keyboard-playing Barry fan, not coincidentally.)
Time has a funny way of slipping away when you’re not looking, and as the years passed, Barry stayed out west more and toured less. Me, I moved back to New York, where I can curse freely and maintain my bodily autonomy.
The pandemic arrived, and with each horrible loss came an awakening as to how much can be gone in an instant.
Suddenly, I became aware of what I still wanted to do and how much time had already vanished.
There is no longer forever in front of me. And there won’t always be another tour for every artist I love.
I entered what I like to call my “one last time” phase of concert going, just in case either one of us doesn’t get another shot at it.
So when I saw that Barry Manilow would be at Radio City for five nights, I asked Anthony if he wanted to go with me again now.
It was a Thursday, June 1st, 2023 as we neared Radio City on foot. The pedicabs were blasting Barry Manilow music in the streets. The entrepreneurial types were selling Manilow t-shirts outside for $20 going in and $10 going out.
Lest the nostalgia lull me into thinking this was any time other than present day, we had to go through metal detectors and bag searches to enter, but once we did, the excitement was palpable.
We were handed glow sticks on the way to our seats with no instructions as to how to activate them. Not rocket science, I know, but still, snapping it in half did not seem intuitive to me.
Glow sticks aside, there was something about six thousand Barry Manilow fans under one roof that enveloped me like a soothing blanket. I can only imagine what it was like from Barry’s perspective.
A fifty-piece orchestra added to the grandeur. When Barry emerged, the crowd leapt to its feet, where we remained for the better part of the evening.
This wasn’t just a concert, it was an event. There was no hit left unsung, no ounce of love left unexpressed by the audience for Barry or by Barry for the audience.
The two and a half hour show was seamlessly woven together with gentle banter infused between songs that gave us a glimpse of the man and not just the showman.
There was the charity he started to buy instruments for school children. The teacher he honored in the audience. The story about his grandfather, who encouraged his musicality from early childhood. The show, Harmony, that took him decades, but is finally coming to Broadway this fall.
It was more than just a guy singing a string of hit songs back to back. It was six thousand people singing every word of every song with him, and oddly in tune, I might add.
We are the amalgam of everything we experience in life, songs included. They shape us, keep us company, remind us of first love, and maybe walk us home.
Lyrics become more poignant with age. Singing, “All the time, all the wasted time…” doesn’t hit the same in your twenties as it does in your fifties. Neither does “This One’s for You” or “I Made it through the Rain.”
It felt like all of us wanted this one more time to revisit collectively the music that shaped us.
I can’t know what Barry took from the night, but I hope he got the colossal “thank you” that it felt like from the audience.
Exiting Radio City, no one seemed in a hurry. The glow sticks were petering out as the crowd dissipated.
Pedicabs were still blasting Manilow music throughout the streets of New York as we walked to the garage where my car was parked.
There, on 51st Street, between 7th Avenue and Broadway, the mass of concertgoers were either in line to pay or waiting patiently for their cars to be brought out. It started somewhere in the back, the sea of voices wafting its way toward the entrance, singing…
“Even now, when I have come so far
I wonder where you are
I wonder why it’s still so hard without you…”
More voices joined, ours included, until everyone was singing…
“Even now, when I come shining through
I swear I think of you
And how I wish you knew, even now.”
There was something about the sound of our voices singing this song in a New York City parking garage at 11pm on a Thursday night in 2023 that brought me to tears.
It was as if everyone wanted the night to continue just a little bit longer.
The five shows at Radio City are over now. But I hope the magic of them lingers as long in Barry’s heart as it will in mine.
…with great affection from this songwriter.
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