By Jonathan Karp
Barry Manilow. Photo courtesy Carol Marshall.
In 1982, as a college freshman, I took the socially precarious risk of writing an essay in The Brown Daily Herald in which I confessed my admiration for the music of Barry Manilow. I described my furtive trip to the campus ticket outlet, where, in a lame effort to establish myself as a cool customer, I first inquired about Elvis Costello before easing my way into the purchase of the Manilow tix. The night of the show, I snuck away from the dorm, telling no one where I was going. I met a friend from another college outside the arena.
The concert was a life-changing experience. I had never seen a performer connect with an audience in such an entertaining and emotionally direct way. The conventional wisdom about Manilow, much of it negative, seemed so superficial and mean-spirited that I felt compelled to make the case for his greatness: Don’t judge him by the clothes or the hit singles or the overt sentimentality, I argued. Listen to the album cuts! Appreciate the craft of his songwriting, the inventiveness of his arrangements, the purity of his expression, his self-deprecating self-awareness. Applaud him for having the talent to overcome his innate discomfort with performing, for we are all at some point in our lives reluctant performers.
The article made quite an impression on my peer group. To this day, college friends remember me—if they remember me at all—as a Barry Manilow fan. At reunions, people I barely knew have approached me and said, "Do you still listen to Barry Manilow?" Just last month, when Newsweek published a positive story on Manilow’s latest comeback, the magazine’s arts editor, classmate Jeff Giles, felt compelled to alert me to the piece, as if my long cultural excommunication had been lifted.
As the years have passed, my appreciation for Manilow has only deepened and grown. Reasonable minds can disagree, and I realize I’m going out on a limb here, but it is not out of the realm of the possible that Barry Manilow is God. He may or may not have written the songs that make the whole world sing, and those songs may or may not be responsible for the births of masses of children conceived under the spell of his romantic balladry, yet one cannot deny his omnipresence (in elevators and, now, Las Vegas), his omniscience (how else could he have won a Tony, a Grammy, and an Emmy?); or his omnipotence (over women of a certain age).
Here comes my big theological leap, which will appeal most to Catholic fans of Jewish rock: If Manilow is indeed God, Our Father, then by logical extension it must follow that his musical neighbors, the Neils—Diamond and Sedaka—must be the Son and the Holy Ghost. Together, this trio of songwriters shall forever be recognized (by me) as the Holy Trinity of Brooklyn Rock.
Separated in birth by only six years, they personify the journey of the musically gifted, middle-class outsider who parlayed songwriting smarts into an unlikely career as a solo star. Musicians first, tunesmiths at heart, performers by necessity (driven more by a desire to share their songs than to be singers) their careers overlap in unusual ways.
Sedaka and Manilow attended Juilliard, where they studied classical piano. Diamond has said in interviews that Sedaka was an early musical influence on him. Manilow and Diamond were up for the lead role in the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer, have recorded duets with Barbra Streisand, and, in perhaps their greatest shared example of assimilated Jewish identity, have released Christmas albums (as has Streisand, creating the opportunity for a special "Jews for Jesus" promotion at your local Virgin Megastore).
Although all three were raised in Jewish households, Sedaka is the only one who has strongly identified himself as a Jewish entertainer: in interviews, on songs such as "The Immigrant," and in a new album of Yiddish folk songs, Brighton Beach Memories. Interestingly, in an interview with Belfast Telegraph writer Joe Jackson, Diamond concurred with a comment reportedly made by Sedaka about "the oppressed cry at the heart of Jewish music," but only to an extent. Writes Jackson: "Diamond’s music definitely does contain echoes of what one of his original heroes, Neil Sedaka, once described as 'the cry’ at the heart of Jewish music. 'But although I do feel that connection to my own racial history, it probably had more of an influence on my early music,’ says Diamond. 'I was also exposed to singers like Sinatra, rock, folk, blues and gospel, so my music evolved over the years. Yet maybe Neil [Sedaka] is right to suggest a lot of what we create, and are, is rooted in the Jewish background. But I think the sadness in many of my songs comes as much from the person I’ve become as it does from whatever was carried within my genes.’"
The only thing publicly Jewish about Barry Manilow is his nose. In fact, when Manilow suffered a broken beak in an accident in June of 2003 and faced possible reconstructive surgery, The Guardian, a British newspaper, began a campaign to "to save one of the world’s wonders." Among those engaged in the campaign were sculptor Mark Quinn, who said, "To lose the Manilow nose would be like knocking the nose off a classical statue. It would be like Samson losing his locks."
Art critic Adrian Searle was even more aghast at the prospect of a reconfigured schnoz. "I feel as if the Taliban just decapitated another Buddhist statue, that some Japanese tycoon wants his beloved Van Gogh cremated along with his corpse. The suggestion that the Manilow nose may be in any way altered, diminished, relined or consolidated without awaiting a full conservation report is a cause for great cultural concern. Perhaps UNESCO can help." Fortunately, no international aid—or plastic surgery—was necessary, and Manilow’s nose remains a beacon for all.
Sedaka and Manilow have written most of their songs with lyricists, so personal spiritual references in their work are rare, though Christian listeners may detect a messianic resurrection theme in the superb 1974 comeback album, Sedaka’s Back. Manilow’s songs consistently espouse self-empowerment and universal humanism, best expressed in "One Voice":
Just one voice, Singing in the darkness, All it takes is one voice, Singing so they hear what’s on your mind, And when you look around you’ll find, There’s more than one voice.
Diamond writes virtually all of his songs by himself—he’s a solitary man, after all. "America" is his Irving Berlin/immigrant/bootstraps anthem. (Manilow has one, too—"Let Freedom Ring," written with Bruce Sussman). If there’s a Jewish sensibility in Diamond’s lyrics, I haven’t heard it. His great pop song, "I’m a Believer," epitomizes the secular thrust of his writing—he’s a non-denominational romantic and his writing is best when he’s unspecific and he lets the melody do the work. I’ve always been mystified that Diamond considers "I Am...I Said" one of his best songs, if only because it contains one of the clumsiest lyrics in Diamond’s estimable catalogue: "I am...I said/To no one there/And no one heard at all/Not even the chair." The chair? Diamond is much better when he’s direct. "Forever in Blue Jeans" is a classic: seductive, sly, simple, and sincere all at once.
All three performers have at times taken a beating in the press—mostly for their glitzy stage apparel and old-fashioned performance style. There’s a little bit of Jolson in all of them, and Manilow, whom Bill Zehme, writing in Rolling Stone, has called "the showman of our generation," in particular owes a debt to another great assimilated Jewish-American entertainer, Danny Kaye. Their Jewishness, however, is only a peripheral aspect of their isolation from the rock mainstream. Because they came of age in a pre-rock era, influenced more by Broadway, swing, jazz, and folk, it’s not surprising that the Holy Trinity remain outsiders. Billy Joel, born in 1949, only ten years after Neil Sedaka, represents the apotheosis of the assimilated Jewish rocker. His best song about guilt describes Catholic guilt— "Only the Good Die Young"—inspired by his own trips to Mass as a young man in a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism. Joel has identified himself as being Jewish, but like the others, he doesn’t seem to find overt musical inspiration in those roots.
Ultimately, the Holy Trinity of Brooklyn Rock should be worshipped for their songwriting. They are the legitimate heirs to the Gershwins and Irving Berlin. Like fellow Brooklynite Carole King (to whom an entire religion ought to be devoted), they applied the craftsmanship of Tin Pan Alley to the pop sensibilities of their era and created a new catalogue of standards, whether it’s Sedaka’s "Laughter in the Rain" or Manilow’s "I Made It Through the Rain"; Diamond’s "Solitary Man" or Sedaka’s "Solitaire"; Diamond’s "Beautiful Noise" or Manilow’s "Beautiful Music." They wrote. They emoted. They moved us. They didn’t always dress so well, and sometimes they gesticulated too much, but their work will endure. For that, we should say a grateful Amen.
Jonathan Karp is the publisher of the Simon Six imprint and the former president and CEO of Simon & Schuster.