About John W Baldwin Expertise I can answer almost any question about Barry`s music and videos: Content, lyrics, instruments, arrangements. You know -- the important stuff! --JB
Experience 30 years of collecting his music and being a fan. I also own an extensive collection of recordings, interviews, books, magazines and rarities for Barry Manilow.
Question What TV jingles were written by Barry. I believe I read that the Band-Aid brand jingle "I am stuck on band-aid brand cause band-aids stuck on me" was written by Barry is this correct and if so what others did he write.
thank you
Answer As Barry himself said on the Ellen DeGeneres show today, he wrote the Band Aids song ("I am stuck on Band-Aid, and a Band-Aid's stuck on me"), as well as the State Farm song ("Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there"). The rest of the catalog requires a little digging.
According to the liner notes of the original Barry Manilow Live album (Arista Records, 1977), Barry also wrote the Stridex song ("Give your face something to smile about"), and one for a bathroom cleaner called Bowlene ("I've got the bathroom bowl blues"). These tunes are part of a segement of the show he used to call his Very Strange Medley, or VSM. Part of the VSM are songs that he sang, but didn't write, including the McDonald's commerical ("You deserve a break today"), the Pepsi song ("Join the Pepsi people"), and the Dr Pepper song ("It's the most original soft drink in the whole wide world"). The Dr Pepper song, interestingly enough, was written by another pretty famous guy, and one of Barry's fellow Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees, Randy Newman. Apparently, it's a small world when you're a songwriter.
In 1981, a Barry Manilow concert was shown on the Showtime network in which Barry does a few more numbers from his days in the "Jingle Jungle". The interesting thing is that he includes a song that was rejected by a client -- in this case, the Hoover vacuum cleaner company. And, in 1980, he talked about a rejected song he submitted to the Vicks cold medicine people.
In 1992, Barry released a box set, called the Complete Collection, and Then Some.... (Arista Records), which included a video of on-air and video highlights. It starts out with a segment of the Mike Douglas show from 1974, in which Barry sings a different Dr Pepper jingle ("Dr Pepper, so misunderstood"), and others which later show up on the VSM on Barry Manilow Live.
Of all the phases of Barry Manilow's career, its this "Jingles" period which is the most murky. I have never seen a definitive list of what he wrote, sang or arranged as far as commercial jingles, and must rely on what little published source material there is. The few compilations of commercials on tape or CD don't seem to have Barry's stuff anywhere on them. Hopefully, someday, this will be remedied. Rumor has it that Barry will be accepting an award this summer from the Advertisers group for his contribution to the industry. --JB
