Oh, Barry, you came and you gave

Why even some cool people are Manilow fans

Sandi Shorter's musical taste has two potencies, enthusiastic and obsessive. There are plenty of cool artists she's enthusiastic about, like the Shins and Marah. And she has her obsessions, including Wilco and Bob Dylan.

But a few of Shorter's obsessions are puzzling. Long-ago teen idol David Cassidy is one, and another is ... Barry Manilow.

"Yes, Barry Manilow has been a lasting obsession," she admits sheepishly. "I went to see him when I was 10 with my mom and that was it, man. I was hooked. Had the poster on the wall and everything. I used to pretend that the song 'Mandy' was actually 'Sandi.'"

This obsession has lasted into adulthood, and it's strong enough for Shorter (who works as an office assistant for a civil engineering firm in Durham) to fly her mother in from Louisville, Ky., so they can attend Manilow's Sunday night show at Raleigh's RBC Center. This follows a 2006 trip they took to see Manilow in his run at the Las Vegas Hilton -- a show that Shorter admits was disappointing and more than a little cheesy.

So why is she going again?

"Because he writes the songs that make the whole world sing," she says in a tone that screams duh. "It's Barry Manilow! Right here in Raleigh! How could I not? I can't in good faith carry around a Barry Manilow keychain and claim to be in love with him and not go."

For most people, putting a half-dozen of your own songs on a soft-rock covers collection called "The Greatest Songs of the Seventies" (Arista Records) would be an act of hubris. For Barry Manilow, it was just acknowledgment that it wouldn't be '70s soft-rock without him.

Decades past his 1970s heyday, Manilow has hung around long enough to achieve elder-statesman status, iconic cheese division. It's not just his signature ballads, including "Mandy," "Looks Like We Made It" and "I Write the Songs" (none of which, irony of ironies, he wrote). And it's not all the omnipresent commercial jingles he's done over the years -- "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there," for example.

It's Manilow's realization that if people are going to laugh at you anyway, playing along can be highly profitable (see also: William Shatner). Stephen Colbert has made much comedic hay out of losing to Manilow at the 2006 Emmy Awards. That didn't stop Manilow from appearing in a sketch on "The Colbert Report," mocking both Colbert and his own status as Mr. Soft Rock.

Of course, it helps to have fans in unexpected places. For example, Peter Blackstock, who lives in Mebane and co-edits No Depression, the successful and hip music magazine that has country diva Shelby Lynne on the current issue's cover. Blackstock's tastes run mostly to Texas troubadours. But he's enough of a Manilow fan to occasionally bust out Manilow's 1974 breakthrough hit "Mandy" when he performs himself. It always gets a funny reaction.

"Half the people seem to consider that a big joke, while half seem to remember it fondly from their childhood," Blackstock says. "That's about right because I play it for both reasons. I've always thought he was a good singer with a really good sense of melody, a talented guy. But I don't know if he ever could have taken a more serious path because he doesn't seem to have that temperament or interest.

"Still," Blackstock concludes, "he wrote some good songs and found some worth covering. It would not surprise me terribly if some indie-rock band were to revisit a Manilow song and do something good with it."

Another unlikely Manilow enthusiast is Sean T. McMann, a sportswriter in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Now 33, McMann grew up thinking Manilow's music "stunk." His conversion experience came in college, when a particularly harsh romantic breakup made him a fan of Manilow's pathos and passion.

"I put on a tape and listened to 'Mandy' and all these other songs that were so depressing," McMann says. "They just spoke to me: 'My gosh, he totally understands what I'm going through.' Then when you see him in concert, he's so into the music. He gets it!"

Like most Manilow fans, McMann takes a lot of ribbing from family, friends and co-workers. He has seen a dozen of Manilow's shows over the years, up and down the East Coast and as far south as Florida. When McMann was in Tampa covering the Yankees' spring training a few years back, there was a Manilow show nearby.

"That was God saying he wanted me to see Barry," McMann says. So he went.

Manilow concert reviews turn up with some regularity on McMann's blog, seantm.blogspot.com (he's also a Clay Aiken fan and writes about him there, too). But even though he's a journalist, McMann has never interviewed Manilow. It would be, he says, a daunting task.

"I've interviewed Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, no problem," he says. "But Barry Manilow's the one I've not checked off the list because it's never been a possibility. I don't even know what I'd ask him. I probably wouldn't ask any questions so much as thank him for being there for me when I needed him."