When the Manhattan Transfer formed in October 1972, singer Janis Siegel says she and the other three singers in the vocal quartet initially kept their day jobs.
“I was waitressing at the time, at the very beginning of the group,” Siegel, 70, says recently. “We all had day jobs. Alan’s happened to be on Broadway.”
And not just any old Broadway show either: Alan Paul was part of the original Broadway cast of “Grease,” double cast as Teen Angel and Johnny Casino.
Paul, 72, says he’d been performing in “Grease” for a year and a half when he met his future partners in the Manhattan Transfer. First Laurel Massé, then Siegel, and finally Tim Hauser.
“Laurel was dating the drummer in the show and I used to see her backstage all the time,” he says. “The guys in the ‘Grease’ band, after doing the show sometimes, they’d go to one of the clubs and perform.
“And when I heard them sing, I was completely blown away.”
Fifty years later, Siegel and Paul are still singing with the Manhattan Transfer. Massé left in 1979 after a car accident, with Cheryl Bentyne taking her place in the group. Hauser died in 2014 and was replaced by Trist Curless.
Now, with the aptly named new album “Fifty” just released, the Manhattan Transfer is looking at the end of the road. A final world tour runs through next year, but after that, the group is not likely to perform live again, Siegel and Paul say.
Harmonious beginnings
Siegel met Hauser in 1972 when she was singing in a group called Laurel Canyon, named in tribute to that music scene – though at the time, only 19 or 20, the Brooklynite had barely been west of Manhattan, much less all the way to California. Hauser was working as a cab driver.
One night the conga player in the band got into Hauser’s cab after a gig, and on learning Hauser was a musician, too, invited him to the show’s after-party.
“He parked his cab, thank God, and came up and met us all and took my number to sing on his solo project,” Siegel says from her home in New York City. “I showed up and there was Laurel Massé at the session, who had actually met Tim when she got into his cab one night.
“It sounds like a B-movie script, but it’s actually true,” she says. “It’s just one of those magical things that sometimes happens.”
The three quickly discovered they loved how they sounded singing harmony vocals, and Hauser, whose apartment was packed with records including scores of obscure 78s, 45s and LPs, introduced Siegel and Massé to new genres to explore.
“That was the first time I really started to listen to jazz,” Siegel says. “He was the beginning of my education. And when I heard four- and five-part harmony, the top of my head blew up.
“I said, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to be in the middle of that.’”
Paul, despite loving how the three sounded when he first heard them sing, was not thinking about joining them to complete the quartet.
“I was absolutely not interested in being in a group,” he says from his Los Angeles home. But the voices were so good, he adds.
“I remember Janis singing Aretha Franklin’s ‘Dr. Feelgood,’” Paul says. “She’s 19 years old. I couldn’t believe that voice coming out of her. And Laurel, her voice was like a bell. So I thought, OK, I’ll go down and meet the other guy, and we’ll talk.”
Paul says that when he walked into Hauser’s apartment he noticed two things right away. “There was no furniture, no place to sit,” he says. “It was wall-to-wall crates of records. He came out, this hippie guy with long hair, and I didn’t quite get it.”
Two hours later, after talking about the kinds of music they all loved, vocal groups and swing and doo-wop among them, and how the New York City scene was changing from the folk clubs of the ’60s to the cabaret and rock clubs of the early ’70s, Paul was in.
“I went, OK,” he says. “I was looking for something else to do. Kind of bored in a way. So I said, let’s give it a shot.”
Cult act to superstars
When the Manhattan Transfer started to play shows around New York City in 1973, there was nothing else like the group, Siegel says.
“We were coming up in the age of glitter rock so people were moving away from sort of the introspective singer-songwriter type of entertainment to more glamorous, dressed up,” she says. “Supper clubs were starting to pop up. You had David Bowie and the New York Dolls and all that stuff happening, too.
“So we came up with that kind of sensibility too, except that we were doing jazz voicings and jazz harmonies.”
While that New York Dolls might seem an unusual comparison, Siegel and Paul both note that the early days of the group were far from the top hats and black or white tuxedos and ball gowns they eventually adopted.
Hauser’s sister, Fayette Hauser, was a member of the Cockettes, the San Francisco acid-glam performance troupe, and she dressed them in the earliest days.
“So Tim would wear a Howdy Doody mask and I was in a diaper with high heels,” Siegel says. “Yeah, it was wild. But then we decided, OK, we have to tone things down a little bit. Let’s be more like German cabaret.”
Their musical uniqueness attracted fans to shows but confused record label executives for the first few years of the group, Paul says.
“Nobody would sign us,” he says. “We were too different, and nobody wanted to take the risk. Then came Ahmet Ertegun (of Atlantic Records) and everything changed overnight.”
Not long after the release of the 1975 self-titled debut, the group relocated to Los Angeles where it made an immediate splash with the Hollywood set. Stars such as Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson came to the Roxy in West Hollywood where the Manhattan Transfer sold-out a three-week residency, Siegel and Paul say.
“We had dinner at Groucho Marx’s house,” Siegel says. “We started going to the Playboy Mansion every Sunday for movie night. Tony Curtis was hanging out there, and Gene Kelly we met up there. It was nuts.”
Mary Tyler Moore cast the group alongside Ben Vereen in her variety special, “Mary’s Incredible Dream,” which proved too trippy for CBS to air initially, though it did lead to the Manhattan Transfer getting a summer-replacement show in Cher’s time slot in 1975, Paul says.
Life in the group continued apace for the group’s first decade after its 1975 breakout. The 1977 single “Chanson D’Amour” went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom and top 10 across Europe, making them stars on the continent.
The 1979 album “Extensions,” the first after Bentyne replaced Massé, saw them expand their retro-modern sound in new directions, with the single “Birdland” winning a pair of Grammys including best vocal arrangement for Siegel.
In 1981, the group became the first ever to win Grammys for pop and jazz vocals for the songs “The Boy From New York City” and “Until I Met You (Corner Pocket)” respectively.
“I’ll tell you what Amhet said to us,” Paul says of the group’s first wave of success. “He said, ‘Enjoy this now, because it will never happen like this again.’ And it was amazing.”
An end, a beginning
“Fifty” presents 10 songs, nine of them new orchestral versions of tunes the Manhattan Transfer had recorded at earlier stages in its career. Siegel says the idea was to revisit songs that represented transitional moments in the group’s career.
“The first priority was to pick songs that we felt could benefit from an orchestral treatment,” she says. “So something like ‘Boy From New York City’ obviously wouldn’t work. And other things that were maybe more pop or R&B-oriented would. Some of the Brazilian stuff like ‘Agua,’ and certainly (the Beach Boys’) ‘God Only Knows.’”
The decision to do one last tour arrived from a variety of directions. Paul says the demands of travel have become more difficult in recent years at their current ages.
He plans to write and produce music, and complete the documentary on the Manhattan Transfer he’s been working on.
Siegel also mentioned the toll that travel takes, but also noted the vocal changes that accompany age are particularly difficult for a group known for its intricate four-part harmonies.
“As a solo performer, you can always lower keys, and if you have the energy and the stamina you can keep performing,” she says. “As a group, it’s pretty hard. You can’t really lower the keys all that much because the rest of the harmony suffers.”
She expects to continue to perform as a solo artist, and also explore interests from cooking and wine to the lifelong interest in healing that had her considering a career in nursing before the Manhattan Transfer took off.
“I see opportunity rather than an end,” Siegel says. ‘And the Manhattan Transfer will always be No. 1 in my heart.”
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