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visit MUSIC FEATURE
NOVEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi
Graham Reid considers the return of one
of the great songwriters, Neil Diamond.
S Speak this low: Neil Diamond used to
be cool. Not ‘tacky coo’l like Engelbert
Humperdinck, but actual ‘rock star cool’.
Quite when he lost the cool is hard to say, but
you’d have to factor in the God-awful mawkish
duet in ‘78 with Barbra Streisand on You Don’t
Bring Me Flowers.
It wasn’t entirely all down hill after that,
but before then he’d been so cool thatThe
Band invited him to appear at their Scorsese-
filmed LastWaltz farewell concert, alongside
Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, NeilYoung, Dr. John,
Emmylou Harris, Van Morrison and other
luminaries.The Band’s Robbie Robertson had
produced Diamond’s ambitious Beautiful Noise
album earlier that year, and his 1972 double
live album Hot August Night – which effectively
encapsulated his career to that point with hit-after-
hit – sold in massive numbers. In the mid 70s it
was assessed that one in seven households in
New Zealand had a copy . . . which accounts
for so many in the cheap bins at secondhand
record shops today.
Diamond had begun his musical life as a
jobbing songwriter in NewYork in the early ’60s
and started singing in clubs in Greenwich Village
with little success. He’s said when he realised
Lennon and McCartney wrote their own songs,
he decided he’d start pushing his solo career
forward, despite some small successes writing
in the Brill Building for the likes of Jay and the
Americans and later the Monkees: I’m a Believer
and A Little Bit Me, A Little BitYou are his
compositions – he’d recorded them first, but
The Monkees released their versions before him.
Suddenly, Diamond songs were all over the pop
That said, he was always more than a
merely competent songwriter – Burt Bacharach,
David Foster, Carole Bayer-Sager and Stevie
Wonder were happy to write with him.
He almost got cool again when Urge Overkill’s
cover of Girl ,You’ll Be AWoman Soon appeared
on the soundtrack to QuentinTarantino’s
Pulp Fiction in 1994.
His rehabilitation started with 2005’s 12 Songs,
which was produced by Rick Rubin and was
typically stripped back in the manner of Rubin’s
work with Johnny Cash (although the overly
earnest collection of covers Dreams was leaden).
He might even get further back in favour with his
new album Melody Road which is co-produced
by DonWas and Jack Knife Lee, and that’s pretty
cool.
The songs released at the time of this writing
aren’t bad at all: Something Blue has all the
hallmarks of an early ’70s Diamond classic (an
increasingly orchestrated singalong) andThe Art
of Love one of those seriously brooding love
ballads he can be so good at.
Given Barbra Streisand’s latest album rocketed
into the charts last month – and she’s never been
cool – and the love felt for 80-year old Leonard
Cohen’s new album Popular Problems it’ll be
interesting to see how Melody Road is received.
It would be kinda cool if 73-year old Neil
Diamond was cool again. In an actual ‘cool’ way,
I mean.
For more reviews, interviews and overviews
by Graham Reid:
charts handled by the likes of Lulu (The BoatThat
I Row), but increasingly, he was there as a solo
artist. He scored dozens of chart hits in the late
’60s, among them Solitary Man (later covered by
Johnny Cash), Cherry Cherry, KentuckyWoman
(covered by Deep Purple), Sweet Caroline (Elvis,
a rather icky song about 11-year old Caroline
Kennedy)… He even opened forTheWho once.
And in the ’70s the hits just kept coming:
Cracklin’ Rosie, Song Sung Blue, I Am I Said,
Brother Love’sTraveling Show… He did the
Grammy-winning soundtrack to Jonathan
Livingstone Seagull and stretched himself into
song suites. There was however a sticky and
sentimental showbiz side to Diamond: his later
live albums contain stories about girls rejecting
him, and guests like Helen Reddy. Check out Love
at the Greek from 1977 (if you dare) to hear him
at his most cloying, and havingThe Fonz (Henry
Winkler) join him on Song Sung Blue. By the
end of the ’70s Diamond was no longer the hip
character he’d once been, and his appearance in
the central Al Jolson role of the remake of The
Jazz Singer was roundly condemned.
In the mid ’70s
it was assessed
that one in seven
households in
New Zealand
had a copy