STACK NZ Nov #57

MUSIC FEATURE

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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) and The 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.

In the mid ’70s it was assessed that one in seven households in New Zealand had a copy

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.

For more reviews, interviews and overviews by Graham Reid: www.elsewhere.co.nz

NOVEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.co.nz

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