Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  They laughed when Clive Davis, then president of Columbia Records, made that $4 million bet on Diamond's endurance. No one's laughing anymore. Some of them are even humming.

  And yet, Diamond is not content. He is the consummate searcher. He would've been perfect in Stardust, the story of a star still groping for the meaning of life.

  While many of Diamond's songs deal directly with loneliness, love, and the healing power of music, many others are elliptical, if you know what I mean. Listeners sail along on the sweet caramel melodies, the majestic, swelling arrangements, the dramatic tempo changes, the gospel/Broadway/baritone deliveries of "Holly Holy" and "Soolaimon" and "Play Me"-while not quite getting their points.

  Jeff Barry, songwriter and producer of Diamond's first large handful of hits, says: "His songs haven't changed, really; they just get harder to understand."

  Diamond doesn't think any of his songs need to be explained. Or even understood. "`Holly Holy,"' he says, "is not the kind of thing you're supposed to think about. It's the kind of a piece where one line, or one word, sets off a little zinger, gives you a twinge. And that's all it is. `Play Me,' I've had people say, `Jesus, there's a couple of lines I wish you'd change.' It's crazy. Let one line reach. Let it not add up to anything and touch you. And let's you not understand it. There are no rules, you see. That's the beautiful thing about it. And the best things I've done are the things that people don't really understand."

  Diamond is at Bill Whitten's Workroom 2 7, planning his show and getting fitted for the four outfits he'll wear in Las Vegas. In contrast to the gaudy, schizo, cowboy/Indian costumes Whitten designed in '72, these are simple, single-color tops. "For the Seagull segment, I'd like to be in all white. For the Brother Love segment, I'd like to be dressed in all black."

  Diamond works his way into a pair of flared leather pants and begins to spar with his fitter, Steve Loomis, who wants them to stop just half an inch from the floor.

  Diamond wants them an inch shorter than that.

  "I hate those bell-bottom things," he says.

  "But you don't want to look like a little boy who's outgrown his pants," says

  Loomis. "The front has to touch your shoe."

  "Who says?"

  "The Bible."

  "I'll settle for three-quarters of an inch."

  Out of the studio, he says he's avoided wearing leather onstage and that he doesn't much care for the glittery belt. "But sometimes you have to in big places, to be seen." But he doesn't mind costumes. "You can be a gladiator or a warrior up there-whatever gets you off." Diamond, who constantly flashes back to the old days in New York, adds: "I used to shop in Greenwich Village...."

  At the beginning, ten years ago, when he worked at his manager's nightclub, the Bitter End, he was so insecure and nervous that the manager, Fred Weintraub, ordered him not to talk between songs. Diamond wore all black. "It was a protective thing," he says now. He can chart, year by year, his progress: "1966: black. '67: black. '68: black. '69: dark brown...dark red...dark blue...lighter blue." Finally, in late '70, in Corvallis, Oregon, white. "It was a breakthrough. Somehow it was symbolic of opening up, of letting defenses down."

  For a man so meticulous about everything he touches, Diamond can be relatively loose onstage. His humor is offhanded, nervous and are-you-with-me humble. On opening night, he stalked around the stage remarking on how everything done that night would be a first, finishing with: "If you stick gum under your seat, that'll be the first gum." He introduced the audience to a device attached to his microphone that sprayed ionized water into his mouth as he sang to provide him with a moisturized air stream and help him fend off the dread "Las Vegas Throat." "It's gonna do horrible things to my hair," said Diamond, "but screw it...."

  But most of the two-hour show is standard Neil Diamond-most of the hits, done in an alternately smooth and cracklin' voice. He doesn't tease like a Tom Jones; there are no martial-arts moves like Presley's. But he laps up the attention of the younger girls in the audience, hugging and kissing and posing for photos. And he sways with a defined beat that's more physical support for his music than any attempt to turn anyone on.

  The feeling is down-to-earth. And yet he can be lofty, and pretentious, sermonizing unconvincingly on "Brother Love" or zigging from the despair of "I Am...I Said" into the birdbrained optimism of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

  To which Diamond responds: "When I get onstage, it's a theatrical experience. It doesn't relate to real life. It's real life magnified ten thousand times. There are many parts you play onstage. Only one of them is the real you."

  Offstage, in wine-colored shirt (I didn't ask what year), smoke-gray suit and tinted glasses, he sits for a CBS-TV interview and says he doesn't want to be a celebrity who gets "swept away by it all; it's not real," but that celebrity "is part of my skin; I love it."

  At lunch at Le Restaurant, across from his office, he asks to switch seats with me, so that he is facing away from the entranceway. "This way I'm less observable," he says.

  "If I had my druthers, I'd be an anonymous star," he continues. "Somebody that was able to do his work, have it accepted by the public and still be able to maintain his own private feelings and live as reasonably normal a life as one could expect in this situation. I've tried to do that. I've avoided getting too hot; I've avoided overexposure, staying away from television for a long time has been part of it. I may be coming out of that now, I'm getting older and I'm able to deal with it a little better."

  During his sabbatical, Diamond went through therapy. He's uncertain what kind of therapy it was-"My guess would be Freudian, but we never discussed his techniques." All he knows is that in 1972 he felt he didn't know how to talk with peoplewith the press-about his work. And that it was Lenny Bruce who got him open to psychoanalysis.

  "I went out to do a test for the Lenny Bruce film. I had met Tom O'Horgan [director of Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair] a couple of times. I spent a number of weeks studying this script. Bruce's language and thoughts were so violent. It was almost an intellectual form of vomiting. He was just saying all those things I had been holding in, that anybody holds in, `fuck' and `shit'...and `death' and `kill' and all of those things that he was getting out, I found that they were coming out with me. It was all the anger that was pent up in me. Suddenly here I was, speaking words that I had never spoken before. These violent monologues of his, and the way he acted. And I went into therapy almost immediately after that. Because there were things coming out of me that I couldn't deal with. It was frightening because I had never been willing to admit this part of my personality."

  Diamond, who'd studied acting for a short time in New York, got the part. The film, however, got stalled and wound up on Broadway. By that time, Diamond had turned to Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

  The Bruce experience inspired not only almost four years in therapy, but also the song "I Am...I Said," easily (or uneasily) Diamond's most wrenching paean to loneliness. "He is," he said, and no one heard him. "Not even the chair." Talk about your sound of silence.

  He was depressed at the screen test, he said, thinking he'd done miserably. "During a lunch break, I was in my dressing room with my guitar. It just came out."

  Since therapy, Diamond feels he's worked out a balance between self-confidence, which he's always had, and self-esteem, which he's never had and which accounted for all the nervousness, the inability to talk. "I was unable to go out and be social. Going to parties is just something I've been able to develop over the last few years."

  "I was a solitary child." To hear his songs and stories, you would think that Neil Diamond was born lonely. That, apparently, is not far from the truth.

  Neil Diamond was born in Coney Island. His family moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming-where his soldier father was stationed-before he was 4. In Cheyenne, and later, back in Brooklyn, he was in and out of nine schools before he was 16 because his father operated dry-goods stores, and was always chasing fortunes from one location to another. Diamond had few frien
ds and says he turned to music and to an imaginary companion. One such buddy became a song: "Shilo."

  He heard radio music when he worked in his dad's shop; at home there were his folks' Latin dance records; he idolized singing cowboy movie stars and, at Erasmus Hall and Lincoln High School, he was in the choral group. At 16, he went to a camp in upstate New York where Pete Seeger performed. `And some of the kids had actually written a song and they played it for him, and I kinda sat in the back and watched, and I became aware of the possibility of actually writing a song. And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs."

  Neil was attracted to songwriting because "it was something no one in my family had done. It was unusual, it wasn't your everyday average kind of thing, and it was the first real interest I had shown in anything up until that point." It was also a release for his frustrations. Diamond wrote constantly-basic love songs, influenced by the pop music of the day, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, the Drifters and the simple folk music of the Weavers.

  "I began to get more and more into the lyrical part of it when I got into college," he says. "I was bored by school, and writing lyrics in class was interesting. It resulted in abysmal failure in school. I mean, I just hung on by the barest thread."

  He had been admitted into New York University on a fencing scholarship as a premed major. "I probably would not have ever gone to college if I hadn't been offered a scholarship." he says. "They were the only school that accepted me." But with chord progressions spinning around his head, he found himself splitting his time at NYU between fencing and songwriting. Then, he says. "I began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, tried to get the songs heard.

  "I never really chose songwriting," he says. "It just absorbed me and became more and more important in my life as the years passed." In gravitating towards Tin Pan Alley, Diamond was unknowingly following a tradition, that of the Jewish-American pop-music craftsmen. Today, he acknowledges the relationship: "The Gershwin tradition, of the person who really began with a primitive musical education and somehow expanded on it." He has previously said: "I don't dream of being George Gershwin. I dream of being Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Robert Frost. That's how much I think I can do musically."

  He found Tin Pan Alley in the yellow pages, while looking up "music publishers," and got an offer from Sunbeam Music to write songs for $ 50 a week for sixteen weeks. "It seemed like an eternity," says Diamond. Only ten units short of graduation, he quit NYU.

  SUNBEAM KICKED HIM OUT of his cubicle after the sixteen weeks were up. By then he'd begun singing his own songs for demo (demonstration) purposes, and he got a one-record deal from Columbia Records. He promoted the single with his first public appearances, lip-synching the song at "hops and little fairs." His first performance was in Pennsylvania. He wore a suit, had not yet worked a guitar into his act, "went out there, tripped over a wire, and fell flat on my face. My first introduction to the stage."

  His record did a similar fall and Columbia bounced him back out on the streets. He was in and out of publishing houses for the next seven years. Diamond's problem was simple: he couldn't write for anyone else.

  Unlike his peers-Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Neil Sedaka, Howard Greenfield, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weill-Diamond never wrote a hit. "I had very few things that were recorded even. Which is probably why I had such a nomadic life as a writer. Part of it was they felt there were too many words. I'd spent a lot of time on lyrics, and they were looking for hooks and I didn't really understand the nature of that.

  "The only real success I had was in being able to sell the songs in the first place to the publishers and get the advance. It was purely a matter of survival. I was able to sell one song a week or every two weeks and get my $100, which carried me another two weeks till the next song was sold."

  He reached a point where he allotted himself 3 5 cents a day for a meal: a 2 3-cent Hoagy-a submarine sandwich-a Coke, and a two-cent piece of candy from Woolworth's. "I did that for a year," he says.

  The frustrations, he willingly admits, affect him to this day. "Listen," he has said, "it's very difficult to accept seven years of failing without it doing something to you. And what it did was close me up more as a person."

  After about the millionth firing from a staff writing job, Diamond went into business for himself, renting a storage room above Birdland on Broadway for $ 3 5 a month. "Put a piano in, put a pay phone in, put two chairs in and I stayed there for a year and wrote. And something new began to happen. I wasn't under the gun, and suddenly interesting songs began to happen, songs that had things that none of the others did." For one of his songs, he needed a demo singer and called on Ellie Greenwich. With partner Jeff Barry, Greenwich was one of the successes on Broadway, writing and/or producing for the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the Shangri- Las, among many others. Greenwich and Barry eventually joined Diamond in a publishing firm and agreed to produce him. Suddenly, given the impetus of writing for himself, he came up with three hits in their first session: "Solitary Man," "Cherry Cherry" and "I Got the Feeling (Oh No No)."

  Jeff Barry took Diamond to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Diamond, now equipped with a black Everly Brothers/Gibson guitar, ran through his tunes. Wexler says he made a deal "on the spot." However, a producer who'd been working with Atlantic, Bert Berns, was just starting a record label-financed by Atlantic and called Bang Records-and when Berns phoned Wexler the next day to talk about acquisition of talent for Bang, Wexler "handed Neil to Burns."

  Bert Berns is one of the great untold stories of rock and roll. He died on the last day of 1967, at age 38, of a heart attack. He began in the early sixties as a song plugger, and became a producer for Atlantic, working with Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett and, most successfully, the Drifters. As a songwriter, he'd written Latin-influenced hits such as "Twist and Shout"; for the Drifters, his "Under the Boardwalk" and "Save the Last Dance for Me" inspired, among many younger songwriters. Neil Diamond. After the British assault of '64, he was in England, producing Them (he wrote "Here Comes the Night") and later signed Van Morrison onto Bang Records.

  Diamond's instant success at Bang was based on a way with melodies, a reliance on a go-go bounciness and simple love lyrics.

  Diamond stayed with Berns for only two years. Berns, he says, had two sides: one the creative, supportive, paternalistic musical genius. The flip side was the hardheaded, chart-minded businessman. Diamond ran into trouble when he asked that "Shilo" be released as a single. "It was my first attempt at an autobiographical thing. It was not what he wanted. It was not `Cherry Cherry' or `Kentucky Woman.' And I had asked him over a period of time if he would release it as a single. `No, go in and do some more singles.' I finally became desperate because I just felt that it was part of my development, and I told him I wouldn't take any royalties for it, and please put it out. And he said, `If you give me another year on your contract I'll put it out.' And at that point we had been having very bad relations and I was just totally disgusted with it and I walked out. When I told him I wouldn't record for him anymore the heat began to really get intense. Bert started threatening me because I was his biggest artist and he wanted more of the same. At that time Fred Weintraub was managing me. About two weeks after our real big blow-up, somebody threw a bomb into the Bitter End, and we knew it was related to this whole thing."

  "It wasn't a bomb," says Weintraub, now a film producer. "It was just a stink bomb that destroyed the place so we couldn't use it for a couple of days. And I got beaten up very badly. But it's hard to pin things like that down. There's no proof of anything."

  Diamond, meantime, borrowed a. 38 from a friend and sent his wife and daughter out to Long Island for several weeks. "Things seemed to cool down," he says, "and so I just left it at that."

  Mrs. Bert Berns-now Ilene Biscoe-is still at Bang Records, now located in Atlanta. "God, that's absurd," she says. "It sounds like a motion picture script." Berns,
she says, "wasn't that kind of a guy." But she was obviously pained. "Why does a beautiful man like Bert Berns have to have that kind of garbage thrown on his grave? How does a dead man defend himself?"

  Jerry Wexler, now an independent producer, also expressed "shock" at Diamond's claim. But, he says, Berns was "zealous and jealous about what he considered his equity. He could become very excited. Violence? I don't know."

  In leaving Bang Records, Diamond was turning his back on symbols of his past: Brooklyn, Tin Pan Alley, the Top 40 treadmill... and his first wife.

  They were too young, he says, 16 or so when they went steady, 21 or so when they married, and parents a year later.

  "It was almost as though our destiny was preordained. We were to be married, have children; the best we could hope for was a little house on Long Island. We'd live the lives our parents wanted us to live. I didn't really begin to think about myself and my life until I began to travel and remove myself from that peer group. And I realized that that wasn't what I wanted at all, and things began to deteriorate from that point.

  "I just decided to split and leave it all behind. In a sense it was running away." But he wasn't alone. In New York, he had met an employee at a TV station he was visiting. "I'm not sure what it was that attracted me to Marcia," he says solemnly. "Maybe it was the sadness in her eyes more than anything else. I saw this girl and she evidently understood great pain." And that was before they'd exchanged a word.

  Soon after arriving in L.A., Neil and Marcia married. Diamond signed with MCAs Uni label for $250,000 after entertaining numerous offers. MCA, he says, gave him his wings, and he responded with songs like "Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show," "Brooklyn Roads," and "Sweet Caroline." He grew musically but, outside of Marcia, had no social life. Rock, in 1968, dominated Los Angeles; it stood for all manner of social change and protests; rock stars were replacing movie stars as Hollywood royalty. And Neil Diamond stayed at home.