"I never could identify with that. I never did understand... this rebelliousness. First of all, I was not a teenager anymore. I was 26 or 27, I had already been married, had two children at that point.
"I knew that I was out of it. But I could never relate being serious about my work and hanging out with people. It didn't relate to what I was trying to do, which was essentially to try and be Alan Jay Lerner or George Gershwin. `Hip' was something frivolous people had time to be. I didn't have time to be hip and with it and groovy. I was dealing with something that was much more important: with my life and trying to write songs that had substance. And hip is bullshit. It doesn't cut deep. It cuts for today and tomorrow."
Still, there was the Brother Love album, which had Diamond bearded on the cover, while inside there was an aimless "Salvation Game" that made use of the argot of the Aquarian Age. "I suppose from a business point of view I could have tried to be hip," says Diamond. "The growing of the beard, I suppose, from outward appearances looked like I was getting hip or something. In reality: I was hiding from some private detectives my first wife had hired."
RO B B I E ROBERTSON I S AT THE BOARD at Kendun studios in Burbank, mixing "If You Know What I Mean," the first single from Beautiful Noise, while Diamond sits on a couch behind him, writing a liner note. Slowly, Robertson, with two engineers, peels away a synthesized calliope sound, some of the higher-registered strings, and, by Neil's direction, some of the echo-"There's an edge to it I don't really like," he tells Robertson. While Robbie huddles, Neil gets busy recopying his one-sentence liner note.
On a break, in an adjacent room, he reads it: "This album is a series of recollections, remembrances from a time in the early sixties, when a young songwriter set out to make his way on the beautiful but noisy streets of New York City's Tin Pan Alley."
"We really tried to cover a milieu that I spent quite a bit of time in, that Robbie passed through briefly on his way to New Orleans, and we're familiar with a lot of the same characters, a lot of the same experiences, and when we first got together and started to think seriously about doing an album, we kinda groped around and one of the subjects that we covered was our shared experiences in New York. And Robbie thought it would make a fascinating story, that it hadn't really been told."
Robbie Robertson picks up the thread: "That period was-it was the beginning and the end," he says. "It was the beginning of `hip,' it was the beginning of the songwriter era, it was... all of a sudden, people started saying what was gonna be on their album covers. People's hair got long. Kennedy got assassinated; there was the Vietnam War. It was such an incredible cultural, social revolution-like an interAmerican revolution. It spurted across here and there and ignited these things, and it was worldwide. And the real capper in it is the death of Tin Pan Alley. It exploded with the rest of it."
Neil Diamond and Robbie Robertson. Images, categories of "hip" and "straight" aside, it's an odd coupling.
"We thought it was an odd combination, too," says Diamond. "Robbie being so rooted in his thing and me being in my area. But we thought the combination of the two would create a third thing that neither of us had experienced before."
The two had met casually, a few years ago, when Robertson lived in Woodstock. Then they met up again when they discovered they were neighbors in Malibu. `And then it was time to go off and sit on the beach and talk about things. And after a while we began to think we could maybe set off a few sparks between us."
Robertson shrugs off Diamond's "commercial" aura. "The main thing, you know, was trying to understand whether the experiment would work musically. It seemed just weird enough that it was a worthwhile undertaking."
Beautiful Noise may become a movie, says Diamond. Early on, he and Robertson were thinking of it as a possible Broadway musical. Now, they'll pursue a film version. But, of course, Diamond's still touring, and he has a TV special planned for later this year, and he's talking about building this camp for kids. It was at a camp, after all, where Diamond first experienced fresh air and was inspired to write songs.
And, as he says, "Songwriting gives me the greatest joy, the greatest sense of accomplishment, the sense that my life does have some purpose, although I don't fully understand it right now. It's what I am."
He said.
-September 23, 1976
Rolling Stone
For the author's bio that Rolling Stone ran with feature articles, I wrote: "Fong-Torres himself has written some hundred songs, including "Tommy Was a Commie" and "Johnny Wore Shoulder Pads." Modesty kept me from offering a sample lyric (i.e., from "Tommy": "He don't iron clothes, but a Curtain instead"), and from adding such classic titles as "Bleeding Ulcers" and "I Saw Her Handling Beer." Those songs were composed in the late sixties. At Rolling Stone, I wrote several more, including a parody of Bob Dylan's "Serve Somebody." My song, which I thought was more to the point, is called "Suck Somebody."
Neil Diamond would've been proud.
THE LIFE AND LURVES OF
Diane Keaton
'm not complaining, mind you, but by the mid-seventies, I was firmly identified as a rock journalist, a music writer-and nothing else. Maybe that's why I found time for Chinatown and to write that foreword for the book Chink!
Actually, at Rolling Stone, all of us handled stories that reached beyond the world of music. Early on, I reported stories having to do with drugs, religion, and, especially, radio and television. Having had experience on the air at KSAN, I covered the underground radio scene and the many battles stations fought with the Federal Communications Commission and various politicians over drug lyrics and perceived obscenities. And I was the front man in our annual sniping at the Grammys, which, in our early years, was deaf, dumb, and blind when it came to rock and roll. My profile subjects were almost all musicians, but I did have the occasional visit with comedy acts. And, one day in 1976, when I was in Las Vegas with Neil Diamond, I bumped into Mae West, and wrote a story about it.
There was no question, however, that Diane Keaton was a personal breakthrough.
It wasn't as though someone at Rolling Stone looked at me one day and said, "Let's have Ben write about movie stars." I had to come up with the idea and pitch it.
I did it out of love. Years before, watching the occasional TV, my roommates and I would drool over Keaton, then starring in a commercial for a deodorant. When she crossed over to movies, I followed along, lapping up both her work in films like Play ItAgain, Sam and Annie Hall, and her nearly psychotic appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
When, in 1977, she wrapped shooting on Looking for Mr. Goodbar, I learned from her manager that, given her druthers, she'd prefer Rolling Stone over The New York Times and other suitors for her first interview in two years.
As calmly as I could, I volunteered for the task of spending a few days with Keaton in New York.
Maybe it was because Rolling Stone had announced plans to move to Manhattan, and I'd already made noises about staying in San Francisco. Maybe my fellow editors wanted to see what I could do in foreign territory-not New York, but the movies.
Here's what I did-with wonderful cooperation from Diane, from her family, and from Woody Allen. When his name came up, Keaton offered to call him on my behalf, and suddenly, the article had a special guest.
ANNIE HALL (DIANE K E A T O N) is getting ready to engage Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in their first conversation. They'd just met for a doubles match at this tennis club in Manhattan, and now they're back in street clothes, which means for Annie a white men's shirt and baggy, wrinkled tan slacks, a black vest and a white polka-dot black tie that falls out over her belt buckle. Her hair is mostly swept up under a black fedora, and she enters laughing and waving..."Hi. hi."
Alvy Singer returns the greeting. Hall stands there, swaying a little, cups her hands together and smiles big. "Well," she says with another wave, "bye!"
As she turns to go, Singer speaks up: "You play very well." She pounces, "Oh, yeah? So do you!" and is immediately stricken.
"Oh, God, ooh, what a dumb thing to say, right?" Nervous giggle. "You say, `You play well,' then right away I have to say, `You play well."' Her hands go to her hips, in reprimanding position. She shakes her head, looks down, all contrite, lets her left hand drop. "Oh, God, Annie.. .well, oh, well-" Her scolding is over, and she is bright again-"La-di-da," she singsongs, "La-di-da."
It is only thirty seconds into the scene, but the movie audience is already in love. They applaud Keaton's "La-di-da."
A romance begins.
And I become, like Alvy Singer, a man for whom love is too weak a word. I lurve her, I luff her, I loave her.
Jeez, what a way to be talking. I mean, I'm supposed to go and interview Diane Keaton. Her doorbell makes a loud, jarring sound. Seconds later, she opens the door, fast, and backs up, welcoming me in. "Hi, hi," she says, extending her hand. She is dressed in men's clothing: a white shirt, an old vest, oversize suit pants with subdued striping and rolled-her-own cuffs. I hand her a small bouquet of apricot roses-an old New journalism ploy-and she goes into a spasm: "Oh, wow," she says in her singing, soprano voice. "Wow ...jeez, you didn't have to do this."
Well. So this is Diane Keaton, Woody Allen's leading lady in Play It Again, Sam; Sleeper; Love and Death and, last and most of all, Annie Hall.
At age 31, Keaton is the closest she's been to emerging from behind Woody Allen's diminutive shadow. Through her title role in Annie Hall she has become the comer among actresses. A dramatic lead role in the film version of Judith Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar, due out this fall, is expected to nudge her even higher.
Today, though, she is straight out of Annie Hall. There are her clear, excitable blue eyes, her high, round cheekbones, her long, straw brown hair and those large, fluttery, wayward hands. I expect a flustered Keaton, speaking sentences the way my father drives, as if she knows she's headed for an accident and must make all these sudden stops, backup moves, and surprising little turns.
She does not disappoint. At her kitchen table, we talk about being Capricorns and being pigeonholed in all the astrology books as humorless. I note that Keaton doesn't seem to mind a laugh now and then. "Just occasionally, you know," she says, "not very often. I have a severe life."
Her kitchen is very white-walls, doors, floors, white appliances, Braun coffee grinder and Osterizer, white salt and pepper shakers, spice rack and watering can, Keri lotion in a white container on the white kitchen shelf. And a white wall telephone.
"White," she says, "is very cleansing for me. Also, I like a lot of room. It opens things up to me. I don't like it closing in."
And yet, her outfits are mostly dark and layered, so that most of her body is constantly covered up. "I feel most comfortable that way, relaxed," she says. "I'm very selfconscious about my body." Her clothes, she says, date back to her childhood in Santa Ana, a suburb of Los Angeles, and going through thrift shops with her mom for funand for actual clothes, which Diane would design and Mom would sew. "Stores were a way of expressing ourselves," she says, "since there were not a lot of museums in Santa Ana." She studies her pants, which look like they belong in a museum. "It's beautiful fabric, isn't it?" she asks gently. "I love patterns and stripes." She says she thinks she found today's outfit in a men's store. And, yes, that ensemble she had on in the tennis club scene in Annie Hall was out of her own closet. "Mainly, I like that kind of clothing," she says. "I don't have a lot of gowns." A laugh begins to build. 'And I don't have any tiaras!"
The rest of the apartment is sparse and contemporary. Her bed, which is a yard off the ground on a wooden platform, also serves as a dresser. It is tightly made, a white cotton spread shrink-wrapped around her mattress.
Diane's apartment is in the Upper Sixties; Woody Allen's penthouse is a few blocks north. Like Keaton's place, it is clean and open, but it is filled with color, the tasteful, dark colors of rugs and wing chairs and chests and canisters and shelves full of chinaware and books. Allen has lived here some eight years, including the year he and Keaton lived together, 19 71. And guess who helped him decorate?
Allen, himself decorated in tan slacks and blue work shirt over a T-shirt just beginning to tatter, says Keaton accounted for "tons of stuff all through the house. In recent years, she's gotten more and more interested in a kind of gallery, spare, white look. But she's crazy about it here. Our tastes have coincided an enormous amount, which I found very surprising, considering that I came from an urban New York Jewish background and hers was totally different."
Well, now, you're what Grammy Hall would call a "real Jew. " She hates Jews. She thinks they just make money, but let me tell you, she's the one, is she ever.
-Annie Hall to Alvy Singer
KEATON AND ALLEN ARE BEST FRIENDS. Allen wrote Annie Hall (with Marshall Brickman, also his cowriter on Sleeper) for Keaton (whose last name is actually Hall; Keaton is her mother's maiden name). Although it is not exactly their story, there is an understandable tendency to take what is on the screen to be what happened in real life. For example, that quality of Keaton's, that comic nervousness and self-deprecation that makes her so lovable, so easy to want to reassure. Allen knows it well.
"I think it's something that she grew up with, and she probably learned at an infant's age that that kind of thing is very endearing to people," he says. "But it's not at all calculated. Tony Roberts [costar in first the stage, then the film version of Play It Again, Sam] used to feel that she was the type that would wake up in the morning and immediately start apologizing. She's one of those people who is forever putting herself down-and always coming through."
When something counts, says Allen, Keaton gets all jittery. And she does not eat. So at the Caffe Tartufo, while I lunch, she orders a Perrier water and tosses a carefully rolled stick of Doublemint into her mouth. "I love gum," she says. "It's very pleasing for me to crack it."
She talks about how she met Woody. She had been in Hair on Broadway in 1968 and heard about auditions for this new Woody Allen play called Play It Again, Sam. Allen had written a vehicle for his own acting debut; he would portray a recently separated film critic with a Bogart fixation and an apparent problem finding dames. (Allen himself was going through a divorce from Louise Lasser at the time.) The female role was a small one: Woody's best friend's wife, with whom Woody falls in love.
Keaton had impressed Allen and the play's director, Joe Hardy, right away, but they had to go through some fifty other actresses. Finally, she was called back as a finalist. `And he had to come up and audition with me," says Keaton, "and he was as scared as I was. And I thought he was great-I'd seen him on television before and I thought he was real cute-you know? He looked good to me. I liked him. Mainly, he was as scared as me, which I found real appealing."
Woody, indeed, remembers being nervous. "I was scared because-first of all, I had never acted in my life. I was strictly a nightclub comic. And then, when we called her back, we were worried that she'd be too tall, you know, and we didn't want the joke of the play to be that I was in love with a, you know, super-looking woman. And so we got onstage together, and both of us were nervous-I felt, 'Oh, this is a real actress, she was in Hair, and I'm just going to waste her time'...and we measured back to back, and it was like being in the third grade." Allen, who usually maintains a sober, jokeless air during interviews, laughs at the memory. `And we were just about the same height, and so that was it."
Keaton had an immediate crush on Allen, and Woody was also openly smitten. Something in the way she dressed:
"She'd come in every day with an absolutely spectacularly imaginative combination of clothes. They were just great." Asked for an example, Allen himself gets imagi native: "Oh, she would-she was the type that would come in with, you know, a football Jersey and a skirt.. .and combat boots and, you know"-he is cracking up again"you know, oven mittens....
'And I thought she was very charming to be around, and of course you always get the impulse with Diane to protect her. And she was so bright and so quick. She's also a real easy laugher, which
is very seductive, and we kind of drifted together, is what happened."
"The first time I called for Diane in California, I picked her up in Santa Ana, and she...."
Allen looks out one of his floor-to-ceiling windows, as if measuring distance. "From here to across the street was a supermarket-and we wanted to get some gum, 'cause she always had, like, a chaw of gum in her mouth, like a baseball player, and she said, 'Well, let's get in the car and go.' And I said. 'You're going to get in the car and go?' And she said, 'Yeah!' Her whole life, she had been getting in the car and driving four hundred feet to the supermarket. She said, 'You're not going to walk, are you?' And I said, 'Well, yeah, of course, I mean, I walk thirty times that length without thinking to get the newspapers,' and she couldn't believe it. And I walked with her, and she said, 'You know, hey, I guess you can walk.' I mean, it was so shattering."
Woody and Diane acted together in Play It Again, Sam for a year-"A long haul," says Keaton-and every night, Woody would lose-or give-Diane back to her husband, the way Bogie gave Bergman back to Henreid. But in real life, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Keaton got a small part, "about six minutes," in 1970, in a comedy called Lovers and Other Strangers. Then it was Woody Allen almost all the way, beginning in 19 72 with the film version of Play It Again, Sam, for which Allen expanded her role, and followed by Sleeper and Love and Death. With Allen, Keaton matured into a comic actress able to help shape her own character and able to move into drama, in The Godfather. While Keaton is most often referred to as "Oh, yes, Woody Allen's girlfriend," she has done more than hang on to his coattails with her oven mittens.
Faced with the suggestion that Allen has been her crutch, Keaton's voice becomes cold steel. Even her gum is quiet. "I don't believe that at all," she says. "I feel that everybody has a career based on somebody and we're influenced by somebody and I have to feel that I have the talent to back it up. And I feel I've worked hard. I don't agree with that. Otherwise I'd kill myself."
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 41