by Paul Anka
I wasn’t all that promising as a matinee idol: I had problems with my height and weight, I was swarthy, and like all teenagers I was preoccupied with my hair. What was I going to do with it? I was forever combing it back, pulling it down in the front. But I had the performing bug like crazy. The writing began to develop, and at that point it all started to come together. Then it just became a question of singing my own material, which was so custom-made for me that nobody else would want to do it. Everyone sensed I had it, this energy and crazy drive in me, but where is he going to go with this? Timing is everything in this world, especially the music business. To want a career in rock ’n’ roll you had to have the guts to pursue it beyond reason because back then the singers you heard on the radio were almost entirely older, established performers and vocal groups. I was the first kid of that kind out of Canada, so it was understandable that not many others even tried to get into it. I didn’t even know what it meant.
Later on, much later, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Celine Dion, they all left. Celine Dion went to Berlitz to learn English; she was French Canadian and hadn’t had a chance to learn English as a kid.
In April 1957, with $500 from my dad I went to New York with my songs—it was do or die. The songs I took to New York with me were “Diana,” “Tell Me That You Love Me,” “Don’t Gamble with Love,” and “I Love You, Baby.” All were written somewhere around ’56, into ’57. I would have been fifteen or sixteen, I’d say, when the writing bug really took hold, when the ideas started to come, and now I was ready. I wanted to do the most impossible thing imaginable: take my songs to New York City and see if anybody else would buy my dreams.
Two
TEEN IDOL
Two weeks later, I’m in New York City sharing a small hotel room with The Rover Boys, trying to figure out where I’m going to sleep ’cause there aren’t enough beds! I didn’t care: I knew my life was going to change in a big way. So I put a mattress down in the bathtub and charted my course.
We stayed at the President Hotel, a small place in the West Forties where musicians and theater people stayed. I was having a great time, hanging out, meeting people. I’d go down to the coffee shop to eat or get a doughnut. Every little thing was just magic for a kid from Ottawa. New York wasn’t dangerous then. You could walk down Eighth Avenue, Broadway, go to the movies in the middle of the night on Forty-second Street!
I checked out the jazz clubs that you could still find on Broadway. I wanted to get a feel of the city and everything I’d read about the music scene in New York.
While eating in the hotel coffee shop one day I ran into this guy from Cuba, a real charming guy, a fantastic bongo and conga player named Chino Pozo, cousin of the great Afro-Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo who virtually invented Latin Jazz. Chano was a tough, rowdy guy who got killed in a bar in Harlem over a bag of marijuana at age thirty-three. His cousin Chino was a sweet mild-mannered guy, very different from his hot-tempered cousin. I used to see Chino play with Peggy Lee in a little jazz club, Basin Street East. It was a very tight stage and I’d be ringside so we’d notice each other. Later I’d see him back at the hotel and say, “Chino, you’re going to work for me one day.” This obviously amused him—“Who is this loco kid?”—but he was always nice about it. Soon after I had my first hit I ran into him again and I said, “Chino, I’m ready! Are you coming to work for me?” He worked with me for years, right up until he died. I ultimately moved him to Vegas and bought him a car—he was amazed, he’d never even driven a car before. He used to cook up a big pot of paella and bring it backstage. You always wanted this guy around—very loyal, and I was loyal to him, too. That’s how it was back then. Somebody’s with you from the beginning, you don’t ever let them go. All my life, he was my bongo player/percussionist. One day in 1980, we were on our way to the airport to go on tour in Canada and we stopped by his condo to pick him up. We knock on the door. No response. Eventually we open a window and climb inside and find he had died in the night.
The Brill Building at 1619 Broadway was the action spot of the music biz, along with the other hive of publishing and songwriting, 1650 Broadway. The Brill Building was a big office building with a restaurant in the basement. We used to go and grab a huge bowl of shrimp for a buck. It was where W. C. Handy and Irving Berlin had hung their hats so that was like walking into the tower of song. Meanwhile, 1650 Broadway was maybe a little hipper since the younger songwriters hung out there.
When you walked down any given hall in those buildings, you would hear piano playing coming out of the doorway. You’d hear Hal David working with Burt Bacharach, who was tinkling a melody in one room, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller harmonizing in another. It was like a music factory, piano plunking and oo-pah-pahing on every floor. Doors open, people hanging out in the hallways, smoking, talking, schmoozing, joking, paying off bookies, trying out riffs on each other. In the offices, guys would be playing cards, some of the older guys there praying that rock ’n’ roll would go away. It was the kind of building where you could hang out in just about any office. Everybody knew each other; going from office to office was like a musical guided tour. If I wanted to hang out with Artie Ripp and a bunch of the doo-wop guys, I went up to the fourth floor and stood around the piano, everybody doo-wopping. All the music and talent came out of that building. Hard to imagine today, that we could walk from office to office and see the guys actually writing the hits.
Creativity and thievery flourished side by side in the early days of rock ’n’ roll. There was the notorious Morris Levy, who was part of the Genovese crime family, a handsome, slick, ruthless character like Bugsy Siegel. He took co-writing credit on Frankie Lymon’s “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” and sole credit for “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent.” And that was nothing unusual. There was a famous saying of Morris Levy’s, “Write a word, get a third,” meaning if you came up with a word or a phrase in a song, you got one third of the writer’s and publishing proceeds. And Levy made sure he put his contribution into as many songs as possible. He’d say stuff like, “No, no, not ‘sun’ it should be ‘fun.’” If anyone asked him about royalties, he’d say, “Royalties? If you want royalties, go to England.”
That year, “Party Doll” by Buddy Knox was my favorite record. I loved anything by The Everly Brothers. The Rover Boys had a big hit, “Graduation Day,” and they brought me in to see Don Costa, who was a producer at ABC-Paramount Records. With that I got my foot in the door and launched into my sales pitch. “Aw, let the kid in, see what he’s got.” They thought it was funny, me being so young and enthusiastic and green about how you do things in the music biz. I guess I was pretty good at promoting myself, because the guy was sold enough to convince the company president, Sam Clark, and the suits to come in and hear me. I’d basically just walked in off the street and plunked out four tunes on the piano—and here were big shots at a major record company taking me seriously.
Imagine the scene: in walks a fifteen-year-old who’s very positive and who has a song (“Diana”) that says something—even though the song is pretty basic—and the whole picture adds up. I mean, I was hardly a pretty boy and barely tall enough to see over the lower half of this Dutch door they had leading to their office stockroom!
Costa had his own funny description of my arrival on the scene: “There we were, jammed into my office listening to little Mr. Five-by-Five pounding out the songs. It was like the movie Words and Music, about Rodgers and Hart. Paul was Mickey Rooney playing Larry Hart. Everything frantic, hammed up, overplayed; but he had something.”
I had a tape with my entire catalog on it at that time … four songs: “Diana,” “Tell Me That You Love Me,” “Don’t Gamble with Love,” and “I Love You, Baby.” I played everything I had on the piano for the record company executives. After Costa and Sam Clark heard them all—the room was still vibrating with the last notes—they said, “Paul, you should call your parents and tell them we need to talk about signing you to the label.” I had only been in New York for
two weeks and they’re offering me a contract! Right there in the office I called my parents and told them that ABC wanted to sign me. That fateful meeting with Don Costa changed everything: my life as a teenager ended at fifteen.
My parents were taken by surprise but they did have a bit of prior conditioning from my “Blau Wilde De Veest Fontaine” adventure. I’d done local TV in Canada and they’d heard certain industry people say often enough, “Geez, he’s got something. I’d keep an eye on him.” I was hungry, always fighting my parents’ common sense because I knew what I wanted. Knowing how bull-headed I was, they probably figured I was going to stay with it no matter what anybody said.
But New York City, that was a different matter. It’s the Big Apple, the scene, and they’re obviously overwhelmed, very openly humble about it. They sure weren’t show business parents, but still my father wasn’t stupid—he was a very astute businessman. Even after I hit, my dad kept me centered. That’s how Canadians are—anchored. We keep the lower 48 from floating off into the blue.
My parents signed. Don Costa signed along with the president Sam Clark, a great guy, and Larry Newton and Irwin Garr signed, too—these were the top executives at ABC. They wined and dined my parents and came up with a formula. They’d give me a hundred bucks a month to write for their publishing company. The contracts got signed and the folks were sent home. I stayed, and my life began.
Costa started working with me right away, suggesting arrangements, finding the musicians, and generally getting me ready for the recording date. Don’s first assignment for me was to complete the last couple of lines in the bridge for “Diana.” I had to get ready to cut the record in the studio in a couple weeks. I wrote the song real fast—it was a poem first—but I didn’t know how to finish it. The morning of the recording I overslept—I’d been up late the night before enjoying being in New York. So I was late for the date, which was for two o’clock. Uh-oh! I think I got up at ten to two and ran like a son of a bitch down Broadway. I got to the Capitol studio but I still didn’t have what I wanted. I said to myself, “I’m not gonna blow this. Just go in and wing it!” My problem was I didn’t have any words for certain notes, that’s why I used those “uh-ohs” at the end of the bridge in “Diana” that every other rock group would soon be using in their songs. I just threw the “uh-ohs” in, but because of the urgency of the song, they seemed to be expressing inarticulate teen yearning. What began as a filler line was seen as a deliberate stylistic move. And that became one of the song’s hooks. You have to be open to chance—mistakes can often turn into innovations if you can find a way of flipping them.
We recorded “Diana” over at Capitol’s studios. It all happened so fast it kind of blew the top off my fifteen-year-old head. This was the big time and I had very little preparation except for my experience in clubs in Ottawa and my one failed recording. I came out of an environment of fan magazines where all these people were on a pedestal. When it happened to me, it was so unreal—I felt like I was dreaming.
I had good ideas, but musically a lot of them weren’t right. They needed fixing and Don was the doctor. He was a guitar player, but he was also a well-rounded musician and like a lot of the other A&R directors he could pretty much do everything. Writing, arranging, figuring out the chords and the voicings. The voicings, you know, come about when you’re thinking of an arrangement—it’s the way you put a song across. Every professional knows instinctively where to take the basic track they’ve heard played on a piano with just a rough vocal sung by the songwriter on a demo.
That’s when you start laying it out, figuring out at what moment the strings could come in. The horns, are there going to be backup singers? That’s an art, to come in and know how to arrange a song, to reinforce the emotional tilt but still stay out of the singer’s way. They don’t write like that today, believe me. Don had a lot of heart and soul, along with good commercial sense. When we sat down and did “Diana,” it was as if the song I heard in my head came leaping to life out of that simple calypso melody I’d played on the piano. Costa and Nelson Riddle, and many like them are the unsung heroes of the music business.
Michael Jackson was a classic example of a songwriter who began with very basic ideas. He was not a great musician, not particularly talented at playing an instrument—piano, guitar, whatever—but he had this great way of singing out the parts so that the arranger could hear the latent potential. Costa was a genius at catching that. He had a fantastic command of creating arrangements. I would get together with him, lay down a feel; I would scat, I’d go eah-eh-eh da-da-dada, just to get me to the next verse. That way it all came out so honest, and that direct current was intrinsic to the songs I was writing at the time. Don would take my basic black-and-white scripts and turn them into Technicolor, widescreen little movies. That’s where one and one makes three.
Costa was the most instrumental, creative person in my life. I would come to him, we’d sit down at the piano, I’d play my songs to him and try to tell him the sort of sound I heard in my head. I never physically wrote the notes down; I just tried to articulate to him what I felt as best as I could. He was able to pick up on those little hints, capture them, and turn them into orchestrations. By the second year of recording I was writing down notes, coming up with chords.
When Costa heard where I wanted to go stylistically, he’d take the lick and put in a sax and lock it to the guitar line to give it that signature sound. We were all hip as to the necessity of the hook—the hook is the money in the song, the refrain that grabs you and sells it. These are the things that bind a song together, the underlying elements that the listener is only subliminally aware of—but if they aren’t there the song doesn’t work. In most of these early songs it was either the hook or the intro that grabbed you right off the bat. My whole thing has always been to get the idea out immediately, so every title primarily came off the first line—“Puppy Love,” “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” “You Are My Destiny,” “Lonely Boy,” “My Home Town,” etc. That became a bit of a pattern with me because I wanted them to get what the song was about right away.
And I was a kid. When you’re unsophisticated, your expression is raw, raw but pure. I wasn’t afraid to sing “This is not a puppy love” or “I’m just a lonely boy.” Those were natural things that most guys felt at that age, but I could put them into words. And that was really the backbone of my early songs and that has been my approach to songwriting through the years … continuing to just say what I felt, how I felt about it, and the dilemma of being out of place, not getting the girl—the pain and ecstasy of love.
Don would sit down with me and say, “What are we hearing here, Paul, what do you think we should do in the bridge? He was always thinking ahead. The innovations he developed out of my homemade songs were kind of revolutionary. To do what he did on “You Are My Destiny,” make a pop song into a swelling operatic number with strings, girl backup singers, and a big band sound behind it, was out there. He made this little pop song sound like an aria from Verdi or Puccini.
Don always knew where we were going and with what instruments, but he never overwhelmed me; he would create pockets, comfort zones for me to lay in my vocal. I would have ideas, suggestions, licks, but basically it was all him.
Like “Lonely Boy” and it’s a-a-a-a: Don took it and really framed it ingeniously. “Lonely Boy” was a bit doubtful in the beginning. We had to strip it down piece by piece and rebuild it, mainly by the arranger and the musicians, ingenious mechanics who tinker with a song and make it run. Those are the guys! Look at Sinatra, at Presley, all of them—there’s always that brilliant arranger involved, finessing, amplifying. I was very fortunate to have somebody like that in my corner. The managers, the agents are different, they’re like those little fish sucking off the big sharks; and they come in later. Very few of them start out with the artist and really put their balls on the line. Costa was the guy who made it happen, who brought everybody else to the table. And that was such an important spoke in t
he wheel. It doesn’t matter how great a songwriter you are, your songs are not going to work without the framework of a great arranger. Those are the guys who know the notes, the voicings, the orchestration. It’s a hell of a feat: to sit down with a melody and a sketch of a lyric, and know which note goes where and how to voice it and what triad you want to use where. It takes talent and long, long hours and when it’s brilliantly done nobody knows you did it—the artist gets all the credit. But without that critical group of musicians improvising with head arrangements it would never have come off as spectacularly as it does.
Don Costa was about five-foot-seven, balding, always heavier than he should have been, very much a Francis Ford Coppola–type Italian. He carried himself in a very natural way, instead of the pseudo way of so many other producers. My great, gray Don. At the end he grew a beard, and the gray beard and the goatee were his thing—“the look.” Not very contemporary, but timeless. Which is funny, ’cause that man did have an incredible sense of time—and a sense of humor.
What a guy! Incredibly talented, genius arranger, a man with great A&R ears, and one of the warmest individuals ever. It’s all about making hit records and Costa was one of those guys who could spot talent, even a talent as crude and unshaped as mine when we first met. Right from the first to the end, we were very, very tight. He had everything to do with my making it—there’s no way I could ever repay him … although I did introduce him to Sinatra! And that led to him producing one of my favorite albums, Sinatra and Strings.
Not that we always agreed on everything: Don thought “Don’t Gamble with Love” was a surefire single. He thought that “Diana” was just a bit too crude, but I insisted we make “Diana” the A-side. I knew it was gonna be a hit because it was so direct and unsophisticated. I even wrote Diana Ayoub and told her so in a letter!