by Paul Anka
Well, in twenty hours I’ll be releasing my new record. I helped pick out the instruments and the feel and all the arrangements are great! You want me to tell you what it’s called? “Diana”! It’s favored as the hit record by everyone, they said it is a different sound and it’ll be the one. Now listen, don’t say a word or I’ll … I’ll just kiss you if it sells, because you started it.
Well, it didn’t happen quite as overnight as I’d written to her. It took a few weeks before they were ready to record it. “Diana” with “Don’t Gamble with Love” on the B-side, was recorded in May 1957 with four musicians: Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar, Irving Wexler on piano, Panama Francis on drums, Jerry Bruno on bass. Plus six backup singers, three women and three men.
When Don Costa figured out how to orchestrate arrangements for my songs he began to apply the same method to other singers. Carole King had a contract with ABC-Paramount records. She worked with Costa, and some of her early stuff sounded a little like my records—that was the sound that Don Costa knew how to create. He also produced Lloyd Price and Steve and Eydie—Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé (aka Sidney Leibowitz and Edith Gormezano).
“Diana,” with “Don’t Gamble with Love” on the B-side was released in July 1957. Both songs got play, but eventually it went right over to “Diana.” It was on its way to selling a million copies by mid-summer, the week after my sixteenth birthday! I was on my way down to Philly to do American Bandstand with Dick Clark when I heard it on the radio. There’s nothing in this world like hearing your first hit on three different radio stations as you’re driving down the highway.
Dick Clark’s American Bandstand was the show that broke everything. He was the key back then; the kids all watched him. He was it: the all-American boy-next-door, very friendly, very different from the other disc jockeys. Not that old razzmatazz approach. He felt like part of your family, rather than a deejay. Always looked that young, which was a spooky thing. It was like he had a painting in the attic.… He wasn’t gruff, wasn’t like a lot of the other people in the industry, just a very straight-ahead business kind of guy, always a gentleman—that’s why I continued to work with him.
Dick was close to that whole Philadelphia group—Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, and James Darren. Those kids from Philly. The guy behind the Philadelphia sound was Bob Marcucci along with his partner, arranger and songwriter Pete DeAngelis. After I broke out, it allowed a whole different kind of crowd to come in. Marcucci was the subject of the movie The Idolmaker, starring Ray Sharkey. I was a consultant on that film and spent a lot of time with Ray (who played Marcucci). We became friends, I continued to see him from time to time. In the early ’90s he was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1993.
When a single came out in those days the record companies sent advance copies out to all the radio stations. Then you made the rounds: you’d go stop by the local deejays around the country, do their hops, and if it caught on you’d have a hit record within two weeks. You’d literally leave the studio, take this tape, get a piece of vinyl made with the song on it, a rough test pressing, and they’d ship it out to disc jockeys and you’d follow up with personal appearances at the radio stations. Your whole life, your whole career depended on a piece of wax you made in ten, fifteen minutes. Cheap acetate demos became essential when you were trying to sell a demo because often the producers, record company guys, and especially the artists, couldn’t read music. People still don’t comprehend all the acts or new artists I work with, they just can’t understand that we had to walk into a room and stand there and get that performance all in that moment—that’s a tough thing to do.
In the beginning people would sometimes confuse me with Neil Sedaka partly because we both came from Middle Eastern backgrounds. But Sedaka was a completely different animal. I’m an autobiographical songwriter—even when I’m writing songs for other people. Sedaka’s a craftsman, a Brill Building–type songwriter. Part of Sedaka’s magpie talent was that he could rewrite songs sideways, and change the chords of the song even as he was listening to it. They say “Stupid Cupid” was partly based on Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire”—though I can’t see it. Sedaka was so quick and adept, he once wrote a song based on pages from Connie Francis’s diary! And he worked with a brilliant lyricist Howie Greenfield.
At that time, the writer/performer had not really emerged within the pop scene—it wasn’t until the 1960s when The Beatles came along that that all changed. Until then there were only a handful of singers writing and performing our own material. Presley, like many other pop singers, was using other people’s material. Leiber and Stoller and Doc Pomus were among the few writers who were creating hip pop songs at the time. The record industry was focused on the USA; everything came out of the States. It hadn’t yet spread internationally. England didn’t have its own scene until the 1960s—up until then British singers were using American music. The big stars in England at the time were Tommy Steele (a kind of Brit Elvis), who became famous covering the American hit, “Singing the Blues,” and Cliff Richard who covered Lionel Bart’s “Living Doll.”
“Diana” was number one in England before it reached the top in the USA. It became a worldwide hit by September 6. I always felt “Diana” had such a big international appeal because of its Semitic melody line. The way I sang and wrote those early songs got an instantaneous worldwide reception—from Mexico to the Middle East to Japan—because they were in a minor key and people around the world could relate to that. Everyone recognizes the minor key; it’s the way all cultures moan out their troubles from the blues to Inca flute melodies.
That was the secret ingredient in Cole Porter, you know—most of his songs are in minor key and that’s what makes them so attractive. But Cole Porter was a very sophisticated songwriter—maybe the most sophisticated writer of lyrics ever with songs like “Night and Day,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” But what I did in my form of singing was to fuse a minor key melody to gut, honest emotions—which I spelled out in romantic semaphore.
I had this talent for stupid little teenage songs at a moment in time when teenagers wanted to hear simple little teenage songs. I was a lonely boy and I knew there were plenty of us out there—I’d see other lonely boys at the hops I’d play. Put your head on my shoulder—that was your objective that weekend … plus maybe getting a kiss and your hand in her blouse. All that I understood only too literally by the mere fact that I was a teenager. I was going through all these emotions myself. I didn’t second-guess, I didn’t try to be clever. What I was writing and performing was just an unabashed teenage lament. All of that early stuff was intensely personal, drawing from what I knew, which was pretty basic.
As soon as “Diana” became a hit, stories began to circulate about how it came to be written. They printed endlessly that my teen crush Diana Ayoub had been my babysitter. I just got tired of stomping out that fire so I let it live. It was a cute little story. That was the fifties. If you were a sixteen-year-old boy, you only dated a girl younger than you. The opposite situation was just taboo in those days. And Diana wasn’t just older than me, she was much more sophisticated. You know how girls are—even back then teenage girls were a lot more grown-up, more grounded. Guys are still immature at that age. And that was me. The three-year difference in our ages made romance impossible. The only way to declare myself was through that song.
My limitations were my greatest asset. Out of necessity or ignorance, nothing I did came out contrived or manufactured. All my songs back then were a composite of things I really felt myself and I decanted them directly into primitive adolescent songwriting. What else would kids my age want to hear?
I was a teenager writing for other teenagers—and however simplistic that was, it was new, appealing, and kind of sexy in a teenage way. “You and I will be as free, as the birds up in the tree, o please stay by me, Diana.”
The pop music business was just beginning to grow; there were a limited amount of record s
tudios, record labels. People were wondering what the next decade would bring and here was this kid who almost by default was hitting all the right buttons and kids are relating to him. Not long after I hit, the Avalons, the Fabians came along—groomed by the Marcucci-DeAngelis Chancellor Records stable. We really were a clergyman’s answer to rock ’n’ roll: we “white-ified” it. But back then, just to get an idea for a song was a major achievement; to get it recorded and on the radio was out of this world. We were part of that second wave of rock ’n’ roll that was about to hit. As the first white kid singer-songwriter, I became the unlikely model for a type that soon became extremely popular: the teen idol. Being short, Semitic, not exactly in the mold of the current matinee idol, I was a most improbable candidate for this role. But I made it in spite of all that—maybe even because of it.
The Frankie Avalons and the Fabians of course had people writing for them, but because I was actually going through the stuff I was writing about there was no guesswork about how teenagers would react to my songs. I was one. Every generation is going to have its own needs, its own flock of screaming teenagers. A lot of people in the business are going to scratch their heads and not be able to get what’s going on. But this was my time. I may not have been the best at any one thing, but somehow the package came together: writer, performer, the right age, the look and that was it.
When “Diana” went to number one in the USA in September, a month after my sixteenth birthday, I found myself all of a sudden booked on The Ed Sullivan Show! Aside from American Bandstand all we watched back then was The Ed Sullivan Show. Sure, there were other shows—Milton Berle, I Love Lucy, Howdy Doody—but The Ed Sullivan Show was the thing. One minute I was sitting there as a fan and then, all of a sudden, I was going to be on it. I was scared to death.
I had to fly into New York from wherever we were on tour, Pittsburgh I think it was. Originally, The Ed Sullivan Show had been filmed in this little studio where David Letterman is now, but for some reason they moved it to Madison Square Garden and I didn’t find that out until I got there. So there I was, rehearsing in this huge space. The band is way the hell over on one side and I’m way the hell over on the other side—not intimate at all. This was only my second time on national television in the U.S. and I’m, like, “Shit!”
Also I’m singing live, unlike American Bandstand and shows today where they play the tracks and you’re lip-synching to the band. It was a very weird situation: you’d have a hit record that you’d cut in mono in a studio with simpatico musicians and then you’d have to sing it with a band that not only hated the music, but were simulating the instruments on the record—a sax and a trumpet, a guitar—with an orchestra. The sound had nothing to do with what was on the record. You’re standing there live and you know it’s live so you can’t stop and go back and start over again. I remember walking in there and going, “Shit, I’ve got to just stay focused as I can, ’cause I don’t know how I’m gonna get through this!”
And Ed Sullivan? Stiff, unusual-looking guy, big jaw, but stylish, always a custom-made shirt and tie, sharkskin suit, which kind of hung weirdly on his shoulders. You never felt relaxed when you talked to him. He remained a columnist at heart; they put him in the position of being an emcee but he was never at ease with it. It was a tough gig for him. He was very uptight, an odd, almost Frankenstein-like character—big, with this funny pronunciation. Head too big for his body. A truly strange guy to be an emcee. Emcees usually are, “Alright, and here … they … are!” As if you’re about to hear the greatest band on earth. Ed often sounded almost embarrassed and he never got all the names right. That was Ed. It was like one of those movies where the wrong guy gets shoved on stage and has to ad lib. But he was always a gentleman.
“Diana” entered the charts in July and stayed there for eighteen weeks, replacing Debbie Reynolds’s “Tammy,” which was number one at the time. I think “Diana” was initially a bigger R&B record than it was a pop record. That’s how my future manager Irv Feld, who produced the The Biggest Show of Stars, knew it was going to be huge—because he sold R&B records at his drugstores in Washington. He had the superstores right in the middle of Rhythm & Blues Alley, you know, and they would come in and whatever they were buying, whoever the hits were to the largest amount of audience, then he would know who to book for his tours—all on account of his drugstores!
He’d put speakers in the windows and play the new records as they came out to attract customers. Soon the music part of the business became bigger than the drugstore or the soda fountain, so over time he converted it to a music store. Eventually he had three record stores in Washington—the first record-store chain in the U.S.
At that time there were only a few record companies—a little like today with the three or four multinational conglomerates—but back then everything was still simple and not very sophisticated.
The record companies would send Irv demos, “white copies” they were called, 45s with the big hole in the middle. At home Irv would play them and ask his son Kenny and his friends and, eventually, me, too. “So what do you think about this one?” It was a kind of kitchen-table market research. Irv would say, “Okay, this one’s going to be a hit—let’s buy it cheap now.” Then he plunged right into show business. Started these Show of Shows tours around the country. When he found a record he liked or it became a hit he would book that act—at first the artists were mainly black R&B performers—on his Biggest Show of Stars tours. And that was the case with me. Irv received a copy of “Diana,” played it in the office for his brother Izzy and his partner Allen Bloom. He’d thrown me out of the Biggest Show of Stars for 1956 spring show at the Ottawa Auditorium, the big hockey arena, the year before when I had snuck backstage.
Irv was a little guy, about five-seven, very slight, thin, with curly sparse hair and thick glasses. Very brainy, very smart, always cooking something up. To this day he’s seen as one of the smartest guys in the industry and revered by people in the business as an innovator and farsighted thinker. He met a lot of people, what have you, and they’d give him their numbers and he’d keep all these pieces of paper in his pocket. When he’d get back to Washington, he’d take them out and review where he’d been and who he’d met.
On the other hand, Al Bloom was a big, husky guy with a Romanesque nose, piercing eyes, who looked like a bouncer and tried to pull off the tough-guy act, but wasn’t. More of a businessman type.
Anyway, Feld and his brother Izzy and Al Bloom would sit around and listen to stuff. Irv had a hunch about “Diana.” He had a great ear for talent, and he was real good at that, which was surprising because you wouldn’t have pegged him as a pop music fan. But he must have heard something he liked because he signed me to go on one of his tours, much to the objection of Al and his brother Izzy. They were looking for a new act for their Show of Shows. Al and Izzy wanted this guy named Teddy Randazzo, who composed a bunch of classic pop songs such as “Goin’ Out of My Head,” “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle,” and “Hurt So Bad.” Remember Teddy? He had some kind of a record out at the time that was doing well. But Irv was the boss and he stuck with his decision to take me on the tour.
With Irv, it was all about business, but he was not the tough kind of guy you’d expect to find in the rough-and-ready rock ’n’ roll scene. It’s just that his ability to pick talent was uncanny, he had great timing, and he was a lot more honest than most of the managers around today. Irv knew “Diana” had the sizzle. He was the packager for the rock ’n’ roll shows, he was the guy. He had an alliance with Buddy Howe at my agency, the General Artists Corporation.
Irv used to pick the show’s stars. I honestly think Dick Clark learned a lot from him. All Irv ever did was see what the blacks were buying in his stores and those were the acts he’d pick for his rock ’n’ roll tours. He’d invite around fifteen acts to go on the road, whoever was hot. He told me he’d kept my number from that show in Ottawa, but he probably didn’t know who the hell I was until I walked into his office.
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He calls my house that July and says he wants to speak to my father, Andy, about getting permission for me to go on the Biggest Show of Stars tour that fall.
I handed the phone to my dad, who was reluctant at first. He reminded Feld that I was very young and still in high school. He was worried about sending me out on the road alone; he didn’t want his son running all over creation with strangers. But he didn’t want to stand in my way, either—he knew how desperately I wanted to be a part of it. It was a tough sell for Irv—it took a few phone calls—but in the end he convinced my father to let me join the tour. This was what I had been waiting for all my life.
The tour started the first week of September in New York at the Paramount Theatre and continued into late November, a three-month tour that ended up at the Mosque in Richmond, Virginia, on November 24. Before I knew it, I was rehearsing with The Drifters, Clyde McPhatter, The Everly Brothers, Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers, LaVern Baker, Buddy Holly and The Crickets, and Chuck Berry. A year before I’d been in Berry’s dressing room, pitching “Diana,” and he’d almost thrown me out, telling me not to quit my day job. Now “Diana” was number one in the country.
I was scared to death about being in the company of these stars. I tried to fit in as best I could with the other performers who were all older than me. I was trying to stay cool and confident, but, of course, many of the singers misunderstood and thought I was an arrogant little twit.
My dad negotiated with Irv how I would be treated on these tours. He was very nervous about the kind of situation I was being thrown into. I was very young; the other acts on the tour were much older and seasoned performers. I had no idea what I was getting into. Irv assured my dad that I would travel with him by plane. But occasionally I wanted to hang out with the other performers—most of them, after all were my idols—so I’d ask to get on the bus with all the other acts. I was the youngest member of the group, traveling with all these guys who were already living legends: Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, The Drifters, Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers. As the tour began, the first people I got close to were The Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, and LaVern Baker.