B009HOTHPE EBOK

by Paul Anka

  How I made the transition from my moment of fame in the fifties to my new situation in the mid-sixties was that I knew a tidal wave was coming. The Beatles began having hits in England in October 1962 on their English label, EMI. By 1963, they were huge in England, but EMI’s USA subsidiary, Capitol Records, at first refused to distribute their singles, delaying The Beatles’ success here by over a year. Their first American releases came out on the small American labels, Vee-Jay and Swan Records, but by December 1963 the demand for Beatles records had become so huge that Capitol began releasing their singles. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” came out on December 26 of 1963 and by January 10th, of the following year it had sold over a million copies. When they arrived at Idlewild Airport (subsequently renamed JFK) on February 7, Beatlemania had begun.

  Most of my contemporaries couldn’t compete with the new sound. There’s only so much space on the radio. I was fortunate in that I continued to have songs on the charts for the next couple of years.

  The group sound that came with the British Invasion was so prominent that nine out of ten records on the charts were by bands, and most were guitar driven. Something I dearly loved—having a streak of hits—had stopped happening. All of a sudden it wasn’t working and I had some heavy thinking to do. I was still performing, but I was living on my past, and the past was receding down the railway lines. The Beatles had derailed us.

  It was an especially bitter pill for me to swallow because I’d always been the youngest on the bus, the youngest in Vegas, the youngest this, the youngest that. I’d always been the kid. There was no precedent for what I was doing in terms of the industry. The R&B musicians (Little Richard, Chuck Berry) and the country rockers (Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis) and even the guitar slinging Southern boys all come out of a tradition. I came out of nowhere, out of my own tormented teen head. It had always been uphill. I was always having to prove myself, always had to be better than anyone else, because the public weren’t that accepting of young kids who sang teen heartbreak songs. They’d never heard one before me—and hoped they’d never have to again!

  And then, after all you think you’ve achieved, you suddenly realize you’re being left behind, the Cadillac you’re driving is last year’s model. You can be hot as hell and everything comes to you clean as a whistle, and then you cool off and your career goes into a long winter’s nap that you pray to wake up from. Knowing the inevitability of change, you need to be ahead of it. I’ve always tried to anticipate what’s coming next, and that’s when I began to realize: Okay, this thing of mine could end, and will, so what do I need to build that’s going to help me last where others in my crowd didn’t?

  * * *

  Bobby Darin’s dilemma was similar to my own but he dealt with it very differently. Basically his predicament was typical of the problems American pop singers had to deal with in the face of the British Invasion. In many ways he was a classic casualty of that shift as well as the impact of Bob Dylan and hard rock. He was a great artist, one of the most talented from that whole ’50s, early ’60s group of singers. So it’s pretty painful when you’ve seen people like Darin hugely successful all of a sudden get shut down and are no longer working. Doubt is debilitating for a performer, and once it enters your life, it’s hard to recover from it. Once the media abandoned certain performers, they lost their nerve. And once that spirit disappears in your mind, you’re gone. I saw that so many times with friends. You don’t know what to say.

  When the changes happened, Darin tried to get on the new bandwagon but it just didn’t take. He went totally into left field: he wore jeans, he played guitar, he took off his toupee, he did Dylan songs, which I didn’t think he could pull off. You have to stay within the context of your musical personality, but Bobby changed his whole image drastically. And more than once. He tried to fit in, and ultimately it destroyed him—his career never recovered, never mind what it did to his health.

  I said, “Bobby, you can’t change everything about yourself every five years. You’re Bobby Darin; they’ll get over it, like they did with Presley.”

  He did manage to pull it off a couple of times, with “Simple Song of Freedom” and those things. He got more politically aware, hung around with Bobby Kennedy—but overall, I think he lost his way, lost his identity. When you forget who you are, when you change too much, you end up losing yourself in the shuffle.

  When the British Invasion came along I remember Darin saying, “I don’t know how we’re going to survive this.” I was never tempted to adapt to all the hard rock or guitar-driven stuff. I couldn’t, anyway, and I didn’t think anyone would buy me doing that. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do or even if I wanted to stay in the business. I didn’t want to succumb to that. I had a lot of discussions with Darin about it. He was sincere about his attempts to adapt, and at least managed to pull it off to the extent that it didn’t become a joke.

  He was the most talented of the Sinatra wannabes, he certainly got Frank’s attention. He had that kind of chutzpah and arrogance that kept him going on for a long time. He truly was a force of nature in pop music, along with Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley—those were the guys who would have ongoing careers, whatever happened.

  Bobby Darin got very, very ill, at the end. One of his last shows was The Midnight Special, which he promised to come on and do with me. He should never have been there, because he was not well at all. I was very indebted to him because I knew he was not in good shape. We all knew it was just a matter of time. I went to see him shortly before he died, went out on his boat with him. He was always very fatalistic. He used to say, “I’m not going to live long.” Toward the end of his life, he changed, became more mellow, humbler, more sensitive, and open.

  * * *

  I realized early on in my career, watching people come and go, that it was a very dangerous business to be in because the turnover was so rapid. One solution was to focus on writing, whether it was for movies, TV theme music, or writing songs for other singers.

  I looked at it in terms of economics. I’d spent all of these years establishing myself, and by the early sixties I was making more money without hit records than I’d had with them, so on some level I was happy. I’d written the theme for The Longest Day, I’d come up with musical overture for the Tonight Show theme, so as a human being, as an artist, I was being rewarded, and even fulfilled. I had a strong foundation … but how to build on it?

  By happenstance—and Irv’s foresight—I’d had four years to prepare. I was the opening show for four weeks at the Empire Room in the Waldorf Astoria. Things were doing well on the global front, too. I put out my second Italian LP that year, A Casa Nostra. My record, “Ogni Volta” was number one in Italy, selling over a million copies soon after release. I sang it at the San Remo Festival that summer and it ultimately sold four million copies in Italy.

  Then in July 1964, they typecast me. I played Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy Run? temporarily replacing Steve Lawrence on Broadway. I’d been in all those teen exploitation movies but now I had to learn lines and try to act—as in acting. But then again it wasn’t exactly Hamlet, it was a musical. I then put out my annual Merry Christmas ad in Variety to start the New Year, and I was off to Italy, where things were still going strong with my Italiano album from the previous year.

  By now, with The Beatles dominating the charts and the airwaves, I figured I’d turn the tables and go to England from January 20 to 31. I’d basically sidestepped the tsunami of the British Invasion by going global and transforming my pop performance into main showrooms by ’65; let’s just say things were not going all that well for me. I went through a bit of a dip from 1965 through 1966, but managed to get through it. I was constantly recording, writing, and doing a lot of TV appearances thanks to my agent Sandy Gallen. Sandy has been a good friend all these years and has gone on to be successful in the personal management business, representing a lot of artists in entertainment. I only began to get seriously concerned in the mid-sixties, 1965 and 1966, when I stopped se
lling the number of records I was used to and began to question everything.

  When The Beatles and the other British groups were invading the U.S., I was actually moving into their territory—Europe and Italy especially. I started learning Italian, writing songs in Italian, releasing albums there under my new label, RCA Records. Because my last name ended in “a,” everyone in Italy assumed that I was Italian, and as a country, Italy embraced me.

  I had hits on European labels. I had lived there, made friends there. So I never resented the British Invasion. In fact, I embraced it. It freed me.

  I was already doing runs out to Vegas, and had an agent out there to handle all that: Jim Murray, who worked with Buddy Howe at GAC. In Vegas you figured out soon enough who the great artists were and their dilemmas, who had problems with their timing and who had problems period. The whole Vegas thing was a dream come true for me. I had to shake myself every day when I woke up: “Wow, here I am in the hottest spot in the whole damn country, and to go out there and see all these big names, some doing their act in the lounge, some in the main showroom, it was unbelievable. I had found a whole new forum, a whole new lifestyle that fit me just like a three-piece Italian suit.

  Vegas to me was a place where you could go out and get as much as you wanted, go as far as you wanted to. In Vegas you could (a) check out what was going on in the heart of the glamorous beast; (b) see people you idolized close-up, get to know them; (c) find out where you were going to work and get a sense of showmanship—what you were going to take from all of that showmanship you saw and use it in your own act.

  How I came to Vegas the second time was via the Copacabana. Playing the Copacabana led to a one-time shot at the Sands Hotel—and I knew from the first moment I was there that it was just where I wanted to be. I was still with Irv, of course, and still had my two or three engagements a year at the Copacabana in New York. Some strange stuff happened there.

  I’ll never forget the night of the disappearing table at the Copacabana. One night Sammy Davis Jr. was on stage, singing in what was basically a basement dolled up as an intimate nightclub. The stage was just a twenty-by-twenty floor with all kinds of chairs and nothing really phenomenal about it in a modern sense. It had none of the flair of clubs you’d find in Florida or Vegas in that era, in the Fontainebleau and what have you.

  I was ringside sitting there at a table with Anne and a couple of guests and up on stage is one of my idols, Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy’s singing the song that goes, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child…” and about four tables over, little round tables, are two guys, and one guy says out loud, “And you look like one!”

  Well, at the Copa the place was so small you could hear everything that was said in the room. You heard this big gasp go up from the crowd. Suddenly the lights went out, you heard the sound of fists, and then in the semi-darkness you see security carrying the two guys out with the tables and the two chairs and bringing in another table and two more chairs all in one minute. Then the lights went up and Sammy picks up the song right where he left off.

  * * *

  In 1966, I re-signed with RCA. My buddy Jimmy Bowen, who I used to tour with, produced “Strangers in the Night” for Frank Sinatra that year. Ernie Freeman, my old friend from the fifties—from the time I recorded the “Blau Wilde De Veest Fontaine” at Modern Records—was the arranger on that record. I remember seeing Bobby Darin that year and he was pissed because he had already recorded “Strangers in the Night,” but it hadn’t done anything. Frank, on the other hand, was thrilled with having that hit and that his daughter was doing well with her kinky hit, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”

  In ’66, I also did The Dean Martin Show, The Hollywood Palace, Hullabaloo—all those variety shows. My TV appearances were still ongoing, my recordings were still making it into the charts. So, me and my mini orchestra, we’re off to Paris, Italy, Germany, Sweden, and London, in nightclubs doing engagements. We’re in Puerto Rico at the Caribe Hilton Hotel where I’d had a relationship for years. Then back to Sands in Vegas and the Copacabana in New York. A lot of great activity, a lot going on, but I knew there were problems in my career and I started looking for my next move in terms of music. Where to go from here on in?

  How did I deal with the anxiety at the time, what with The Beatles and the British Invasion and the drug scene? Very simple: I had to grow up—fast. In November 1966, I released my Strictly Nashville album. I’ve always loved country music and for me it’s always been adult music, as opposed to much of pop music, which is directed at teenagers.

  I never did hit bottom. In fact, in parts of the world—some of them in the USA—I was still wildly popular. When I performed at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles in 1966, Hedda Hopper called me “a one-man Texas oil gusher.” After a concert in Vancouver a newspaper voted: “Anka for President.” “I’ve seen very few standing ovations,” the journalist reported, “and as far as I can remember, I’ve never seen one in a Vancouver nightclub, until Paul Anka came to the Cave. I have never seen anything like it. By the end of the first show, if they had called a snap election Anka would have been elected Prime Minister—or King—by acclamation.”

  My philosophy became: When you’re earning a million a year, what’s there to complain about? Are you gonna cry because you don’t have a hit record?

  Five

  PAINTED WORDS

  And then it occurred to me: Paul, what had been your original ambition? Writing!

  The one thing I’ve learned is that great pop songs never go away. The influence of the ’50s carries on even as far as Elvis Costello. Elvis Costello is Buddy Holly reinvented. He took the Buddy Holly look and adapted it to the ’70s.

  It was always my plan to focus on writing, really. Everything came from that. Your career becomes problematic when you don’t write your own material. Writing was one way for me to separate from the pack.

  One of my major concerns was, How do I write a hit again? It wasn’t until 1967 when I wrote “My Way” that I started realizing what was at that time lacking in my life—hit records. I had to adjust.

  The songs I wrote were typical of the era we came out of and as time went by and I got a little more sophisticated, the lyrics became a little bit more complicated. But I never wanted to write songs that I had to explain. My songs are very basic—they’re all about love and life. I wrote about what I felt and what I knew. My songs tend to tell a story—an autobiography, or fragments of autobiography. All of my songs back then were composite. Part of it was things I really felt and part of it was indigenous adolescent songwriting. When the audience hears it, it identifies.

  We all wrote to the same formula in the beginning. The structure of the music was also simpler, it was just the classic AABA format. A represented the verse (that is, the story of the song), the B being the bridge (the chorus). So it goes: first verse, second verse, bridge, third verse. That’s the way God and BMI meant it to be. You were told by the record company and the radio stations to keep it under three minutes, so most of those records in the beginning were 2:56 or 2:50—otherwise they wouldn’t get air play on the radio. Only years later did they start getting longer and longer. Part of the obfuscation of song lyrics has evolved from the kids versus the parents thing. It became a code that only kids understand.

  People sometimes ask me what comes first, the music or the lyrics? Basically, I just want to nail the feel of the song, the vibe, and build on that. In most cases I start by using dummy words to get a melody structure. Once I get the structure of the melody down, I go back and finish it, refining the words and changing them until they work. That’s essentially how I work—I say that, but really I have no idea how it happens.

  You start out with a lyric like, “Isn’t it a lovely night that we’re having, holding you here so good.” Right there you’ve got your melody and your structure, although things can easily change if you find a great hook. The hook to the song is everything, it’s the engine—it’s what grabs you. I use nonsense words u
ntil I get the right ones—the way Paul McCartney used “Scrambled Eggs” before he came up with “Yesterday.” You scat, you go da da da, just keeping the basic idea in mind. The words are generally tweaked later. Like a house, you need that foundation to build on. You need the music. The words are only as good as the notes under it. That’s where the magic comes in, when you have that real strong melody.

  It’s a craft, basically, songwriting. You’re isolated, sitting there on your own and drawing on your imagination. On A Body of Work and Walk a Fine Line, I collaborated with a lot of good writers, and it really shook up my way of working. Suddenly you’re driven by who you’re writing for. But when there’s no specific goal, you just put down random ideas.

  “I Don’t Like to Sleep Alone” was written when I was living in Sun Valley. It all started with “(You’re) Having My Baby.” My friend, Bill Harrah, owned a bunch of casinos and kind of set a new standard with the look of his resorts. A lot of the guys in Vegas took a page from these places he created in Lake Tahoe—they had a very modern, clean look. He was a character, a hell of a guy. I had access to a place he owned up in the mountains in Boise, Idaho. We used to fly in by airplane; it was a remote place right on the river that was aesthetically very inspiring. I wrote a lot of that up there, and at Lake Tahoe. “One Man Woman/One Woman Man” I wrote on a guitar in a motel in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The ideas were just flowing.

  Some songs are really personal for me, but I have to admit that some others just felt like hits. “Having My Baby” obviously came out of my life. Whereas “I Don’t Like to Sleep Alone” and “(I Believe) There’s Nothing Stronger Than Our Love” just struck me as good ideas, not autobiographical in any sense. The latter so was basically a conceptual song. I was just checking out what was out there. The songs all tell stories, but I’ve rarely tried to decant autobiographical material directly into any particular song, the way someone like Al Green or Randy Newman might.