I'LL BE WHAT I AM, NEIL DIAMOND TELLS WIND BACK WEDNESDAY
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In a theatre near you now or soon you’ll be able to see a musical about Neil Diamond in Australia. On one of the streaming services, if you missed it at the cinemas, you can see a film about a Neil Diamond impersonator – played by Our Hugh no less. And unless for the past few years you have been living under a rock – you lucky lucky bastard – you will have encountered the deeply offensive but unstoppable assault of crowds of people singing Sweet Caroline (not so good, not so good) at sporting events, drunken moments in a bar or that stupid ad on the TV.
While Parkinson’s forced the man himself to give up performing a few years ago, as has been noted here in the Wind Back Wednesday world – see below for links – until that happened, Mr Diamond was doing Neil Diamond things on stage with all the showmanship of the 1970s well into his 70s. And doing them well.
But even if you grew up with him in some way, as seems to have been de rigeur for Australians, you may not have known all that mattered. About him, for him. So this 2009 interview around the time a new take on his career-reframing live record was coming, may go some way to filling in some of that story where all that glitters was not always gold.
So strap on that guitar, stay forever in blue jeans, and enjoy.
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LEGEND HAS IT that Neil Diamond’s mid ‘70s live double album, Hot August Night, sold so many copies in Australia that one in every two households had one.
At the time, on the way to selling some 130 million (and still counting) albums, the besquined Diamond seemingly bestrode the world on the same scale, though much shinier and a lot less noisy, as Led Zeppelin.
But what’s fascinating to learn now, watching a mini-documentary about Diamond’s return home to New York for a reprise of Hot August Night last year, is that Neil Leslie Diamond didn’t leave “those Brooklyn streets” he later sang about even to cross the East River to Manhattan, until he was 17. Had no need to. Had no interest in it. Why would he? Flatbush Ave, not Fifth Ave, ruled his world.
"[Manhattan] could have been a different country to me because I'd lived my whole existence in my neighbourhood,” Diamond says today in a slowed down version of his stage voice, which along with a very measured walk (so unlike the on-stage bounce and strut), is the only sign of his 68 years.
Ah, but he still remembers the first time he came up from the subway onto the streets of this different country.
"It was awesome. Awesome. It's like you're thrown into the middle of some kind of unbelievable glacier of buildings and people,” he says. “It was a far cry from where I was growing up in Brooklyn which was a quiet neighbourhood. It had a little grocer, a little sandwich shop, a haberdashery store which was my dad's. It was a very quiet, kind of protected existence."
Manhattan, in particular the fabled buildings housing dozens of song publishers and fellow aspiring songwriters like Carole King, Burt Bacharach and Neil Sedaka, became his base. Later it was Los Angeles. But listen to his songs, from those first hits of the late ‘60s like Solitary Man and I Am I Said, to the two emotionally exposed, career resurrecting albums he’s made with producer Rick Rubin in the past few years, and you get the feeling that Diamond never again felt as safe or as comfortable with himself or the world as he did before he discovered life outside Brooklyn.
He’s written some of the happiest, and sometimes the cheesiest, songs of pop music yet there is a restlessness, a yearning to know and to be known at the heart of the best of Neil Diamond’s songs and that shadow passes across his greatest moments. Even on last year's often stark Home Before Dark, he said in the song Pretty Amazing Grace, "I was an empty vessel/you filled me up inside/and with amazing grace restored my pride”. Tougher yet is the line from Act Like A Man, "Song maker you heartbreaker/you faker … you know you're just a worthless daydreamer/but hey dreamer/it's time to act like a man".
Has he needed to be the outsider, the incomplete man, to be the songwriter he is?
"I don't know. Maybe it was," he says hesitantly. "It's certainly not something that I premeditated. It's not intentional; it just seems to be the way it worked out."
Even when he was a major star, with film roles and Grammy awards and concerts which never failed to sell out?
"People see you on the television and they read about you and may listen to your music and it all maybe seems important as though I'm somebody important. But I don't see it that way," says Diamond. "I still have to look at myself in the mirror in the morning and I don't particularly like what I see. And I understand what you mean because I read about other people and I feel like my God this person is fantastic, larger-than-life, but you know when you meet these people they are not larger-than-life they are just exactly the right size, the same size as life.
“It just so happens that a magnifying glasses and placed in front of them and a spotlight has been put on them and their accomplishments are blown most likely way out of proportion in the name of commerce maybe. But that person still knows in his heart that he is a life-size: he is not an inch bigger than life and he's prone to all the fallibilities and frailties and flaws that everybody else has to confront. He has not given a pardon or a pass. So I was never particularly impressed with myself.”
Actually, for a long while there, many of us weren’t that impressed with him either. Did he recognise that many of us had lost respect for him because we had, fairly or unfairly, dismissed him as merely the showman and favourite of the middle aged set? And if he did, was it our problem or his?
He chuckles. "It turned out to be both of our problems.”
“I did feel for a while that I became part of the landscape, the musical landscape. But I think [with the Rubin albums] I got back to the essence of what I do best, which is to present music from the heart and I think once I got back on that track the audience and the general population out there came to realise again that this was something that was maybe not the usual stuff that is thrown out there but it was special and should be considered special.
“So I consider myself very lucky to have had the time to be around to come to that point where I can re-engage an audience on a level and no longer be just part of that landscape."
And it's fair to say there are many who are glad that we had the chance to come back.
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