Almost everybody in the entertainment industry received a career boost after September 11. Performers who hadn't had a hit in years (see: Lee Greenwood) but had the good fortune to pen a song that had the word America thrown in were suddenly given more visibility than Al-Jazeera TV gives Osama Bin Laden.
Some, though, didn't need it. Say the name "Neil" to half of America's music fans, and they come up with the mental image of Neil Young, the be-flanneled feedback warrior who changes musical styles as often as most musicians change shirts. Say the same name -- Neil -- to the other half, and one man immediately comes to mind. The Jewish Elvis. Neil Leslie Diamond.
The song in question here, "America," is a stone cold classic of the genre, rooted deep in the kind of soil that has sustained folks like God-fearing rebel Charlie Daniels for years. The song is anthemic in the strictest sense of the word and is built to please, containing many opportunities for crowd participation (Neil: "They comin' to America!" Crowd: "Today!"). Heck, it was even the unofficial anthem of the Michael Dukakis (remember him?) presidential campaign. The song is such a crowd pleaser, in fact, that Neil Diamond now opens and closes his shows with the tune. Not that he needs help pleasing crowds, mind you. He could write a song about how they comin' to Kandahar and still fill arenas nationwide.
That Diamond is popular is no surprise -- after all, folks like Engelbert Humperdinck still draw respectable crowds. It's the shine of this Diamond that stuns. A veritable army of loyal fans have been around a long time, and now the under 30 crowd has caught on. Cover bands. Tribute albums. A movie, Saving Silverman, the story of a hapless group of Neil Diamond impersonators. And this is for a singer who, to many music fans, is more a memory than a current favorite. After all these years, Diamond has a rabid fan base that will pepper the local paper with letters if one dares to write a negative word about him.
They say diamonds are a girl's best friend. Neil Diamond, then, must be the woman's, with a few odd husbands, rock critics, and would-be hipsters thrown in to boot.
January 24, 1941 was an important date for Neil Diamond -- after all, it's the day he was born. But for our purposes, January 24, 1957 is almost as noteworthy. Rock & roll music was exploding all around, and a pompadoured yokel by the name of Elvis Presley had taken America by storm. For his birthday, Neil received a brand new guitar.
In 1962, Neil Diamond signed with Columbia Records. By 1966, Neil had his first hit with the song "Solitary Man," recently covered by another key Sun Records figure of Diamond's youth, Johnny Cash. Written in a minor key with a big flourish of an ending, it quickly established another Diamond trademark, and was to be a template he would follow for the rest of his career.
After scoring success with "Cherry Cherry," Diamond penned the song that would become a hallmark -- unfortunately, it was for a ready-made pop assemblage called The Monkees. "I'm a Believer" went on to become a huge smash hit. Emboldened, Diamond tried his hand at a country tune, "Red, Red Wine." Again, it became a smash -- this time, 21 years later -- thanks to the dub-reggae treatment given to it by the fey English pop band UB40. The year 1969 became the watermark year for Diamond, and, many say, the year that changed him. After penning "Sweet Caroline," "You Got To Me," and more, Diamond was way past being just a songwriter for others. Using the quiet-loud dynamics that later worked so well for Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, the Neil Diamond of old -- a man, who at his peak, Will Hermes, Senior Writer at Spin magazine, calls "a mass-market version of Leonard Cohen" -- faded into the background. A new Diamond emerged, a singer who took himself and his own music more seriously, the author of "Holly Holy" and "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" -- cut for maximum visibility, replete with the glitzy wear and feathered hair of one Elvis Presley, who was soon to become a sensation in Las Vegas.
When offered the opportunity to write "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" for the soundtrack to the movie based on the Richard Bach book, his reputation as mass market idol was cinched. This led to the woeful three-make of The Jazz Singer. The movie failed with a younger demographic, but older folks loved it. Six years later, performing "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" with Barbra Streisand, one could almost hear the sound of housewives crying behind the closed doors of their ranch homes. Diamond had become the Elvis of the suburbs, replacing the raw sexuality present even in the King's later years with a soporific sentimentality that seemed to pour you a drink even as it told you some lies. Most listeners, glad for the attention, didn't seem to mind at all.
Before talking about Neil Diamond's big comeback, it's important to know that to many, Neil was never really gone in the first place, despite the media attention thrown his way over the past few years: the Saving Silverman movie, the countless cover performers, and the like. Like the turgid latter-day Elvis, Diamond continued to sell out arenas. Women didn't throw their panties at him -- rather, they (and their husbands) threw dollar bills, as a Diamond show became one of the higher-priced regular touring units.
His longtime fans say the experience is the thing: in a musical and cultural climate where everyone wants to take the consumer's dollar but not actually admit that they breathe the same air, Diamond comes across as a guy that puts on his sequined shirt one sleeve at a time just like everyone else.
While some attribute it to the $75-100 a head Diamond receives for a gig, Debbie Ogden, a Charlotte-area fan, posits that Neil's enthusiasm might well be the reflected glee of his fans, who have come to count on the performer to express things they might have a hard time with.
"He is at his absolute best when audiences stand, dance, clap, and actively participate in the experience," Ogden says. "I think anyone who has played music on stage can understand the way the performers feed off of the crowd and vice versa."
Ogden also points to Diamond's "emotional versatility."
"Name any mood or state of mind and I betcha there is a Neil Diamond song to console or commiserate or lift your spirits. Should he rightfully be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? You bet your sweet Cherry Cherry ass he should!"
Problem is, most don't consider him rock anymore. Conversely, he's not quite easy listening or smooth jazz, either. With his army of devoted fans, then, think of Neil as a kind of a one-man Grateful Dead. Fans following him from town to town, million-plus hits on Diamond bulletin boards, three-hour shows, set list trading, and a rabid audience ready to pounce at the drop of a sequin.
"I did a review of a Neil Diamond concert for the Charlotte Observer back in the 70s," says Charlotte author and journalist Frye Gaillard. "Although his music by then was not to my taste (I had bought a couple of his records in the mid-to-late 60s before he was Neil Diamond), I praised him for the energy of his show and the competence of his band, but had some minor criticisms as well. I got more angry mail for those minor reservations than for anything I've ever written. I still don't have an explanation for it."
The real question, then, is why the 30-and-under crowd seem to be eating it up so. John Strausbaugh, editor of New York Press and author of the book Rock 'Til You Drop, a look at geriatric rockers, suspects "among younger folks the appeal is mostly ironic -- see the first issue of Heeb, the magazine for hipsters of the Jewish persuasion, with its Neil Diamond centerfold. (It's) kind of like the ABBA phenomenon among people who were in their diapers when ABBA was in its heyday. For older fans, I've always assumed he was a milder, safer Elvis figure."
"He's a curious bird," says North Carolina-based music writer Parke Puterbaugh, who has written for Rolling Stone and others. "A rock & roll-era Brill Building songwriter and performer who actually turned out some pretty decent stuff in the early days, then went on to become the male Barbra Streisand. I think those who came of age in the rock era -- to wit, those who are and will remain forever young, no matter how old and wretched they become -- find great maudlin humor in the hammy way Diamond labors over midlife crises in song. It's like watching your dad have a breakdown after a bridge game."
Greg Kot, music critic at the Chicago Tribune, is typical of most music folks surveyed when it comes to mining the critical opinion of Diamond -- he may be heavy, but he's a mutha.
"I called him the Teflon Entertainer the first time I reviewed him in concert," Kot says. "Even though songs like 'You Don't Bring Me Flowers' are almost unforgivable for the heavy schmaltz factor, he wins over even the skeptics with his obvious enthusiasm for what he does. 'No one cared at all, not even the chair' may be the worst throwaway line in a standard ever written, but like other deeply flawed signature songs -- 'My Way,' for example -- 'I Am, I Said' rises above its deficiencies to become undeniable. I have no doubt it will endure on jukeboxes for generations. The guy gives good tune, though the stone classics are outweighed by the guilty pleasures. But, make no mistake, he has written classics. 'Solitary Man'? No excuses necessary. Johnny Cash knew what he was doing when he covered it recently."
"He came out of a very traditional school of songwriting," opines Anthony DeCurtis, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, "where you try to hit a particular mark. What happened with Neil Diamond, I think, is that his music, or maybe himself personally, came to represent a kind of rock & roll fantasy for people living a very non-rock & roll life -- particularly women. I think it became sort of a trap for him, and with few exceptions, he hasn't really gotten out.
"I think the way the emotions got packaged is sort of what did him in artistically," says DeCurtis. "Songs like 'Solitary Man' and 'Red, Red Wine' exhibited a sort of rawness. The frustration of those emotions became something more akin to 'You Don't Bring Me Flowers,' where the frustration becomes a little more contained. It's not something that's going to blow apart a particularly visceral person, but rather captures some sort of suburban angst. Which is real, to be sure. But it's not necessarily done like maybe John Updike might do it, with a sense of finesse."
Finesse, however, apparently went out with the smooth-talking Clinton administration. Mix the schmaltzy, vaseline-lensed soft porn nostalgia of Diesel and countless other magazine ads, the revisionist, campy-as-cool That 70s Show, and a New Cold War hammerhead political mentality, and you get the whole current, backward-facing 30-and-under zeitgeist -- a land where hip-huggers and tube tops rule, the dunderheaded Creed is the biggest band on Earth, and the flashiest guys get all the sex. Ours was a post-Vietnam culture that forgot Vietnam, and now we have another one (and, thanks to Enron, we may even get our Watergate). Is it any wonder, then, that Neil Diamond reigns?
A Neil fan named Danielle points to the media as a main cause of Diamond's fans' (self) righteousness.
"Through the years the media, who were not encouraging or kind, fueled the fire for his fans," she says. "For reasons I don't totally understand, the need to defend him is quite strong once you've been 'diamondized.' Perhaps it's due in part to his uniqueness. He never gave in to the media or industry pressure to fit in. . .he's always listened to his heart and done it his way, and from that example, encourages us to do the same. It's not a rebellious 'do it your way' -- it's simply 'believe in yourself, your dreams and don't ever allow anyone to snatch them out of your hands.' The world needed someone like that in the early 70s. It still does."
Neil? Attitude? On a VH1 Behind the Music profile that first aired last summer, Neil was asked by the interviewer about his infamous glittering wardrobe. Neil smiled and said, "Well, I'm something of a contrarian," adding if writers write that they don't like his sparkling shirts, he's generally inspired to "go out and order a dozen more."
Neil Diamond is almost Zen-like in his tightrope walk, the same walk he's managed so gracefully for some 30 years now. He's cool precisely because he seems blissfully unaware of all the fuss. He doesn't see his work in ironic terms, and neither do his longtime fans. He's a walking Hallmark card -- his lyrics might be cliches, but cliches typically become cliches because they tend to have some kernel of universal truth. The statements he makes might be maudlin, but they stir the emotions of listeners. Neil apparently cares enough to give the very best, every night, to his audience, and for that they adore him. Every move might be scripted for maximum impact, the hand gestures and the messianic poses, but unlike many of today's contemporary crooners (Enrique Iglesias, are you listening?), they somehow seem genuine. The guy seems to genuinely care and in this era of neverending irony, that counts for something. Despite themselves, most people can admire a man like that, even as they roll their eyes knowingly and smirk when one of his songs comes on the radio.
Rest assured, however, that while they're smirking, they'll probably know all the words.*