The music of Neil Diamond –– catchy, emotional, steering a commercially remunerative path between good time folk-rock and searing personal ballads –– served as the soundtrack to my childhood thanks to my parents and their shared obsession with his popular 1972 double live LP Hot August Night. Their copy of the album seldom left the cassette deck of our chunky brown stereo system and also accompanied us on every family holiday and car journey of any substantial duration, its songs becoming a permanent fixture in the lives of myself and my sister thanks to our almost daily exposure to them.
But as much as I loved Hot August Night, it was my discovery –– around the age of twelve or so –– of the other Neil Diamond albums in my parents' record collection which proved to be the turning point in my musical education, particularly his 1968 LP Velvet Gloves and Spit (re-issued in Australia in 1973 as Brooklyn Roads, a less esoteric title containing no off-putting references to saliva). This was the first record not by Elvis Presley that I felt compelled to listen to all the way through in one sitting and then listened to repeatedly, often while lying on my bed in the dark so as to focus more intensively on its lyrics. The song that most affected me was the album's title track, a kind of abbreviated Proustian reassembling of the singer's past set to moodily dramatic music that still plunges me into a mood of reflective nostalgia every time I hear it.
And why, I can almost hear you ask, would it do that? Unlike Neil Diamond, I didn't grow up as the eldest son of orthodox Jewish parents in a Brooklyn apartment house during the 1940s and 1950s, speaking Yiddish before I spoke English. But I did do a lot of standing at windows and daydreaming as I looked out of them, just as I was often told by teachers and my parents that I had a 'good head' that could become better if I would only buckle down and conscientiously apply myself to my studies. In hindsight I realize that Brooklyn Roads was the first piece of art –– and what is a memorable pop song if not one of the more accessible forms of art? –– that made me feel it was acceptable to be precisely who and what I was. It was also the first song I heard that made me yearn to write songs of my own or, to put it more broadly, to express my thoughts in language that aspired to (if never actually attained) the level of poetry. I was never going to grow up to be a doctor (as Diamond himself was expected to and for a short time studied to become), a lawyer or an accountant. If I was going to be anything, then I was going to be somebody who used language to both describe and hopefully affect human emotions –– something I've been trying to do, with limited success, for more than forty years.
I'm far from being the only person in the world who feels an enduring emotional connection to this particular Neil Diamond tune. The comments section of YouTube is filled with remarks from people who found something in Brooklyn Roads that spoke to them of their own lives as well as those of their families, immigrant and non-immigrant alike. The song's power as a work of art lies in its ability to simultaneously revive and recapture those lost memories, allowing listeners to connect with their own past while listening to a musical composition which specifically references the childhood of its creator. While our experiences form us, it's our memories of those experiences, sometimes reliable and sometimes not, that combine to make us the individuals we are. And nothing serves as a more effective (and affective) entry point into the past than the modern popular song, hence its ongoing dominance of Western culture.
Neil Diamond once told an interviewer that he would like his music to be categorized as 'theatrical rock,' a perhaps surprising admission from a performer whose style, to the casual listener, may seem to be firmly anchored in the classic 1960s pop tradition. But this description of his music is not the misnomer it may at first appear to be. The only recording artist I can reasonably compare him to is the great Belgian born chansonnier Jacques Brel, another performer whose best songs are intensely theatrical and create vivid pictures in the mind and whose impassioned style of delivery could be a little daunting to listeners who preferred music to be a bland background noise that neither stirred the soul nor forced them to confront their own memories. (Brel also wrote songs about his childhood, one of which –– Mon Enfance [My Childhood] –– recreates his experiences as a child growing up in Nazi occupied Brussels during World War Two.) Nor does it strike me as a coincidence that Diamond chose to include a version of If You Go Away, Rod McKuen's widely covered English translation of Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas [Don't Leave Me], on his 1971 LP Stones. While Diamond and Brel never met to the best of my knowledge, they were kindred spirits in a sense, sharing a gift for creating music that managed to be intimately personal while speaking directly to people about their own lives in intimate yet highly dramatic ways.
Quite an achievement for a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who attended ten different public schools because he had problems fitting in with his fellow students. If young Neil wasn't a good mixer, then it was possibly because he had more important things on his mind –– like creating timeless popular music, for instance –– than doing whatever needed to be done to blend in with the crowd.
Sadly, NEIL DIAMOND was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in January 2018, bringing to a premature end what can only be described as a remarkable fifty-six year career in the music industry. As someone whose own father suffered from this debilitating disease and died as a result of it in 2006, I wish him and his family the very best for the future, whatever it may bring.
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube. Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.
You might also enjoy:
Une vie intense REMEMBERING JACQUES BREL
Some Books About… ELVIS PRESLEY
Words for the Music 007: RICKIE LEE JONES
Last updated 21 October 2021 §
