Pages

Thursday 26 December 2019

Words for the Music 015: NEIL DIAMOND



NEIL DIAMOND
c 1968




BROOKLYN ROADS
NEIL DIAMOND
from the 1968 MCA/Uni LP 
Velvet Gloves and Spit
[reissued in Australia in 1973 
under the title Brooklyn Roads]





BROOKLYN ROADS


If I close my eyes
I can almost hear my mother
Calling 'Neil, go find your brother,
Daddy's home and it's time for supper
Hurry on'

And I see two boys
Racing up two flights of staircase
Squirming into papa's embrace
And his whiskers warm on their face
Where's it gone
Oh where's it gone

Two floors above the butcher
First door on the right
And life filled to the brim
As I stood by my window 
And looked out on those
Brooklyn Roads

I can still recall
Smells of cooking in the hallways
Rubbers drying in the doorways
And report cards I was always
Afraid to show

Mom would come to school
And as I'd sit there softly crying
Teacher'd say 'He's just not trying,
Got a good head if he'd apply it
But you know yourself
It's always somewhere else'

I'd build me a castle
With dragons and kings
And I'd ride off with them
As I stood by my window 
And looked out on those
Brooklyn Roads

Thought of going back
But all I'd see are strangers' faces
And all the scars that love erases
But as my mind walks through those places
I'm wondering
What's come of them

The son of a young boy
Come home to my room
Does he dream what I did
As he stands by my window 
And looks out on those
Brooklyn Roads
Brooklyn Roads



Words and music by  
Neil Diamond
© 1968 Stonebridge Music




 

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.

 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American singer-songwriter, musician, producer and actor NEIL DIAMOND:
 
 


 

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 §

Thursday 19 December 2019

The Write Advice 127: HUBERT AQUIN


I have nothing to gain from going on writing.  But I go on anyway, though I’m writing at a loss.  No, that’s a lie: for the past few minutes I’ve known perfectly well that I will gain something from this game, I’ll gain time: an interval I cover with erasures and phonemes, fill with syllables and howls, cram with all my acknowledged atoms, multiples of a totality they’ll never equal.

Prochain épisode [Next Episode] (1965)


 

Use the link below to read more (in English) about the life and work of Québécois novelist, essayist, filmmaker and political activist HUBERT AQUIN:

 

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/hubert-aquin

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
The Write Advice 107: FELICIA MIHALI

 
The Write Advice 077: ELIZABETH JANE HOWARD

 
The Write Advice 037: GABRIELLE ROY

Thursday 12 December 2019

Think About It 051: MICHAEL PALIN


I think for a long while you're yourself, or who you think you are.  And then you become something which is somebody else's and it is their view of you.  So I'd be on a programme because I'm a celebrity and I'd think: 'I'm not a celebrity –– I'm me.'
      Occasionally I can deal with that quite happily.  You just act it.  But other times it got to me and I thought 'I'm not being able to be myself.'  I think that's the key to a lot of my anxiety.  And the work I do is actually trying to remember who I am and what I can do rather than become a sort of figment of what people want me to be.  People say: 'You're a great star; you're a national treasure; you've done all this brilliant stuff.'  It just embarrasses me.  It's not the way I feel about myself.

Quoted in Anxiety: A Very Short Introduction (2012)


 

Use the link below to read more about the book Anxiety: A Very Short Introduction (2012) by DANIEL FREEMAN and JASON FREEMAN:

 

https://www.veryshortintroductions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780199567157.001.0001/actrade-9780199567157

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
Think About It 043: KAREN HORNEY

 
Think About It 036: MARTIN SELIGMAN

  
Think About It 026: GORDON LIVINGSTON

Thursday 5 December 2019

The Write Advice 126: PAMELA FRANKAU


Should somebody penetrate the barbed-wire entanglement of my handwriting and read my Rough [draft], it would make little sense to him.  He would find bewildering changes of time and place.  The people would confound him with sudden new characteristics.  Some would change their looks.  Some would be whisked away without explanation.  Some would put in a late appearance, yet be greeted by the rest as though they had been there from the beginning.  He would find, this reader, traces of style followed by no style at all; pedestrian phrases, clichés, straight flat-footed reporting.  Here a whole sequence of scenes complete and next some mingy skeleton stuff with a burst of apparently contemptuous hieroglyphs on the blank left-hand page beside it.  Nor is the left-hand page reserved for “Exp” (meaning Expand), “X” (meaning Wrong), “//” (meaning much the same as “X” only more so) and “?” (meaning what it says).  The left-hand page is likely to be a shambles, taking afterthought insertions for the right-hand page; paragraphs whose position may not be indicated at all.  No; a reader would have no more fun with the Rough than the writer is having.

Pen To Paper: A Novelist's Notebook (1962)


 

Use the link below to read a fascinating article about British novelist PAMELA FRANKAU (1908-1967):

 

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=3816

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
The Write Advice 056: JOYCE CAROL OATES

 
The Write Advice 017: IRWIN SHAW

 
The Write Advice 124: JENNIFER DUMMER