![]() Monday morning - it was all I hoped it would be. WARD: Still, Diamond was determined to have his own career and worked hard at it, even if he, too, sometimes recorded excellent versions of other people's songs.ĭIAMOND: (Singing) Monday, Monday, so good to me. Oh, don’t you know that there ain’t no way… You know when I forget how good life is, you bring it home to me. Oh, baby, there ain't no way in the whole wide world. THE BOX TOPS: (Singing) Ain't no way to get you out of me. And so it was no surprise when The Box Tops, led by Alex Chilton, chose a song of his to record the next year. The Monkees' version of "I'm A Believer" was 1967's top-selling song. Twenty-five years later, the British band UB40 recorded it on an album of the songs they'd grown up with, released it as a single and topped the British charts, and eventually many others, too, over an amazing two-year period. WARD: "Red Red Wine," for instance, found its way to the Jamaican expat community in London where a guy named Jimmy James recorded it, only to be scooped by Tony Tribe, who put a reggae beat to it. ![]() TONY TRIBE: (Singing) Red, red wine goes to my head, makes me forget that I still need her so. ![]() So Talleyrand Music, the company Barry and Greenwich had set up with him, was placing his songs all over the place. Suddenly, he was writing more than he could record. WARD: Barry and Greenwich scored him a deal with Bert Berns' new label, Bang, and his second single, "Cherry, Cherry" wound up in the top 10 in 1966. Says she loves me, yes, yes she does - going to show me tonight. At that point, something happened.ĭIAMOND: (Singing) Baby loves me. And after getting fired from Leiber and Stoller, he asked Barry and Greenwich if they'd take a chance on him. He'd been mentored by the great songwriting team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich after Greenwich sang backup on a demo he'd cut. Next came a songwriting contract with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, which kept him fed but produced only six songs in one year. He went from one unsuccessful record contract to another, from the most obscure to a one-single deal with Columbia. Almost immediately, he started writing songs and performing them with a neighbor. Diamond was born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents in 1941 and got a guitar for his 16th birthday. But my disappointment in the show was based on remembering where Diamond had come from. His fan club newsletter picked it up, and for 2 1/2 years, we got letters denouncing me, the last of which came from Vanuatu in the South Pacific. I couldn't leave her if I tried.ĮD WARD: Probably the strongest negative reaction I've ever gotten to anything I've written was when I panned a Neil Diamond show during my stint at Austin's daily newspaper. Now I'm a believer, not a trace of doubt in my mind. ![]() NEIL DIAMOND: (Singing) I thought love was only true in fairy tales, meant for someone else but not for me. 1 hit "I'm A Believer," but it was Diamond himself who made most of his own songs famous - songs like "Sweet Caroline," "Solitary Man," "Cherry, Cherry" and "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon."Īs a lot of his contemporaries fell off the charts, he moved from teen pop to adult pop, including his duet with Barbra Streisand and his hits from his remake of "The Jazz Singer." Before we get to the interview, let's hear the piece about him that our former rock historian, the late Ed Ward, recorded in 2011 after a compilation of his songs was released. Neil Diamond started out writing songs for a music publishing company in the hopes that someone would record them. In 2018, Diamond revealed he'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. His life is the subject of the current Broadway musical "A Beautiful Noise," which features his songs. We're going back into our archive to listen to our 2005 interview with Neil Diamond. ![]()
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