Neil Diamond

Young child with dreams . . .

I grew up listening to Neil Diamond’s music which, in the late 60s and early 70s, was inescapable. You couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing “Sweet Caroline” or “Song Sung Blue.” Whenever my dad took me and my brother to Dante’s, our favorite Italian restaurant, we fought over who would get to put the quarter he slid across the heavily lacquered wood table into the jukebox. If I won (which was rare) I always played “Cracklin’ Rosie.”

By the time “Neil Diamond, His 12 Greatest Hits” was released in 1974 I was nine and had realized that trying to keep up with my older brother and cousin when we played at my grandparents’ house wasn’t worth the effort. Getting pummeled or ignored by two soon-to-be teenage boys had lost much of its charm.

Instead I wandered around the big empty house trying to find a spot to be alone. Most of the bedrooms were dark and uncomfortable but my aunt Elizabeth had a corner bedroom on the second floor that looked over the backyard. On sunny afternoons it was bathed in warm bright light--and Elizabeth had a cassette player. She  also had “His 12 Greatest Hits.” There were very few books in the House (most of them were romance novels), and even less music, so this was something of a find.

I spent hours listening to the tape from beginning to end. I loved every song, not equally, but deeply. One day, when it was time to go home, the idea of parting with that music seemed unbearable. In a really uncharacteristic move, I stole the cassette. I found out a couple of decades later that Elizabeth had stolen a Timex watch from me. My grandmother had given it to me for Christmas and Liz thought it was far too nice a watch for a kid so she took it. A couple of decades later she returned it to me (I had no memory of it at all) but I hung onto that cassette tape until it met the fate that most cassettes do.

There are some things even a pencil can’t fix.

“Shilo,” a song about a kid with an imaginary friend, spoke to me even though I didn’t have an imaginary friend. I wasn’t a loner but I was introspective. I was outgoing but I also needed to spend a lot of time by myself.

I felt the soaring in that song when I listened to it while hiding out in my aunt’s bedroom. I still feel it now.

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To be honest, this is the only Neil Diamond album I ever owned (or stole), so my second pick is another track from it: “Holly Holy.”

This is the live version recorded in 1972 at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. It’s better than any other live version I’ve heard and so far superior to the studio version it’s hard to describe.

Give these a listen and let me know what you think.