Neil Diamond shares his guilty pleasure hits (Hint: 'Sweet Caroline' is on the list)

The new film Song Sung Blue is about a Neil Diamond tribute band. Before Diamond began recording his own hits, he worked in Tin Pan Alley writing songs for others. Originally broadcast in 2005.

Transcript

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. In the new film "Song Sung Blue," Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play a couple who form a Neil Diamond tribute band.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SONG SUNG BLUE")

HUGH JACKMAN: (As Mike Sardina) You know, Neil is special. And I just want everyone to get that feeling I get when I listen to "America" and "Forever In Blue Jeans."

KATE HUDSON: (As Claire Sardina) Or "Sweet Caroline."

JACKMAN: (As Mike Sardina) "Sweet Caroline," yeah. But I'm never going to be the real McCoy. I mean, I don't really look like Neil. I don't even really sound like Neil. And I'm - I got to be Neil, but I just got to be me, too.

HUDSON: (As Claire Sardina) Yeah. You don't want to be a Neil Diamond impersonator. You want to be a Neil Diamond interpreter.

JACKMAN: (As Mike Sardina) I was looking for the right way to say it, and you just came right out and said it. A Neil Diamond interpreter.

DAVIES: Today, we're going to listen to our interview with Neil Diamond. In the 1960s, he started out writing songs for a music publishing company, hoping someone would record them. He wrote The Monkees' hit "I'm A Believer." But it was Diamond himself who made most of his own songs famous. Here's a sampling.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOLITARY MAN")

NEIL DIAMOND: (Singing) Melinda was mine till the time that I found her holding Jim, loving him. Then Sue came along, loved me strong. That's what I thought - me and Sue. But that died, too. Don't know that I will, but until I can find me the girl who'll stay and won't play games behind me, I'll be what I am, a solitary man. Solitary...

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHERRY, CHERRY")

DIAMOND: (Singing) She got the way to move me, Cherry.

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS #1: (Singing) She got the way to groove me. She got the way to groove me.

DIAMOND: (Singing) Cherry, baby.

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS #1: (Singing) She got the way to groove me.

DIAMOND: (Singing) All right.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M A BELIEVER")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Then I saw her face. Now I'm a believer. Not a trace of doubt in my mind. I'm in love. And I'm a believer. I couldn't leave her if I tried.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEET CAROLINE")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Hands touching hands, reaching out, touching me, touching you. Sweet Caroline. Good times never seemed so good.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AMERICA")

DIAMOND: (Singing) On the boats and on the planes, they're coming to America, never looking back again. They're coming to America. Oh.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SONG SUNG BLUE")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Song sung blue. Everybody knows one. Song sung blue. Every garden grows one.

DAVIES: As a lot of Neil Diamond's contemporaries fell off the charts, he moved from teen pop to adult pop. He recorded a duet with Barbra Streisand, had hits from his remake of "The Jazz Singer," and dressed in spangles for his sold-out concerts. In 2022, his life and music became the subject of the hit Broadway musical "A Beautiful Noise." Neil Diamond is now 84 years old. Let's listen to Terry's interview with him, recorded in 2005.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

TERRY GROSS: Your - I think it's fair to say your first big break - correct me if I'm wrong - was when you had recorded a demo, and the songwriters Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry heard the demo, and they really liked you. And they - some of their songs are "Da Doo Ron Ron," "Chapel Of Love"...

DIAMOND: "Be My Baby."

GROSS: "Be My Baby," yeah. So how did they hear you?

DIAMOND: I was making a demo. Usually, when you sold a song to a publisher, they would allow you to go in and make your own demo, which was invaluable experience to me. But I went in and made the demo and hired Ellie as a backup singer, which she did, despite the fact that she was having huge hits. She liked to sing in the studios with the other girls. And so I hired her for this session. And she liked something about what I was doing - my writing or my singing. And she brought me to her husband, Jeff, and he liked something about my - what I was doing. I don't know if he liked the writing or the singing. But one liked one, and the other one liked the other. So we started a working relationship. We were both working for the same music publisher. And I kind of got let go by that music publisher, and I asked Jeff and Ellie if they were interested in producing me.

GROSS: In the first session that you did with them, you recorded "Solitary Man." Did you like the idea of horns on this?

DIAMOND: I liked the idea of anything on those records.

GROSS: (Laughter).

DIAMOND: I was just thrilled to be there.

GROSS: Right. Well, let's hear "Solitary Man," which I have to say, I think it's really a terrific recording.

DIAMOND: Thank you.

GROSS: Yeah. So, OK, let's hear it. This is your first hit - yes?

DIAMOND: Yes, if you can call it that.

GROSS: ...That you recorded yourself. Yeah. OK.

DIAMOND: Yeah.

GROSS: OK. So this is Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOLITARY MAN")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Melinda was mine till the time that I found her holding Jim, loving him. Then Sue came along, loved me strong. That's what I thought - me and Sue. But that died, too. Don't know that I will, but until I can find me the girl who'll stay and won't play games behind me, I'll be what I am, a solitary man. Solitary man. I've had it to here being...

GROSS: That's Neil Diamond.

Now, did you write this song for yourself or for somebody else?

DIAMOND: No. I wrote this for myself. I had a contract with Jeff and Ellie, and I started to focus in on just what I wanted to do. And so "Solitary Man" was written for me and for the first sessions that I was to do with Jeff and Ellie.

GROSS: There's this, like, urgency in the song and in the way you sing it. And I think of you, in a way, as kind of specializing in some of your work in that urgency. Is that something you've been conscious of, that you think really, like, works especially well for you as a songwriter and as a singer?

DIAMOND: Well, I can tell you that I wasn't conscious of it until you just mentioned it. I've never thought of my songs having that sense of urgency, but I - you know, I'll listen again. And maybe as an objective observer, you can pick up on that stuff, but I never felt that there was an urgency. A sense of drama, a sense of yearning - lots of things, but not urgency. But you may be very - you may be very right about this. I'm going to listen again, now.

GROSS: So how did it "Solitary Man" change your idea of what you wanted from your musical life?

DIAMOND: Once I had a chart record of my own, I was no longer a kid knocking around on the streets. I was now - well, we didn't call them artists at that time. We called them vocalists, but I was a vocalist. And it was a whole different thing. I was writing for myself, so I had to really dig in and write as well as I possibly could. And I have to say, before that time, I don't know if I was doing that. I was just writing and writing and writing, maybe just to get an advance from a publisher. But there was not a lot of me in those songs, and "Solitary Man" was the first of a long line of me songs, my experience songs.

GROSS: When you were working as a songwriter for publishers, writing for other people, were you writing for specific people? Were you writing with specific singers in mind?

DIAMOND: Well, that's usually how it went back then, although I was never a good enough writer to kind of write for some other singer, to understand what they did best, the keys, the kind of song. Usually, you were told that so-and-so is coming up for a session in three weeks and they need a song of this type. And it was usually as close as possible to the song that they had previously, which was a hit, if it was a hit.

And you had to write a - kind of, like, a copy of that, in a way, 'cause that's the way it worked in those days. You have a hit record and your next record sounds - should sound as much like the hit record as you can make it. But I wasn't very good at it. That's probably why I spent eight years down there in Tin Pan Alley and had very little success. Nothing more, really, than selling a song and taking a small advance for it to get me through the week.

GROSS: Now, The Monkees did a couple of your songs - "I'm A Believer" and "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You." Did you write those with them in mind or for yourself? I'm trying to think of what the chronology was. Like, you start recording in - what? - like, '67?

DIAMOND: '66.

GROSS: '66. OK.

DIAMOND: Yeah.

GROSS: And what year are The Monkees? Like, is that after that?

DIAMOND: I think '67, something like that. I'd recorded a couple of songs, including "Solitary Man" and "Cherry, Cherry," which was a big hit. And because of that hit, the people who were producing The Monkees called and said, we like "Cherry, Cherry." Do you have any other songs? I said, well, I don't have anything like "Cherry, Cherry," but I have an album coming out soon and I'll send it over and take your pick.

GROSS: You know, it's funny. The common wisdom goes, when telling the story of, like, songwriters from the Brill Building and The Beatles, is that The Beatles changed everything. After The Beatles band started writing their own songs, it drove out the professional songwriters. But, of course, The Monkees are a band that's, you know, a kind of fabricated band copying the Beatles (laughter). And you have this tremendous success writing for them. And in that sense, like, The Beatles' success inadvertently really helped you as a songwriter.

DIAMOND: Oh, yeah. No question about it. But it was not only in the sense of The Monkees doing a couple of songs. It was in the sense that the doors began to open for songwriters who were able to sing. And I just happened to be one of them who'd been knocking around the streets for years and now suddenly was getting a new and fresh listening to my work. So The Beatles made an enormous change, as did Bob Dylan. They brought the songwriter up to - so up to the front of the line and said, you know, you guys do it. And it had a devastating effect on the music publishing business in Tin Pan Alley. But it opened up many doors for people like me.

GROSS: My guest is Neil Diamond. Here's his version of "I'm A Believer."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M A BELIEVER")

DIAMOND: (Singing) I thought love was only true in fairy tales, meant for someone else, but not for me. Love was out to get me.

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS #2: (Vocalizing).

DIAMOND: (Singing) That's the way it seemed.

UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS #2: (Vocalizing).

DIAMOND: (Singing) Disappointment haunted all my dreams. Then I saw her face. Now I'm a believer. Not a trace of doubt in my mind. I'm in love. And I'm a believer. I couldn't leave her if I tried.

DAVIES: That's Neil Diamond, singing the song that became a hit for The Monkees. More of our interview with Diamond after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2005 interview with singer and songwriter Neil Diamond. The new film "Song Sung Blue," titled after a Neil Diamond song, stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as performers in a Diamond tribute band.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

GROSS: I want to ask you about another of your songs. And this is also an earlier song. It's "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon." And the Urge Overkill version of this was used by Quentin Tarantino in "Pulp Fiction."

DIAMOND: Yeah.

GROSS: Can you tell us the story behind the song?

DIAMOND: Oh, behind the song was pretty basic. I was playing mostly to teenagers, teenage girls, when I first started. And so going through that period, I just wrote a song for the audience for me to do in the show - and for the audience which was, as I say, teenage girls. And "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" was something I wrote for them and recorded it myself.

GROSS: How did you find out that Quentin Tarantino was going to use a version of this song for "Pulp Fiction"?

DIAMOND: Well, first they have to request the right to use it. But I got a request and a part of a script to be used in this movie called "Pulp Fiction." And I've always held to a very tenuous line as to what I wanted my songs to be used as. And I wouldn't let them be used in cigarette commercials or alcohol commercials. And the script that I read was way out there. It was, you know, beyond what I would turn down normally. And I did turn it down. I heard almost immediately from my publisher, who said, you know, you shouldn't turn this down. This guy is a tremendous director. And you should just do it and let them do it, which I did. And, of course, I've never regretted it because it was an entirely different way of seeing that song. But that's basically how it happened.

GROSS: So what'd you think of the movie?

DIAMOND: Oh, I love the movie. I was amazed by the movie. I've seen it. Yeah.

GROSS: How come you love the movie but didn't love the script? What was different actually seeing it?

DIAMOND: Well, I didn't get the whole script. I only got a few pages of the script in which the song would be used. And I don't know if you remember the scene. But she was - Uma Thurman was very heavily into a coke binge, and she went unconscious and had to be taken for some, quote unquote, "special treatment." And, you know, it just seemed too strong for my own taste. And I turned it down on that basis.

GROSS: Well, here's a song you wrote to please your teenage fans, and now it's going to be used in an overdose scene, in a drug overdose scene.

DIAMOND: Yeah.

GROSS: Not what you had in mind.

DIAMOND: Not at all. But I would've reacted the same to any of the other songs I had written.

GROSS: But it was very effective in the film.

DIAMOND: It was very effective, and it was a lesson that I learned, you know, see who else is working on it. See how serious they are. Don't take it at face value and don't take your prejudices into this kind of discussion.

GROSS: Why don't we hear your version of the song? Here it is.

DIAMOND: Great.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIRL, YOU'LL BE A WOMAN SOON")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Girl, you'll be a woman soon. I love you so much, can't count all the ways I'd die for you, girl. And all they can say is he's not your kind. They never get tired of putting me down, and I never know when I come around what I'm going to find. Don't let them make up your mind. Don't you know, girl, you'll be a woman soon. Please, come take my hand. Girl, you'll be a woman soon. Soon, you'll need a man. I've been misunderstood for all of my life. But what they're saying, girl, just cuts like a knife. The boy is no good.

GROSS: I want to ask you about another song that you wrote and recorded, a big hit for you, "Sweet Caroline," which is now played at Red Sox games at Fenway Park. And maybe you know the story of why (laughter), of why that is. But let's start with the song itself. Is there a story behind the writing of the song?

DIAMOND: Yeah, I think so. I was heading down to Memphis for my first recording session down there. And there were some producers I wanted to work with. And I only had two songs written. And in those days, a session was 3 hours, and you usually had three songs that you recorded. So the night before the session, at some motel in Memphis, I knocked out this song, "Sweet Caroline." It was one of the fastest songs I've ever written. And we recorded it the next day. And it became one of my biggest songs, if not the biggest song. But songs usually don't come like that. There's usually a lot of work and teeth-gnashing and agony and torment over any of these songs. But that one just popped out, and there it was. And here it is now. Still people can sing it.

GROSS: It's also sung a lot in bars.

DIAMOND: Well, the fact is that it's fun and easy to sing with. And I think that's the bottom line, as far as that song is concerned. It's easy to sing. It's fun. People like to sing it. And that's why it's popular in bars, because anybody can sing it no matter how many drinks you've had.

GROSS: Well, Neil Diamond, thank you very much for talking with us.

DIAMOND: My pleasure, Terry.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEET CAROLINE")

DIAMOND: (Singing) Where it began? I can't begin to know when. But then, I know it's growing strong. Was in the spring, and spring became the summer. Who'd have believed you'd come along? Hands touching hands, reaching out, touching me. Touching you. Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good.

DAVIES: One of Neil Diamond's biggest hits. Terry Gross spoke with Neil Diamond in 2005. The new film "Song Sung Blue" stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as performers in a Diamond tribute band. Coming up, Noah Wyle on his HBO Max series "The Pitt." Season 2 premieres tomorrow. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.