Bandmaster of the Mainstream

By JAY COCKS

Hit records and a new movie bring Neil Diamond back to basics

The beginning, he remembers now, was a contest. At the age of three, this Coney Island baby stood tall, mouthed selections from The Marriage of Figaro as a record played in the background, and pulled down a prize of 25-c-.

Thirty-seven years later, the stakes are higher, the rewards are greater, but Neil Diamond is still fronting a big sound. He has written and sung some of the smoothest and best contemporary pop, yet he remains a performer in search of a tradition, a megabucks pilgrim looking for roots he never had and a place in which to settle. Rock really is not his neighborhood; his fur-lined melodies and forthright sentimentality make him stand out among rockers like a Coupe de Ville at a demolition derby. Diamond has been a smash act in Las Vegas, but he is neither as smooth as Sinatra, as cloying as Wayne Newton nor as annoying as Steve Lawrence.

All this difficulty about categorization and definition sometimes gives even Diamond pause. "I fell between two musical generations," he admits. "I love Sinatra and Eddie Fisher. Yet I really loved the Beatles." The only folks who don't seem at all confused--or at least don't care if they are--are the millions of fans who have given Diamond, by his own reckoning, 20 platinum and gold albums and over 30 hit singles, including 1978's You Don't Bring Me Flowers, a duet with Barbra Streisand. Diamond loyalists right now are making their boy's latest efforts two of the year's hottest records. Love on the Rocks, a typically canny Diamond ballad, is currently No. 2 on the charts, while the album it comes from, The Jazz Singer, is fifth among the top LPs. Gratifying as this may be, at least one question remains: How come all the people who are buying The Jazz Singer are going in only modest numbers to see the movie?

Diamond's $15 million retooling of the old Al Jolson chestnut is a recklessly schmaltzy, relentlessly retrograde musical that, according to its "surprised and devastated" producer, Jerry Leider, "received 4-to-l bad notices." Neil, who does not go in for such meticulous and perhaps masochistic tabulations, nevertheless says,

"We expected serious critics wouldn't like it. It is not an art movie. It is a modern-day Hollywood musical." Well, as Neil's high school English teacher might have told him back home in Brooklyn, one of those modifiers is inappropriate. The only thing "modern day" about Diamond's Jazz Singer is the setting and the overstuffed musical orchestration. All the rest, from story (nice Jewish boy brings down paternal wrath by forsaking tradition and trying to make it big in show biz) to score (love songs, fun songs, even marching songs), is stubbornly vintage. Diamond even pops up in blackface for a fast comic turn; about the only act of Jolson's that he doesn't try is going down on one knee.

Neil had to fight to "tell the traditional story. One studio wanted to take some of the 'old-fashionedness' out of it. They tried to make the father a college professor instead of a cantor." Doing right by the source may in fact have undone the remake, which seems like a slightly fragile pop legend propped up--and perhaps overwhelmed--by a Broadway-style score that sends up a great salvo in the opening notes and goes out with all guns blazing.

It is not hard to understand Diamond's attraction to the material, however, or his heavy emotional involvement with it. There are certain parallels with his own life. Like Jess, the character he plays in the movie, Diamond put aside what was expected of him in favor of what he hoped for. He dropped out of pre-med at New York University, spent some time as a staff writer for an assortment of Tin Pan Alley companies, then finally rented himself a storage room with a piano and a pay phone and set out to write on his own. He had three hit singles in 1966, one of which, Cherry, Cherry is echoed in The Jazz Singer's own insidiously catchy You Baby. Diamond says, "It wasn't until I began to sing my own songs that I had real success." He married young, like Jess, and like him divorced his Jewish wife to start a new life, as they say in the movies, outside the faith. Neil and the former Marcia Murphey of Columbus have two sons, Jesse, 10, and Micah, 3, and homes in Malibu and Beverly Hills. "It's only in the past ten years that I have been making large salaries," Neil says. "I have a couple of holding corporations behind me."

There is also a fair amount of drama behind him, the sort that did not make it to the big screen. Three winters ago, Diamond collapsed onstage during a concert. Doctors diagnosed a tumor on the spinal cord, and Neil endured a twelve-hour operation and three months in a wheelchair, uncertain whether he would ever walk again.

The low drama and high sentiments of The Jazz Singer may be only a glossy reflection of Diamond's life and sometimes troubled times. But the movie does pull off at least one tricky proposition: it finally and snugly tucks Neil Diamond inside a tradition. He is revealed as a rouser, a showman, a kind of bandmaster of the American mainstream. Like Jolson's, even Diamond's slickest movements seem sincere. The stuff may be corny, but it's never prefab. Neil leans into the Kol Nidre as if it were a sacred version of his sound-track anthem for Jonathan Livingston Seagull. One may question his taste, but not his enthusiasm or his exuberance. America, his up-tempo celebration of the immigrant glories of American life that opens and closes The Jazz Singer, is equal parts Emma Lazarus and Irving Berlin, and none the worse for it. It is too close to Diamond's heart to be purely sappy. It is a showman's showstopper, and it is not a bad little tune for a pilgrim, either.

--By Jay Cocks. Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

With reporting by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

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