Picture this: it’s 2012 and a new Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings masterpiece hits the (by then entirely virtual) record store shelves. The album art features, in arty black and white, a solitary figure, perhaps hunched slightly, but with his chin held defiantly high, sitting at a grand piano in the Nevada desert under a vast grey sky, the panorama of the landscape that surrounds him somehow enlarging him rather than shrinking him. When you press play, you’ll hear the sound of a lone artist in an empty room, the absence heavy in the air as the tentative, almost muted simplicity of a few eerily melodic piano keys provides the solemn backdrop for the voice, once a belting baritone, now roughened up by the sandpaper of hard-earned wisdom and tamed by a reluctant familiarity with mortality. Men and women of America, I give you an artist chewed up and forgotten but not defeated. With the great beyond in sight, he’s perched at an elevation to survey the great before that was One Man’s Life — the showgirls and the bubbly drinks, the whole world as a chorus, the highlights and the bright lights alongside all the derision and disrespect — and to whisper in the only voice with which age can address youth; cracking, failing, but insistent: no regrets, no excuses; it’s sad, and lonely, and scary at the end, and though memories of a life lived on your own terms are a poor substitute for a life ahead of you, they become all that remains. Ladies and gentleman, in the tradition of Johnny Cash, the singer-songwriter as American Icon:

Barry Manilow? Nah, right? But if Rick Rubin can work his man-for-the-ages magic on Neil Diamond, you gotta figure it could be anyone. Manilow? Why not. Elton John? Step right up. Phil Collins? Of course, this came to my attention thanks to Diamond’s song “Act Like A Man,” which is frustratingly unavailable online in a form I can link to available for a free listen right here. The track, which shares a title with the blog, is from the current Billboard number one album, Home Before Dark, also number one on the UK charts. And it could also function as the title of the album, or at least the theme for the entire project he’s engaged in with Rick Rubin: “Look at me, I’m acting like a man! Like a man! No rhinestoned shirts, no string sections, no Shouting! Toward! The! Cho-oh-oh-orusssss! Can’t you see I’m an artist? Can you give me a little respect, now?” The chart-topping debut indicates maybe the appeal is working. For me, listening to the album itself, I’m left feeling a little meh. I mean, I felt all the poignant sense of loss and sadness about the irreconcilability of human dreams with cold reality that Diamond might have hoped he’d inspire, but it ain’t the music tugging the heartstrings. It’s the spectacle of a man making a last, desperate Hail Mary attempt at the credibility he craves — the only type of success that’s really ever eluded him — and missing it.

Just to back up: In case you’re under eighteen years old and only just heard of Diamond during his recent American Idol performance, he’s an old hand in the music business, famous for this type of song, which you might have heard belted out by nostalgiac drunks half in love with its cheesiness and half in love with the universally compelling emotionalism of its schmaltz:

He’s got a million of them — “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore,” “Cherry, Cherry,” “America (Theme from the Jazz Singer)“. It’s pop music with a hint of Gershwin, a bit of showtunesy bounce, music in which every emotion can be wrung out a bit more by the swelling of a string section, a ratcheted up climax, a few showy time signature changes. He crossed genres too — writing “I’m a Believer” for The Monkees and “Red, Red Wine,” which became a big hit for both Tony Tribe and UB40 (even there, though, with the ersatz British Invasion rock and what would become a reggae-inflected hit, there’s a bit of a theatrical bounce — a little of the schmaltz laid on).

Which, I should say, I think is fine. There’s really nothing wrong with schmaltz, which is why it becomes so popular. To say that Neil Diamond is a crowd-pleasing craftsman of a songwriter — one of the world’s best — who makes crowds of drunks want to get up and sing along — should be a high compliment. To add that he’s a great performer in the Vegas tradition should be icing on the cake for any career.

But Diamond himself clearly was never comfortable seeing it that way, as this neat little profile in The Independent makes clear:

For most rock fans, Diamond remains notorious for his performance of “Dry Your Eyes” in The Last Waltz (1978), Martin Scorsese’s film of The Band’s final show. “Follow that,” he reputedly bragged to Dylan, who whipped back: “What do I have to do, go on stage and fall asleep?”

[...] Bizarrely, auditioning to play the revolutionary, scabrous comedian Lenny Bruce in 1972 was what peeled open this inner torment. “Bruce’s language and thoughts were so violent,” he told Rolling Stone. “He was just saying all those things I had been holding in, ‘fuck’ and ’shit’ and ‘death’ and ‘kill’… It was all the anger that was pent up in me. I went into therapy almost immediately after that.”

“I Am…I Said”, his 1971 hit, is an early example of such navel-gazing. It agonizes over the worth of his, or anyone’s, songwriting. But Diamond has also been giddily vain enough to state: “I don’t dream of being George Gershwin, I dream of being Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Robert Frost. That’s how much I think I can do musically.” Blowsy numbers such as the 1978 Barbra Streisand duet “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” have been far more typical. Diamond is odd, but no lost genius.

In some way, Diamond clearly wanted a little of the respect that followed Bob Dylan — to make music that was poetry and art. And that sequence after the Last Waltz performance shows the sort of pissing contest that’s been going on between boys and men, between craftsmen and artists, between journeymen and masters, since Salieri and Mozart. Top that, Diamond says, allowing himself a moment of self-congratulation after leaving it all on the stage. Yawn, says the effortless master.

AND NOW, LATE IN HIS CAREER, still left out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an object of casual derision and some small of bit back-handed respect, Diamond still wants a little of that Dylan artistic mojo. How did Bob do it? With Time Out of Mind and Modern Times — a comeback achieved through sandpapered-down vocals and sombre, spare instrumentation and the melancholy of a youth long, long gone. Leonard Cohen’s been working that voice of ultimate-wisdom grind since he transformed from uber-nasal wonderboy troubador into grey-haired smoking man sometime in the 1980s. And Johnny Cash — what a third act that guy had, rescued from the stigma of bank-machine hawking and variety show hosting by Rick Rubin.

RUBIN BECAME FAMOUS as a hip-hop producer — he gave us LL Cool J, Run DMC, Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys and later produced Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” among eleventy-kajillion other credits. He also did metal of the very heavy sort — Slayer and Danzig, for example. But for all that, he’s been talked up most recently for his role in reviving Johnny Cash’s reputation and giving him some of the best recording years of Cash’s life. At a time when Cash was considered long since washed up, Rubin put him in a room with a guitar and a microphone and worked with him on some carefully selected cover songs and a bunch of originals. In every case, it was as if Rubin was drawing the sadness and profoundly haunting wisdom out of Cash’s broken-down outlaw voice and slow, deliberate guitar work. There was a million years of longing and heartbreak and sorrow in Johnny Cash’s American Recordings. And as a result, we all remember him as an iconic genius of outlaw manliness rather than as the huckster of the Johnny Cash Money Machine.

So now Diamond wants Rubin to give him some of that same third-act magic. Maybe the accolades and Grammies and the simple fucking respect will follow. The problem, when I listen to the record, is that with Diamond it all seems forced. Like I said, “Act Like A Man” isn’t online, but a few of the other songs are here on Diamond’s MySpace. There’s the spare instrumentation, the restrained vocals. It sounds like Diamond doing a Johnny Cash imitation. And it ain’t half bad, at that, but the ghosts that haunt listeners just aren’t there in Diamond’s voice. He may be feeling the million years of blah, blah, blah, but it just isn’t in the voice, which is like a thoroughbred in a harness — straining to open it up and run free over the big notes while Rick Rubin pulls back on the reigns and says “easy boy.” The songs themselves are like that too — they aren’t terrible, but they don’t do it for me. But beyond that, almost every track on the album sounds like the demo version of a big production number. On “Act Like a Man” in particular, you’ve got that bit of extra descending showbiz at the end of the chorus that’s familiar from “Sweet Caroline,” that little bah, bah, baaaaah down the scale as we move back into the verse. I’d almost think it’s a compliment to his signature style that listening to the album it’s obvious — this is the place where the horns should come in, here’s where we do a little handclap, here’s where you shout it out to the girls in the back row of the theatre. Except the Rubin-Cash formula is to leave those things out, so it all just seems a little… incomplete. You can dress the lounge singer down as a cowboy, but the sequins are there in the DNA of his songs and his voice.

IF HE WANTED TO GO another way, there would’ve been an obvious route available to Diamond for renewed hipness. The William Shatner/Tom Jones/Pat Boone trail of accepting your role as a bit of an ironically appreciated relic. All three of them once pursued serious careers, all three of them have decided to internalize their roles as sort of clowns. And they get some respect of a kind from that — they’re in on the joke, which today is the ultimate hipster currency. But for anyone accepting the role as the jester, it’s always a kind of consolation prize. Recognizing that there are limits you don’t control on how you can pull off things is safer than swinging for the fences and striking out, but it isn’t nearly so sweet as hitting a home run. The real men are the ones taking risks — and the ultimate risk is making a fool of yourself. It’s a risk that’s necessary for artistry, and for genius. And so even as I think he’s failing, that’s where the Diamond record moves me a bit, as I listen to “Act Like a Man” one more time. The song itself is about putting away the frivolous things to accept responsibility, but also about holding onto the thread of one’s potential:

Song maker you heartbreaker

You faker

You better stop it while you can

You know your just a worthless daydreamer

But hey dreamer

It’s time to act like a man [...]

Being a man means responsible

You hear it wherever you go

Nothing is ever impossible

Something inside tells me so

And I know what I know

And as Diamond takes his swing at artistic respect, in the way that one way that still seems possible to him, and misses by just a little, I can feel the sorrow and the pathos that he hoped the songs might have conveyed. He’s had a good run all along, but he’s taking his one last shot at the big prize he really wanted that’s always eluded him. There’s something touching in that, even in failure. And it engenders a kind of respect. Just probably not the kind he was desperately hoping for.

Tags: barry manilow, johnny cash, music, neil diamond

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Posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 12:35 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.