heidicuda's Blog

L.A. Girl/L.A. World

 

I got the call around noon.

 

The offer? Two tickets to paradise. A terrace suite at the Hollywood Bowl to see Neil Diamond on a hot October night.

 

I’ve been in and around nightclubs since the age of 11, and Diamond is the last great artist I had yet to see live. After last night’s show, I’ll carry him in my heart always.

 

It was my night alright. While thousands of motorists opted to grow long in the tooth on the Highland Ave. offramp, counting stars while they missed the opener, I parked for free at the Metro and hopped an underground train non-stop to the Bowl.

 

Best buck-twenty-five I ever spent. After soaking in the neon lights of Tinsel Town for a sweet second, I hotfooted up Highland. I didn’t want to miss a moment of his two-hour performance. When I got to my suite, it turned out I was sharing it with Steve Appleford from Rolling Stone, who I hadn’t seen since a Jayhawks show at McCabe’s in 1992, where post-show we knocked back watered down tequila at the Ski Room while listening to Neil Diamond on the jukebox. (How’s that for kismet?)

 

It was only the third time I’d danced since I quit drinking five years ago, and it felt so good. The first time was in Germany when I fell in love, the second at Jamie Foxx’s Oscars party and third time’s a charm. It was during “Cherry, Cherry” and Neil wouldn’t take no for an answer. He got everyone up off their bums where they stayed and swayed all night.

 

And lemme just tell you, when Neil Diamond performs, there’s no fluff. It’s all him, no filler, no choirs from Harlem, no opening acts or juggling monkeys. He gives it to you, straight, no chaser. So if he’s gonna put out, at the age of 67, the least you can do is get off your [...] and dance.

 

Cher was among the revelers last night and he reminded her from the stage that the last time they’d been to the Bowl together was in ’66, when he was performing with his rock ‘n’ roll review and she was Sonny’s sidekick.

 

Didn’t matter that four decades had gone by. Diamond’s music is just as vital today, maybe even more so. It’s uncanny that so many songs of heartache were written by a person with such a positive spirit. Midway through the show, I realized there isn’t any performer who can pack more of an emotional wallop into a simple turn of phrase than Diamond. He's like a poet-pugilist.

I wasn’t the only one with a tear-streaked cheek when he started to sing, “Play Me.” Its purity and simplicity, like a minimalist painting. In anyone else’s hands, its lyrics--“You are the sun, I am the moon, you are the words, I am the tune”--would come off as pokey and twee. A trite little ditty in need of a rewrite. But when he sings those words, it hits you in places you didn’t even know you had.

 

I watched him last night, with his grace and ease that makes it seem at times as if he's merely floating across the stage, and I thought about all the other performers I’ve seen. With the exception of Elvis, I’ve seen them all, or at the very least, all I care to see. And I couldn’t come up with a category for him. He’s like this inexplicable national treasure, a solitary man, a party of one.

 

As he sang songs off his new album, “Home Before Dark,” a Rick Rubin-produced marvel that shows he’s still incredibly relevant knee deep in his sixth decade, I thought how few performers continue to record songs of value after a couple of lucky hits. With Diamond, I guess it’s never been about luck. To wit, the first track on “Home Before Dark.” It's an epic, seven-minute song of heartache (but aren’t they all?) titled “If I Don’t See You Again.” Its quiet reflection on love and pain and longing is as good as any song he’s ever written and then some.

 

As the big screen at the Bowl played Super 8 tape of him with his family in Brooklyn as a kid, looking like a Jewish James Dean, Diamond sang about his youth and his dreams of being a songwriter. The crowd was still, just taking it all in, the knowledge that they were witness to greatness. A greatness made even grander by his humility, his constant reminders from the stage of just how grateful he is to do what he does. A unfeigned humbleness, not part of any act.

 

And just when you think he’s played every song you came to hear, he sits in a chair as if he’s just an average Joe belly up to a bar and says, “L.A.’s fine, the sun shines most of the time and the feeling's laid back….” You can feel the burn in the audience, a heat radiating from the inside, and by the time he winds up to, “But I got an emptiness deep inside and I’ve tried, but it won’t let me go….” it’s like we’re all grasping to envelope our souls with his words.

 

As the traveling troubadour recites the song’s finale, “I am, I cried, I am said I, and I am lost, and I can’t even say why. Leavin’ me lonely .... still….” it seems so clear to me. We all came out to hear his simple, raw, pure, poetry so we could fill up those empty places that hurt us deep down inside with whatever it is that Neil Diamond has.

 

It’s some kind of magic.... xoxo hsc

(Performance photos Jared Milgrim; Portrait by Jesse Diamond)