It’s been a long time since Neil Diamond graduated from Tin Pan Alley blacksmith to quintessential '70s songwriter to MOR balladeer, only to see his critical stock plummet thanks to bloated (but hugely popular) projects like the Jazz Singer remake. By the 1980s, he’d become that singular thing: a yesteryear man who could still sell out stadia while incurring the derision of hipsters who bitched about music for culchie nurses.
But in the mid-'90s culture flux, Diamond’s legacy got revised in all the right places. Shane MacGowan & The Popes covered ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’ live, Urge Overkill’s torch and twang take on ‘Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon’ did for Neil what Pulp Fiction did for Travolta, and then came serious benediction in the form of Johnny Cash’s clench-jawed version of ‘Solitary Man’.
At which point Rick Rubin entered the equation. It’s not the first time a producer of distinction has attempted to bestow cool kudos on Diamond – Robbie Robertson manned the desk for 1976’s Beautiful Noise – but Rubin’s particular gift is not spraypainting old models in the newest lacquers but the converse. Functioning more as inspired A&R overseer and performance watchdog than technician, his role is transparent, if not invisible, his gift a Zen-like ability to locate the integral Slayerness of Slayer, The Pettyness of Petty, the Z-ness of Jay, and bring it forth as if new-minted. More David Briggs than Butch Vig, he’s most at home configuring the Chili Peppers or The Jayhawks or The Mars Volta in rickety old houses instead of airlocked studios, lounging on the floor with his mutts while the talent finds its way to the heart of the material.
What he’s done for Diamond is rescue him from the super-sized supper set and corporate private party circuit. The result is an album that sits closer to Lee Hazlewood or Tim Hardin than Billy Joel (another hard-nosed ballad-toting veteran whose talent is all too often mismanaged by unsympathetic handlers).
Songs like ‘Oh Mary’, ‘Hell Yeah’ and ‘What’s It Gonna Be’ take up where ‘Solitary Man’ left off – vows of integrity from an old salt too long in the tooth for frills and frivolities. His voice is close-miked and all-business, every tune a weighty testimony humped down from the mount.
Age suits him. In the past, Diamond’s stony-faced delivery could sound like the speechifying of a blowhard telling the room that he didn’t get where he is today. Now his voice resonates with the gravity of an old timer who’s earned the right to speak his mind.
He’s got two tones, two themes: vows of faithfulness (‘Captain Of A Shipwreck’, ‘Face Me’, with its echoes of Brel) and hurt rebukes (the narky jazz of ‘I’m On To You’, the self-consciously epic – but still epic – tearjerker ‘Evermore’). But as anyone who’s sustained scar tissue on the heart will tell you, that’s plenty to be going on with.
Yes, he’s guilty of the occasional blast of emotional grandstanding, but that’s a small price to pay for some truly great songs. ‘Save Me A Saturday Night’ is an instant standard somewhere between one of The Drifters’ clocking-off time doo-wop operettas, Bruce doing his working class romantic bit and the Velvets’ ‘Sunday Morning’. But Neil don’t do throwaway. The vaudevillian ragtime blast of ‘We’ is about the closest he comes to whimsy, and even a feelgood rollick like ‘Delirious Love’ is imbued with Wagnerian pomp and classic ‘Sweet Caroline’ chord changes. You gotta admire the man’s seriousness and intensity: this is anything but easy listening. Rather, the overall feel is redolent of the slanty-eyed suspicion of Oh Mercy, the too-old-for-this-shit impassiveness of the American series and Leonard’s last couple of records, all filtered through a pop craftsman’s sensibility honed over decades.
So who’s next up for a turn on the Rubinicon? Brian Wilson (who crops up on a handclaps-and-harmonies reprise of ‘Delirious Love’)? Van Morrison? Or (gulp) Bob himself?
Don’t start me talking.