Neil Diamond Is, He Said
So how about another greatest hits comp?

The world needs another Neil Diamond compilation like I need a hole in the head, to coin a phrase, but there it is anyway. Walk into your favourite CD retailer (Starbucks) and the man who experienced big screen love at the hands of Lucie Arnaz is peering at you from beside the cash register, captured in that golden moment when his receding hair was buffed up into something resembling a beachfront taco kiosk. If you grew up in the ’70s, then your dad had a copy of Diamond’s ’72 live masterpiece Hot August Night, and the opening guitar riff on “Crunchy Granola Suite”—it rises out of the string section like a dirty thought—was probably your infant gateway to the harder stuff, like the Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses” and eventually KISS.

Flash forward 20 years. If I remember anything at all about the ’90s, it’s that a generation of men—my generation of men—had almost unanimously alighted on the same essential truth. After rejecting his work for decades, we all realized, probably thanks to Urge Overkill’s heroic version of “Girl (You’ll Be a Woman Soon”), that Neil Diamond fuckin’ rocked. Or he soft-rocked, or something. Whatever it was, it was great. Whether he was laying down the world’s first bubblegum bossa nova with “Cherry, Cherry” or showing up at the Band’s Last Waltz show in that suit with that hair playing that song (“Dry Your Eyes”—awful), it was clear that Diamond possessed a kind of brazen genius that sat at its own unique angle to the rest of the world.

I’ll waste no more than a sentence on the fact that Diamond could write a hook. Goes without saying. But I like it when he aspired to depth. Or, as my friend, local journo Shawn Conner once put it: “When I was a kid I thought Neil Diamond was profound. Then I grew up and thought he was terrible. Now I think he’s profound again.” Early Bang Records single “Solitary Man” might be the most elegant example of Diamond’s loftier ambitions, but I have a huge soft spot for the more pretentious moments in the canon: the cod religiosity of “Holly Holy”; the AM radio-formatted existentialism of “I Am... I Said”; or, best of all, the apparent psychotic break that bequeathed us “Be,” from Diamond’s under-appreciated Jonathan Livingstone Seagull soundtrack. “While the sand would become the stone, which begat the spark, turned to living bone. Holy, holy. Sanctus, sanctus,” he intones, bafflingly. Cue the swelling thousand-piece orchestra. Would Elton John have had the balls? John Denver? Bobby Goldsboro? You?

Neil Diamond: All-Time Greatest Hits is a good enough sampler of a bunch of songs you’ve only heard a billion times before. “Be” is missing, if not long-forgotten, but they throw in a solo version of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” for the collectors out there. Mind you, if the people that curated this “new” collection had done their job properly and contacted me, All-Time Greatest Hits would come with Diamond’s All-Time Greatest Song. “Coldwater Morning” is from the 1970 opus Tap Root Manuscript. It’s profound, terrible, and profound, like all of Diamond’s top drawer stuff.

The Tyee, September 2014