doghouse speaks…”Hot August Night”
As a child of the Eighties, my first real exposure to Neil Diamond was the silhouetted crooner on the poster of The Jazz Singer – possibly accompanied by his anguished vocals as he serenaded us with “Love On The Rocks.”
However, as I settled into my seat at Madison Square Garden on the 16th of August for my first live viewing of the longstanding pop icon, the image that batted about in my head was his contorted visage on the cover of the classic live album Hot August Night.
It was a dusty LP my parents owned – nestled somewhere in between my mother’s copy of The River by Bruce Springsteen and one of my father’s many Marty Robbins compilations. I didn’t recognize Diamond at first. He looked nothing like the Diamond that was coarsely singing “Forever In Blue Jeans” on one of the many other live albums my mother had acquired (in retrospect, it might have – in fact – been Hot August Night 2 – this live album’s lackluster sequel.)
I recall my parents being next door visiting our neighbors. Being of the age where a child would rather die then be caught listening or embracing their parents’ music, I quietly snuck the first LP onto the turntable and plugged in the headphones – not wanting anyone to know I had followed through with this curiosity.
The cardinal sin of investigating one’s parents’ musical influences.
There was something about the cover that caught my imagination. This long-haired man adorning the cover stood as if in a fit of madness and looked like some strange, denim clad Shakespearean figure.
I will admit it. By the end of “Crunchy Granola Suite,” the album had me. I couldn’t point to anything specific other than the surprise I felt that this was the same man who had recorded the sweet but lyrically underwhelming “Heartlight.” (I have since grown a certain fondness for that song’s unabashed sincerity – as well as many other Diamond tunes I was certainly not going to warm to with my prepubescent musical tastes.) There was simplicity of intent the album had. Each song – and even more so – Diamond’s interpretation of each song was not emotionally complicated. It was so simple. Perhaps naïve. But this was naivety before it was replaced by the far more fashionable knowing irony – a malady I would certainly come down with by my late teens and early twenties. By the time “Red Red Wine” played, I wanted to run out and get my heart broken so I could commiserate with some of my fellow, fallen mates in some honky-tonk bar. And – at long last – when the seminal “I Am…I Said” resonated through my Realistic headphones, (a version much quieter, more introspective, more desperate, and far lovelier than the popular radio version I must have heard a thousand times by that time via classic rock stations) the spell was cast.
Years later, watching Diamond play that enormous arena, I was thrown back into that sweetly nostalgic places when the 67 year-old rock singer launched into “Crunchy Granola Suite” and – for one of the few moments of the night – Diamond seemed to channel that mysteriously enthralling, joyously naïve, and electric energy that had held me ensconced in that album two decades prior – and had held my parents ensconced a decade earlier.
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