In 1970, Neil Diamond auditioned to play the lead function in a movie concerning the comedian Lenny Bruce. He didn’t get the half, however he did come away from the expertise with a traditional track, “I Am… I Said.”
Whereas his earlier hits had been primarily character songs or universally themed love songs, “I Am… I Said” was the primary to inform you precisely what was on Neil Diamond’s thoughts. Reaching that time wasn’t straightforward. Diamond was critical about moving into the flicks in 1970, although he’d as but carried out little or no performing. When producer Marvin Value courted him a few Lenny Bruce biopic, he threw himself into it – to the purpose of performing a full set of standup comedy at The Bitter Finish West in West Hollywood. (To followers’ everlasting frustration, no recordings of this have ever turned up.)
Hearken to the playlist Not Candy Caroline, which celebrates a few of Neil Diamond’s greatest hits.
By all accounts, Diamond did a superbly good job on the audition, however the expertise shook him up a bit. For one factor, Bruce’s mom, Sally Marr, was current. Diamond was unsettled by talking a deceased artist’s phrases together with his mom wanting on. For one more, Bruce’s materials is significantly extra risque than Diamond’s, and because the track later identified, he was “not a man who likes to swear.” As he advised Rolling Stone afterward, “He was just saying all those things I had been holding in. It was all the anger that was pent up in me. Suddenly here I was, speaking words that I had never spoken before. These violent monologues of his, and the way he acted. And I went into therapy almost immediately after that.”
Writing the track was therapeutic, and got here out of a interval of introspection. He referred to this in a few 2008 interviews, telling Mojo that the track “was consciously an attempt on my part to express what my dreams were about, what my aspirations were about, and what I was about. And without any question, it came from my sessions with the analyst.” The lyric additionally referred to the sense of dislocation he felt at leaving his birthplace of New York Metropolis for Los Angeles, the place he nonetheless felt like an outsider. In a separate interview with Q, he admitted it was nonetheless robust for him to assemble himself after performing the track, even a long time after writing it.
Among the traditional Diamond songs had been written shortly – he as soon as claimed “Heartlight” took an hour – however “I Am…I Said” was positively not a kind of. In actual fact, he’s usually named it the hardest track he’s ever written, consuming up 4 months of fixed work. Even the track’s complicated rhyme scheme made it troublesome to finish: “I wrote the first verse, and when it came to writing the second, I had to use the same format, and the first verse was so complicated that it was almost impossible to write that form when I came to the second. It had to be the exact same rhyming pattern.”
The laborious work paid off: “I Am…I Said” was launched in March 1971 and have become a radio fixture for months, lastly hitting its chart peak in Could. “I Am…I Said” was additionally the primary Neil Diamond track to seem on the identical album twice. It opens and closes the 1971 album Stones, which could possibly be referred to as his homage to the singer-songwriter motion. With solely three unique songs, Stones discovered him deciphering traditional numbers by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Randy Newman. Stones opened with the one model of “I Am..I Said” and closed with a reprise, which begins with the second verse and continues after the one fades, with Diamond shouting “I am!” with solely strings for accompaniment. Rolling Stone reviewer Paul Gambaccini singled this second out, calling it “as touching as the single itself.”
However the definitive model of “I Am…I Said” might be the one on the 1972 reside album Sizzling August Evening. Although it was the finale of his fundamental set, it’s truly extra intimate than the one, starting with simply acoustic guitar and by no means reaching the anticipated crescendo. Diamond’s supply evinces all of the emotional turmoil that birthed the track, together with the toughness and confidence that got here out of it.
Hearken to the playlist Not Candy Caroline, which celebrates a few of Neil Diamond’s greatest hits.
