Some Overdue Thoughts on Neil Diamond

Neil Diamond in 1971, the year he
released “I Am… I Said”

I started ragging on Neil Diamond’s 1971 top-five hit “I Am… I Said” years before I heard it. Despite its high Billboard ranking, it generally isn’t regarded among Diamond’s greatest hits—let’s acknowledge, it’s no “Solitary Man” or “Sweet Caroline.” It doesn’t get extensive classic rock radio airplay like others of Diamond’s peak career recordings. Even for many fans, it’s largely a cypher.

Therefore, when humorist Dave Barry made it a recurring theme to belittle Neil Diamond in general in the 1990s, and “I Am… I Said” particularly, I didn’t blink. I knew Barry’s mockery was exaggerated for comic effect, because no matter how earnestly over-written Diamond’s hits were, hell, the man still wrote “I’m a Believer” and “Cherry Cherry,” and I’ll fight you if those aren’t classics. But “I Am… I Said”? Surely radio programmers buried it on purpose.

Barry quoted Diamond’s lyrics, particularly the central hearing-impaired chair, extensively. He said nothing about Diamond’s music, his life, or the cultural context amidst which Diamond wrote. Barry simply threw out Diamond's refrain lyrics, which aren’t exactly Robert Frost. Without context, and especially without the more subdued stanzas surrounding the refrain, the lyrics looked bathetically ridiculous, like an Angora cat in the rain.

Superficially, I had no reason to believe Dave Barry wasn’t representing Neil Diamond accurately. If I’d thought more deeply, I would’ve realized Barry also pooh-poohed “Cracklin’ Rosie,” which is maybe a bit overproduced but seriously still slaps. Cool, rational thought might’ve told me that, if Barry disparaged a banger like “Cracklin’ Rosie,” maybe his representation of “I Am… I Said” wasn’t wholly reliable.

In my limited defense, I hadn’t turned twenty yet.

Years later, I finally heard the song. When my local radio station started playing the opening riff and first stanza, I clearly identified it as belonging to the 1970s, a decade when hippie utopianism began surrendering to ennui, age, and the realization that it required more than optimism to change the world. Though most artists didn’t record anything quite this melancholy until after 1973, it’s instantly recognizable in its time.

More importantly, “I Am… I Said” is pretty good. It isn’t Diamond’s best, not in a career that produced classics like “Red Red Wine” and “Kentucky Woman,” but it’s a substantial glimpse into the psyche of a man facing his own age and mortality. The contrast between Diamond’s understated, more poetically complex stanzas, and ostentatious orchestra behind his choppy refrain, presages later anthems to adult futility, like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Neil Diamond in 2018, the year his
health forced him to retire from touring

I believed Dave Barry’s criticisms in the 1990s because I hadn’t yet heard Diamond’s song, and I presumed Barry represented the song accurately. I realized Barry, a humorist, might privilege the joke above facts. Yet in 1993, when one couldn’t check YouTube or Spotify to verify the source, I chose to assume Barry was essentially honest. I adopted Barry’s jokes as my own opinion, and repeated them for nearly thirty years.

Everyone sometimes adopts others’ opinions as our own. Nobody can possibly have encyclopedic knowledge of, say, climate science or presidential politics or big-ticket TV productions. We must trust scholars, critics, friends, and others. When that happens, we must obviously evaluate whether that person’s opinion is trustworthy enough. Is the scholar scholarly enough to be reliable? Has the movie reviewer seen enough movies?

Dave Barry is probably the funniest White person of my lifetime, a man who often extracted comedy from well-written descriptions of furniture. He commanded language to cultivate emotions in readers, without depending on voice and performance, a mark of somebody who thinks deeply about every word and phrase. Because he commanded written English with an ease I find enviable, I presumed Barry must’ve thought equally deeply about his subjects.

It never occurred to me that Barry might’ve misrepresented his subject, or omitted information that would’ve influenced my opinion, such as Diamond turning thirty, divorcing his high school sweetheart, or having little to show for his career. I trusted the evaluation of a critic who, it appears, was more invested in the joke than the facts. Barry’s take-down of Diamond’s lyrics remains hilarious, but frustratingly divorced from reality.

This forces me to ponder: what other untrustworthy “experts” have I trusted? As an ex-Republican, I certainly shouldn’t have trusted P.J. O’Rourke and Thomas Sowell, who influenced my early politics. My parents admitted the ideas they taught me were often informed by fear. Much of adulthood involves purging false teachings from untrustworthy mentors who concealed their agendas.

And that chair totally heard you, dude.