| Neil Sedaka
enjoyed two distinct periods of
commercial success in two slightly
different styles of pop music: first, as
a teen pop star in the late 1950s and
early '60s, then as a singer of more
mature pop/rock in the 1970s. In both
phases, Sedaka, a classically trained
pianist, composed the music for his
hits, which he sang in a boyish tenor.
And throughout, even when his performing
career was at a low ebb, he served as a
songwriter for other artists, resulting
in a string of hits year in and year
out, whether by him or someone else. For
himself, he wrote eight U.S. Top Ten pop
hits, including the chart-toppers
"Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," "Laughter
in the Rain," and "Bad Blood." The most
successful cover of one of his
compositions was Captain & Tennille's
recording of "Love Will Keep Us
Together," another number one. And over
the years his songs were recorded by a
wide range of pop, rock, country, R&B,
and jazz performers including ABBA,
Frankie Avalon, LaVern Baker, Shirley
Bassey, Teresa Brewer, Carol Burnett,
Glen Campbell, the Carpenters, Nick
Carter, David Cassidy, Cher, Petula
Clark, Richard Clayderman, Patsy Cline,
Rosemary Clooney, Sheryl Crow, Vic
Damone, Bobby Darin, John Davidson, Neil
Diamond, Gloria Estefan, the Fifth
Dimension, the Four Seasons, Connie
Francis, Crystal Gayle, Lesley Gore, the
Happenings, Engelbert Humperdinck, Wanda
Jackson, Jan & Dean, Tom Jones, Carole
King, Earl Klugh, Peggy Lee, Little
Anthony & the Imperials, Tony Martin,
Johnny Mathis, Susannah McCorkle, Clyde
McPhatter, Mandy Moore, Nana Mouskouri,
Maria Muldaur, the Monkees, Jim Nabors,
Wayne Newton, Jane Olivor, Donny Osmond,
Patti Page, the Partridge Family,
Bernadette Peters, Wilson Pickett, Elvis
Presley, Cliff Richard, the Searchers,
Sha Na Na, Kay Starr, John Travolta,
Dinah Washington, Andy Williams, and
Glenn Yarbrough, among many others.
Sedaka was born in Brooklyn on March
13, 1939. His father, Mac Sedaka, a taxi
driver, was the son of Turkish
immigrants; his mother, Eleanor (Appel)
Sedaka, was of Polish-Russian descent.
He first demonstrated musical aptitude
in his second-grade choral class, and
when his teacher sent a note home
suggesting he take piano lessons, his
mother got a part-time job in a
department store for six months to pay
for a second-hand upright. He took to
the instrument immediately. In 1947, he
auditioned successfully for a piano
scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard
School of Music's Preparatory Division
for Children, which he began to attend
on Saturdays. He also maintained an
interest in popular music, and when he
was 13, a neighbor heard him playing and
introduced him to her 16-year-old son,
Howard Greenfield, an aspiring poet and
lyricist; the two began writing songs
together.
In high school, Sedaka formed a vocal
group, the Tokens. After singing at
local functions, they got an audition
with a music publisher in Manhattan at
1619 Broadway, the famed Brill Building.
This, in turn, led to an audition with
the head of a small label, Melba
Records, which released a single
containing two Sedaka/Greenfield
compositions, "I Love My Baby" and
"While I Dream," in 1956. It achieved
some airplay locally, but did not become
a national hit, and Sedaka left the
group, which later reorganized and went
on to professional success in the 1960s.
Around the same time, another song
written by Sedaka earned a more
prominent recording. He had collaborated
with his brother-in-law, Eddie Grossman,
on "Never Again," which Grossman
arranged to have published and which was
recorded by Dinah Washington for Mercury
Records.
Meanwhile, the budding composer
continued to attend Lincoln High School
in Brooklyn and to pursue his classical
studies. In 1956, he was one of a small
group of New York City high school
students chosen in a competition judged
by Artur Rubinstein to play on the local
classical radio station, WQXR. Upon his
graduation from high school, Sedaka was
accepted by the college division of
Juilliard. At the same time, however, he
and Greenfield continued writing songs
and taking them to publishing companies
at the Brill Building and another
Manhattan office building just up the
street at 1650 Broadway. There they
encountered a new firm, Aldon Music, run
by Al Nevins and Don Kirshner, who
signed them to a songwriting contract
and also signed Sedaka to a management
contract as a performing artist. In
1957, without his prior knowledge, two
demonstration recordings he had made of
his songs "Laura Lee" and "Snowtime"
were released as a single by Decca
Records, giving him his first solo disc.
Again, the record was not a hit. But the
team of Sedaka and Greenfield finally
did reach the charts when they placed
"Stupid Cupid" with the new singing star
Connie Francis in 1958. Francis had
broken through with a revival of the
1920s ballad "Who's Sorry Now," while
"Stupid Cupid" was up-tempo rock & roll.
It peaked at number 14 on Billboard's
Hot 100 in September, and Francis
followed it with another Sedaka/Greenfield
composition, "Fallin'," which peaked at
number 30 in November. (In a harbinger
of things to come, the songs were even
more successful in the U.K., where
"Stupid Cupid" hit number one and "Fallin'"
made the Top 20.)
Another of Sedaka's demos, "Ring-a-Rockin',"
turned up on disc in 1958 and even
earned an airing on the American
Bandstand television series, but did not
become a hit. Nevertheless, interest in
Sedaka as both a songwriter and a
performer clearly was growing. In the
fall of 1958, he took a leave of absence
from Juilliard, and he auditioned at RCA
Victor Records. He was signed, and RCA
quickly issued his first formal solo
single, the Sedaka/Greenfield song "The
Diary," which peaked at number 14 in
February 1959. But its follow-up, the
up-tempo "I Go Ape," missed the Top 40
(despite reaching the Top Ten in Great
Britain), and his third RCA single,
"Crying My Heart Out for You," was a
flop.
In his 1982 autobiography, Laughter
in the Rain: My Own Story, Sedaka writes
that, after the disappointing
performance of his second RCA single and
the failure of this third, "I knew I had
to have a hit. I would get no more
chances." To come up with that hit, he
consulted the international charts in
Billboard, then went out and bought the
three most successful records he saw
listed and listened to them repeatedly,
"analyzing what they had in common. I
discovered," he writes, "they had many
similar elements: harmonic rhythm,
placement of the chord changes, choice
of harmonic progressions, similar
instrumentation, vocals phrases, drum
fills, content, even the timbre of the
lead solo voice. I decided to write a
song that incorporated all these
elements in one record." The result of
this deliberate effort was his fourth
RCA single, "Oh! Carol" (dedicated to
songwriter Carole King, an early
girlfriend of his), which turned his
performing career around, becoming his
first American Top Ten hit as an artist
in December. (In 1962, the Four Seasons
covered it on their chart album Sherry &
11 Others.)
Meanwhile, RCA had released his debut
album, Neil Sedaka, and it earned a
nomination for the 1959 Grammy Award for
Best Performance by a "Top 40" Artist,
losing to Nat King Cole's "Midnight
Flyer." And as a songwriter, he had
other hits during the year: LaVern Baker
reached the Top Five of the R&B chart
with "I Waited Too Long"; Connie Francis
took "Frankie" into the pop Top Ten;
Clyde McPhatter reached the R&B Top 20
with "Since You've Been Gone"; and Roy
Hamilton had a pop chart entry with
"Time Marches On."
After the success of his fifth RCA
single, "Stairway to Heaven," which
peaked in the Top Ten in May 1960, the
21-year-old Sedaka finally began making
personal appearances to support his
records. Soon, he was touring
extensively, including shows in South
America, the Far East, and Europe. (He
also began recording in Italian, German,
Japanese, and Spanish, increasing his
international popularity.) Meanwhile,
the hits kept coming. His next single
was a double-sided success, with "You
Mean Everything to Me" making the Top 20
and "Run Samson Run" the Top 30, and his
third 45 of 1960, "Calendar Girl," gave
him his third Top Ten hit with a number
four peak in February 1961. He seemed to
have less time to write songs for other
artists, but Jimmy Clanton peaked in the
Top 30 in June 1960 with "Another
Sleepless Night." Clanton had another
Sedaka/Greenfield song, "What Am I Gonna
Do," out by the end of the year, and it
charted in January 1961.
The busy pace seemed to tell on
Sedaka by 1961. "Little Devil" gave him
his sixth consecutive Top 40 hit in May,
but his next single, "Sweet Little You,"
was his first with a song that he had
not composed himself (it was written by
Barry Mann and Larry Kolber), and it
broke his string of hits. "Happy
Birthday, Sweet Sixteen," another Sedaka/Greenfield
composition, was out before the end of
the year and returned him to the Top Ten
with a peak at number six in January
1962, however. (Neil Diamond covered it
on his 1993 chart album Up on the Roof:
Songs From the Brill Building.) Also in
1961, Sedaka released his second album
of new studio recordings, Circulate, on
which he sang pop standards. And his pen
was far from idle otherwise. He and
Greenfield had written the song score
for the film Where the Boys Are, Connie
Francis' acting debut, which resulted in
a Top Five, gold-selling hit in her
recording of the title song in early
1961.
"King of Clowns," Sedaka's first
single of 1962, missed the Top 40, but
he scored his biggest hit yet with
"Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," which went
to number one in August. It was
nominated for the 1962 Grammy Award for
Best Rock & Roll Recording, but lost out
to Bent Fabric's "Alley Cat." The song
went on to become perhaps Sedaka's most
valuable copyright, being revived for a
pop singles' chart entry by the
Happenings in 1968, an R&B Top 30 and
pop Top 40 hit by Lenny Welch in 1970,
and a Top 30 pop hit (and U.K. Top Five)
by the Partridge Family in 1972, while
also appearing on chart LPs by the Four
Seasons, Little Eva, and Sha Na Na, all
before Sedaka himself revived it for a
hit again in the mid-'70s.
Sedaka' third single of 1962, "Next
Door to an Angel," reached the Top Five.
RCA marked the completion of his fourth
year as a hitmaker by releasing Neil
Sedaka Sings His Greatest Hits, which
became his first LP to reach the charts.
Meanwhile, the Sedaka/Greenfield team
placed "Venus in Blue Jeans" with Jimmy
Clanton for a Top Ten hit (it also made
the U.K. Top Ten in a rendition by Mark
Wynter), and "Keep a Walkin'" on Bobby
Darin's chart album Twist With Bobby
Darin.
By 1963, Sedaka reportedly had sold
25 million records worldwide. But at
this point his career began to go into
decline. He released four singles in
1963, and all of them charted, with
three in the Top 40 and one, "Alice in
Wonderland," even making the Top 20, but
that was a disappointing performance
after his previous successes. 1964, the
year the Beatles arrived in America and
launched the British Invasion, was
worse, with Sedaka's three single
releases resulting in only one brief
appearance in the Hot 100 for "Sunny,"
and 1965 wasn't much better, as another
three Sedaka singles produced only two
chart entries for "The World Through a
Tear" and "The Answer to My Prayer"
(both written by Chris Allen, Peter
Allen, and Richard Everitt). In 1966,
Sedaka released two last singles on RCA,
but they failed to chart, and by early
1967 he was without a record label. He
was not, however, without a publisher.
Aldon had been sold to Screen Gems and
offered him plenty of opportunities to
place his compositions. Screen Gems'
main priority at the time was the
Monkees, the group created for a
television series patterned on the
Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night, and
the Sedaka/Greenfield song "When Love
Comes Knockin' (At Your Door)" appeared
on their second album, More of the
Monkees, a number one hit in early 1967.
That spring the Cyrkle reached the
charts with Sedaka/Greenfield's "We Had
a Good Thing Goin'." "Workin' on a
Groovy Thing," written by Sedaka with
Roger Atkins, was a Top 40 R&B hit and
pop chart entry for Patti Drew in the
summer of 1968, and a year later earned
Top 20 rankings in the pop and R&B
charts in a cover by the Fifth
Dimension. Also in 1968, Sedaka had a
cut on Frankie Valli's chart album
Timeless called "Make the Music Play."
In 1969, Sedaka/Greenfield's "The Girl I
Left Behind Me" appeared on the Monkees
LP Instant Replay. Also, for the first
time in three years, Sedaka had his own
release, on Screen Gems' SGC label, the
single "Star-Crossed Lovers," which
became a hit in Australia, but not in
the U.S. Nevertheless, he had a second
SGC release in 1970, "Rainy Jane," a
song covered by former Monkees singer
Davy Jones for a chart entry in 1971.
Also in 1970, the Fifth Dimension
recorded Sedaka/Greenfield's "Puppet
Man" for a Top 30 pop hit, and a year
later Tom Jones also had a Top 30 hit
with it. Peggy Lee cut Sedaka/Greenfield's
"One More Ride on the Merry-Go-Round"
for her 1970 chart album Make It With
You, and the team also wrote songs for
an animated children's TV series about
the comic basketball troupe the Harlem
Globetrotters called The Globetrotters.
Perhaps the most significant
recording to Sedaka's career in 1971 was
one he himself was not involved with,
Carole King's breakthrough album
Tapestry, which topped the charts. The
LP demonstrated the new appeal of soft
rock singer/songwriters and made veteran
writers from the Brill Building-era hip
again. Don Kirshner negotiated a
manufacturing and distribution deal with
RCA for his new Kirshner Records label,
and he signed Sedaka to a contract,
resulting in the release of Sedaka's
first album of new original material in
12 years, Emergence, in September 1971.
He also began performing in showcase
clubs like New York's Bitter End. The
album didn't chart, but it was a new
beginning. Meanwhile, Sedaka continued
to place songs with other performers.
Tony Christie scored a Top 20 hit in the
U.K. with "Is This the Way to Amarillo"
(aka "Amarillo") in the fall of 1971; TV
star Carol Burnett gave great prominence
to a Sedaka tune on her early 1972 chart
album by calling it Carol Burnett
Featuring "If I Could Write a Song"; and
Cher had a chart entry in September 1972
with "Don't Hide Your Love."
At this point, Sedaka made two
important changes in his attempt to
resurrect his career. First, he decided,
after 20 years, to sever his songwriting
partnership with Howard Greenfield in
favor of a new partner who could write
in a style more consistent with what he
called in his autobiography the "more
elusive, more poetic" lyrics of the '70s
singer/songwriters, rather than
Greenfield's "very slick and polished"
words. (He did continue to work with
Greenfield occasionally thereafter.) At
his publisher's, he met Phil Cody, and
they began to write. Second, finding
that he was getting a better reception
in Great Britain than in the U.S., he
moved to London to concentrate on
mounting a comeback there. His
increasing profile was confirmed by the
Top 20 British success of a maxi-single
containing three of his old songs, "Oh!
Carol," "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," and
"Little Devil," in the fall of 1972.
Also that fall, Kirshner Records
released his next album, Solitaire,
which he had recorded in England with a
backup band that would emerge later as
10cc. The album did not chart, but it
produced two chart singles in the U.K.,
"Beautiful You" and "That's When the
Music Takes Me," the latter reaching the
Top 20. Glen Campbell recorded "That's
When the Music Takes Me" for his concert
album Live at the Royal Festival Hall,
which charted in 1977, and other singers
found material on Solitaire. Donny
Gerrard scored an R&B chart entry in
1975 with "(Baby) Don't Let It Mess Your
Mind," and Yvonne Elliman put the same
song on her 1978 chart album Night
Flight. But it was the title song from
Solitaire that became another of
Sedaka's most successful copyrights.
Andy Williams' cover became a Top Five
hit in Britain in the winter of 1973-74;
the Carpenters' version was a Top 20 hit
in the U.S. in 1975; and the song
appeared on chart albums by Johnny
Mathis, Elvis Presley, and Jane Olivor
on its way to being a much-performed
standard. (Sheryl Crow sang it on the
Carpenters tribute album If I Were a
Carpenter in 1994.)
Having reestablished himself in the
U.K., Sedaka signed to the European
label Polydor, which assigned him to its
MGM subsidiary, and recorded a new
album, The Tra-La Days Are Over, which
was released in the U.K. in the summer
of 1973. In the U.S., MGM tested the
waters with a couple of singles, but
when they did not succeed, the LP was
not released in America. In Britain, it
was a different story. "Standing on the
Inside" and "Our Last Song Together"
(the latter, appropriately, the last
song Sedaka had written with Greenfield
before their split) both made the Top
40, and the LP made the Top 20. Sedaka
followed in 1974 with Laughter in the
Rain, released on the main Polydor
label, which also made the Top 20 and
threw off two Top 40 hits, "A Little
Lovin'" and the title song. Again, the
album was not released in the U.S.
Around this time, Sedaka and Cody's
expertise was called upon by Swedish
songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn
Ulvaeus when they wrote English lyrics
for "Ring Ring," one of ABBA's early
songs.
While in England, Sedaka met Elton
John, at the time the top pop recording
star in the world, who was about to
launch his own label, Rocket Records.
John agreed to sign Sedaka for the U.S.,
and for his first release they assembled
a compilation album drawn from
Solitaire, The Tra-La Days Are Over, and
Laughter in the Rain. The album was
called Sedaka's Back, and it lived up to
its name. It was preceded by the release
of "Laughter in the Rain" as a single,
and the song topped the charts in
February 1975, Sedaka's first number one
single in nearly 13 years. (To become a
hit, the Sedaka version had to
outdistance one by Lea Roberts that made
the R&B charts; the song was also
recorded on chart albums by Johnny
Mathis and Earl Klugh.) The album made
the Top 30 and went gold, and it spawned
two more Top 40 hits, "The Immigrant"
and "That's When the Music Takes Me."
After "Our Last Song Together" appeared
on the album, Bo Donaldson & the
Heywoods covered it for a singles chart
entry. In addition, Captain & Tennille
covered "Love Will Keep Us Together"
(another of Sedaka's final
collaborations with Greenfield) from the
album and released their version as a
single that hit number one in June 1975.
(Among the many other recordings of the
song, Wilson Pickett revived it for a
pop chart entry in 1976 and James Taylor
Quartet featuring Alison Limerick had an
R&B chart entry in 1995.) Captain &
Tennille also tapped Sedaka's Back for
"Sad Eyes," which they recorded for
their 1977 Come in From the Rain LP
(that album also contained the Sedaka
song "Let Mama Know"). "Sad Eyes" earned
another cover by Maria Muldaur on her
1976 chart album Sweet Harmony, after
having been a number 11 hit on the Easy
Listening chart for Andy Williams in the
fall of 1975. "The Other Side of Me,"
another track from Sedaka's Back, gave
Williams a British chart entry in 1976
and was featured on U.S. chart albums by
Shirley Bassey and Crystal Gayle. But
Donny Osmond had beaten them all by
putting it on his chart album Alone
Together back in 1973, just after its
initial appearance on The Tra-La Days
Are Over.
Sedaka toured the U.S. as an opening
act for the Carpenters; by the end of
the year, he was a Las Vegas headliner.
Meanwhile, he had continued to record
for the U.K. market, issuing a concert
LP, Live at the Royal Festival Hall, in
the fall of 1974 and, in the spring of
1975, a new studio album, Overnight
Success, featuring the Top 40 hit "The
Queen of 1964." Again, this LP was not
issued in the U.S., but in the late
summer, with Sedaka reestablished,
American disc jockeys began playing a
cut from it, "Bad Blood," which featured
a prominent backup vocal by Elton John.
This forced a quick U.S. release for the
song, and Overnight Success, with a
couple of track substitutions, appeared
in America in September 1975 under the
title The Hungry Years. "Bad Blood"
soared to number one and went gold, and
the album made the Top 20 and went gold,
while also throwing off a new slow-tempo
version of "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do"
that peaked in the Top Ten in early
1976, leading to the odd occurrence that
the 14-year-old tune earned a nomination
for the 1976 Grammy Award for Song of
the Year, which it lost to Bruce
Johnston's "I Write the Songs."
"Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" was given a
new lease on life. Jimmy Bee and Ernie
Fields & His Orchestra covered it for an
R&B chart entry in 1976, and the same
year the Carpenters put it on their
chart LP A Kind of Hush. In 1983, the
American Comedy Network had a pop chart
entry with a parody, "Breaking Up Is
Hard on You," and Gloria Estefan sang it
on her double-platinum 1994 album Hold
Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me. Also, Captain &
Tennille located another Sedaka-penned
hit on The Hungry Years, recording
"Lonely Night (Angel Face)" for a
gold-selling Top Five hit in early 1976,
and Wayne Newton scored a chart entry
with the album's title song, which also
earned covers in 1976 on chart albums by
Johnny Mathis, Engelbert Humperdinck,
Shirley Bassey, and Rita Coolidge.
Sedaka finally managed to put out the
same album in the U.S. and overseas at
the same time in the spring of 1976 with
Steppin' Out, but it was not as big a
hit as its predecessors, even though it
reached the Top 30 and contained three
chart hits, "Love in the Shadows," "You
Gotta Make Your Own Sunshine," and the
title song. None of the album's songs
became hits for other performers, but
John Travolta recorded a new Sedaka
composition, "I Don't Know What I Like
About You Baby," for his self-titled
1976 chart album. Steppin' Out concluded
Sedaka's contract with Rocket Records,
and he moved to Elektra for 1977's A
Song, produced by George Martin of
Beatles' fame, another modest success
that contained his chart revival of his
song "Amarillo" as well as "You Never
Done It Like That," which Captain &
Tennille covered for a Top Ten hit. The
duo also recorded "Love Is Spreading
Over the World," a new Sedaka song, on
their Dream album in 1978, while Jane
Olivor put "The Big Parade," another
song Sedaka himself had not recorded, on
her 1977 Chasing Rainbows LP.
Sedaka's second Elektra album, All
You Need Is the Music (1978), missed the
charts, suggesting that his second
commercial resurgence as a record seller
had subsided. But he returned in the
spring of 1980 with In the Pocket. It
was preceded by the single "Should've
Never Let You Go," which he sang as a
duo with his daughter Dara Sedaka. The
single made the Top 40 and earned a
cover by Bernadette Peters on her
self-titled chart album released at the
same time. In the Pocket only made the
lower reaches of the charts, however,
and 1981's Neil Sedaka: Now, Sedaka's
fourth and last Elektra album, did not
chart at all. He switched to MCA/Curb,
which had him record oldies in the
company of other veteran stars,
resulting in an Adult Contemporary chart
hit with Dara Sedaka on the old Marvin
Gaye/Tammi Terrell hit "Your Precious
Love" in 1983-84, an Adult Contemporary
chart entry with a revival of the
Cascades' 1963 hit "Rhythm of the Rain,"
and the LP Come See About Me.
Clearly, Sedaka's days as a major
recording act were over by the mid-'80s,
but he had amassed a sufficient backlog
of hits that he could perform
successfully for decades in theaters and
hotel casinos in the U.S. and
internationally. That's what he did,
meanwhile issuing occasional new
recordings and re-recordings of his old
songs. The death of Howard Greenfield
from AIDS in 1986 prompted the release
of the double-album My Friend,
containing the duo's best-known work. In
1991, Polydor's Timeless: The Very Best
of Neil Sedaka became a Top Ten hit in
the U.K. Varèse Sarabande's 1995
collection Tuneweaver, found Sedaka
revisiting many of his old hits, and the
same year saw the release of Classically
Sedaka on Vision, an album on which he
adapted classical themes into songs with
new lyrics that he wrote himself. Tales
of Love and Other Passions, featuring a
jazz trio, appeared in 1997. In 1999, a
TV-advertised collection, The Very Best
of Neil Sedaka, charted in the U.K.
Brighton Beach Memories: Neil Sedaka
Sings Yiddish was released on Sameach in
2003, and the same year Sedaka
self-released an album of new songs to
which he had written both music and
lyrics, The Show Goes On. |
