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Oh, Neil

After more than 40 years, one of pop music's
pioneering singer/songwriters keeps going strong.

MARTIN NATCHEZ
Special to The Jewish News

N

eil Sedaka didn't only
become a man after his
bar mitzvah. More precise-
ly, he became a songwriter.
From his very first composition, a
self-described "ruptured rumba"
called "My Life's Devotion," he pro-
jected a template for his future, writ-
ing, "My life is madness, it's sadness,
it burns with desire. I'm yearning,
just burning, my soul is on fire."
Those words continue to charac-
terize the musical merchant of mem-
ories, who has been banking his songs
into the public's consciousness for
more than 40 years.
Sedaka's hits comprise one of the
most recognized and distinguished
careers in the history of rock 'n' roll,
but the famed Jewish singer/song-
writer who popularized the unforget-
table pearls "Calendar Girl,"
"Breaking Up is Hard to To" and
"Laughter in the Rain" will be of a
new mindset when he appears in con-
cert with Dionne Warwick at
Macomb Center for the Performing
Arts Sept 15-17.
At 61, he has slightly cooler
thoughts about his once-burning pas-
sion for making hit records, and he
views his future with a deeper respect
for the past.
"I'm a performing artist now, and
I'm not in competition anymore with
the young people," Sedaka said about
his current status off the charts. "It's
come down to the final stretch. So as
long as the voice holds, I will do
what I can to make people happy. I
know I certainly make myself happy."
In addition to still performing his
own hits on stage, Sedaka is paying
homage to the tunesmiths who wrote
pre-rock pop. On last year's Tales of
Love, he re-recorded such master-
pieces as "I'll Be Seeing You, " "My
Funny Valentine," "The Very
Thought of You" and "Moonlight in
Vermont," and discovered that he
became very nostalgic about return-
ing to the early musical influences
that typified his youth.
"I was with a band when I was a
teenager, and we played the great old

standards," recalled Sedaka, a 1983
inductee into the Songwriter's Hall of
Fame. "I was a great fan of Mel
Torme, Dinah Washington, Sarah
Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. I had
heard them sing these songs, and
because I always wanted to do the
standards, I felt that, after 42 years of
recording, it was about time I did."
Feeling close to Tin Pan Alley is
understandable. Born in Brooklyn,
the second child of immigrant Mac
Sedaka, a Turkish Sephardic Jew who
drove a cab, and his wife Eleanor, of
Ashkenazic Russian-Polish descent,
Neil became enamored with playing a
second-hand upright piano, which his
mother bought him at the urging of
his second-grade choir teacher.
In 1952, the skinny 13-year-old
and a boyhood chum, Howard
Greenfield, began writing songs
together. Four years later, Sedaka
received a scholarship to the presti-
gious Juilliard School of Music, after
being honored as one of New York's
best high school classical pianists by
virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein.
But the dawning of doo-wop so
enthralled the high-voiced teenager
that he would sometimes skip his
Juilliard classes to spend afternoons
within the darkened majesty of the
Apollo Theater in Harlem.
He also found time to form a
singing group named The Tokens,
which consisted of three close friends
from his days at Lincoln High
School. And with "While I Dream," a
teen ballad that Sedaka wrote for the
group, he made his first singing
appearance on record.
Soon after that, Sedaka and
Greenfield became songwriters for
hire, signing with Aldon Music,
located in New York's midtown music
mecca, the Brill Building. Atlantic
Records seemed most enthusiastic
about the tuneful twosome's efforts.
The major R&B record label often
submitted their compositions to its
roster of best-selling black acts,
including LaVern Baker, Clyde
McPhatter and the Clovers.
Sedaka especially remembers the thrill
of having Dinah Washington record
"Never Again," a song he had independ-
ently written with his brother-in-law.