The Third Degree with Neil Diamond

Todd Peterson

Wednesday, June 9, 1999 | 3 a.m.

This article first appeared on Dec. 30, 1998.

With a new album on the shelves in time for the holidays, pop icon Neil Diamond brings his brand of Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show to the MGM Grand Garden for two special shows Dec. 31 and Jan. 1. For his "Muzoids" (fans) this side of the Rockies, these shows mark his only West Coast appearances this tour (as well as his first-ever New Year's performance).

Diamond's newest release, The Movie Album: As Time Goes By, is a two-disc set on which Diamond performs 20 classic pieces of motion picture music, backed by an orchestra conducted by famed film composer-conductor Elmer Bernstein. Through the course of his extensive and varied career, Diamond has sold a whopping 110 million records and enjoyed more than 35 hit singles. The singer-songwriter began turning fans on with his first hit single "Cherry, Cherry" in 1966 and recently turned on a whole new generation of listeners via his songwriting abilities with "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon," performed by Urge Overkill in the '94 smash Pulp Fiction (but written and recorded by Diamond in the late '60s). It won't be any hot August night when Diamond takes the MGM Grand Garden stage, but it certainly will feel like it.

During a recent break in his tour, lasvegasweekly turned up the heat on Neil Diamond with The Third Degree.

1. Can you tell me a little bit about your method for selecting songs (on The Movie Album). I understand they came together rapidly and you came up with more material than you originally thought you were going to.

Diamond: That's right. Well, we started looking...I say we--that's Bob Gaudio who produced the album, myself, everybody I'm involved with professionally--started to look for movie songs for me to do based on my desire to do an orchestral album, and on Columbia Record's desire to do a movie-inspired album. I started to gather material. I asked everybody involved; the producer had some ideas, the engineer...I called my mother, and she had some ideas about what her favorite movie songs were; the janitor in the hallway threw in a few names, so by the time we finished we had over a hundred songs to go through. We went through them, came down to about 40. I made demonstration records of the 40, and out of those 40 we chose what I thought and what everybody thought were the best 20. That basically makes up the album. It spans a time period from 1936 up to the present, and I think that's very interesting. It's just very high-quality songs, and it turned out to be a great experience. It was scary, but it was great.

2. It seems to me there are a lot of the same images and phrases that crop up on the album; for example love, which isn't at all strange to any music, but there are seven songs with love in the title, and night seems to be a pervasive theme as well. Was any of that planned?

Diamond: Not at all. As a matter of fact, that's the first time I've heard that. "Love" was in the title of seven songs. I'm not at all surprised because it is a very romantic album and that's basically what it had to be, it had to be romantic. So that's why you get all those numbers like that.

3. Was it unlike anything you'd ever done before? How did it differ from work you did on Jonathan Livingston Seagull or The Jazz Singer?

Diamond: First of all the songs were completed; I knew exactly what (I was) dealing with. When I'm making my own albums or when I did Jonathan Seagull, I was still writing the songs as I was recording them. I was still making changes and thinking about that and criticizing my own work and being involved as a writer. In this situation I've been involved only as a singer, and some of the greatest songwriters of the century provided me with the material, so it's quite different than that. It was new to me. But it was an exciting idea. I'd hoped that my voice would meld well with this type of presentation, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. As far as recording, it happened relatively quickly. We were able to record sometimes as many as two of those songs during a three-hour recording session, which is about par for course with things that are pre-written and pre-orchestrated. Some of them were quite difficult and complicated. I think it went faster than most of my other albums because the material was already created, and the way that we recorded lent itself to doing it fast.

4. Do you feel like that was less pressure on you, having the material already there?

Diamond: Well, it was less pressure on me, without any question. I could just step aside and be the singer and kind of enjoy that experience without having to worry about the songs themselves.

5. You've been working these into the live show. How has that gone so far?

Diamond: It's gone great in front of a live audience, partly because they know these songs from before and partly because I think the presentation is very, very beautiful.

6. It seems like throughout the '90s a lot of the projects you've been involved in have had some sort of concept attached to them: Up On the Roof: Songs From the Brill Building (a collection of Diamond's favorite pop classics from the '50s and '60s); this one now; In My Lifetime (a three-disc set documenting his first demos up to contemporary works). What sort of album are you planning on dealing with next?

Diamond: I'm not sure, but I have a feeling it will be a Neil Diamond album. I don't think I'm going to go outside and look for other songs. I'm starting to get the urge to write again.

7. So you feel ready to do something all new?

Diamond: Yeah. I think so. This was fun, but I don't want to give up my day job, which is writing my own songs and performing my own songs.

8. Why do you think soundtracks have seen such a resurgence lately?

Diamond: Well, I know it makes sense from a marketing point of view for a film company to promote the soundtracks, and there's a lot of cross promotion going on and they've been very successful in that regard. So it's kind of a new form of music that's come out, a new form of album. When I first came to Columbia Records, my first album for them was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and they almost fainted because it was a soundtrack, and nobody was happy about that at Columbia.

9. There must be some feeling that drives you to want to continue to perform, to get out onstage, with so many albums, so many records sold, so many accomplishments. Is there any way to describe that?

Diamond: I'm still trying to understand that myself. After all these years I've come to the conclusion that I'm addicted to it. I'm addicted to the adrenaline rush that I get during the performance, and I think that's probably why I continue.

10. Any thoughts on playing in Las Vegas? You said you're gearing up for it; what is it like to play here for you?

Diamond: Well, I honestly didn't know until we played there a couple of years ago, but the audiences were obviously from all over the country, all over the world, and they were amazingly receptive and responsive, and I couldn't wait to get back. I'll play there anytime I can.