But in the mid-90s culture flux, Diamond’s legacy got revised in all the right places. Shane MacGowan & The Popes covered ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’ live, Urge Overkill’s torch and twang take on ‘Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon’ did for Neil what ‘Pulp Fiction’ did for Travolta, and then came serious benediction in the form of Johnny Cash’s clench-jawed version of ‘Solitary Man’.

At which point Rick Rubin entered the equation. It’s not the first time a producer of distinction has attempted to bestow cool kudos on Diamond – Robbie Robertson manned the desk for 1976’s ‘Beautiful Noise’ – but Rubin’s particular gift is not spraypainting old models in the newest lacquers but the converse. Functioning more as inspired A&R overseer and performance watchdog than technician, his role is transparent, if not invisible, his gift a Zen-like ability to locate the integral Slayerness of Slayer, The Pettiness of Petty, the Z-ness of Jay, and bring it forth as if new-minted. More David Briggs than Butch Vig, he’s most at home configuring the Chili Peppers or The Jayhawks or The Mars Volta in rickety old houses instead of airlocked studios, lounging on the floor with his mutts while the talent finds its way to the heart of the material.

What he’s done for Diamond is rescue him from the super-sized supper set and corporate private party circuit. The result is an album that sits closer to Lee Hazlewood or Tim Hardin than Billy Joel (another hard-nosed ballad-toting maverick whose talent is all too often mismanaged by unsympathetic handlers).

Songs like ‘Oh Mary’, ‘Hell Yeah’ and ‘What’s It Gonna Be’ take up where ‘Solitary Man’ left off – vows of integrity from an old salt too long in the tooth for frills and frivolities. His voice is close-miked and all-business, every tune a weighty testimony humped down from the mount.

Age suits him. In the past, Diamond’s stony-faced delivery could sound like the speechifying of a blowhard telling the room that he didn’t get where he is today. Now his voice resonates with the gravity of an old timer who’s earned the right to speak. He’s got two tones, two themes: vows of faithfulness (‘Captain Of A Shipwreck’, ‘Face Me’) and hurt rebukes (the narky jazz of ‘I’m On To You’, the self consciously epic – but still epic – tearjerker ‘Evermore’). But as anyone who’s sustained scar tissue on the heart will tell you, that’s plenty to be going on with.

Yes, he’s guilty of the occasional blast of emotional grandstanding, but that’s a small price to pay for some truly great songs. ‘Save Me A Saturday Night’ is an instant standard somewhere between one of The Drifters’ clocking off doo-wop symphonies, Bruce doing his working class romantic bit and the Velvets ‘Sunday Morning’. But Neil don’t do throwaway. The vaudevillian ragtime blast of ‘We’ is about the closest he comes to whimsy, and even a feelgood rollick like ‘Delirious Love’ is imbued with Wagnerian pomp. You gotta admire the man’s seriousness and intensity: this is anything but easy listening. Rather, the overall feel is redolent of the slanty-eyed suspicion of ‘Oh Mercy’, the too-old-for-this-shit impassiveness of the ‘American’ series and Leonard’s last couple of records.

So who’s next up for a turn on the Rubinicon? Brian Wilson (who crops up on a handclaps-and-harmonies reprise of ‘Delirious Love’)? Van Morrison? Or (gulp) Bob himself?

Don’t start me talking.

---

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

---

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.