Apologies to Facebook friends for the rerun, but it’s been Neil Diamond week for me ever since I had the idea to look for a good performance of this song to post to my page. (I post YouTube music clips frequently, and sometimes one hits me so correctly that I’ll sit and watch it five or six times. That happened with this one.)
As Diamond mentions in the clip, this was the first cut on his masterpiece Hot August Night, which is one of the greatest live albums of all time. Dad was and is a fan, and this record was some of the first popular music I ever heard.
The spirit of this performance is very much like Hot August Night‘s “Crunchy Granola Suite,” but this has a lot more (probably budget-enabled) spectacle about it. The horn parts in this performance were guitar parts in 1972, and there were no backing vocalists.
Of course, I now own the DVD from which this is taken. The whole show is top-notch. I looked at the set list and wondered how in the world he was going to open with “Holly Holy,” as slowly and deliberately as it begins. So he just started with the up-tempo part, and it worked, though a hardcore purist would probably resent it.
What a showman. What a legacy of marvelous singing and songwriting.
I hope you have a good weekend.
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There’s a lot to said about performances like that. I love watching bands like Chicago, Earth, Wind, and Fire, and The Moody Blues. The music has a lot of depth. Not to mention a ton of talented musicians.
My favorite Neil Diamond song is Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show. The line, “pack up the babies and grab the old ladies” cracks me up.
Cheryl, this DVD is like $13 on Amazon.com, and that’s a steal. Brother Love’s in the set. 🙂
This thread is useless w/o clips of Will Ferrell as Neil Diamond:
“Few people know that I’m fueled creatively by my massive hatred of immigrants.”
BamaDan, I’ve never really gotten Will Ferrell. The funniest thing I ever saw him do was the “saying grace” scene in Talladega Nights. The second-funniest thing I ever saw him do was, uh…gimme a sec…
He’s usually too much of a dufus for me also, but his run at Neil Diamond had me rolling. Probably because he was grounded by such a great straight man in John Goodman. I keep wondering if the line about killing the drifter at the end was ad lib or not.
He was also very good as Alex Trebek on SNL’s Celebrity Jeopardy. His movie stuff…ehhhnnnn…