Tin Pan Tailor

Neil Diamond grew up in Brooklyn, where the latest pop hits sailed out of the radio all day long like home runs out of Ebbets Field. He learned to read music from a few sporadic piano lessons, but most of his knowledge was picked up by listening to records and studying other people's hits. He wrote his first song at 15. At 20, he went to work as a song plugger on Tin Pan Alley --then as now a mythical street on the tattered fringe of Broadway. Hired by Sunbeam Music, Diamond sometimes felt like a tailor, sitting in a tiny cubicle and fitting songs to the needs of assorted Grade B singers. "Gloria wants an up-tempo ballad like that Patti Page thing," the boss would say. "And while you're at it, throw in some bongos."

Diamond was a good musical tailor, but he managed to move up and out of the Alley in a hurry. Today, at 29, he is a smooth, inventive composer-performer with various talents that have enabled him not only to bridge the generation gap but to leap all the way from commercial pop to rock stardom. In the past three years, Diamond has turned out enough hit songs (among them: Kentucky Woman and Sweet Caroline) to keep the current champion, Burt Bacharach, watchful and busy. But where Bacharach plods as a performer, Diamond dances.

In person, Diamond has a naturalness and relaxed cool that are fine foils for rhythms as infectious as a Mardi Gras parade. His voice still has a touch of the crooner, but it can turn soulful. His songs delve ingeniously into hard and soft rock, blues, gospel, even country rock--a range of styles that Bacharach does not even try to match. Diamond's latest album, Tap Root Manuscript (Uni), was No. 16 on the Billboard charts last week--with more than $1,000,000 in sales. That gives him four top-selling LPs at once.

Six-Pack. Tap Root is ample proof of Diamond's versatility. Side 1 contains Cracklin' Rosie (a reference to the joys of loosening up with a sparkling pink wine), a Top Ten single for two months last fall, as well as the new He Ain't Heavy . . . He's My Brother, currently the No. 22 single.

Side 2 is devoted entirely to The African Trilogy, which grew out of Diamond's interest in gospel music and his desire to explore its rhythmic roots. Using African beats--more sophisticated than African melodies--Diamond grandly started out to depict the three principal stages in a man's life: birth, maturity, death. Though the trilogy finally grew to six parts, Diamond liked the original title and kept it.

Trilogy or sixpack, it is a stunning example of pop crossbreeding: Soolaimon, for example, is a pulsating toe-tapper that Diamond terraces forcefully with one climax after another. In contrast are these tender lines from a children's chorus called Childsong that opens the work:

Weeping sky,

We bring the sun

To make you glad

And fill you with the day . . .

Back at Sunbeam Music, Diamond became quite good at spotting a dud song --or so he thought. "Like the time these two guys in the cubicle next to me kept beating out those old-fashioned Jewish tunes. Man, I knew for sure they weren't going anywhere." The two guys were Bock and Harnick, and the Jewish songs eventually evolved into Fiddler on the Roof. Diamond doesn't make that kind of mistake any more.

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