Fenway Park, Boston 2013. The Red Sox were playing the Kansas City Royals in front of 37,000 fans. Bottom of the eighth inning,…
Irasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn, 1958. The annual talent show auditions were brutal. Only 10 acts would make it to the stage. Neil…
Brooklyn, New York, 1947. A tiny six-year-old boy stood on a wooden stage at PS181’s talent show. Neil Diamond could barely reach the…
The Trouador, West [music] Hollywood, August 25th, 1970. A 23-year-old British pianist named Elton John was bombing on stage. The club was half…
FBI headquarters, Washington, DC. 1967. J. Edgar Hoover sat in his office reading a classified file labeled 10044438, the monkeys communist infiltration. His…
Memphis, Tennessee, 1970. Elvis Presley sat in his recording studio at American Sound, holding sheet music for two songs by a Brooklyn songwriter…
Los Angeles, 1971. [music] Neil Diamond sat alone in the recording studio at 3:00 a.m. attempting take number 47 [music] of the same…
Neil Diamond wrote a gentle ballad about young love. Innocent, [music] sweet, designed for teenage fans and their parents. 1994. Director Quentyn Tarantino…
Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco. November 25th, 1976. The Last Waltz, the band’s farewell concert. The guest list read like a rock and roll…
August 1969, a phone call that should have been every songwriter’s dream, felt more like a death sentence. Elvis Presley, the king himself,…