Neil Diamond Fucking Rules. James Taylor Should've Stayed on Dope.

Watching the Kennedy Center Honors. The inimitable Neil Diamond is being honored tonight for his contributions as a singer/songwriter. Neil's a fucking American institution. A true original. A classic. He's aged well, sells out stadiums in minutes to this day, and has a catalog of hits that rivals that of any American songwriters and we're STILL talking about him, watching him live, and marveling in his Neilness after all these years. There's literally nobody my age that I know personally who doesn't categorically love Neil Diamond.

Two people on this planet love Neil Diamond more than anything on earth other than our children: me and Steven Drozd. We wear Neil t-shirts. We tweet to Neil on Twitter in the unlikely event Neil will tweet back to us. (Steven admittedly has a better chance of getting a tweet back since he's famous and I'm not.) Neil asks Twitter fans to submit jokes he can tell his grandchildren and we wrack our brains coming up with jokes to tweet to Neil. We obsessively talk about him like giddy schoolgirls.

About time he was honored properly by the Kennedy Center and inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Way overdue.

My Tatus can't understand how I can have such awesome taste in music and love Neil Diamond so much. To that I say, "It's Neil Fucking Diamond! He fucking rules!" which my Tatus doesn't understand at all. He knows I have an eclectic taste in music to put it mildly, but thinks that Neil just sucks. He cringes at Boston ball games when the whole crowd breaks out into "Sweet Caroline," though he did let us leave it on the radio the last time we rode together in the car, and I think he actually started singing along. (This was after I told him Caroline was my middle name and that my parents used to play this song for me all the time. Great, now every time he hears a baseball crowd go "Bum, Bum, Bum," he'll think of me. Just great!)

I found the following hauntingly beautiful version of Neil Diamond doing "Solitary Man," one of my favorite songs, on YouTube.

Tatus' missus loves James Taylor. He was also on the Kennedy Center Honors tonight, in an abomination of clashing vomitrotious, almost incandescent lightning rods of drivel. Taylor's performance was a cover of The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun," written by my favorite musician of all time, George Harrison. Taylor was the first American artist to be signed to The Beatles' Apple Records label in the late 60's, because McCartney thought he had promise as a songwriter, so I suppose he feels he has some right to perform "...Sun" on national television in 2011.

James Taylor, though, has no soul. Nothing stands out about him. He used to be just a hippie little fucking pansy guitar player/singer-songwriter writing lame tunes about lame things--he couldn't even evoke emotion about heroin addiction in "Fire and Rain." "You've Got a Friend" wasn't even written by him; it was written by Carole King (who's also equally lame). Neil Diamond gets up and dances and plays guitar and has groovy moves and woos the ladies. James Taylor can't even get off a fucking stool as the lighting crew attempts to cover up his enormous bald spot. The only song I can stand by him is a duet with JD Souther, "Her Town Too," about his divorce from Carly Simon (who's also pretty lame). He got clean eventually, dropping heroin and methadone, but in this writer's humble opinion, he might have a shot at having a soul if he had just stayed on smack, and you know that I don't advocate drug use for ANYONE, as both Drozd and I are recovering narcotics addicts ourselves. Except James Taylor. I think in this video, it's a smackdown of smack-ups, as both Taylor and Souther were still on H. Souther can barely sit up.

The best tribute to Neil Diamond was my friend Steven Drozd's project, "Hot Coffee and Mornin' Lovin'" by his Neil Diamond tribute duo, You in Me, with Allan Novey, karaoke sensation and Diamond imitator extraordinaire. It's an original composition, not a Neil Diamond cover. A pastiche. It's comical, dead-on, and plus Steven looks really awesome in the video:

Neil Diamond will stand the test of time. He will always be adored by sold-out crowds full of fans like me, Steven and my Ma, while James Taylor will be relegated to playing to wine-drinking, cheese-eating crowds of oldsters at Ravinia until he's on the cover of AARP magazine next to an article heading about Medicare donut holes.

Beautiful Noise

First of all, Neil Diamond tickets for Chicago go on sale at 10am. I texted my supervisor at 5:30 am asking her if I could clock out at 10 and order tickets online at work. She doesn't get half of my texts amazingly, but she damn well better have received this one, because my mom and I are going to this concert come hell or high water. We have a notoriously slow internet connection at work, so I'm hoping for the best. (Addendum: As it turned out, Luke woke up sick and is staying home. I decided to stay home long enough to order my Neil tickets.)

Neil is an unlikely but significant presence in The Band's "The Last Waltz," incidentally. He sticks out like a sore thumb, and is the only one in the film who doesn't act completely coked out. Whether or not he was high...I should hope he had better brains than that, but The Band's Robbie Robertson did produce 2 of Neil's albums, including "Beautiful Noise," so I guess Robertson can't be all that bad, though he comes across not only in the film, but also in life in general as a pretentious prick. We'll see what TOC thinks of him after the film on Wednesday, but his general impression of Neil is that he's a cheeseball. What does he know? It's not like I'm buying Andrea Bocelli tickets. Puhleeze.

I heart the Neil. I've seen him no fewer than a dozen times live in my life, my mom NEVER having seen him, amazingly enough. So procuring tickets for this concert is really, really important to me. I realize it's during one of our most frantic times in the office, but too fucking bad. That's about the extent of my participation in Cyber Monday.

Had a dream about having to have sex with my ex-boyfriend that woke me up at 4am, but I was able to fall back asleep until 5:30. Thank God.

I've been reading the book accompanying the George Harrison "Living in the Material World" documentary and have to completely agree with a statement by Ringo Starr, made recently. With regard to the beauty of Indian music, Starr said, "Over the years, I got to love the music myself and now I'm a Christian Hindu with Buddhist tendencies. Thanks to George, who opened my eyes as much as anyone else's." I'm a practicing Christian but I have to side with Ringo on his philosophy. I take a lot from Eastern religious tradition and Buddhist thought, much to my congregation and pastor's chagrin. I highly recommend the Harrison book--it's 400 pages of rare photographs, many taken by George himself, or his family members, with recollections by his most trusted friends and family. It's tits.

Came across this quote this morning, to remind myself:

“…Your light is seen, your heart is known, your soul is cherished by more people than you might imagine…If you knew how many others have been touched in wonderful ways by you, you would be astonished. If you knew how many people feel so much for you, you would be shocked…You are far more wonderful than you think you are… Rest with that. Rest easy with that. Breathe again. You are doing fine. More than fine. Better than fine. You’re doin’ great. So relax. And love yourself today.”~~Neale Donald Walsch

Time to rouse Luke from his slumber. Oh, to jam this Diamond tune and rudely awaken him. Produced by Robbie Robertson, ugh.

"Beautiful Noise"