B009HOTHPE EBOK (21 page)

Then in July 1964, they typecast me. I played Sammy Glick in
What Makes Sammy Run?
temporarily replacing Steve Lawrence on Broadway. I’d been in all those teen exploitation movies but now I had to learn lines and try to
act
—as in acting. But then again it wasn’t exactly
Hamlet,
it was a musical. I then put out my annual Merry Christmas ad in
Variety
to start the New Year, and I was off to Italy, where things were still going strong with my
Italiano
album from the previous year.

By now, with The Beatles dominating the charts and the airwaves, I figured I’d turn the tables and go to England from January 20 to 31. I’d basically sidestepped the tsunami of the British Invasion by going global and transforming my pop performance into main showrooms by ’65; let’s just say things were not going all that well for me. I went through a bit of a dip from 1965 through 1966, but managed to get through it. I was constantly recording, writing, and doing a lot of TV appearances thanks to my agent Sandy Gallen. Sandy has been a good friend all these years and has gone on to be successful in the personal management business, representing a lot of artists in entertainment. I only began to get seriously concerned in the mid-sixties, 1965 and 1966, when I stopped selling the number of records I was used to and began to question everything.

When The Beatles and the other British groups were invading the U.S., I was actually moving into their territory—Europe and Italy especially. I started learning Italian, writing songs in Italian, releasing albums there under my new label, RCA Records. Because my last name ended in “a,” everyone in Italy assumed that I was Italian, and as a country, Italy embraced me.

I had hits on European labels. I had lived there, made friends there. So I never resented the British Invasion. In fact, I embraced it. It freed me.

I was already doing runs out to Vegas, and had an agent out there to handle all that: Jim Murray, who worked with Buddy Howe at GAC. In Vegas you figured out soon enough who the great artists were and their dilemmas, who had problems with their timing and who had problems period. The whole Vegas thing was a dream come true for me. I had to shake myself every day when I woke up: “Wow, here I am in the hottest spot in the whole damn country, and to go out there and see all these big names, some doing their act in the lounge, some in the main showroom, it was unbelievable. I had found a whole new forum, a whole new lifestyle that fit me just like a three-piece Italian suit.

Vegas to me was a place where you could go out and get as much as you wanted, go as far as you wanted to. In Vegas you could (a) check out what was going on in the heart of the glamorous beast; (b) see people you idolized close-up, get to know them; (c) find out where you were going to work and get a sense of showmanship—what you were going to take from all of that showmanship you saw and use it in your own act.

How I came to Vegas the second time was via the Copacabana. Playing the Copacabana led to a one-time shot at the Sands Hotel—and I knew from the first moment I was there that it was just where I wanted to be. I was still with Irv, of course, and still had my two or three engagements a year at the Copacabana in New York. Some strange stuff happened there.

I’ll never forget the night of the disappearing table at the Copacabana. One night Sammy Davis Jr. was on stage, singing in what was basically a basement dolled up as an intimate nightclub. The stage was just a twenty-by-twenty floor with all kinds of chairs and nothing really phenomenal about it in a modern sense. It had none of the flair of clubs you’d find in Florida or Vegas in that era, in the Fontainebleau and what have you.

I was ringside sitting there at a table with Anne and a couple of guests and up on stage is one of my idols, Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy’s singing the song that goes, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child…” and about four tables over, little round tables, are two guys, and one guy says out loud, “And you look like one!”

Well, at the Copa the place was so small you could hear everything that was said in the room. You heard this big gasp go up from the crowd. Suddenly the lights went out, you heard the sound of fists, and then in the semi-darkness you see security carrying the two guys out with the tables and the two chairs and bringing in another table and two more chairs all in one minute. Then the lights went up and Sammy picks up the song right where he left off.

*   *   *

In 1966, I re-signed with RCA. My buddy Jimmy Bowen, who I used to tour with, produced “Strangers in the Night” for Frank Sinatra that year. Ernie Freeman, my old friend from the fifties—from the time I recorded the “Blau Wilde De Veest Fontaine” at Modern Records—was the arranger on that record. I remember seeing Bobby Darin that year and he was pissed because he had already recorded “Strangers in the Night,” but it hadn’t done anything. Frank, on the other hand, was thrilled with having that hit and that his daughter was doing well with her kinky hit, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”

In ’66, I also did
The Dean Martin Show
,
The Hollywood Palace
,
Hullabaloo
—all those variety shows. My TV appearances were still ongoing, my recordings were still making it into the charts. So, me and my mini orchestra, we’re off to Paris, Italy, Germany, Sweden, and London, in nightclubs doing engagements. We’re in Puerto Rico at the Caribe Hilton Hotel where I’d had a relationship for years. Then back to Sands in Vegas and the Copacabana in New York. A lot of great activity, a lot going on, but I knew there were problems in my career and I started looking for my next move in terms of music. Where to go from here on in?

How did I deal with the anxiety at the time, what with The Beatles and the British Invasion and the drug scene? Very simple: I had to grow up—fast. In November 1966, I released my
Strictly Nashville
album. I’ve always loved country music and for me it’s always been adult music, as opposed to much of pop music, which is directed at teenagers.

I never did hit bottom. In fact, in parts of the world—some of them in the USA—I was still wildly popular. When I performed at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles in 1966, Hedda Hopper called me “a one-man Texas oil gusher.” After a concert in Vancouver a newspaper voted: “Anka for President.” “I’ve seen very few standing ovations,” the journalist reported, “and as far as I can remember, I’ve never seen one in a Vancouver nightclub, until Paul Anka came to the Cave. I have never seen anything like it. By the end of the first show, if they had called a snap election Anka would have been elected Prime Minister—or King—by acclamation.”

My philosophy became: When you’re earning a million a year, what’s there to complain about? Are you gonna cry because you don’t have a hit record?

Five

PAINTED WORDS

And then it occurred to me: Paul, what had been your original ambition? Writing!

The one thing I’ve learned is that great pop songs never go away. The influence of the ’50s carries on even as far as Elvis Costello. Elvis Costello is Buddy Holly reinvented. He took the Buddy Holly look and adapted it to the ’70s.

It was always my plan to focus on writing, really. Everything came from that. Your career becomes problematic when you don’t write your own material. Writing was one way for me to separate from the pack.

One of my major concerns was, How do I write a hit again? It wasn’t until 1967 when I wrote “My Way” that I started realizing what was at that time lacking in my life—hit records. I had to adjust.

The songs I wrote were typical of the era we came out of and as time went by and I got a little more sophisticated, the lyrics became a little bit more complicated. But I never wanted to write songs that I had to explain. My songs are very basic—they’re all about love and life. I wrote about what I felt and what I knew. My songs tend to tell a story—an autobiography, or fragments of autobiography. All of my songs back then were composite. Part of it was things I really felt and part of it was indigenous adolescent songwriting. When the audience hears it, it identifies.

We all wrote to the same formula in the beginning. The structure of the music was also simpler, it was just the classic
AABA
format. A represented the verse (that is, the story of the song), the
B
being the bridge (the chorus). So it goes: first verse, second verse, bridge, third verse. That’s the way God and BMI meant it to be. You were told by the record company and the radio stations to keep it under three minutes, so most of those records in the beginning were 2:56 or 2:50—otherwise they wouldn’t get air play on the radio. Only years later did they start getting longer and longer. Part of the obfuscation of song lyrics has evolved from the kids versus the parents thing. It became a code that only kids understand.

People sometimes ask me what comes first, the music or the lyrics? Basically, I just want to nail the feel of the song, the vibe, and build on that. In most cases I start by using dummy words to get a melody structure. Once I get the structure of the melody down, I go back and finish it, refining the words and changing them until they work. That’s essentially how I work—I say that, but really I have no idea how it happens.

You start out with a lyric like, “Isn’t it a lovely night that we’re having, holding you here so good.” Right there you’ve got your melody and your structure, although things can easily change if you find a great hook. The hook to the song is everything, it’s the engine—it’s what grabs you. I use nonsense words until I get the right ones—the way Paul McCartney used “Scrambled Eggs” before he came up with “Yesterday.” You scat, you go
da da da,
just keeping the basic idea in mind. The words are generally tweaked later. Like a house, you need that foundation to build on. You need the music. The words are only as good as the notes under it. That’s where the magic comes in, when you have that real strong melody.

It’s a craft, basically, songwriting. You’re isolated, sitting there on your own and drawing on your imagination. On
A Body of Work
and
Walk a Fine Line,
I collaborated with a lot of good writers, and it really shook up my way of working. Suddenly you’re driven by who you’re writing for. But when there’s no specific goal, you just put down random ideas.

“I Don’t Like to Sleep Alone” was written when I was living in Sun Valley. It all started with “(You’re) Having My Baby.” My friend, Bill Harrah, owned a bunch of casinos and kind of set a new standard with the look of his resorts. A lot of the guys in Vegas took a page from these places he created in Lake Tahoe—they had a very modern, clean look. He was a character, a hell of a guy. I had access to a place he owned up in the mountains in Boise, Idaho. We used to fly in by airplane; it was a remote place right on the river that was aesthetically very inspiring. I wrote a lot of that up there, and at Lake Tahoe. “One Man Woman/One Woman Man” I wrote on a guitar in a motel in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The ideas were just flowing.

Some songs are really personal for me, but I have to admit that some others just felt like hits. “Having My Baby” obviously came out of my life. Whereas “I Don’t Like to Sleep Alone” and “(I Believe) There’s Nothing Stronger Than Our Love” just struck me as good ideas, not autobiographical in any sense. The latter so was basically a conceptual song. I was just checking out what was out there. The songs all tell stories, but I’ve rarely tried to decant autobiographical material directly into any particular song, the way someone like Al Green or Randy Newman might.

The Painter
is the closest I ever came to a concept album. Usually it’s just bits and pieces. But
The Painter
was a very special album for me, one of my favorites from that time and place, and I certainly approached it very differently from anything else I’ve done. Michel Colombier did an incredible job on the arrangements. I was collecting art on a grand scale at the time, thus the title. I was seeing everything through the eyes of an art lover. It’s also why I used Michel Colombier—because he was a subtle French composer and writer and he brought some really incredible colors to
The Painter
. I loved working with him; he was just a brilliant musician who approached song content like an Impressionist canvas. Sadly he died a few years ago from cancer. He’d done some work with Herb Alpert, and I got Herb to work on the
Painter
album, too. Michel was a brilliant, brilliant arranger.

I’ve always written well on the road. The road is for writing! I’ll lock myself in a motel room with a piano and once I get the basic idea—a few lines of a lyric, or a melody, I’m off and running. I can write anywhere. In the early days, I wrote a lot on the road because that’s where I was most of the time. I got a lot of my ideas out there. “Puppy Love,” “Lonely Boy,” and “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” were all ideas I got from playing record hops.

I start out at the piano and begin getting into a groove, something that takes me away from what I’ve been doing all day. I’ll work out a melody and, perhaps in the course of that process, a title will occur to me. A catchy title is always a great start. Outside of “Diana,” which was a poem I had written for Diana Ayoub, I’ve never written a lyric first and then gone to the piano to put it to music.

There are professional writers who sit down and say, “Well, Tuesday morning … got to write a song.” And they do it! I can’t write that way. I’ve got to have a congenial environment to write in—and once I get a feel that glues the bits and pieces together that have been floating around in my head start to gel and then it begins to take shape at the piano.

For a while I tried to force-write. But I soon stopped. I stopped writing for a few years in the mid-sixties because I felt my songs were getting “commercial,” that I was prostituting myself. Then I started again to say what I really felt. I no longer wanted to project the idea that Anka equals everything’s perfect. I felt I could be honest about my situation in my songs. Nothing sweet, just the truth as I felt it.