B009HOTHPE EBOK (7 page)

Costa started working with me right away, suggesting arrangements, finding the musicians, and generally getting me ready for the recording date. Don’s first assignment for me was to complete the last couple of lines in the bridge for “Diana.” I had to get ready to cut the record in the studio in a couple weeks. I wrote the song real fast—it was a poem first—but I didn’t know how to finish it. The morning of the recording I overslept—I’d been up late the night before enjoying being in New York. So I was late for the date, which was for two o’clock. Uh-oh! I think I got up at ten to two and ran like a son of a bitch down Broadway. I got to the Capitol studio but I still didn’t have what I wanted. I said to myself, “I’m not gonna blow this. Just go in and wing it!” My problem was I didn’t have any words for certain notes, that’s why I used those “uh-ohs” at the end of the bridge in “Diana” that every other rock group would soon be using in their songs. I just threw the “uh-ohs” in, but because of the urgency of the song, they seemed to be expressing inarticulate teen yearning. What began as a filler line was seen as a deliberate stylistic move. And that became one of the song’s hooks. You have to be open to chance—mistakes can often turn into innovations if you can find a way of flipping them.

We recorded “Diana” over at Capitol’s studios. It all happened so fast it kind of blew the top off my fifteen-year-old head. This was the big time and I had very little preparation except for my experience in clubs in Ottawa and my one failed recording. I came out of an environment of fan magazines where all these people were on a pedestal. When it happened to me, it was so unreal—I felt like I was dreaming.

I had good ideas, but musically a lot of them weren’t right. They needed fixing and Don was the doctor. He was a guitar player, but he was also a well-rounded musician and like a lot of the other A&R directors he could pretty much do everything. Writing, arranging, figuring out the chords and the voicings. The voicings, you know, come about when you’re thinking of an arrangement—it’s the way you put a song across. Every professional knows instinctively where to take the basic track they’ve heard played on a piano with just a rough vocal sung by the songwriter on a demo.

That’s when you start laying it out, figuring out at what moment the strings could come in. The horns, are there going to be backup singers? That’s an art, to come in and know how to arrange a song, to reinforce the emotional tilt but still stay out of the singer’s way. They don’t write like that today, believe me. Don had a lot of heart and soul, along with good commercial sense. When we sat down and did “Diana,” it was as if the song I heard in my head came leaping to life out of that simple calypso melody I’d played on the piano. Costa and Nelson Riddle, and many like them are the unsung heroes of the music business.

Michael Jackson was a classic example of a songwriter who began with very basic ideas. He was not a great musician, not particularly talented at playing an instrument—piano, guitar, whatever—but he had this great way of singing out the parts so that the arranger could hear the latent potential. Costa was a genius at catching that. He had a fantastic command of creating arrangements. I would get together with him, lay down a feel; I would scat, I’d go
eah-eh-eh da-da-dada,
just to get me to the next verse. That way it all came out so honest, and that direct current was intrinsic to the songs I was writing at the time. Don would take my basic black-and-white scripts and turn them into Technicolor, widescreen little movies. That’s where one and one makes three.

Costa was the most instrumental, creative person in my life. I would come to him, we’d sit down at the piano, I’d play my songs to him and try to tell him the sort of sound I heard in my head. I never physically wrote the notes down; I just tried to articulate to him what I felt as best as I could. He was able to pick up on those little hints, capture them, and turn them into orchestrations. By the second year of recording I was writing down notes, coming up with chords.

When Costa heard where I wanted to go stylistically, he’d take the lick and put in a sax and lock it to the guitar line to give it that signature sound. We were all hip as to the necessity of the hook—the hook is the money in the song, the refrain that grabs you and sells it. These are the things that bind a song together, the underlying elements that the listener is only subliminally aware of—but if they aren’t there the song doesn’t work. In most of these early songs it was either the hook or the intro that grabbed you right off the bat. My whole thing has always been to get the idea out immediately, so every title primarily came off the first line—“Puppy Love,” “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” “You Are My Destiny,” “Lonely Boy,” “My Home Town,” etc. That became a bit of a pattern with me because I wanted them to get what the song was about right away.

And I was a kid. When you’re unsophisticated, your expression is raw, raw but pure. I wasn’t afraid to sing “This is not a puppy love” or “I’m just a lonely boy.” Those were natural things that most guys felt at that age, but I could put them into words. And that was really the backbone of my early songs and that has been my approach to songwriting through the years … continuing to just say what I felt, how I felt about it, and the dilemma of being out of place, not getting the girl—the pain and ecstasy of love.

Don would sit down with me and say, “What are we hearing here, Paul, what do you think we should do in the bridge? He was always thinking ahead. The innovations he developed out of my homemade songs were kind of revolutionary. To do what he did on “You Are My Destiny,” make a pop song into a swelling operatic number with strings, girl backup singers, and a big band sound behind it, was out there. He made this little pop song sound like an aria from Verdi or Puccini.

Don always knew where we were going and with what instruments, but he never overwhelmed me; he would create pockets, comfort zones for me to lay in my vocal. I would have ideas, suggestions, licks, but basically it was all him.

Like “Lonely Boy” and it’s
a-a-a-a
: Don took it and really framed it ingeniously. “Lonely Boy” was a bit doubtful in the beginning. We had to strip it down piece by piece and rebuild it, mainly by the arranger and the musicians, ingenious mechanics who tinker with a song and make it run. Those are the guys! Look at Sinatra, at Presley, all of them—there’s always that brilliant arranger involved, finessing, amplifying. I was very fortunate to have somebody like that in my corner. The managers, the agents are different, they’re like those little fish sucking off the big sharks; and they come in later. Very few of them start out with the artist and really put their balls on the line. Costa was the guy who made it happen, who brought everybody else to the table. And that was such an important spoke in the wheel. It doesn’t matter how great a songwriter you are, your songs are not going to work without the framework of a great arranger. Those are the guys who know the notes, the voicings, the orchestration. It’s a hell of a feat: to sit down with a melody and a sketch of a lyric, and know which note goes where and how to voice it and what triad you want to use where. It takes talent and long, long hours and when it’s brilliantly done nobody knows you did it—the artist gets all the credit. But without that critical group of musicians improvising with head arrangements it would never have come off as spectacularly as it does.

Don Costa was about five-foot-seven, balding, always heavier than he should have been, very much a Francis Ford Coppola–type Italian. He carried himself in a very natural way, instead of the pseudo way of so many other producers. My great, gray Don. At the end he grew a beard, and the gray beard and the goatee were his thing—“the look.” Not very contemporary, but timeless. Which is funny, ’cause that man did have an incredible sense of time—and a sense of humor.

What a guy! Incredibly talented, genius arranger, a man with great A&R ears, and one of the warmest individuals ever. It’s all about making hit records and Costa was one of those guys who could spot talent, even a talent as crude and unshaped as mine when we first met. Right from the first to the end, we were very, very tight. He had everything to do with my making it—there’s no way I could ever repay him … although I did introduce him to Sinatra! And that led to him producing one of my favorite albums,
Sinatra and Strings.

Not that we always agreed on everything: Don thought “Don’t Gamble with Love” was a surefire single. He thought that “Diana” was just a bit too crude, but I insisted we make “Diana” the A-side. I knew it was gonna be a hit
because
it was so direct and unsophisticated. I even wrote Diana Ayoub and told her so in a letter!

Well, in twenty hours I’ll be releasing my new record. I helped pick out the instruments and the feel and all the arrangements are great! You want me to tell you what it’s called? “Diana”! It’s favored as the hit record by everyone, they said it is a different sound and it’ll be the one. Now listen, don’t say a word or I’ll … I’ll just kiss you if it sells, because you started it.

Well, it didn’t happen quite as overnight as I’d written to her. It took a few weeks before they were ready to record it. “Diana” with “Don’t Gamble with Love” on the B-side, was recorded in May 1957 with four musicians: Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar, Irving Wexler on piano, Panama Francis on drums, Jerry Bruno on bass. Plus six backup singers, three women and three men.

When Don Costa figured out how to orchestrate arrangements for my songs he began to apply the same method to other singers. Carole King had a contract with ABC-Paramount records. She worked with Costa, and some of her early stuff sounded a little like my records—that was the sound that Don Costa knew how to create. He also produced Lloyd Price and Steve and Eydie—Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé (aka Sidney Leibowitz and Edith Gormezano).

“Diana,” with “Don’t Gamble with Love” on the B-side was released in July 1957. Both songs got play, but eventually it went right over to “Diana.” It was on its way to selling a million copies by mid-summer, the week after my sixteenth birthday! I was on my way down to Philly to do
American Bandstand
with Dick Clark when I heard it on the radio. There’s nothing in this world like hearing your first hit on three different radio stations as you’re driving down the highway.

Dick Clark’s
American Bandstand
was the show that broke everything. He was the key back then; the kids all watched him. He was it: the all-American boy-next-door, very friendly, very different from the other disc jockeys. Not that old razzmatazz approach. He felt like part of your family, rather than a deejay. Always looked that young, which was a spooky thing. It was like he had a painting in the attic.… He wasn’t gruff, wasn’t like a lot of the other people in the industry, just a very straight-ahead business kind of guy, always a gentleman—that’s why I continued to work with him.

Dick was close to that whole Philadelphia group—Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, and James Darren. Those kids from Philly. The guy behind the Philadelphia sound was Bob Marcucci along with his partner, arranger and songwriter Pete DeAngelis. After I broke out, it allowed a whole different kind of crowd to come in. Marcucci was the subject of the movie
The Idolmaker,
starring Ray Sharkey. I was a consultant on that film and spent a lot of time with Ray (who played Marcucci). We became friends, I continued to see him from time to time. In the early ’90s he was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1993.

When a single came out in those days the record companies sent advance copies out to all the radio stations. Then you made the rounds: you’d go stop by the local deejays around the country, do their hops, and if it caught on you’d have a hit record within two weeks. You’d literally leave the studio, take this tape, get a piece of vinyl made with the song on it, a rough test pressing, and they’d ship it out to disc jockeys and you’d follow up with personal appearances at the radio stations. Your whole life, your whole career depended on a piece of wax you made in ten, fifteen minutes. Cheap acetate demos became essential when you were trying to sell a demo because often the producers, record company guys, and especially the artists, couldn’t read music. People still don’t comprehend all the acts or new artists I work with, they just can’t understand that we had to walk into a room and stand there and get that performance all in that moment—that’s a tough thing to do.

In the beginning people would sometimes confuse me with Neil Sedaka partly because we both came from Middle Eastern backgrounds. But Sedaka was a completely different animal. I’m an autobiographical songwriter—even when I’m writing songs for other people. Sedaka’s a craftsman, a Brill Building–type songwriter. Part of Sedaka’s magpie talent was that he could rewrite songs sideways, and change the chords of the song even as he was listening to it. They say “Stupid Cupid” was partly based on Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire”—though I can’t see it. Sedaka was so quick and adept, he once wrote a song based on pages from Connie Francis’s diary! And he worked with a brilliant lyricist Howie Greenfield.

At that time, the writer/performer had not really emerged within the pop scene—it wasn’t until the 1960s when The Beatles came along that that all changed. Until then there were only a handful of singers writing and performing our own material. Presley, like many other pop singers, was using other people’s material. Leiber and Stoller and Doc Pomus were among the few writers who were creating hip pop songs at the time. The record industry was focused on the USA; everything came out of the States. It hadn’t yet spread internationally. England didn’t have its own scene until the 1960s—up until then British singers were using American music. The big stars in England at the time were Tommy Steele (a kind of Brit Elvis), who became famous covering the American hit, “Singing the Blues,” and Cliff Richard who covered Lionel Bart’s “Living Doll.”

“Diana” was number one in England before it reached the top in the USA. It became a worldwide hit by September 6. I always felt “Diana” had such a big international appeal because of its Semitic melody line. The way I sang and wrote those early songs got an instantaneous worldwide reception—from Mexico to the Middle East to Japan—because they were in a minor key and people around the world could relate to that. Everyone recognizes the minor key; it’s the way all cultures moan out their troubles from the blues to Inca flute melodies.