Neil Diamond – I Am… I Said

The record company told him to cut the line about the chair. Fifty years of comedians have agreed with them.

Uni Records issued the single in a picture sleeve showing Neil Diamond sitting on the floor against a plain background, next to an empty chair. That chair is in the song. It is the most ridiculed line in his catalog, the one the label wanted removed before release, and he put it on the packaging.

Keep watching: Neil Diamond – Sweet Caroline · Cher on MVC

He had been trying to become an actor. Diamond auditioned for the role of Lenny Bruce in a planned biopic and did not get it, and the work of trying to reach Bruce’s state of mind pushed him into therapy in Los Angeles. The song took four months. What finally came out arrived in under an hour, alone in a Holiday Inn room, looking at palm trees and sunshine and feeling acutely homesick for New York — a man who had left one city for another and found he was not properly from either of them any more. He has said since that the song emerged directly out of those sessions, as an attempt to set down who he actually was.

Tom Catalano produced it at Sound Recorders in Hollywood with Armin Steiner engineering, and Larry Muhoberac and Marty Paich wrote the orchestral arrangements. The decision they made together was restraint: the strings swell at the chorus and then get out of the way, and everything else sits close around the voice. The record ends on the title phrase repeating into the fade rather than resolving. For a song this exposed, the production is remarkably reluctant to help.

Which brings it back to the chair. Diamond refused to take the line out. The humorist Dave Barry built a routine on it years later, proposing alternative rhymes involving a pear and head lice, and the joke has followed the song ever since. The critics of 1971 went the other way — Cash Box called it excellent and Record World reached for Descartes — and AllMusic has described it as an impassioned statement in step with the confessional songwriting turn of the period. Both readings are right, and that is the whole point of the line. A man alone in a hotel room addressing furniture is either absurd or the most accurate description of loneliness anyone put on a single that year, and the song only works if you accept it might be both.

What it did after he let it go

Uni released it on March 15, 1971. It moved slowly at first and then accelerated, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 by May, No. 2 on Adult Contemporary, and No. 4 in the UK. It topped the charts in Ireland and New Zealand, went to No. 2 in Canada and Switzerland and No. 3 in Germany, and reached the top ten in Australia, Belgium, South Africa and the Netherlands. Fourteen weeks on the Hot 100, and Diamond’s first Grammy nomination, for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male. That is an unusual result for an introspective ballad in a year of harder rock, and radio programmers reportedly read the slow climb as evidence that listeners had found something in it that could not have been manufactured.

It went onto Stones that November, opening side one and returning at the end of side two as a reprise, which is a strange thing to do to an album and tells you what Diamond thought the song was worth. Others agreed. Checkmates Ltd., Killdozer and Mikey Spice have all recorded it, Italian, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese versions exist, and Brooke White sang it on American Idol with Arizona substituted for New York. It anchors the Broadway show A Beautiful Noise, where it stands in for the moment Diamond became himself.

Four years after the single, Cher sang it on her own CBS variety show, on November 16, 1975, in an arrangement built for a television orchestra rather than a band. A song written by a man about his own name, his own two cities and his own empty room turned out to transfer intact to somebody else entirely, which is the strongest evidence available that the specificity was never the problem. Diamond has told interviewers it is among the hardest things he has to perform, that gathering himself afterwards has never got easier. That is the trade he made when he refused to cut the line. The song costs him something every time, and it has outlasted every joke made at its expense.

Cher’s performance, from her own show in November 1975: