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The royalties check came in the mail. Twenty-three hundred dollars. Wow. The 19-year-old show biz tenderfoot proudly dashed upstairs to break the happy news to his parents. Upon casting a skeptical glance at the physical evidence, mom quickly noticed her gloating progeny’s poor number comprehension skills: the check actually read twenty-three thousand dollars. A few moments of stunned silence later, Neil Sedaka decided that songwriting was definitely the way to go, and, effective immediately, his parental units suspended their efforts to talk him out of it.
A motley bunch of bards and minstrels gathered at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall to celebrate the prolific tunesmith with the mellifluent tenor voice for his Fifty Years of Hits: the perpetual bobbysoxer Connie Francis hiccupped her Stupid Cupid before revealing Where the Boys Are, American sort-of-Idol Clay Aiken excited quite a rush of Clay-mania among female spectators with his impassioned rendition of Solitaire, and Natalie Cole, Dion (The Wanderer), The Captain and Tennille, and the lovely Renee Olstead performed other selections from Mr. Sedaka’s extensive musical canon. David Foster, the “man with the golden touch,” emceed part of the show, Cousin Brucie also had a few words to say, and somebody must have left the Ed Sullivan Theater unlocked, for Paul Shaffer had escaped to join the merry sha-la-la-lala-lalala.
Finally, the Brill Building legend himself alighted at his Kiwai and skillfully demonstrated, once again, the audible why behind his enduring success. Human nature simply seems to be hardwired to enjoy the sound of Sedaka, just as we are all genetically biased in favor of vanilla ice cream.
Never short on confidence, in his teens the native Brooklynite had developed a bizarre habit of buying little 45 rpm’s, scratching out the names of singer and songwriter, and replacing them with his own “to see how it looked.” Most psychologists would have characterized such behavior a bit differently, but Neil Sedaka firmly insists that he had always been a “positive thinker.” Norman Vincent Peale may have had a point after all.
And the hits just keep on coming.
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