PREVIEW Neil Sedaka When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day.
Where: Hard Rock Rocksino, 10777 Northfield Road, Northfield.
Tickets: $55 to $85, plus fees, at the box office, online at ticketmaster.com and by phone at 1-800-745-3000.
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Neil Sedaka isn’t bitter about his exclusion from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Well, wait. Maybe he is, at least teensy bit. And probably for good reason.
The singer-songwriter who is at the Hard Rock Rocksino on Valentine’s Day was part of the magical songwriting team at New York’s Brill Building. His contemporaries? Carole King. Burt Bacharach. Neil Diamond. Sedaka’s own boyhood songwriting partner, Howard Greenfield. Gerry Goffin. Bobby Darin. Gene Pitney.
Of that group, only Bacharach, Greenfield and Sedaka do not have the words “Rock & “Roll Hall of Famer” on their resumes.
“I’d rather not talk about that,” said Sedaka, and then proceeded to do just that. “It’s really very political. It’s run by one person.
“It would be nice to get in before I say goodbye to the world,” said Sedaka, who will be 78 in March. “Even if it’s just as a writer, I think I should get in. But it’s really up to one person.”
That person? Sedaka won’t use his name – it’s that personal — but it’s Jann Wenner, who co-founded the Hall of Fame with recording industry legend Ahmet Ertegun. Sedaka is not the first individual to blame the Rolling Stone magazine publisher for his exclusion, nor will he be the last.
But sometimes, the squeaky wheel theory works. Just ask fans of KISS or Joan Baez or Yes or Deep Purple or … Well, you get the idea.
Sedaka’s history and his discography – with such songs as “Laughter in the Rain” and “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” – are hardly Metallica fare. But the music that’s come from his pen, from Connie Francis’ iconic “Where the Boys Are” to the Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” really were the soundtrack of a generation, cliche as that sounds.
“It was a phenomenon,” he said, talking about his childhood and adolescence. “A lot of teenagers in Brooklyn, New York, were very musical.
“Your parents always bought you a piano, and you were asked to take lessons,” Sedaka said. “It’s an incredible list of people who came from that area – myself, Neil Diamond, Carole King, Barbra Streisand.
“I started with a private teacher, and then went to Juilliard as a scholarship student for about seven years for prep school, then a couple at the college level,” he said.
Though initially trained in classical piano, radio at the time opened his eyes and ears to the pop world of people like Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page, Les Paul, Patty Ford and Mel Torme, he said.
“I started playing by ear things I heard on the radio, and then Howard Greenfield, who was a neighbor of mine – I was 13 and he was 16, and he was a poet – knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to write songs,” Sedaka said.
“We wrote hundreds of songs together,” he said.
While the era was different, the reason he became a musician is something everyone from Mozart to Metallica could understand:
“I think it was trying to be popular in school,” he said, laughing. “If you can play the piano, you can be invited to many of the parties!”
Not that much has changed.
“The name of my new album is ‘I Do It for the Applause,’ ” Sedaka said. “That’s so autobiographical. There’s a rush of being in front of a live audience. Everybody wants to have a standing ovation, and everybody wants to have that recognition and applause.”
And the applause is always there from a devoted fan base who still love the songs of their youth.
“People are still coming, because you can’t hear many of the oldies,” he said. “You don’t hear them unless you have satellite radio.”
Those songs, even after all these years, still resonate.
“My compositions are like my children,” said Sedaka. “They live and breathe every time I perform them. I never get tired of them.
“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for ‘Calendar Girl’ and ‘Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,’ ” he said. “They weren’t bubblegum. I was lucky to be part of the original rock ‘n’ rollers.”
And maybe, someday, alongside them in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
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