After the man in a dark cashmere sweater and tortoise shell glasses sat down at a piano and leaned into the microphone, his first words were a declaration: “Sedaka’s back … again!”
It was late March and the lounge at Vitello’s — an old-school Italian restaurant in the heart of Studio City, Calif. — was packed for a show by the irrepressible 86-year-old singer and songwriter Neil Sedaka. He had booked a series of semiregular Sunday night appearances here to mark the golden anniversary of his professional resurrection.
Fifty years ago, Sedaka completed one of the most remarkable comebacks in pop music. A smiling star of the teen idol era, he’d made his name with run of hummable hits — “Oh Carol,” “Calendar Girl,” “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” — but his bubbly tunes, sung in a high tenor, were soon swept away, first by the arrival of the Beatles and then by the turmoil of the 1960s.
In the difficult years that followed, Sedaka lost his fortune, his record deal and his sense of self. At his lowest, he would walk down the street and people would ask: “Didn’t you used to be Neil Sedaka?”
In the early ’70s, Sedaka exiled himself to England, where he gradually rebuilt his career, playing small clubs as he rediscovered his muse and a new group of collaborators. A fellow piano man and avowed fan, Elton John, eventually midwifed his return to the American charts in 1975, helping release the hit LP “Sedaka’s Back,” which has just been reissued in a deluxe vinyl package.
Onstage at Vitello’s, Sedaka introduced the songs that heralded his second coming — “Laughter in the Rain,” “Bad Blood,” “Love Will Keep Us Together” — and beamed as he recounted his journey from the top to the bottom and back again.
“You see,” he said, a note of pride in his lilting Brooklyn accent, “I’m a survivor.”
ON A SUNNY summer morning a few weeks later, Sedaka settled into his office in the expansive West Hollywood apartment that he and his wife of nearly 63 years, Leba, have called home since 1976, for a video interview. He remains a furious ball of showbiz energy, telling stories, dropping names and singing snatches of his songs with an infectious zeal.
It was a combination of precocious charm and prodigious talent that landed the Brighton Beach-bred Sedaka a scholarship to Juilliard, but he gave up his classical pursuits after hearing the Penguins’ 1954 hit “Earth Angel,” and instead learned his trade as a pop songwriter in the style of the Brill Building. “Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, I played a lot of that at Juilliard, so it had an influence,” Sedaka said. “At the Brill Building, we were taught hooks, and how to deliver hooks in the right manner, in the right style, with the right harmonics.”
Along with his songwriting partner Howie Greenfield, Sedaka wrote the Connie Francis hit “Stupid Cupid,” before stepping out as a solo artist, making the Top 20 with “The Diary” in 1958. Over the next five years, Sedaka sired a succession of smashes, becoming RCA’s second biggest star, behind Elvis Presley. But his fortunes started to wane in 1963, and in 1966 the label dropped him. Worse, he discovered that his mother’s boyfriend, who had been managing him, had run through his savings.
Sedaka was back to plugging his songs and playing piano on other artist’s recording sessions. “I would come into a session, and they would say, ‘Neil Sedaka?! What are you doing here?’” he recalled. “But I had a wife and two kids, so every penny counted. And it was still a way of expressing myself as a musician.”
The latter half of the ’60s saw Sedaka effectively sidelined as pop rapidly evolved from beat music to psychedelia, country-rock to the singer-songwriter movement. “I missed it. I missed it with a vengeance,” he said. “I listened to the radio and thought what do I have to do? No more of the tra-la-las and do-be-dos, which I was the king of. I wanted to be an artist that fit into the culture of the time.”
His first attempt at a comeback, the 1971 singer-songwriter collection “Emergence,” flopped. At the suggestion of his booking agent, Sedaka moved to England that fall, where he could earn a living playing a circuit of working men’s clubs, including the Batley Variety Club near Leeds. “I sang all the old hits for them, that’s all they knew,” he said. “But the people were very nice, so I started to put some of the new songs in.”
At the Batley, Sedaka was approached by the music manager Harvey Lisberg with an offer to work up material at Strawberry Studios, where his clients — Graham Gouldman, Lol Crème, Kevin Godley and Eric Stewart, soon to become the hit pop band, 10cc — could back him, in hopes of reviving his recording career.
“I was a bit in awe of Neil really,” Gouldman said in a recent interview. “He was warm, he was funny, but he was serious at the same time. He was absolutely serious about his music.”
The Sedaka/10cc collaboration produced immediate chemistry, and a couple of hit albums in the U.K., including “Solitaire” from 1972 and “The Tra-La Days Are Over” the next year. Gaining momentum, he was soon playing bigger venues in England, though he remained without a U.S. label. Fate intervened backstage at a Bee Gees concert when Sedaka met Elton John.
“He told me he was a big fan, that he’d bought all my early records,” Sedaka said. A few days later John turned up at Sedaka’s Mayfair apartment. “Elton came in dressed in all his regalia, and he sat and played, ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,’ which he’d just written. Then he asked: ‘What have you been doing?’ and I played him ‘Laughter in the Rain’. He said, ‘That’s a hit! We’ve got to get you on my label.’”
John’s company compiled the best of his recent albums on “Sedaka’s Back,” as the star began a personal campaign on Sedaka’s behalf. “I was so committed to relaunching his career,” John recalled in 2009, “that he used to call me ‘the most expensive publicist in the world!’”
In early 1975, just as Sedaka prepared to play a three-night stand at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, “Laughter in the Rain” reached No. 1 in the U.S. After 12 long years, he was back on top of the charts, on top of the world, kick-starting a triumphant year that included the Captain and Tenille’s version of “Love Will Keep Us Together” rising to become a Grammy winner. “It was a wonderful moment,” he said, as his eyes glistened at the memory.
In Winston-Salem, N.C., the 9-year-old budding pianist Ben Folds fell for the endearingly unhip Sedaka after seeing him perform on a TV special. “His music spoke to my nerdy little soul,” Folds said in an interview. Folds — who, like Sedaka, dropped out of music school to play pop — noted that his “songwriting style is very much like the études, preludes, nocturnes, and waltzes of Chopin. Sedaka’s using that vocabulary. ”
“He lures you in with a simple hook and then takes you to a higher place — musically, intellectually, technically — with his changes,” added Folds. “He immediately gives you a compelling reason to listen.”
AT THE END of Sedaka’s show at Vitello’s — as the P.A. blasted his own music — he rose from the piano bench and started to work the room: shaking hands with the men in the audience, kissing their wives, miming to the songs and dancing his way through the crowd.
“My voice isn’t what I used to be,” he admitted, noting he’s a perfectionist. “It was very hard for me, but it was wonderful. You could feel the love in the room.”
Last year, Primary Wave announced it had made a deal with Sedaka for his publishing and master album rights. In addition to the reissue of “Sedaka’s Back,” there are plans for other expanded physical releases and efforts to bring albums like “The Hungry Years” (1976) to streaming services for the first time.
One thing the Primary Wave campaign won’t include is any new material from Sedaka, who stopped writing a few years ago. “I wrote songs from the time I was 13 years old until I was 83 years old,” he said and shrugged. “I figure if you can’t top what you’ve done before, don’t do it anymore.”
His last major compositional effort, a 2016 piano concerto called “Manhattan Intermezzo,” was a return to his earliest roots. (Billy Joel, another piano-based songwriter, did something similar in 2001.) “I’m very proud of that,” he said. “Classical is good for the soul — but not so good for the pocketbook.”
In the end, Sedaka doesn’t seem worried about his legacy. “I was born to make music, that was my purpose in life — to spread joy, and to make myself happy,” he said, smiling. “And I’ve done that.”
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