I scraped 79 cents together and bought a record for the first time in 1961. I was 8 years old and I’d heard this song on the radio that began, “Wo wo wo wo, yeah yeah yeah, heyyyy Little Devil.” I found out when I bought the record that the singer was a guy named Neil Sedaka.
I had no idea what he was singing about, I just liked the music, and I misheard some of the words — when he told the girl, “You’ve met your water love,” I figured that water love must be something that happens to bad girls. (The real lyric, of course, is “Waterloo,” but what 8-year-old knows about Napoleon?)
I got excited when I found out that this was the same singer who sang “Calendar Girl” a few months earlier, and not long afterward he became the first singer I bought a second record by, a little song called “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” and a third not long after that, the best one yet, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do.”
I ended up buying every 45 rpm single Neil Sedaka released between 1961 and 1963. It was the first time I could say I was a fan of a singer. And I saw that he wrote his own songs, with some guy named Howard Greenfield, and I was intrigued because he obviously was singing his own harmonies and a lot of the backup vocals. My interest in multi-track recording my own songs traces back to my fascination with Neil Sedaka.
Like many pop singers of that era, he seemed to disappear after the Beatles changed the landscape in 1964. Around 1970 I blundered across an album called Emergence and got excited to see that Neil Sedaka was still out there!
Another four years went by, and suddenly Sedaka was back in the top 10 with a song called “Laughter in the Rain” and an album promoted by Elton John of all people called Sedaka’s Back. Now in my early twenties, I was thrilled to see my boyhood hero back in the spotlight.
Somewhere around 1976 or 1977, I got to see him in concert in Madison, Wisconsin. It was an entertaining show — I was a little disappointed that most of his early sixties songs were relegated to snippets in a medley, but otherwise it was a great evening.
I was working in radio then, at an “adult contemporary” style station, and one night a kid called in a request for “Stairway to Heaven,” expecting me to blow him off and chase him off the phone, but I told him, “Sure, no problem.” He called back, very confused, after I played Neil Sedaka’s 1960 hit, “Stairway to Heaven.”
Less than a year after I became editor of the venerable Door County Advocate 25 years later, Sedaka played a concert at Door Community Auditorium in Fish Creek in July 2003. The paper was offered an opportunity to do a phone interview, and I seized the chance to interview my old hero for myself. I recognized the familiar smile in his voice, he seemed to be sincerely touched to hear I was a fan boy, and he was a generous and gracious interviewee.
The rise of the internet made it easy to check in from time to time to see if he was still going, and he not only was still going but seemed to have the same buoyant energy as he moved into his eighties. During the COVID scare, he did regular video concerts from his home, singing three or four of the old tunes each time, always smiling.
Not long ago I saw a video where he played a new song from a new album due in April. The song, “Good Times, Good Music and Good Friends,” is not bad for a guy who would be 87 when the album is released.
Except he won’t see his 87th birthday on March 13 after all. Sedaka was rushed to the hospital Friday morning and died a short time later.
I’ve reached the point where I generally take in stride the passing of the people I admire, but this was my first, and so it hits a little harder. I put his greatest hits album on the turntable Friday night and couldn’t help but be teary-eyed; after all that we’ve been through, breaking up is hard to do.
I’m so glad I had a chance to talk with him for 10 minutes and tell him I loved his music. He was a genuinely nice human being.
