Did You Know...

When a Brooklyn teen has been named by Artur Rubinstein as an exceptional classical pianist, how does he fit in at school? He starts writing pop songs. Neil Sedaka began writing with a neighbor, Howard Greenfield, when Sedaka was 13 and Greenfield was 16. They wrote a song a day, and once they signed a songwriting contract, they began working in the Brill Building, now known as one of the great sources of early 1960s pop songs.

Sedaka's first big songwriting success was 'Stupid Cupid,' a 1958 hit for Connie Francis. At that point, Sedaka opened a door that the other Brill Building songwriters (including Gerry Goffin/Carole King and Jeff Barry/Ellie Greenwich) could not unlock: he became a major recording artist. Here he put his doo-wop background (as a founder of the Tokens) to work in such Top Ten songs as 'Oh! Carol' and 'Stairway to Heaven' (no, it is not that 'Stairway to Heaven'). Unlike the doo-wop groups of his time, Sedaka did not have a backup group; he multi-tracked his own voice. With lines like 'sha dooby down dooby doo down down, kama kama . . .' how could he miss?

He didn't miss. 'Breaking Up Is Hard to Do' hit #1 in 1962. While the hits dried up for him as a performer when the Beatles took over the charts, Sedaka could still sell tickets to his shows, and he wrote 'Workin' on a Groovy Thing' for the 5th Dimension in 1969. He maintained a fabulously popular performing career in England, and he was selling more tickets there in the 1970s than any number of British artists. As a friend of John Lennon and Elton John, Neil Sedaka was poised for a comeback.