These are a few photos of young singer-song-writer Neil Sedaka and his steady girl-friend Leba Strassberg and their outing on the Coney Island Park in the summer of 1959. You see, Sedaka had met Leba when he played played piano at Miss Strassberg's Esther Hotel in Monticello, N.Y. Leba was the daughter of the couple who owned the resort hotel. Leba & Neil started going steady in 1958. Now, it was time for Leba to visit Neil at his parents' home on Coney Island Avenue in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
One might ask why this Coney Island affair is posted at a Brazilian Rock blog. Well, I guess it has to do with what Neil Sedaka would do in the next 3 or 4 months after those pictures were taken. Sedaka would fly down to Rio in December 1959 to sing professionally in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. That would be his very first foreign tour as a rock'n'roll singer for Sedaka's only claim to fame so far was as a songwriter of 'Stupid cupid' sung by Connie Francis (#14 at Billboard on 4 August 1958) and 'The diary' sung by himself (#14 at Billboard on 28 December 1958).
In Brazil, Sedaka had the chance to get used to the sensation of being a true 'teen idol' having been mobbed by crowds of teenagers since he stepped out of the airplane that flew him there. In late December, still in Rio de Janeiro, Sedaka would receive news from the USA saying his 'Oh! Carol' single for RCA records had climbed to #9 at Billboard on 7 December 1959. Neil Sedaka had finally arrived.
young fans find out Neil Sedaka is loose at Coney Island Park; summer 1959.
Are you ready to go to Coney Island Park?
Ready, steady, go!
getting tickets for the Cyclone Coaster at Coney Island...
Neil Sedaka in 2004
Singer-composer-producer Neil Sedaka is a man on a mission. He wants to gladden the hearts of his multitude of fans for many more years to come. “It’s been an incredible journey of 48 years of singing and over 50 years of songwriting,” says the father of two. I’ve written over 1,000 songs, and I’m proud to say that some of the greatest singers have recorded my work—from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley. I’m one of the major songwriters in Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), which means that every time a song of mine is played on the radio, it’s logged and recorded and thank God it will keep my wife Leba in the style to which she has become accustomed.”
This legendary singer is a well-known “family man” and enjoys talking about his roots. “My paternal grandparents were born in Istanbul, Turkey, and came to New York around 1910. My father, born on the Lower East Side, drove a taxi for over 30 years in order to put me through The Juilliard School of Music.
“Although my upbringing was not Orthodox in nature, nonetheless the feeling within the home was that of a Jewish family with Jewish traditions. As a cohesive family unit, my wife and children attend the High Holidays in New York and it’s an event we look forward to each and every year. I have a great love for Jewish culture, as does my 88-year-old mother Eleanor, who lives and enjoys life in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A few months ago they featured my biography on A&E and Mom was interviewed, which was a great thrill for all of us.
“I am probably one of the more well-known American singers in Israel. In the ’60s, I made several appearances in kibbutzim, as well as in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa and I made a few records in Hebrew. To this day, if I go into a cab and the driver is Israeli, they stare at me for a minute or so and say, ‘You look familiar,’ and when I tell them that my name is Neil Sedaka, they tell me, ‘Do you know you are the top singer in Israel?’ And that is always something wonderful to hear! The last time I visited Israel with my wife, my mother and aunt eight years ago, we made many stops in all the major cities.
“I am extremely proud to be Jewish. Wherever I go, people tell me that my name, Sedaka, means ‘charity’ in Hebrew and I affirm this to them and tell them of the wonderful feelings I have for my surname. As much as I love Israel and its people, I don’t usually get involved with the politics. However, I feel strongly that this is a time when one should be supportive of Israel. I’m strictly an artist, a creator, a musician. Financially I am a supporter of many Jewish charities and organizations, and I’ve planted many trees in honor of loved ones.”
“Recently, I produced an album of Yiddish songs which I loved doing and which I find so exciting. And because I always think in musical terms, I came up with these wonderful old Jewish songs that are disappearing from our wonderful culture. These songs are called Brighton Beach Memories – Sedaka sings Yiddish. There are 13 songs such as “Exodus,” “My Yiddishe Mama,” “Mein Shtetele Belz,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” “Ich Hob Dich Tzufil Lieb,” “Bei mir bist du schoen,” as well as many others that invoke wonderful memories for me.
“When I was growing up in Brighton Beach, my mother used to play these Yiddish songs performed by the Barry Sisters. I did a record with a klezmer group which was a labor of love. I made a couple of hundred just to send to my friends and family and, all of a sudden, it has taken on a life of its own. I’m getting so many calls from record labels, from concert halls and theaters asking about this Yiddish album. There is a very big movement of people who love this music. As far as my albums go, we are selling many of them at my concerts and at my appearances.
“Once a year I visit Brighton Beach where I go swimming at Bay 3. I make it a point to visit my street sign (Neil Sedaka Way) on the boardwalk on Coney Island Avenue. Then I treat myself to a Nathan’s frankfurter and go on the Cyclone to see if I can still take those drops. I always remember how happy the entire family was when they attended my bar mitzvah at Temple Beth El in the Manhattan Beach area of Brooklyn.
“Recently, I was honored by the Friars Club in New York and Borough President Marty Markowitz came up and gave me a special Brooklyn award. I remember when I was crowned King of Brooklyn in 1994; my mother and my sister came in to see me accept the crown. It was a wonderful event that the borough president sponsored each year with all Brooklyn personalities coming home to visit their place of birth.”
Much of Sedaka’s life has centered around Brighton Beach and its environs. In the late 1950s, Sedaka could have been any teenager cruising around Kings Highway, driving his Chevy Impala convertible with the radio blaring. But, unlike most youngsters, Sedaka wasn’t just listening to music, he was writing it, and often it was one of his songs which was being played. “I would be listening to the radio and then a song like ‘Oh, Carol’ would come on. I wrote that for Carole Klein, who was a girlfriend of mine at the time and, as most people now know, she went on to become Carole King, a wonderful, wonderful singer.”
Sedaka, who began composing in 1952 at age 13, recalls his childhood as a mixture of love, affection and some unhappiness in school. “But pop music became my means of acceptance and my way in with the ‘in crowd.’”
Almost all his early songs were collaborations between himself and his best friend, Howie Greenfield, who lived in the same apartment house at 3260 Coney Island Avenue. (Sadly Sedaka confides that Greenfield has since passed away.) “Our first song, “My Life’s Devotion,” was pretty good considering it was done by two kids aged 13 and 16.” Sedaka and Greenfield turned out many hits, among them “Where the boys are,” “Breaking up is hard to do” and “Happy birthday sweet sixteen.”
Back in the ’60s, Sedaka, who was earning more than $250,000 a year, quickly adjusted to his newfound fame and wealth. “I had to pinch myself to believe it,” he reminisces. And although he now had the wherewithal to live anywhere, still he chose to stay in Brooklyn.”
Born in Brooklyn’s Madison Hospital on 13 March 1939, he tells about his early life in Brooklyn.
“My family lived on Coney Island Avenue, right on the ocean. To this day, I’m partial to the ocean and whenever I visit relatives living in Brooklyn, I make it a point to take a swim in the cold ocean water. When my kids, Marc and Dara, were growing up, Leba and I wanted a home in the Brighton Beach area. We were lucky, we found a lovely place at The Seacoast Towers right on the waterfront. I think it is still called that. We took two apartments, broke down the walls and ended up with a wonderful 10-room residence. At that time the rent was $500 per month. Today, I don’t think you could touch it for less than thousands.”
And although Sedaka enjoys the accoutrements of fame—homes in Manhattan and California, the trips abroad and the adulation of a loyal and vast public—he still prefers the joys of family life to attending cocktail parties and making small talk “with people who hang around ‘winners.’ A quiet dinner with family and friends is my favorite way to spend an evening.”
By choice, Sedaka would give only five or six appearances a year while the children were still young. Dara Sedaka was born on 26 June 1963, in New York City, Marc Sedaka was born in 1967. “This way I got to spend precious time with the family, something I enjoyed very much. I am a very lucky man: I have my own music company and a wonderful, loving family.”
Always the proud father, Sedaka speaks of Dara, “who sings jingles for radio commercials” and Marc, “who is writing for movies and television and is currently working on two projects: one a Broadway show based on Neil Sedaka songs with a story, and the other for PBS which is still in development. He is working with Ken Levine trying to develop a show called Papa Neil’s Penthouse, which is a Mr. Rogers type of show.
“Marc is married to a wonderful girl from Sheepshead Bay, Samantha Parker, and they have given us two wonderful granddaughters, twins, Amanda and Charlotte. The twins are fraternal and they live in Studio City, California.
Sedaka is currently enjoying a renaissance — a rebirth at an age when most performers are looking to retire. Never one to rest on his laurels, Sedaka keeps a hectic schedule. He still tours constantly, performing concerts all over the world.
At this time, Sedaka who loves performing, has no intention of leaving the public arena. When asked what he would like to be remembered for when and if he does retire, he quickly answers: “I would like to be remembered foremost as a Jew, and also as a composer and singer, a person who contributed to the American scene as a worthwhile entertainer. I love this country and feel proud to have been part of its musical growth!”
On Thursday, 3rd June 2004, Sedaka will be performing selections from Brighton Beach Memories at a gala fund-raiser for the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre at Carnegie Hall. He will be joined by the world’s most renowned klezmer band, The Klezmatics, and the New Yiddish Chorale, conducted by Zalmen Mlotek. He looks forward to doing the show, as he feels a great need to preserve Jewish culture through its music and theater.
Neil Sedaka, the kosher Carol singer
by Jenni Frazer, 23 March 2006
One of popular music’s greatest singer-songwriters, Neil Sedaka's many enduring hits include a serenade to a famous girlfriend and fellow musician, and who is about to tour the UK
Neil Sedaka’s new album improbably offers the opportunity to make some of his best-known songs into a ringtone for your mobile phone. On purchase of “The show goes on,” fans will be able to download “Breaking up is hard to do,” or “Happy birthday, sweet sixteen.”
We meet just after Sedaka, the quintessential singer-songwriter, has celebrated a birthday — not a 16th but his own 67th - 13 March 2006, in Palm Beach, Florida, with his wife and family. An indefatigable performer, Sedaka was appearing locally in a couple of concerts and doubtless paying a filial visit to his 89-year-old mother, Eleanor, who lives in Sedaka-funded splendour in Fort Lauderdale, just up the road. It is, says Sedaka, “wonderful to be able to call your mother your best friend.” Yes, he is an avowed and proud mama’s boy.
His astonishingly long career owes a lot to women: Eleanor, of course, who took a part-time job in a department store in order to pay for a second-hand upright piano for her prodigy son; his famous girlfriend, Carol King, née Klein, for whom “Oh, Carol” was written; and his wife of 44 years, Leba Strassberg, whom he met in the Catskills and who became his inspiration and his manager.
These days, Sedaka, who is about to set off on a UK tour, lives in some style on Park Avenue, Manhattan. But life in 1940s Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where he grew up, was very different. “My father, Mac, was born on the Lower East Side to parents who had immigrated to the States from Istanbul,” he tells me. “He became a taxi driver, and my mother (until her decision to go out to work) was a housewife.” The Sedakas’ two-room apartment was “very crowded.” Indeed it was containing, as it did, Sedaka, his sister, their parents, his paternal grandparents, and no less than five aunts.
“It’s always said that my parents were musical,” Sedaka says, “but that wasn’t so. My grandmother, on my mother’s side” — Eleanor Appel came from a Polish-Russian family — “was said to have played the piano but she died when she was 26, so there was no way of knowing if I inherited that. But my mother’s father, so the family story goes, had some sort of a vaudeville act, where he sang — and he’s also believed to have written songs. We were told that he’d written a song called ‘Let a smile be your umbrella on a rainy day,’ but that he’d sold it for just $50. Actually, we looked up the song but someone else has the writing credit. Anyway, it’s a nice story — and it is a very nice song.”
Even if his parents weren’t musical, Sedaka had a musical barmitzvah. “I sang the haftorah so well that there wasn’t a dry eye in the temple,” he recalls. “All the rabbis said I should become a cantor, but my parents had other ideas.”
By the time he was barmitzvah, at Manhattan Beach’s Temple Beth El, Sedaka was attending classes at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music, and, he says, had suddenly realised that he was able to write songs. Although he was practising piano five or six hours a day, he didn’t resent not being out on the streets with his friends.
“I loved it,” he insists. “Besides, playing piano got me invited to all the parties… well, it was fun going to the parties but being able to write songs, that was special. And I realised,” he says without irony or undue modesty, “that I had a natural, remarkable voice, and that I wanted to be a singer-songwriter” — something which hardly existed in 1952.
Mrs Sedaka, whose friends were making their children become doctors and lawyers and dentists, determined that her son should become a concert pianist, an ambition strengthened by his being picked out by the classical musician, Artur Rubenstein, to play on a programme on New York’s classical radio station, WQRX.
Sedaka ultimately studied at Juilliard for 12 years. Rubenstein described him as “one of the finest classical pianists in New York,” but a chance introduction by his mother — typically, Sedaka remembers the date, 11 October 1952, to Howard Greenfield, the 16-year-old son of a neighbour, changed his direction forever.
Greenfield, says Sedaka, “was a poet.” At any rate, he provided the lyrics to Sedaka’s music, and, between 1959 and 1963, records by Sedaka and Greenfield sold more than 25 million copies. Greenfield stayed as his lyricist partner until 1972. It was a heady time, not least because Sedaka’s friends and neighbours appear to have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the same enterprise. “We were the New York City group,” he says now, reeling off a list of young Jewish friends and acquaintances who went into the music industry. “Neil Diamond lived across the street… I knew songwriters Barry and Cynthia Mann from Brooklyn… I went to school with Mort Shuman, who wrote for Elvis… there was Carole Klein, whom I dated in high school, there was Barbra Streisand, there was little Paul Simon…”
Why were so many of the successful singers and writers in the industry Jewish? “Maybe it was something in the water. But, at home, I was certainly inspired by Jewish music. We listened to the Barry Sisters whose greatest hit was “Bei Mir Bist du Schein” and, in fact, Claire Barry joined me on stage in Florida recently.”
By the time he was 19, in 1958, Sedaka had made so much money from his songs — $42,000 in royalties — that he was able to mollify his mother by buying her a mink stole. Eleanor, apparently, described this as her “Hadassah tallit.”
It was in that same year that he met Leba. Her parents, Esther and Irving Strassberg, owned a kosher hotel in the Catskills resort town of Monticello, the Esther Manor, and Sedaka was part of the lavish after-dinner entertainment.
Four years later, the pair were married — at the Manor — and have been together ever since, proud parents and grandparents. His daughter, Dara, duets with him from time to time and, although Sedaka says she won’t appear live because of stage fright, the father-and-daughter combo had a hit with “Should’ve Never Let You Go” in 1980. His son Marc, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, is also involved in the family business, producing all the technical video material for Sedaka’s stage shows.
Sedaka’s other “children” — as he refers to his greatest hits — provided a constant soundtrack of “sha-la-la” during the ’60s. From “Happy birthday sweet sixteen,” “Oh Carol,” “Calendar girl,” “Breaking up is hard to do,” he had a stream of hits, while providing hits for many other artists. The first song that he sold, “Stupid cupid,” was a hit for Connie Francis, and Sedaka songs have been recorded by everyone from Elvis to Tom Jones, with ’60s icons like Frankie Avalon and Clyde McPhatter in between. In those days, Sedaka clocked in at the legendary Brill Building song factory, locked himself in his office and wrote every day.
When the Beatles burst upon a startled world in 1964, Sedaka’s career took something of a dip. But, with the help of Elton John, he relaunched himself and in 1974, he produced two monster hits, “Laughter in the rain” and “Love will keep us together” in 1975. He even wrote, for Tony Christie, last summer’s surprise revival hit, “(Is This The Way to) Amarillo,” which became the biggest selling single of 2005. Altogether he has written more than 1,000 songs.
Sedaka has been loaded with honours throughout his career - there’s even a Sedaka's Way in Brooklyn, and, as one might expect, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There’s a waxwork Sedaka at the Las Vegas branch of Madame Tussaud’s, and “Breaking up is hard to do” has been listed as one of the 50 most performed songs of the 20th century.
Sedaka - which, as he is quick to point out, is derived from the Hebrew, tsedaka, charity — is the most “out” Jewish performer of his generation. Although his father’s family were Sephardi, and spoke Ladino, it was Yiddish that he heard in the streets, and Yiddish music and rhythms, with its plaintive minor keys, which influenced him. Last year, to raise money for New York’s Yiddish Theatre, Sedaka took to the stage at Carnegie Hall with a remarkable all-Yiddish concert, together with the renowned group, the Klezmatics. It was a sell-out event (and made half-a-million dollars) and the resulting album, “Brighton Beach Memories, Neil Sedaka Sings Yiddish,” made even the singer himself cry. “I’m a very proud Jew,” Sedaka says. “When I went on family picnics, on the bus we would sing these songs with a kazoo and a ukulele. They bring back wonderful memories for me.
“I can’t exactly say I speak Yiddish today but I can sing it very well phonetically, and I’ve had lots of help from my wife.”
I’m moved to ask, given that uber-producer Rick Rubin is doing wonders to rescue the formerly cheesy Neil Diamond from the dairy farm of his career, whether Sedaka might be ready to be Rubin-ed. “Yes,” he replies, “I would be interested if someone approached me. In the end, it all depends on the record company and how they’re prepared to market you.”
Now, if you’ll excuse him, Neil Sedaka has a tour to prepare. And he offers me his lifetime tips for preserving his voice: “Never go into a loud room where you have to shout to be heard. Don’t drink iced drinks. Don’t sit in front of an air-conditioning unit. Get lots of sleep. And you must have a positive attitude. That’s the most important thing.”
Do you want some candy floss?
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Map of Eastern New Jersey with Newark in the North, Staten Island, Manhattan and Brooklyn with Coney Island and Brighton Beach on the right...
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Brighton Beach at Coney Island in Brooklyn...
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