Watching Instagram reels (that is, stunned in front of the cell phone screen and abandoned to more of the same), something surprises me:
the algorithm offers me a short video of Neil Diamond
, very old, singing “Sweet Caroline” before an audience excited that she films it with her phones and does the backup vocals.
He sings from a box.
A legend says (it informs me) that
Diamond suffers from Parkinson's Disease
, which gives new meaning to the video, better explains the emotion that spreads in the theater and that infects me.
What do I know about Neil Diamond?
Bit.
That he had a couple of hits in the seventies.
That Fideo, a friend from Pompeya, loved it, which was still a rarity in a neighborhood where everyone played rock or disco music.
That he sang with a deep and serious voice in falsetto times
.
That he had an abundant club, very similar to that of the Ludueña Axe.
That and not much more.
Neil Diamond performing in 2014. Photo: Reuters.
I go to Google.
I write Neil Diamond and Parkinson.
And I find out that
he was diagnosed in 2018
and that forced him to abandon touring and put his career on pause.
When he found out it was a shock and, according to what he said in an interview he gave in 2023,
he was “in denial” for the first two years
until he decided to accept his condition.
“This is the hand that God has given me and I have to make the most of it,” he acknowledged.
The video is from December 2022, when Diamond attended the premiere of “A Beautiful Noise,” a Broadway musical based on his own life.
At 82 years old, he could be seen without the legendary baton, with a gray beard, good looks and with
a voice that still retained the memory of what he was
.
“Sweet Caroline” is a love song that Diamond recorded in 1969. He once said that, to write it, he had been inspired by John Fitzgerald Kennedy's daughter Caroline, then a child, when he saw her horseback riding on the cover of a magazine.
He then gave another version, which may be complementary:
the lyrics were dedicated to his wife Marcia
, but for the chorus melody he needed a three-syllable name and so he resorted to Caroline's.
Video
Ask people to wash their hands because of the coronavirus.
The truth is that the hit transcended the eras not so much as a romantic song but as a
motivational song
that conquered the fields.
I found out about it thanks to the movie “Fever Pitch”, the North American and baseball adaptation of a novel by the British Nick Hornby.
In it, Boston Red Sox fans sing it at the top of their voices as they advance in the campaign that will take them to the championship.
Play “Sweet Caroline” plus “stadium” on YouTube and you will see countless soccer, baseball, boxing and American football fans surrendering to the refrain that says: "
The good times never seemed so good."
I don't know why the Instagram algorithm brought me the video of that Broadway theater, but I saw it so many times that it will surely offer me more (the mechanism works like that, on repeating what is known).
But that does not matter.
What matters is that old Neil's times are still good, despite everything.