The Tragic Reasons Why You Don’t Hear About Neil Diamond Anymore

Neil Diamond wrote some of the most enduring songs of the past 60 years, yet the man behind them often remains a mystery to the millions who sing along. He sold over 100 million records and filled stadiums for five decades. Then, one day, he walked off stage and stayed gone—no farewell tour, no extended goodbye. Just a brief announcement and silence.

The story of why he left is not simple, and it reaches back decades before his final performance, to a single decision he made at age 26 that reshaped his life. Born January 24th, 1941 in Brooklyn, Neil Leslie Diamond grew up in a Jewish immigrant family with little money and almost no musical heritage. At Erasmus Hall High School, he joined the choir—the same choir as a girl named Barbra Joan Streisand. At the time, they were just two teenagers in a crowded public school who barely knew each other.

More than two decades later, those two voices would converge on a number one record in one of the most unlikely stories in pop music history. Before music, Diamond was on a different path. He was a serious fencer who earned a scholarship to New York University and enrolled as a pre-med student with plans to become a doctor. In his final year, with only a few credits left before graduation, a music publisher offered him $50 a week to write songs.

He took the job and never returned to class, trading a medical career for a gamble with no security

The next seven years were brutal. Diamond worked as a songwriter in the Brill Building world of Manhattan, writing in small offices with little more than a piano and a chair. By his own account, he wrote about a hundred songs before anyone had a hit with one. Publishers dropped him, opportunities passed him by, and he sold songs for very little money just to survive.

In his early 20s, he was broke, frustrated, and seriously considered quitting. Then, in 1966, he wrote “I’m a Believer. ” The Monkees recorded it, and it became the biggest-selling single in the United States that year, spending seven weeks at number one. A broke 25-year-old from Brooklyn had written the song that four young television stars turned into a global anthem.

The royalties gave him breathing room, and he signed with a new label run by producer and songwriter Bert Berns. Within 18 months, Diamond produced five straight top-20 hits, including “Solitary Man,” “Cherry, Cherry,” and “Kentucky Woman,” making him one of the most reliable hitmakers in American pop. That success came with a dangerous shadow. Bert Berns, born in the Bronx in 1929, was one of the most prolific figures in American music—he wrote or produced 51 chart records between ages 31 and 38, including “Twist and Shout,””Piece of My Heart,” and “Brown Eyed Girl.

” But he also moved in a world where the record business often overlapped with organized crime. His close associates included Thomas Eboli, the acting boss of the Genovese crime family, and Carmine DeNoia, known asWassel, a man who worked as manager, bookmaker, and, when needed, enforcer. Reports from a 2016 documentary described Wassel throwing people out of windows and once tossing Tiny Tim off a boat into the harbor. Whenhe managed Van Morrison, he reportedly smashed Morrison’s guitar over his head, regretting only the damage to the instrument

Diamond unknowingly stepped into that world when he joined Bang Records.

In late 1967, with his contract up for renewal, a conflict erupted over his next single. Berns wanted “Kentucky Woman”; Diamond wanted”Shiloh,” a deeply personal song about an imaginary childhood friend. Few at the label heard it as a hit. Berns offered a deal: Diamond could release”Shiloh” if he signed a contract extension.

Diamond refused and tried to get out of the label. The dispute turned violent. According to accounts from the period, including a Berns biography and documentary, Diamond’s manager was beaten up, and someone threw a stink bomb into a nightclub where Diamond was performing. A fight over a record had escalated into physical threats.

On December 30th, 1967, while the conflict was still unresolved, Bert Berns’ damaged heart, weakened by rheumatic fever since childhood, gave out at age 38. He left behind his 24-year-old widow, Ilene, their three children, and a label tangled in legal battles that took years to unravel. Diamond eventually escaped Bang, but at a heavy cost. He signed with Uni, then Columbia.

“Shiloh” finally came out as a single in 1970—three years after he first wanted it released

By the end of the 1960s, Diamond waswriting the songs that would define his legacy. One of them,”Sweet Caroline,” recorded in Memphis in 1969, reached number four in America. For years, he let people believe it was inspired by a childhood photograph of Caroline Kennedy. Later, he admitted the truth was simpler: he needed a three-syllable name that worked with the melody, and the song was really about his then-wife, Marsha, whose name did not fit the tune

Decades later,”Sweet Caroline” took on a life beyond Diamond’s control.

In 1997, someone in the Boston Red Sox organization began playing it during the eighth inning at Fenway Park—ostensibly because a marketing staffer had a friend whose baby daughter was named Caroline. It became a ritual, thousands of fans singing it at every home game. Then came April 2013, when two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. After the attack,” Sweet Caroline” carried a new kind of weight.

Teams across Major League Baseball played it as a gesture of solidarity with Boston. On April 20th, five days after the bombing, Diamond flew himself to Boston without any public announcement, arrived at Fenway, and sang the song live for a crowd that had lived through a week of fear and a citywide manhunt. From that point on, the song belonged to everyone—sung in pubs, at football stadiums across Europe, at weddings, funerals, and hospital wards, often by people who could not name the man who wrote it

One of the strangest hits of Diamond’s career began with a divorce in Kentucky. The song,”You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” was written by Diamond with Alan and Marilyn Bergman as a 45-second theme for a sitcom pilot that was later dropped.

Diamond kept performing the fragment on tour, adding an instrumental section to stretch it. When audiences responded, the Bergmans finished the song properly. Diamond recorded it as a solo track on his 1977 album; the next year, Barbra Streisand—the girl from the same Brooklyn choir—recorded her own version for her album”Songbird,” using the same key and arranger

Neither version was released as a single, and the story might have ended there. Then Gary Guthrie, program director at WAKY, an adult contemporary AM station in Louisville, entered the picture.

Going throughwhat he later called a very friendly divorce, he knew his ex-wife loved both versions. One night, he spliced the two tapes together, moving between Diamondand Streisand to create a duet that did not exist. He made it as a parting gift and then played it on air. The phones lit up.

Other stations copied his edit, record stores in Louisville got flooded with requests for a song no company had released. Guthrie sent his tape to CBS on July 27th, 1978. By August 3rd,both artists had agreed to record a real version together. Columbia paid Guthrie a few thousand dollars for the idea and brought the two choir members from Erasmus Hall into a studio together for the first time in their lives.

The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 48 in October 1978; five weeks later, it was the number one record in America and earned a nomination for Record of the Year. They did not perform it live together until February ​27th, 1980 at the Shrine Auditorium, in one of the most-watched television duets of the era. A planned film based on the song was abandoned after Diamond chose a different movie project instead

Diamond’s career continued for decades, but the quiet end came later.

The reasons behind his final exit, long obscured by the bright lights of his hits, trace back to choices made when he was barely out of his teens—when a young man from Brooklyn walked away from medicine for $50 a week and into a world of mobsters, broken contracts, and songs that would outlive everyone involved