Neil Sedaka - Mid-1960s Decline

Mid-1960s Decline

The year 1962 provided Sedaka with one of his career's most important years, as Sedaka scored a No. 1 with "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" and a No. 5 with "Next Door To An Angel". But after 1962, Sedaka's popularity began to wane. His singles for 1963 enjoyed modest success: "Alice In Wonderland" (No. 17), "Let's Go Steady Again" (No. 26), "The Dreamer" (No. 47), and "Bad Girl" (No. 33). "Bad Girl" would be Sedaka's last Top 40 hit in the US until 1974.

Starting in 1964, Sedaka's career went into a sharp decline, hastened by The Beatles' arrival on the radio and especially their much-hyped February 1964 appearance on CBS's The Ed Sullivan Show and the rest of the British Invasion. When describing the Beatles' effect on his career in the mid-'60s, he puts it brusquely: "The Beatles—not good!" From 1964 to 1966, only three of his singles cracked the Hot 100: "Sunny" (No. 86, 1964), "The World through a Tear" (No. 76, 1965), and "The Answer to My Prayer" (No. 89, 1965). His other singles from this era - "The Closest Thing To Heaven", "I Hope He Breaks Your Heart", "Let The People Talk", "The Answer Lies Within" and "We Can Make It If We Try" - were all commercial failures.

To make matters worse, Sedaka's employers at RCA Victor refused to release his new recording, "It Hurts to Be in Love", because he had not recorded it in their studios, as stipulated by his contract. Sedaka attempted another recording of this song in RCA's studios, but the results were unsatisfactory. Howard Greenfield and Helen Miller, the song's co-writers, offered it to Gene Pitney instead, and he took the existing musical track, replacing Sedaka's lead vocal track with Pitney's own. Everything else was Sedaka's, including his own arrangement and backing vocals, piano-playing, and usual female backup singers. Pitney ended up with a No. 7 hit for himself and his record label, Musicor, in 1964.

For the remainder of his tenure with RCA Victor, Sedaka never fully recovered from the effects of Beatlemania, the loss of "It Hurts to Be in Love" to Pitney, or the failure of his recordings. RCA chose not to renew his contract when it expired in 1966, leaving him without a record label.

Although Sedaka's stature as a recording artist was at a low ebb in the late 1960s, he was able to maintain his career through songwriting. Thanks to the fact that his publisher, Aldon Music, was acquired by Screen Gems, two of his songs were recorded by The Monkees, and other hits in this period written by Sedaka included The Cyrkle's version of "We Had a Good Thing Goin'" and "Workin' on a Groovy Thing", a Top 40 R&B hit for Patti Drew in 1968, and a Top 20 pop hit for The 5th Dimension in 1969. Also, "Make the Music Play" was included on Frankie Valli's charting album Timeless.

On an episode of the quiz show I've Got a Secret in 1965, Sedaka's secret was that he was to represent the United States in classical piano at the 1966 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, and he impressed the panelists with his performance of Frederic Chopin's "Fantaisie Impromptu" on the show. Prior to his piano performance, panelist Henry Morgan challenged Sedaka with the fact that the Soviet bureaucracy despised—and, in fact, outlawed—rock 'n' roll music, and that any Western music that young Russians have was by underground smuggling. This exchange continued before the panel learned that Sedaka was to represent the USA at the Tchaikovsky classical piano competition, which Van Cliburn had won in 1958. Morgan's warning turned out to be true: despite Sedaka's classical roots, because of his "other" life as a pop star, he was disqualified by the USSR as the US entrant for the competition.

Sedaka also made an appearance in the 1968 movie Playgirl Killer, with a scene of him performing a song called "The Waterbug".