21-Hit Wonder by Sam Hollander

Author:Sam Hollander
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637741870
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

BONUS CUT

Don’t worry about Aaron. A few years later, he partnered with an equally great writer named Shep Goodman, and together they wrote the American Authors smash “The Best Day of My Life.” It was one of the biggest radio tunes of the decade. Making the Hit was obviously responsible.

Lou Pearlman’s “Making The Hit” box.

CHAPTER 22

Uncle John’s Band1

When I was a kid, my uncle John always held court at the holiday dinner table, receiving endless praise from the relatives gathered around on his latest book or contribution to The Paris Review.

There was plenty to celebrate.

From the publication of his first collection, “A Crackling of Thorns,” which won the 1958 Yale Younger Poets Prize, my uncle published dozens of volumes of verse and numerous works of criticism. He received most of the big awards a poet could receive: the Levenson Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. I didn’t appreciate any of this at the time. On the surface, we had nothing in common. Yes, I knew that he once ran with Ginsberg, but his world of poetic forms meant little to me. I wanted to roll with MTV and Martha Quinn.

My uncle was forever an imposing figure. While I was struggling to pen Baha Men records (no, not even “Who Let the Dogs Out”), he was one of the preeminent poet-critics of his generation. We barely understood each other. At family gatherings, while John regaled the room on verse and allegory, I mostly tuned him out. Some of my most powerful impressions of him were formed in strange, unexpected ways.

There was a Pizza Hut waiter upstate who took my credit card and, after inquiring about the connection (not the sort of dialogue you expect with your Spicy Sicilian), actually screamed profanities about my uncle and his poetic elitism. There was also the slightly intoxicated ride late one night on the F train when I looked up to see one of Uncle John’s poems in the empty subway car (part of the Poetry in Motion series).

It was a beautiful, humbling moment.

That night inspired me to finally crack open his critically lauded Powers of Thirteen, which had been gathering layers of dust under a pile of 45s. It required patience and attention. It was touching and witty. I never reached out to him to tell him.

I was too busy chasing something big myself.

Eventually, the miraculous happened. I wrote a hit. Then another. At this point, my uncle and I rarely spoke, and by the time I finally made something of myself in song, we had lost touch altogether. So you can imagine my surprise at hearing Uncle John’s baritone bellowing through my phone a few years later.

“Hello, Sam. It’s your uncle John. I received an email that I’d love to run by you. May I read it to you?”

Absolutely, I told him, and he continued: “Dear Professor Hollander. I’m a huge fan of your work. My name is Don Henley.

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