“I was laughed at”: the 1968 song Neil Diamond will always regret
That final double vodka tonic you didn’t need on a night out or the haircut you should never have asked for, we’ve all done things we regret, but having a song you regret writing preserved for eternity on streaming platforms next to ‘Sweet Caroline’ is just rough.
It’s fair to say Neil Diamond knows a thing or two about songwriting. In his vast discography are some of the greatest pop songs of all time: ‘Solitary Man’, ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’, ‘Song Sung Blue’, ‘Beautiful Noise’, ‘Forever In Blue Jeans’, ‘Love On The Rocks’, ‘Hello Again’, and of course, every English sports bar’s favourite, ‘Sweet Caroline’.
But there is one song he would prefer to forget. Written and recorded in the late 1960s, ‘The Pot Smoker’s Song’ has embarrassed Young ever since, as he admitted to Q magazine in 2008, “Oh, it was terrible! It was laughed at. I did it because I’d become involved in an anti-drug programme in New York called Phoenix House.”
He explained that after getting to know the people who ran the establishment, he learned about what the “addicts were going through. It seemed like they all started out smoking pot, which was readily available, and they moved on to bigger stuff. So in my mind, I had to write a song.”
The track itself is a strange, almost surreal creation, opening with a lilting, cheerful chorus of “La, la, la, pot, pot, gimme some pot, forget what you are, you can be what you’re not, high, high, I wanna get high, you never give it up if you give it a try”, before cutting abruptly to a spoken‑word recording of a man Diamond met at Phoenix House recounting his addiction. When his story ends, the jaunty chorus bounces back in as if nothing happened, chirping its way through another round of “pot, pot, pot, gimme some pot”.
Diamond later reflected, “I kind of made it a semi‑documentary. Those were the addicts talking through it. They were trying to pull their lives together and were telling me their story”.
It’s clear what he was trying to do: contrast the carefree glow of early drug use with the harsh realities of addiction. But the execution lands somewhere closer to a GCSE drama performance, earnest, well‑meaning, and unintentionally comic. Though Diamond eventually did have the self-awareness to realise the fallings of the track himself: “I felt that I was telling the truth against a silly melodic kind of song. But it may not have even been true as far as pot was concerned. Up till that point, I had never smoked pot before. I didn’t know what it was. It was just another drug.”
The ‘Pot Smoker’s Song’ was included on Diamond’s 1968 album Velvet Gloves and Spit, the title of which is also an embarrassment to him, or “horrible!” as he declared. Despite the record’s flaws, it marked a significant turning point in his career, being his first release for Uni, a subsidiary of MCA Records, and represented his escape from Bang Records, where he felt creatively boxed in.
Bang wanted more of the same, another ‘Cherry, Cherry’, another ‘Kentucky Woman’, another ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’, but Diamond’s writing was shifting, and he refused to repeat himself. Leaving the label led to a lawsuit, but it also led to freedom. At Uni, he was told he could do anything he wanted, and he did. Velvet Gloves and Spit may not be his strongest work (Diamond himself admits he hasn’t listened to it in decades), but it was the first time he felt able to write without constraint.
Fortunately for him, neither the album nor ‘The Pot Smoker’s Song’ left a lasting dent in his career. Unfortunately for him, both remain immortalised on every major streaming platform for you to revisit at your leisure.
