It’s hard to tell from his schmaltzy balladeering, says Sylvie Simmons in Mojo, but Neil Diamond used to be in a street gang. Growing up on the mean streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn, in the 1940s and ’50s, Diamond, now 67, spent much of his childhood dodging bullets—and not always successfully. “You had to become part of a gang because you couldn’t be out there alone. You had to fight your way to school sometimes,” he says. “So I was a junior member of one of those gangs. They had BB guns, pellet guns, garrison belts, which are belts with big buckles for fighting up close. I didn’t have a gun, but I got shot in the face. I still have a scar under my eye.” His parents, who owned a small dry-goods store, eventually relocated the family to nearby Brighton Beach—a move that Diamond says changed his life. If Flatbush was West Side Story, Diamond says, “Brighton Beach was Grease.” He soon found himself pursuing less perilous pastimes: He joined the fencing team, which would yield him a sports scholarship to college, and he sang baritone in the school’s 100-voice choir. That was when his career dreams started to jell. “There was a kid just a year ahead of me who was already having hit records: Neil Sedaka. When you’re that close to something you think, Maybe I could do that too.”
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