Magic Moments: A Six-Disc Box Set Pomus Demos Is Coming (Mojo Magazine)
My dad never danced, and he wrote Save The Last Dance For Me,” says Sharyn Felder, daughter of Doc Pomus. “He never went to Vegas, and he wrote Viva Las Vegas.”
Felder is marvelling at the “songwriter's rich fantasy life” evident throughout You Can't Hip A Square: The Doc Pomus Songwriting Demos, a box set she co-produced with Omnivore's Cheryl Pawelski. Marking the centennial of Pomus's birth, it's a deep dive into both his genius and the magic of the demonstration record — what Doc once called a song's “elemental point”.
“A demo captures the pure intent of the writer,” says Pawelski, archivist behind 2023’s Written In Their Soul set of Stax demos. “There’s something beautiful about hearing a song when it’s first realised,” agrees Felder. As keeper of her father’s vast archive, she says the 150-plus tracks here represent “the tip of the iceberg from his golden era”.
The man born Jerome Felder stood out from other Brill Building-era songwriters with what Pawelski calls “a little more grit and life experience”. Paralysed with polio as a child, Pomus found his calling through Big Joe Turner’s Piney Brown Blues. On the box, ‘Doc’s Disc’ is devoted to his years as a teenage nightclub singer, when he cut sides for Chess and Savoy, and wrote Lonely Avenue for Ray Charles (Pomus’s a cappella demo is goosebump city).
“His existence as a blues singer was very funky,” Felder says. “When he met my mom, he wanted to be respectable. He had to figure out how to convert writing songs into a living. And that meant volume.”
From 1958-65, Pomus’s main ampersand was Mort Shuman, 13 years his junior. Felder says, “It was a father-son thing. Dad took him under his wing.” Soon, that “internship” turned into a prolific hit machine. “Doc and Mort were a potent combination,” says Pawelski. “Mort had this desire and youthful ambition. Doc was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been there’ That yielded some 20th-century standards.” Teenager In Love, Hushabye, This Magic Moment and the astonishing Troubled Mind (a favourite of Lou Reed) are all here as proof. Bare bones demos graduated to “masterpiece-level productions” as the duo became in-demand, eventually replacing Leiber & Stoller as Elvis’s preferred songsmiths. An entire disc is devoted to post-army Elvis tunes, some like Kissin’ Fool and Pot Luck that Presley didn’t cut, but should have.
Collaborations with other writers — Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector, Toni Wine — show how fluid Pomus’s collaborative skill was, shifting from girl group shing-a-ling (Be A Man) to Southern soul (I’ve Been A Bad Girl). “He brought out the best in everyone he wrote with,” says Felder.
Years in the making, the box’s original acetates have all been expertly restored. Already with an eye on a sequel of Pomus’s co-writes with Dr. John, Pawelski says, “We want to add to Doc's story and legacy, and throw it forward, so the music won’t be lost to time. So people will say, ‘Oh, I get it. This guy was important and cool!’”
—Bill DeMain