Last Sunday's New York Times carried Alan Light's review of the new biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt. Doc was one of the true characters of the Brill Building era of pop songwriting. In the immediate aftermath of his death in 1991, the late New Orleans soul singer Johnny Adams produced a stirring tribute to him in "Johnny Adams Sings Doc Pomus: The Real Me."

Until reading Light's review, I don't think I knew that the divorce attorney Raoul Felder was the brother of Doc Pomus. I did know that Doc had been crippled by polio as a kid, but I had never put that together with the lyrics of "Save the Last Dance For Me." Light explains:

[His] crowning achievement was the Drifters’ sublime “Save the Last Dance for Me.” In a story straight out of Hollywood, Pomus actually wrote the lyrics on the back of an invitation to his own wedding, remembering how it felt to watch his bride dance with his brother, knowing that he himself was unable to navigate a dance floor. “Under his pen,” Halberstadt writes, “the simple declaration of love he set out to write wavered, giving way to vulnerability and fear.”

Posted by Scott at 05:06 PM  |    |