Neil Diamond had already left Bang Records when the label decided it wasn’t finished with one of his most personal songs.
The song was “Shilo,” a haunting piece about an imaginary childhood friend. For Diamond, it wasn’t simply another composition. He later explained that the song was deeply connected to his childhood and represented a move toward the more personal, free-form songwriting he wanted to pursue. Bang Records, however, saw something very different. The label considered the song too uncommercial and refused to release it as a single, a disagreement that became one of the major reasons Diamond eventually left.
Then Diamond became successful somewhere else.
After moving to Uni Records, he scored major hits including “Sweet Caroline” and “Holly Holy.” Suddenly, the song Bang had once considered too strange and too personal looked much more valuable.
So Bang went back into its vault.
But instead of simply releasing the original recording, the label took Diamond’s old vocal and built a new instrumental track underneath it. Musicians at American Sound Studio in Memphis were brought in, and the arrangement was reshaped to sound more like the newer Neil Diamond records that were dominating radio.
That created an unusual situation: Diamond had moved on, but his former record company was effectively trying to make his old recording sound as though it belonged to his new career.
And it worked.
The reworked “Shilo” was released as a single in 1970 and reached No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100. Bang even built a compilation album around the song, using the newly altered version as its centerpiece.
But Diamond wasn’t content to let that version represent him.
Instead of accepting the recording his former label had created, he went back into the studio himself. With producer Tom Catalano, he recorded another version of “Shilo”, featuring a quicker tempo, a tighter arrangement and a different vocal approach. That recording was subsequently added to a reissue of Velvet Gloves and Spit in 1970.
And suddenly, one song existed in multiple competing forms.
There was the original 1967 recording that Diamond had fought to have released.
There was Bang’s revamped version, created after Diamond had already left.
And then there was Diamond’s own new recording, made partly in response to what his former label had done.
For fans, it became one of the strangest chapters in his early catalog. The song that had once been rejected as too personal eventually became a Top 25 hit—but not with the recording Diamond had originally made.
The irony was almost perfect.
Bang Records had spent years pushing Diamond toward the kind of straightforward pop hits it believed would sell. Diamond wanted something more intimate. “Shilo” became the battle line between those two visions.
He eventually won his larger fight for control, but it took years. Diamond’s legal disputes with Bang continued long after he had moved to Uni, and in 1977 he finally purchased the rights to his Bang-era master recordings.
By then, “Shilo” had already taken on a life of its own.
The song had been rejected.
Then revived.
Then rebuilt without Diamond’s participation.
Then recorded again by Diamond himself.
And somewhere in that messy history was a remarkable lesson about the young Neil Diamond: he wasn’t willing to let a record company decide what his most personal songs were supposed to sound like.
What began as a disagreement over one strange, intimate song eventually became one of the clearest signs that Diamond was determined to control the direction of his own music—even if it meant recording the same song all over again just to make it his way.