Long before “Sweet Caroline” became an American institution, Neil Diamond was still trying to figure out what kind of songwriter he wanted to become. He was young, ambitious, and eager to write about subjects beyond the romantic songs and pop hits that were beginning to establish his name. Sometimes that freedom produced something brilliant. And sometimes, by his own later admission, it produced something he wished he had never recorded.
One of those songs was “The Pot Smoker’s Song.”
Released on Diamond’s 1968 album Velvet Gloves and Spit, the track came from an unusual place. Diamond had become involved with Phoenix House, an anti-drug program in New York, and hearing the stories of people recovering from addiction affected him deeply. He decided those experiences had to become a song. The problem was that Diamond was trying to write about a world he did not personally understand.
The result was unlike the Neil Diamond songs that would eventually make him famous.
Rather than writing a straightforward pop song, he attempted something closer to a semi-documentary piece, incorporating the voices and experiences of addicts into the recording. His intention was serious. He wanted to say something meaningful about drug use and addiction. But years later, Diamond was brutally honest about how he felt the song had turned out.
He called it “terrible.”
Worse, he remembered that people laughed at it. In a 2008 interview with Q magazine, Diamond looked back on the song with obvious discomfort, acknowledging that the track had not achieved what he intended. He also questioned whether he had been the right person to tell that particular story in the first place, since he had no personal experience with marijuana at the time.
That makes the song fascinating today—not because it was secretly a lost masterpiece, but because it reveals how uncertain Diamond could still be as an artist in the late 1960s.
He was experimenting.
Velvet Gloves and Spit itself came at an important turning point. Diamond had left Bang Records and moved to Uni Records, giving himself more freedom to pursue material that didn’t necessarily fit the formula of his earlier hits. The album contained ambitious ideas, even if not all of them worked. “The Pot Smoker’s Song” simply became one of the clearest examples of Diamond pushing himself into territory where he hadn’t yet found his voice.
And there is something almost ironic about that in hindsight.
The man who would eventually write songs capable of turning ordinary emotions into enormous pop moments was still learning what subjects suited him—and which ones didn’t. His later catalog would contain deeply personal material such as “I Am… I Said,” romantic standards, character songs, and anthems that connected with millions. But before that confidence arrived, there were experiments that simply fell flat.
Most artists would probably prefer those failures to disappear.
Diamond didn’t exactly pretend this one was misunderstood genius. He admitted that it was bad.
That honesty makes the forgotten track more revealing than another success story ever could. Behind the polished image of the superstar was a songwriter who sometimes made questionable creative decisions, listened to the reaction, and eventually looked back at his younger self with a mixture of embarrassment and perspective.
Today, “The Pot Smoker’s Song” is nowhere near the songs most people associate with Neil Diamond. It doesn’t have the cultural afterlife of “Sweet Caroline,” the emotional weight of “I Am… I Said,” or the pop history of “I’m a Believer.”
And perhaps Diamond was perfectly happy with that.
Because sometimes the most revealing song in an artist’s catalog isn’t the one they are proudest of.
It’s the one they later admit they wish they had never written.