I Had to Pay the Rent: The Battles Behind Neil Diamond’s ‘I’m a Believer’
The biggest song of 1967 was sung by a band that did not, strictly speaking, exist — four actors hired to play a pop group on television, fronting a record they were barely allowed to touch. And it was written by a twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn songwriter who was on the record himself, strumming an acoustic guitar in the corner of the studio, watching his own breakthrough happen to somebody else. “I’m a Believer” spent seven weeks at number one, sold a million copies before most record shops had even stocked it, and became one of the best-selling singles ever made. Its writer earned his first decent royalty check from it. He also spent the rest of his career being asked why he gave it away.
This is the story of a song fought over by nearly everyone who touched it: a publisher who grabbed it, a television band who revolted against the system that produced it, a record label boss who went through the roof when he learned what his songwriter had done, and the songwriter himself — a former pre-med student who had quit college ten credits short of a degree for a fifty-dollar-a-week job — learning, in public and at number one, exactly what his best work was worth and what it cost to hand it over.
The $50-a-Week Songwriter
Neil Diamond was not supposed to be a songwriter. He was supposed to be a doctor. Born in Brooklyn on January 24, 1941, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants, he grew up in a household where music was a pleasure, not a profession. At Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, he sang in the Freshman Chorus and the Choral Club — alongside a classmate named Barbra Streisand. They were not close. “We were two poor kids in Brooklyn,” Diamond recalled decades later. “We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes.” The two chorus kids would not properly meet until 1978, when they recorded Diamond’s “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” together and took it to number one. In the 1950s, they were just voices in the same school choir, and only one of them knew yet what she wanted.
Diamond went to New York University on a fencing scholarship, a pre-med student good enough with a foil to make the 1960 NCAA championship team. But he had begun cutting classes to ride the train up to Tin Pan Alley, knocking on publishers’ doors with his songs. In his senior year, ten credits short of graduating, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a job: sixteen weeks writing songs, fifty dollars a week. He dropped out of college to take it. It remains one of the great coin-flip decisions in pop history — the medical career abandoned for a contract shorter than a football season.
When the sixteen weeks ended, Sunbeam did not rehire him. What followed was the better part of a decade of almosts. Diamond wrote songs in a storage room above the Birdland jazz club on Broadway, a space he equipped with an upright piano and a pay telephone, and hawked them around the Brill Building and 1650 Broadway. He landed a brief singles deal with Columbia Records as a performer and watched it go nowhere. He married, started a family, and kept writing — songs for other people, demos sung in his own deep, grainy baritone, rejections filed away by the dozen. By 1965 he was twenty-four years old, a professional songwriter with no hits, a family to feed, and a growing suspicion that the songs he was writing in that room above Birdland might be better than the career he was having.
Cherry, Cherry
The break came through two of the sharpest ears in the business. Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich — the husband-and-wife team behind “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Leader of the Pack” — heard Diamond’s demos and heard something the industry had missed: the songwriter’s own voice, low and urgent, was not a liability. It was the act. They brought him to Bert Berns, the producer and label owner behind Bang Records, and in 1966 Diamond finally became what he had been trying to be since Sunbeam let him go: a recording artist singing his own material.
The results were immediate, if not yet enormous. “Solitary Man,” released in the spring of 1966, was a brooding, minor-key confession unlike anything else on the radio; it stalled at No. 55, but disc jockeys and critics noticed it. Then, that summer, came “Cherry, Cherry” — a handclap-driven celebration Diamond had written years earlier — and it roared to No. 6. “I Got the Feelin’ (Oh No No)” followed it into the Top 20. His first Bang album, The Feel of Neil Diamond, appeared that August — a songwriter’s calling card as much as a singer’s debut, its very title insisting that the grainy baritone Barry and Greenwich had championed was not a demo singer’s placeholder but the point of the exercise. Neil Diamond, the writer for hire, suddenly had a second career as Neil Diamond, the performer. The two careers were about to collide.
Because the performer’s breakthrough record, “Cherry, Cherry,” had also been heard by a man in another office across town who was building the most controversial pop act in America — and who needed, urgently, a song exactly like it.
The Man with the Golden Ear
Don Kirshner was known in the trade as “the man with the golden ear,” and in 1966 the description was barely an exaggeration. He had co-founded Aldon Music, the publishing house that turned the Brill Building songwriters — Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka — into the hit factory of the early sixties, and he had sold Aldon to Columbia Pictures and emerged running the music side of its Screen Gems empire. Kirshner did not merely find songs; he owned the pipeline through which songs became television, and television became sales. As head of Screen Gems’ music operation, Kirshner controlled the songs for The Monkees, the NBC television series about a fictional band — “a manufactured image,” as the industry openly called it — played by Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The show’s creators had wanted real songs by real hitmakers. Kirshner supplied them from his Brill Building stable: Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. The band’s first single, Boyce and Hart’s “Last Train to Clarksville,” had just topped the charts. The machine worked. It also had a hard rule at its center: the four Monkees would sing, but professional session musicians would play. The television band was a front. The records were Kirshner’s.
When Kirshner heard “Cherry, Cherry” on the radio, he heard the sound he wanted next. As Diamond later told Mojo: “It was one of the songs that was supposed to be on my first album, but Donny Kirshner, who was their music expert, heard ‘Cherry, Cherry’ on the radio and said, ‘Wow, I want something like that for the Monkees!’” Kirshner was given access to material Diamond had recorded for his own next album. He did not take one song. He took three: “I’m a Believer,” “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” and “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow).” All three would appear on the Monkees’ second album. The first of them would become the biggest record of the coming year.
Consider what Kirshner had actually done. He had reached into a struggling artist’s own album-in-progress and extracted its strongest commercial material — with the artist’s consent, because the artist needed the money and the exposure, and because in 1966 a songwriter did not say no to Don Kirshner. The arrangement did leave Diamond free to record the songs himself for his own album. But the singles, the television exposure, the phenomenon — those would belong to the Monkees. It was a fair deal by the standards of the Brill Building. It also drove the head of Diamond’s own record company out of his mind, as we shall see.
Written for Eddy Arnold
There is a legend attached to “I’m a Believer,” repeated so often over sixty years that it has become part of the song’s furniture: Diamond, it is said, wrote it with Eddy Arnold in mind. Arnold was the smooth country crooner who had just taken “Make the World Go Away” to the top of the country chart and into the pop Top 10, about as far from a television pop band as 1966 could offer, and the story — Diamond pitching his exuberant love song toward Nashville, only for Kirshner to reroute it to the Monkees — has the neatness of all good music-business folklore. Whether or not an Arnold recording was ever a serious possibility, the anecdote captures something true about the song: it was built like a country songwriter’s idea of joy, simple and sturdy, a convert’s testimony in three chords. “I thought love was only true in fairy tales,” it begins — a doubter’s opening — “meant for someone else, but not for me.”
What is certain is that Diamond was shopping the song hard. He had cut it for his own album. He also suggested it to the Fifth Estate, the group then following up their novelty hit “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” and they recorded it as an album track in 1967. The song was not a treasure its writer was hiding. It was inventory, offered to whoever might take it — which is precisely how a songwriter with rent due behaves, and precisely how a future standard can end up belonging to a band invented by a television network.
Two Days in October
The Monkees recorded “I’m a Believer” in New York on October 15 and again across October 22–25, 1966, at RCA Victor’s studios, with Jeff Barry — Diamond’s own mentor and producer — at the controls and Artie Butler arranging. The personnel list tells the whole story of the Monkees in 1966. Micky Dolenz sang the lead, with Davy Jones and Peter Tork on backing vocals. The instruments were played by the New York A-team: Al Gorgoni and Sal DiTroia on electric guitars, Russ Savakus on bass, Buddy Saltzman on drums, Stan Free on organ, George Butcher on electric piano, George Devens on tambourine. And on acoustic guitar, uncredited in the public mind then and for years after: Neil Diamond, playing rhythm on his own composition while an actor sang it. The session paperwork that proves he was in the room — painstakingly assembled decades later by Monkees historian Andrew Sandoval for Rhino’s archival editions — reads like the attendance sheet of a handover: the author, present but anonymous, strumming along while his song changed owners.
Whatever anyone thought of the arrangement, the record itself is close to perfect. It runs two minutes and forty-seven seconds and wastes none of them. The organ riff announces it like a fairground. Dolenz — a gifted singer whatever the band’s reputation — attacks the lyric with exactly the right mix of grievance and elation: this is a man who has been disappointed by love and is almost annoyed to have been proved wrong. “Then I saw her face.” The chorus does not modulate or complicate; it testifies. Barry’s production keeps everything bright, dry and forward, handclaps and tambourine pushing the beat like a parade. Billboard, reviewing the single that December, called it “an easy-go dance mover” that “will hit with immediate impact.” Cash Box praised its “infectious sounds.” Record World dispensed with analysis entirely: “sensational.”
Those sessions did double duty. The same band, in the same room, also cut Diamond’s “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow),” this time with Davy Jones singing lead — the other half of Kirshner’s harvest, bound for the same album, with Diamond’s acoustic guitar once again buried in the track. When the Monkees machine took a Neil Diamond song, it took the writer along as a session man.
Kirshner moved the television machine behind it. The show had premiered on NBC that September, an instant sensation built to sell exactly these records, and it featured the song repeatedly through December 1966, in episode after episode, so that by the time the single reached the shops, millions of teenagers could already sing it. The Monkees were, by design, the most heavily promoted band in America. “I’m a Believer” was about to show what that promotion could do when the song was worthy of it.
Gold in Two Days
The single — Colgems 1002, “I’m a Believer” backed with Boyce and Hart’s ferocious “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” — was released in November 1966, and what happened next had no real precedent in the record business. Advance orders reached 1,051,280 copies: more than a million records sold before the public could buy one. The single was certified gold within two days of release. Radio did not merely play the A-side; disc jockeys played both sides, and “Steppin’ Stone,” the B-side, climbed the chart under its own power to No. 20 — a showing almost unheard of for a flip side, and evidence that the Monkees phenomenon, at that moment, could have charted the group reading a menu.
“I’m a Believer” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending December 31, 1966 — the last number one of the old year — and stayed there for seven weeks, deep into February 1967. It became the biggest-selling single of 1967 in the United States. In Britain it topped the UK Singles Chart for four weeks across January and February 1967, the Monkees’ only British number one, and sold some 750,000 copies there in its original release alone. It reached No. 1 in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Finland and South Africa. Worldwide sales passed ten million physical copies — a figure fewer than forty singles in history had achieved — and the RIAA’s gold certification, based on four million units in the US accounting of the era, only hints at the scale. The song of a songwriter who, eighteen months earlier, could not get rehired at fifty dollars a week was, for seven weeks, the most popular recording on Earth.
Its writer’s name was on the label, in small print, where songwriters’ names live. Most of the teenagers buying the record did not know who Neil Diamond was. The industry did. And the industry also knew that the man who had written the biggest record in the world was, contractually, an artist on Bang Records whose own singles were doing a fraction of that business. That is where the fighting started.
The Album Nobody Approved
Kirshner, moving at the speed of the phenomenon, rushed the Monkees’ second album into the shops. More of the Monkees was released on January 9, 1967 — assembled from thirty-four session recordings Kirshner’s team had stockpiled, the twelve selections sequenced without the band’s input, and issued while the four Monkees were away on tour. They learned of its existence in Cleveland, Ohio, mid-tour: their new album was out, and nobody had told them. The cover photograph had been lifted from a JCPenney clothing advertisement the group had posed for. Kirshner’s liner notes praised his songwriters and producers at length and mentioned the Monkees themselves almost as an afterthought. Nesmith, the group’s most musically ambitious member and its fiercest internal critic, later told Melody Maker that More of the Monkees was “probably the worst album in the history of the world.”
The public disagreed — comprehensively. The album displaced the band’s own debut at No. 1 and stayed there for eighteen weeks, the longest run of any Monkees album; the debut had managed thirteen weeks of its own, and between them, the first two Monkees albums held the top of the American chart for thirty-one consecutive weeks. More of the Monkees became the best-selling album of 1967 in the United States and has since been certified five times platinum. Diamond’s three songs were aboard, including “I’m a Believer” as the closing track — his composition anchoring an album its supposed artists considered an insult. The paradox is the whole Monkees story in one artifact: a record made cynically, received rapturously, and resented bitterly by the young men whose faces sold it. And it made the revolt inevitable.
A Hole in the Wall
The Monkees’ grievance was not really about money. It was about music. Nesmith and Tork were genuine musicians; Dolenz and Jones were genuine performers; all four were being treated, on their own records, as a vocal quartet hired to decorate other men’s work. In January 1967, at a meeting in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel — Kirshner, the group, and Colgems lawyer Herb Moelis in attendance — the confrontation turned physical in the most famous way a meeting can. Royalty checks and gold records were presented; Nesmith, demanding that the group be allowed to make its own music, put his fist through the wall and told Moelis: “That could have been your face.”
A compromise followed: the Monkees would record their own material; Kirshner’s productions and the group’s would be kept apart. Kirshner then broke the agreement in the most Kirshner way imaginable — by trying to win. Eager to repeat the “I’m a Believer” formula, he flew Davy Jones to New York, cut Diamond’s “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” with Jones’s first lead vocal on a Monkees single, paired it with another of his own productions, “She Hangs Out,” printed promo copies labeled “My Favorite Monkee — Davy Jones Sings,” and released the single in Canada without telling anyone. Copies surfaced; airplay followed; the Monkees and their producers discovered they had a new record out the way they had discovered the album — after the fact. In the last week of February 1967, Kirshner was fired from the Monkees project altogether, and dismissed as president of Columbia-Screen Gems Music and Colgems Records into the bargain.
The Diamond song at the center of the scandal survived it. “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” was retained as the Monkees’ third single, properly released in March 1967 with the group’s own “The Girl I Knew Somewhere” on the B-side, and climbed to No. 2. Freed of Kirshner, the Monkees went into the studio and made Headquarters as a real band — Chip Douglas producing, the four of them playing their own instruments — and took it to No. 1 that spring, proof on vinyl that the revolt had never been only about pride. The “prefab four” had won their war. But it is worth pausing on the strangest detail of the whole affair: the weapons on both sides were Neil Diamond songs. Kirshner’s power play and Kirshner’s downfall, the insults and the hits, all ran through the catalog of one Brooklyn songwriter who was not even in the room.
The First Decent Royalty Check
And what of the songwriter? The mythology of the music business would prefer Diamond bitter — the genius robbed by the machine. The man himself, asked about it across the decades, has consistently refused the role. “I was thrilled,” he told Billboard, of the Monkees’ success with his song. “They were the hottest thing going, second only to the Beatles, and I needed the money. I made a few dollars, and it was the first decent royalty check I received.” To Mojo, in 2008, he put it even more plainly: “I was thrilled, because at heart I was still a songwriter, and I wanted my songs on the charts.”
The fury, it turned out, was not his. It belonged to his own side of the street. “But the head of my record company freaked,” Diamond recalled. “He went through the roof because he felt that I had given No. 1 records away to another group. I couldn’t have cared less because I had to pay the rent, and the Monkees were selling records, and I wasn’t being paid for my records.” Every clause of that sentence is a small education in the economics of 1966. A hit for the Monkees paid immediately, in mechanical royalties, at a scale his own young recording career could not approach. The outrage of his label — whose business was selling Neil Diamond records — was also rational: its artist had just handed the competition, if a television band can be called that, the biggest single of the year, and two more songs besides.
Both men were right. That is what makes the episode a battle rather than a blunder. But only one of them was writing the songs, and the writer had learned something no royalty check alone could teach: his material, sung by anyone, could dominate the world — which meant the material was the fortune. The next question was whether he would keep giving it away.
His Own Believer
Diamond’s own “I’m a Believer” reached the public on his second Bang album, Just for You, in 1967 — and the album has become, in hindsight, one of the most remarkable documents of the era: a songwriter’s trunk, opened. Alongside his “I’m a Believer” sat “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” “Red Red Wine,” “Shilo,” “The Boat That I Row,” his own “Cherry, Cherry” and “Solitary Man” — song after song that the world would eventually know, several of them most famously in other people’s voices. His recording of “I’m a Believer” is leaner and more urgent than the Monkees’, the baritone pushing where Dolenz soared, a writer reclaiming his property by the simple act of singing it as he had imagined it. Nor was it an afterthought dashed off to cash in on somebody else’s hit: Diamond had cut the song before the Monkees ever entered a studio — his own next-album recordings, by his account, were the very performances Kirshner auditioned when he came shopping after “Cherry, Cherry.” The Monkees had not covered Neil Diamond. Neil Diamond had been covered by the Monkees, in advance, with his own record sitting in a vault waiting its turn.
It made little commercial noise at the time — the world already had its “I’m a Believer,” and it wore the Monkees’ faces. Only in 1971, after Diamond had left Bang and become a star elsewhere, did his old label issue his version as a single, part of a campaign of reissues from the catalog he had left behind. It reached No. 51 on the Hot 100, and charted respectably in Germany and the Netherlands — a footnote, by any measure, next to the original. Diamond returned to the song once more on record in 1979, cutting a fresh version with additional lyrics for his album September Morn, as if still turning the thing over, still trying to own it outright. He had sung it on television as early as 1970, duetting with Linda Ronstadt in a medley of his songs on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. And he kept it in his concerts for decades, where it appears on his 1994 live album Live in America — the giveaway, reclaimed nightly, in front of audiences who were there for him.
There is a particular poignancy in those later performances. When Diamond sang “I’m a Believer” in concert, he was not covering the Monkees. He was presenting credentials: I wrote the song the whole world knows; the biggest record of 1967 has my name in the small print; here it is in my own voice. The audiences, by then, understood. It had taken a while.
The Lesson
What did the episode teach him? Follow the money forward and the answer writes itself. Diamond’s years at Bang after the Monkees affair were marked by a hardening determination not to be a supplier in somebody else’s machine. He fought the label over control of his own work — most bitterly over “Shilo,” his song about an imaginary childhood friend, which he believed in as a single and the label did not — and in 1968 he left Bang for Uni Records, a fresh start on terms that suited an artist rather than a staff writer. The man who had let Kirshner pick three songs out of his album-in-progress now guarded his best material for himself.
The signs showed at once — his late Bang singles “Kentucky Woman” and “Thank the Lord for the Night Time” were hits he kept for his own voice — and the harvest came into full flower at Uni. “Sweet Caroline,” kept for himself, became his signature in 1969. “Cracklin’ Rosie” gave him his first No. 1 as a performer in 1970; “Song Sung Blue” another in 1972. The great irony — and Diamond, to his credit, has always seemed to savor it — is that the world went on finding his old giveaway trunk anyway. UB40 took his album cut “Red Red Wine” to No. 1 in 1983 and again in America in 1988. Urge Overkill dragged “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” out of Just for You and into Pulp Fiction. The songs he had scattered in the sixties kept coming back as other people’s hits for the rest of the century — but by then the arrangement had reversed. He was no longer the hungry writer renting out his fortune. He was the fortune’s owner, collecting.
None of which is to say the Monkees episode was painless or simple. It is to say it was educational, in the most expensive currency there is: proof, delivered at number one for seven weeks, that the songs were the asset. Every young songwriter who has ever been urged to sign away a catalog, to take the check and let the machine decide, is living in the shadow of that lesson. Diamond learned it at twenty-five, standing in a studio with an acoustic guitar, listening to somebody else sing his breakthrough. He never stood in that corner again.
Believers Everywhere
A song that sturdy does not stay in one decade. Robert Wyatt, the Canterbury-scene singer rebuilding his life and career after the fall that left him paralyzed, released “I’m a Believer” as a single in 1974, produced by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason; it reached No. 29 in Britain, and Wyatt performed it on Top of the Pops that September — the sunny Monkees hit reframed as quiet, stubborn survival. In 1995, EMF joined forces with the comedy duo Reeves and Mortimer for a boisterous version that climbed to No. 3 on the UK chart. Italy had claimed the song early: Caterina Caselli’s 1967 cover, “Sono bugiarda,” recast the convert’s joy as a confession — “I’m a liar” — and turned up more than half a century later in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci. Even the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple carried the Monkees’ record in its home-video release, until licensing tangles swapped it out of the 2001 director’s cut. The song kept migrating — between languages, genres, centuries — because its mechanism never wears out: a skeptic, converted in two minutes and forty-seven seconds, shouting about it.
The Ogre
Then, in 2001, the song acquired its second enormous life. The makers of Shrek, DreamWorks’ animated fairy tale, needed an anthem for a movie about an ogre who discovers that fairy tales had him wrong — and they chose “I’m a Believer” for the most logical of reasons: its first line. “I thought love was only true in fairy tales” is practically the film’s thesis statement. Smash Mouth, already the soundtrack’s house band thanks to “All Star,” cut a bright, punchy version — twice, in fact: the soundtrack’s sharp, slightly sped-up radio take, and a slower alternate version issued on the CD single, as if even they could not decide whether the song was a sprint or a strut. Released as a single in August 2001, it reached No. 25 on the Hot 100 and the Top 10 in Australia; in the film itself, Eddie Murphy’s Donkey sings it in the finale, converting a wedding into a stadium. A generation of children who could not have picked a Monkee out of a lineup learned the chorus before they learned to ride bicycles.
Diamond’s reaction, when it came, was the reaction of a man who had long since made his peace with the song’s wanderings. “I liked it a lot,” he said, “because it was an animated feature and I’d never been included in anything like that. I thought this would be interesting, especially with Eddie Murphy doing one version of it. I hadn’t heard it until I saw the movie. I liked what they did with it.” There was no territorial growl, no songwriter’s complaint about liberties taken — the same generosity, or the same pragmatism, that had let Kirshner walk off with the song in 1966, now at sixty and from a position of total security. The song’s Shrek afterlife did what afterlives do: it sent new listeners backward, to Smash Mouth’s source, to the Monkees, to the name in the small print. Weezer covered it again for Shrek Forever After in 2010. The fairy tale kept renewing its lease.
Why It Endures
Strip the story down to the lyric and the endurance is no mystery. “I’m a Believer” is structured as an argument with a verdict: a man who had concluded that love was a story told to other people meets a face, and the whole architecture of his skepticism collapses in a chorus. It is doubt and joy in the same three chords, which is why it can serve a Monkees romp, a Robert Wyatt act of survival, a cartoon wedding and a stadium singalong with equal conviction. Critics eventually filed the paperwork: the song stands at No. 341 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and high on Billboard’s all-time Hot 100 rankings, a Brill Building job of work canonized among the century’s standards. Diamond himself entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011 — inducted, pointedly, as a performer of his own songs, in a career measured by the records he kept.
But the song’s deepest claim on us may be the picture it finally produced, fifty-two years after the session. In September 2014, Diamond returned to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn — the school of the choir, the cigarettes, the other poor kid named Streisand — and played a surprise concert in the auditorium, his own “I’m a Believer” ringing around the room where he had first sung in public. And in July 2018, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, where the Recording Academy was presenting him with its Lifetime Achievement Award, the tribute performance of “I’m a Believer” was sung by Micky Dolenz — who was joined, mid-song, by Diamond himself, months after a Parkinson’s diagnosis had forced his retirement from touring. “It was a thrill of a lifetime singing with Neil Diamond,” Dolenz said afterward. The writer and the television singer, the man who gave the song away and the man whose voice made it immortal, standing in the same spotlight at last, trading the chorus like old partners.
That is the whole saga resolved in a single image, and it is why the battles behind “I’m a Believer” were worth every scar. The song survived the machine that manufactured it, the revolt it accidentally armed, the label war it ignited and the ogre who adopted it — because at its center sits the simplest and most useful story pop knows how to tell: a man who believed in nothing saw a face, and changed his mind. Its writer had to pay the rent. The rent got paid. And then, for the rest of his life, so did he.