MAGIC MOMENTS: A SIX-DISC BOX SET OF DOC POMUS DEMOS IS COMING
Medicine heads: (left) Doc Pomus sings at the Pied Piper club, NYC, September 1947; (right) in his Brill Building office with co-writer Mort Shuman, 1961.
William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress
“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”.