Paul Anka on his amazing, star-studded career: ‘Revenge is a motivator you wouldn’t believe’ | documentary

IIn 1956, when Paul Anka was 15 years old, he was in love with Chuck Berry. So, when the star came to play in his hometown of Ottawa, Canada, the ambitious kid made sure to sneak backstage with his guitar to play him a song he had just written. “I started singing Chuck Berry’s Diana when he suddenly stopped me and said, ‘This is the worst song I’ve ever heard, go back to school.’

Instead of retracting such a statement, Anka used it as motivation. “Revenge is a motivation you wouldn’t believe,” the 84-year-old star said with a hearty laugh the other day. “I said to myself: ‘I’ll show him.’ This situation has prevailed for me throughout my entire life.

It didn’t hurt that within a year, the dewy Diana had become a global giant, rising to number one in the UK and US, making him the first Canadian artist to top the US charts while ensuring he would never spend another day in school. The following year, his equal parts single “You Are My Destiny” cracked the top 10 in both countries, a triumph that was tripled in 1959 and ’60 with hits like “Lonely Boy,” “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” and “Puppy Love.”

Although these accomplishments were impressive, what sets Anka’s work apart from that of other teen idols – then and now – is that he wrote all of those songs himself. and I retained the copyright. No wonder that during our 90-minute interview, Anka referred to himself as a writer no less than 22 times. “Without the songwriter, there are no record labels, no CEOs, no lawyers. There is nothing,” he said.

At the same time, Anka knew his career would be nothing if he didn’t find a way to mature his voice as his teenage years waned. Over the decades, he’s done both with enough regularity and speed to sustain a seven-decade career, extended by a new album, Paul Anka: My Way, due to arrive before his 85th birthday next year. In the process, he made key connections with stars from the 1950s (Buddy Holly) to today (Drake). Along the way, his compositions have ranked among the most performed pieces in music history, most notably My Way, which managed to become a signature anthem for both Frank Sinatra and Sid Vicious, as well as the bouncy score for Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, a 15-second refrain that ran throughout the show’s entire 30-year run, earning Anka millions in the process.

The full arc of this development is now told in a new HBO documentary called Paul Anka: His Way. Speaking by phone from a Los Angeles recording studio near his home, Anka said the main reason for participating in the film was to educate those ignorant about the scope of his accomplishments. “There are a lot of people who don’t know that I wrote the last three songs for Michael Jackson,” he said. “I’m very proud of that.”

The structure of the film — half of which takes place in the present — emphasizes another angle that is crucial to it. “I want people to understand that I still work, and that I can walk,” he said with a laugh. “Last week I played in front of 10,000 people in a stadium in Mexico!”

The audiences he finds in such places are not exactly ancient. Six decades after its supposed expiration date, “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” has become a phenomenon on TikTok by generating more than 145 million collective views from more than 21,000 videos created by young people imitating the song. In 2021, a version remixing his original song with Doja Cat’s single “Streets” became a Top 10 hit. “What a life that has been forced upon me that I can sit at home and get a check for something I did years ago,” he said. “It’s stupid money.”

If the result had provided him with a more lavish lifestyle than he started with, his family would not have been starving when he was growing up. His parents, of Lebanese descent, ran a successful restaurant in Ottawa, and when superstars stopped by, Anka would make them listen to him sing. “I’ve always been a fierce kid,” he said.

While his father wanted him to enter the family business, “I believed in being creative,” he said, and he was not ashamed of it. At the age of 14, while visiting his uncle in California, he sought out a local label who had a hit with the band Stranded in the Jungle by the Cadets. He convinced them to let him cut a song he wrote using the Cadet as his backup. While the song bombed, the following year, he lobbied his parents to send him to New York where he successfully convinced producer Don Costa to sign him to his new label ABC-Paramount. Today, he refers to his first single for them, “Diana,” as “a stupid little song about a girl who doesn’t even want to look at me.” Regardless, fans swooned.

Before that, Anka says, he had “no success at all” with girls. “I went from not knowing anything to ending up with French women, Italian women, and Japanese women, who taught me everything I longed to know.”

At the same time, he felt a cog in the teenage machine. “The elders would tell me what to do and what to wear,” he said. “I was in a cage.”

Worse still, he was bullied by some of the older stars on the tour, especially Jerry Lee Lewis. “He hated that I was so successful,” he said. “He would attack me and I would fight back. We would throw things at each other.”

In contrast, he had a close relationship with Buddy Holly, to the point that even though Holly was another rare teen idol who wrote his own songs, he still asked Anka to write one for him. The score, It Don’t Matter Anymore, later covered by stars from Linda Ronstadt to Eva Cassidy, was the last piece Holly recorded before his death in a plane crash in 1959. He recorded it in a very different style from his other songs, eschewing the cricket rhythm section for strings. Immediately after his death, it became the first posthumous single to top the UK charts. However, Anka was so shocked by Holly’s death that he gave all copyrights to the song to his widow, a fact not present in the documentary.

Despite his success as a teenage dream, Anka was already feeling the itch. “I had this little voice, and I really wanted to grow up,” he said.

His role models were Vegas royalty — Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. — all men in suits and exuding stately elegance. Instead of ignoring the kid, “they fully embraced me,” Anka said, making him the youngest person to play in Vegas to that point. In return, he brought a new crowd to the city, much to the delight of the mafiosi who ran the place. Today, he has nothing but glowing things to say about the mob. “I knew what they could do, but I can honestly say they were my men,” he said. “You shake hands with them, and you have a deal they stick to.”

In 1962, he formed another important relationship with an older artist. While considering a TV show for Granada, he felt it needed a comedian to break up the music. He settled on Johnny Carson, who was not widely known at the time. When the comedian had the opportunity to take over the Tonight Show soon after, he asked Anka to write a theme song for him, and while Carson liked the result, he ultimately told Anka that he should go with a piece penned by the show’s musical director, Skitch Henderson. That’s when Anka’s business savvy kicked in: He offered Carson half of his publishing of the song if he would use his take instead. The bribery worked! Years later, Carson’s lawyer told the New York Times that his revenues generated between $800,000 and $900,000 annually for three decades.

This wasn’t the only smart business move Anka made. In 1963, when his record label began to lose confidence in him, he bought back his entire catalog, a harbinger of Taylor Swift’s move decades later. Then, to exploit his growing international audience, he began recording his songs in a variety of languages, including Italian, which eventually made him one of that country’s best-selling stars. However, by the British Invasion in the mid-1960s, Anka had fallen far behind mainstream trends. In response, he began acting, though not particularly well, although he did get a role in the respectable film The Longest Day, for which he also wrote the musical theme.

His real comeback didn’t begin until 1969 when he wrote My Way as a final song for Sinatra, who told him he was planning to retire at 58. Anka matched his self-appreciative lyric to a melody from a French song to which he had acquired the rights two years earlier. Today, he says he has no idea how he got the wisdom, at 24, to write one of the most famous paeans to aging ever. “Where did Jesus get this from?” He remembers thinking. “You changed my life.

He was influenced by Sinatra’s version, and was initially appalled by Sid Vicious’s anarchic style, which added to the lyricism “fuck”, “cunt” and “queer”. “Would I have recorded it that way? No!” Anka said. “Do I have the imagination to do that? No! But I think everyone has the right to express themselves.”

The song he wrote for Tom Jones in 1971, She’s a Lady, not only gave the Welsh singer one of his biggest hits, but became a touchstone for swagger. Three years later, Anka revived his performing career with “You’re Have My Baby,” and while the song became his first No. 1 hit in 15 years, it attracted the wrath of critics. Words – that described a woman as having for him Kid – inspired Ms. magazine to name him “Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year.” “How can it be so negative towards women?” – Anka asked. “I have five women living at home.” (He has five daughters.) “I had my period everywhere.”

Although his songs dried up after the 1980s, he continued to reinvent himself, most clearly on his 2005 album Rock Swings on which he performed swing versions of guitar-driven songs such as Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. “Dave Grohl told me he didn’t know what the words were [to Teen Spirit] “I mean even my copy,” Anka said.

The Michael Jackson songs he co-wrote, all of which were released posthumously, came from sessions Anka had with the late star in the 1980s. After Jackson’s death, his estate used key parts of one song to create the single This Is It, without knowing its true provenance. When Anka found out, he threatened to file a lawsuit if they didn’t give him 50% of the publishing, which they promptly did. The same pattern was repeated in two of Jackson’s singles, one of which sampled Drake’s “Don’t Matter to Me.”

In the years that followed, Anka continued to tour. He’s still performing “Puppy Love” at 84 years old. “Am I embarrassed to sing it now?” “Kind of,” he admits.

To overcome this, he puts himself in the shoes of the fans who still demand it. He plans to continue singing it on his tour next year. He also has a new album working on which he aims to follow up with coming out in February. Oh, and then there’s a play about his life that he’s overseeing and hopes to bring to Broadway. When asked about the final curtain he will leave behind, Anka thinks the play might be a fitting climax, though he’s not sure. “I plan to keep doing this until I can’t stand up,” he said. “Then it will be the big wave and it will come out.”