“How Hearts [and Bones] Approach What They Yearn”
or
How (Paul + Artie) + (Paul + Carrie) – Artie – Carrie
=
1 So-so Film + 2 Albums (One Very Good and One
Excellent)
You’d probably quickly recognize the title track from Paul Simon’s Grammy-Award-winning Album-of-the-Year Still Crazy After All These Years from 1975. And you’d probably also recognize the opening track from Simon’s Grammy-Award-winning Album-of-the-Year Graceland from 1986, “Boy in the Bubble.”
Now, if you know anything about the much-ballyhooed Graceland
album, you’ll know that it was inspired by a cassette tape of South African “township”
music, entitled Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II, that producer
Heidi Berg gave to Paul Simon (Morella 235). The tape intrigued Simon, and his
interest led him to South Africa, despite Apartheid, to learn more about the
music and to meet musicians, which, in turn, resulted in his collaborations
with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Joseph Shabala, Youssou N'Dour, among others.
But what, you may ask, could have caused a famous and
successful singer-songwriter and celebrity to go half-way around the
world to a segregationist country under economic and cultural boycotts (and,
because of the trip, to suffer not-insubstantial criticism subsequently)?
The answer? The failures of both One-Trick Pony,
the 1980 film that he wrote, scored, and starred in, and his 1983 release, Hearts
and Bones, his worst-selling studio album since Simon and Garfunkel’s 1964
debut, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M..
***
Musical
success was something that Simon had, for the most part, always known. He and his childhood friend Art Garfunkel,
performing as “Tom and Jerry” even co-wrote a hit record as teenagers, “Hey
Schoolgirl,” which reached #49 on the Billboard singles chart, and
earned them a spot on “American Bandstand” with Dick Clark on November 22,
1957, an episode that also featured Jerry Lee Lewis (Morella 16; Jackson
25-25).
After
the break-up of Tom and Jerry in 1959, when Artie went to
Columbia to study math education (and, by the way, roomed with my former CCSU
colleague Barry Leeds) and Paul headed off to Queens College as an English
major), Simon continued to write and record his own and others’ rock ‘n’ roll
songs, along Tin Pan Alley and in the Brill Building – as Jerry Landis, True
Taylor, and even Tico and the Triumphs (Luftig 3). While a few of these
forgettable songs broke onto the very bottom of the charts very occasionally,
and despite entering law school upon graduating from Queens College, Paul never
abandoned his desire to be a rock ‘n’ roll star. Nor did Artie.
In
1964, however, in the wake of Bob Dylan, Columbia signed a reunited, and now
folk duo, Simon and Garfunkel to a contract; they then recorded Wednesday
Morning, 3 A.M., which included “The Sounds of Silence.” The album flopped, and,
as a result, Paul headed off to England
solo – only to return to the states and reunite with Garfunkel after an
electrified version, “The Sound of Silence,” (overdubbed by CBS engineer Tom
Wilson without the knowledge of either singer) entered the charts and climbed
to #1 (Jackson 89).
The
rest is oft-told musical history: five consecutive hit albums for the duo - Sounds
of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme (both from 1966);
and then three consecutive #1 albums Bookends and The Graduate
(both from 1968) and 1970’s Album-of-the-Year Bridge Over Troubled Water
(with three Top 10 singles of its own – the title track, “The Boxer,” and
“Cecilia”).
What
followed – namely, the breakup of “Simon and Garfunkel” – surprised everyone
but Paul, who, as the pair’s sole songwriter, was feeling constrained by the
need to write for a duo – which meant supplying Artie and his undeniably
beautiful voice with enough appropriately soaring ballads to please him and
Simon and Garfunkel fans. Paul, the rock ‘n’ roller, remember, had always been
interested in what he termed “rhythm songs,” not to mention writing in, and
for, his own voice.
In
the 1970s, Simon would go on to write, record, and release three solo studio
albums for Columbia: Paul Simon (1972), There Goes Rhymin’ Simon
(1973), and Still Crazy After All These Years (1975), which it should be noted
included a reunion with Garfunkel on the “My Little Town” (reaching #9 on the
charts) and a #1 single, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” All three albums would break into the top
five on the Billboard Album Chart (Whitburn 280), and, as stated at the
beginning, Still Crazy…would win the “Album of the Year” Grammy in
February 1976. In his acceptance speech,
Paul thanked Stevie Wonder for “not releasing an album this year” (O’Neil 236).
In
short, both as a half of “Simon and Garfunkel” and as a solo act, Simon had
been on a phenomenal roll for close to 15 years in a business that is decidedly
fickle and quick to forget, and always looking for the next big thing. Between 1964 and 1980,
remember, pop-music tastes had gone from folk to the British Invasion to Motown
to country-rock to Disco to New Wave (with all the variations and permutations
therein). Simon had survived them all.
***
Simon’s
desire to make a movie in the late 1970s can hardly be considered surprising
given:
a)
his previous musical involvement in films: from Mike Nichols’s The
Graduate and D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop in 1968 (Jackson 106)
to Warren Beatty’s Shampoo in 1975, and his
own role as record producer Tony Lacey in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall in
1977 (Kingston 188);
b)
Art Garfunkel’s film career, with roles in Catch-22; Carnal
Knowledge; and Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, a movie released
contemporaneously with Simon’s One Trick Pony in 1980;
c)
Paul’s close affiliation with the Saturday Night Live team, including his co-writing,
with Lorne Michaels, the hour-long Paul Simon Special, which aired on
NBC on 8 December 1977 (Kingston 191); but, perhaps most importantly,
d)
the cinematic nature of his songwriting.
Think of Simon and
Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” for example:
When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station
Running scared
Laying low, seeking out the poorer
quarters
Where the ragged people go
Looking for the places only they would
know
or
“Gone at Last” from Still Crazy After All These Years:
The night was black, roads were icy
Snow was fallin’, drifts were high
I was weary from my driving
So I stopped to rest for a while
I sat down at a truck stop
I was thinking about my past
I’ve had a long streak of that bad luck
But I’m praying it’s gone at last…
Or
the bridge of “How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns” on One-Trick Pony:
After the rain on the interstate
The headlights slide past the moon
A bone-weary traveler
Waits by the side of the road
Where’s he going?
The question isn’t “Why
would Simon want to write a movie with music?” or even “Why would he want to
star in it?” (Think of every singer from Crosby and Sinatra to Presley, the
Beatles, and, later, Prince.) The question is: “Could he succeed at it?”
***
1980’s One-Trick Pony depicts the current life of
singer-songwriter Jonah Levin, played by Simon, who had an anti-war hit back in
the 1960s, but who is still trying to make a living in music by touring the country, playing small
clubs, with his band (real-life musicians Steve Gadd, Richard Tee, Eric Gale,
and Tony Levin). The band spends its time mostly in rented vans and third-rate
hotels reading the rare newspaper review or gambling on “Rock and Roll Deaths”
(45).
Jonah
is separated, and, later in the film, divorced from his wife Marion (played by
Blair Brown), and they have a young son, Matty. Marion’s primary reasons for
wanting to end their marriage are not that she and Jonah no longer love each
other or Matty, but rather a)
Jonah is never home, and, even when he is, he’s too preoccupied with thinking
about the road, and b) rock ‘n’ roll is a kid’s game, and Jonah needs to grow
up. Indeed, according to Marion, “when you get to a certain age…[rock ‘n’ roll
is] “pathetic” (30). He’s wanted to be Elvis Presley since he was “thirteen”
(29), and, with his one-and-only hit more than a decade old, at this point it
would seem it isn’t going to happen.
And, according to the film, Marion isn’t far off on
either point. The touring in which Jonah is constantly engaged includes audiences
that are there to see other acts (with cameos by the B-52s, The Lovin’
Spoonful, Sam and Dave, and Tiny Tim, by the way!), or dates that are cancelled
due to low ticket sales and even because the venue has shut its doors, without
notice (or recompense). As Clarence, the keyboardist, says, “…I can’t live off
$400 a week. That doesn’t cover my alimony or my dope bills.” And, as we saw, when the band gets reviewed
by the local newspaper, it’s decidedly lukewarm.
Marion
is also correct that Jonah can be as childish as his young son, with Jonah even
admitting to her, “I am Matty, just older” (92). Not coincidentally, Simon, as Jerry Landis,
had written and recorded a song “Just a Boy” in 1960 (Jackson 33).
This
childishness is underscored, perhaps unintentionally, by Simon’s being at its
most animated as an actor – excluding his musical performances with the band –
when Jonah is with his son Matty playing baseball or foosball or pinball or
going to see The Empire Strikes Back. And Simon’s lack of animation even includes
the bedroom scenes – when Jonah sleeps with Marion after the divorce; or
after a gig with a club waitress (played by Mare Winningham); or with his
record company’s president’s wife (played by Joan Hackett). Jonah’s just
happier being a kid in a man’s body.
And, yes, he, in fact, wears an Elvis t-shirt at one point.
Jonah’s
naivete (to put a more positive spin on it) is most pronounced, however, in his
dealings with record and radio executives. Jonah has no interest in playing
their game. He doesn’t perform his one-and-only hit in concert, and he clearly
doesn’t want to listen to any ideas to make his music more radio-friendly. While this can be noble, as when he wants to
include his band, and not drum machines and other such production techniques
that a hit producer (played by Lou Reed) wants to use, Jonah doesn’t
hide his contempt for such commercial concessions. Thus, in a meeting with his record company to
discuss the possibility of a new album, he first subtly insults the
intelligence of Cal Van Damp, Mr. “AM Ears” (played by Alan Goorwitz), and
then, at a party after a televised solo performance of “Soft Parachutes” which
he had only very reluctantly agreed to do, he drunkenly calls Cal a
“fat ass” several times.
The
depiction of record executives as soulless hacks (and the antipathy between
artists and “bean-counters”) is stereotypical, of course, but in this case also
a bit autobiographical, as Simon had just gone through a very messy “divorce”
from Columbia Records, resulting in Simon’s buying out his remaining contract
for $1.5 million and signing with Warner Brothers Records, who had agreed to
finance the film (Morella 194). This negative depiction of radio-friendly
production is also not a little ironic, however, given, remember, the
commercial success of “The Sound of Silence” -- only after being fiddled with
by a radio-friendly producer.
No “spoiler alerts” are necessary since I’m not going to
tell you what happens to Jonah and Marion and the band, and, besides, to be
truthful, you’re better off just listening to the soundtrack album because it
does everything the film does, only better.
For example, the core tensions of this movie can best be summarized in
three short excerpts from Simon’s lyrics on the soundtrack:
From “God Bless the
Absentee:”
Lord, I am a working man
And music is my trade
I’m traveling with this five-piece
band
I have a wife and family, but they
don’t see much of me
God bless the absentee
From “Long, Long Day:”
I’ve sure been on this road
Done nearly fourteen years
Can’t say my name’s well known
You don’t see my face on Rolling
Stone
But I’ve sure been on this road
And,
finally, from “Jonah:”
They say Jonah was swallowed by a whale
But I say there’s no truth to that tale
I know Jonah was swallowed by a song
Here’s to all the boys who came along
Carrying soft guitars in cardboard cases
All night long
And do you wonder where those boys have
gone?
In
addition, some of Simon’s short verses are better than entire scenes in the
film. For example:
In a phone booth
In some local bar and grill
Rehearsing what I’ll say, my coin returns
How the heart approaches what it yearns
is far more evocative of
the distance (both physical and emotional) between Jonah and Marion than the
early morning scene in the movie in which he calls her clearly feeling guilty
for his infidelity with the waitress (19-23).
And, in “That’s Why God Made the Movies,” the songwriter offers us an
etiological myth, an origin myth, for Jonah’s boyish wanderlust (which only
makes manifest how difficult it’d be for the musician actually to change):
When I was born my mother died
She said bye-bye, baby, bye-bye
And since that day
I’ve made my way
The notorious boy in the wild
Adopted by the wolves when he was a child
In short, in his
interactions with his wife, his mistress, and his record bosses, Jonah’s not
simply being contrarian or stubborn or even immature; in many ways the artist
as depicted in the lyrics is simply alien to the world the rest of us
inhabit. If only Simon the screenwriter
had been as nuanced as Simon the songwriter!
Both
the screenwriter and the songwriter envisioned different kinds of songs working
in different ways in the film and divided them into those that were meant to be
performed live in concert to capture the skill and camaraderie of the band
(“Ace in the Hole” and “One-Trick Pony”) and those meant to convey Jonah’s
mental and emotional states. And that’s why, even when the only thing we see on
screen is a van traveling on the highway, with “God Bless the Absentee”
playing, or we follow an outing with Jonah and Matty, with “That’s Why God Made
the Movies” replacing any dialogue, it’s more satisfyingly subtle than the
non-musical scenes because we learn about the character through the medium at
which Simon is best at conveying such subtleties – a song.
Simon’s
meticulous musical sense can be seen even in Jonah’s sole hit record, the
anti-war “Soft Parachutes.” In it, Simon nicely
channels the innocence and simplicity of his own early protest music, and thus avoiding Jonah’s
early work sounding like a mature songwriter:
Soft parachutes, Fourth of July
And villages burning
Returning the bodies, all laid in a line
Like soft parachutes
Last year I was a senior
In Emerson High School
I had me a girlfriend
We used to get high
And now I am flying
Down some Vietnam highway
Don’t ask me the reason
God only knows why.
Soft parachutes…
Compare that
to “On the Side of a Hill” that Simon released on his English solo album Songbook in 1965:
On the side of a hill in a land called
'Somewhere'
A little boy lies asleep in the earth
While down in the valley a cruel war rages
And people forget what a child's life is worth
On the side of a hill, a little cloud
weeps
And waters the grave with its silent tears
While a soldier cleans and polishes a gun
That ended a life at the age of seven years
And the war rages on in the land called 'Somewhere'
And generals order their men to kill
And to fight for a cause they've long ago forgotten
While the little cloud weeps on the side of a hill
Despite
the beautiful and carefully-constructed music, and much to Simon’s
disappointment – one biographer refers to him as “inconsolable” (Morella 205) –
the film received mixed reviews. Chevy Chase, Simon’s
friend and himself the maker of a not few bad films, perhaps summarized it
best:
I wasn’t crazy about it. It didn’t stand
out for me. I think some people stand
out in film and others stand out in their
own form. Paul just didn’t hit me that
well in that role. Anymore than if I went
out the road with an orchestra I would
do well. (Jackson 164)
Even more affecting on
Simon than the mediocre reviews was the poor performance of the film at the box
office. People stayed away – in droves. Indeed, given his investment in
emotional, professional, and financial capital, Simon had never come
close to “experienc[ing] rejection of this magnitude before” (Morella 205).
But,
despite the so-so quality of the film, as a film, in this man’s opinion, it’s
sad that the music didn’t receive any notice from the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences. “Late in the Evening,” after all, reached #6 on the Billboard
singles chart (Eliot 168), and it’s hardly a secret that the Oscars love
popular works. What, you ask, won Best
Song at the 1981 Academy Awards? Michael
Gore’s “Fame” (beating out “9 to 5,” “On the Road Again,” “Out Here on My Own”
also from Fame, and something called “People Alone”). “Late in the
Evening” easily beats every one of those in its musical production, its
lyricism, and, yes, even its significance to the movie by clearly, and
succinctly, introducing Jonah’s musical history.
The movie did spark in Paul the notion that, for as long as he’d
been in rock ‘n’ roll, he had “never
really been part of a band” before – only a duo or playing with studio
musicians (Morella 203), so he immediately went on tour with the band from the
film as its core. At the time, he was quoted as saying:
I’d like to go out there. I’d
like to take this band and have a record of it –
you know, these guys, at this
particular moment, ‘cause I don’t know if
we’ll all be together again.
(Morella 205)
And the
critical reception of the tour, especially of the European leg, was everything
the film’s reception had not been: decidedly positive (including when Garfunkel
joined him on stage in Paris for a few songs) (Morella 206). But, at tour’s end, in 1981, Paul was faced
with a failed movie, the soundtrack’s lackluster sales, the problems of a
long-distance relationship with Carrie Fisher, and a bad case of writer’s block.
***
The main reason Garfunkel was in Paris during Paul’s tour was to
escape New York to grieve the loss of Laurie Bird, his girlfriend since 1975.
Bird had died by suicide in 1979 in
Art’s New York apartment while he was off making the Nicholas Roeg film Bad
Timing…A Sensual Obsession (Livingston 213). Paul’s wishing to help his
mourning friend was also the primary reason he contacted Artie about joining
him on-stage once again when City officials asked Simon about the possibility
of performing a concert to raise funds for Central Park, badly in need of
repairs and updating due to years of underfunding. Paul thought he and
Garfunkel’s singing a few of their hits together would be good for both Artie
and the fundraiser. (And it certainly couldn’t hurt what he deemed to be his
own current professional slump.) Artie was excited by the invitation, and,
after discussions, a few songs became a whole set, which became an entire
concert, which, after the remarkable success of the concert and HBO broadcast,
then morphed into a worldwide Simon and Garfunkel reunion tour. And the
very existence of the tour, coupled with the success of the Concert in
Central Park video and album, raised
the specter of a brand new Simon and Garfunkel album! News even leaked that
that Artie had already laid down some vocal tracks for some of the new songs
that Paul was now writing.
The tensions that split up Simon and Garfunkel a decade before,
however, had re-surfaced over the course of the rehearsals for the tour and the
tour itself. More significantly, however, Paul had broken through his writer’s
block, due in great part to an L.A. therapist named Dr. Rod Gorney (Eliot
169-170), and, as a result, his songwriting had taken a decidedly more personal
turn. Think Too Much, the anticipated Simon and Garfunkel album, thus
became Hearts and Bones, the new Paul Simon solo record.
What was Paul writing about now that was so personal that made
having Artie on board problematic? His relationship with Carrie Fisher, Hollywood
scion (the elder child of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher -- not to mention
Princess Leia!), whom he had been dating off-and-on since 1978. Let’s hear from Ms. Fisher herself, from her
remarkable memoir and one-woman show, Wishful Drinking:
Years ago there were tribes that roamed
the earth, and every tribe had a
magic person. Well, now, as you know, all
the tribes have been dispersed,
but, every so often, you meet the magic
person, and, every so often, you meet
someone from your tribe. Which is how I
felt when I met Paul Simon. Paul and
I had the secret handshake of shared
sensibility We understood each other perfectly. Obviously, we didn’t always
agree, but we understood the terms of our disagreements. My mother used to say
“You know, dear, Paul can be very charming when he wants to be.” And my father
just wanted Paul to write an album for him.
Despite their natural
affinity for one another, the relationship had been plagued by careers that
took them in different directions for long stretches of time, not to mention,
on Carrie’s part, heavy drug use and a revived romantic relationship with Dan
Aykroyd. After the death of John Belushi, however, Carrie:
broke up with
Aykroyd, tried to wean herself off her addictions
to LSD, Ecstasy,
MDA, and Percodan, and moved back east to
star in the Broadway
production of Agnes of God. (Eliot 178-179)
What
happened next, once again, I’ll leave to Carrie:
So, Eddie and Debbie had me and my brother
Todd. I grow up (sort of)
and I marry Paul Simon. Now Paul is a
short Jewish singer, and Eddie Fisher
is a short Jewish singer. Any questions?
My mother makes a blueprint, and I
follow it to the letter. So, Paul and I
have a passionate relationship, filled with
lots of words, big words, clever words,
uh-oh the words get mean.
It is primarily out of this relationship that Hearts and Bones
springs (although the apparent preference of the public for Simon and Garfunkel
over Simon solo was certainly gnawing at Paul). Indeed, in perhaps the biggest
slap to Artie, Simon would sing all of the background vocals on the
record himself (Simon, Hearts and Bones).
At its core, the album explores the inner tension between logic
and emotion, between the head and the heart, between the left and right sides
of the brain.
Simon succinctly summarizes this tension in “Train in the Distance” thus:
Negotiations and love songs / are often mistaken for one and the
same
As such, the
album’s songs are replete with contrasting images of, on the one hand, medicine
(both physical
and psychological) and business and, on the other, love, loss, hope, music, and
memory.
While
that may sound ponderous, at first blush, the album is filled with catchy
riffs, layers of textured sound, cleverly insightful lyrics, and great musicianship
(not to mention great musicians, like guitarists Al Di Meola and Nile Rodgers,
and composer Phillip Glass).
There
is also, despite the intensely personal nature of the songs, not a little humor
and even self-deprecation on Simon’s part. In “Think Too Much (a),”
for instance, he looks back at the beginnings of his over-thinking:
I had a childhood
that was mercifully brief
I grew up in the
state of disbelief
I started to think
too much when I was twelve going on thirteen
Me and the girls
from St. Augustine
Up in the
mezzanine
Thinking about God
Indeed, the appearance on
the album of not one but two songs entitled “Think Too Much” (one fast, one
slow), according to Simon, is a joke in itself:
just another
example of never letting go and thinking too much.
That’s why I did
two songs…ha, ha, ha, it’s a joke. Look at that.
Maybe I think too
much…Or maybe it isn’t a joke. (Zollo 98)
Likewise, the
second verse of the opening track, “Allergies,” offers us a send-up his own
recent therapy:
I go to a famous
physician
I sleep in a local
motel
From what I can
see
It’s the people
like me
We get better
But we never get
well
So I ask myself
this question
It’s a question I
often repeat
Where do allergies
go
When it’s after a
show
and they want to
get something to eat
And, once again, even the
central conceit of “Allergies,” slyly
transforms the Irving Berlin classic into “A Pretty Girl is Like a Malady:”
Maladies
Melodies
Allergies
to dust and grain
Maladies
Remedies
Still
these allergies remain
My
hand can’t touch a guitar string
My
fingers just burn and ache
My
head intercedes with my bodily needs
And my
body won’t give it a break
My
heart can stand a disaster
My
heart can take a disgrace
But my
heart is allergic to the women I love
and
it’s changing the shape of my face.
Of course,
for Fisher, the final image here was hardly considered flattering to a woman he
loved:
He wrote another song, called
“Allergies” and the lyric from that was “My heart
is allergic to the woman I
love, and it’s changing the shape of my face.” Do you
think that’s flattering? I
don’t think it really is. But Paul wrote another album, a
beautiful album (well, they’re
all beautiful), but this particular one was called
Hearts and Bones and
the title song was about us, and it went like this: “One and
one-half wandering Jews return
to the natural coasts to resume old acquaintances,
step out occasionally, and
speculate who had been damaged the most.” But that
couldn’t be it because I
didn’t get permission to reprint those lyrics, so that would
be really bad. Oh, it isn’t really bad, because I didn’t
take any alimony from Paul
so try and think about it this
way, you’re listening to my alimony, and lovely alimony it
is. One and one-half wandering Jews…speculate who
had been damaged the most.”
GUESS WHO WON THAT CONTEST?!?
The real strength of the album, however, is Simon’s careful
weaving throughout the album of the heart-versus-head issue in his
relationships, even in those songs that would seem to have little to do with
his marriage. Two of what Simon likes to
refer to as ‘rhythm songs” on the
album, for example, “When Numbers Get Serious” and “Cars are Cars,” while
stressing the rational/objective nature of their putative subjects,
nevertheless conclude on decidedly emotional details. In “When Numbers Get
Serious,” Simon sings about the reassuring nature of math:
A telephone ringing in the hallway
When times are mysterious
Serious numbers will speak to us always
That is why a man with numbers
Can put your mind at ease
We’ve got numbers by the trillions
Here and overseas
But, at song’s end:
And the numbers all come home
Four rolls into three
Three turns into two
And the two becomes as one
This, of
course, alludes to traditional Western wedding vows, but it also recalls the
married couple, the “one and one-half wandering Jews” of the title track, who
at the end:
twirl
into one
their
hearts and their bones
and
they won’t come undone.
This same movement from the “objective/rational” to the
“emotional” occurs in “Cars are Cars,” a celebration of the universal nature of
the automobile:
Cars
are cars
All
over the world
Similarly
made
Similarly
sold
In a
motorcade
Abandoned
when they’re old
and
Engine
in the front
Jack
in the back
Wheels
take the brunt
Pinion
and a rack
But the
songwriter concludes with the intensely personal relationship people can have in
and with their cars:
I once
had a car
That
was more like a home
I
lived in it, loved in it
Polished
its chrome
If some
of my homes
Had
been more like my car
I
probably wouldn’t have
Traveled
this far.
There is, in
short, very little, if anything, that cannot touch, or be touched by, the
heart.
For example, “Train in the Distance,” a song that recounts Simon’s
first marriage to Peggy Harper and their close post-divorce relationship
(Jackson 220), uses the distant train metaphorically to acknowledge how people
leave one another – often driven by the very same hope that had brought them
together:
What
is the point of this story?
What
information pertains?
The
thought that life could be better
Is
woven indelibly into our hearts
And
our brains
This recalls
both Jonah and Marion’s post-divorce tryst in One-Trick Pony, and also,
as Fisher points out here, the warm memories that affected her relationship
with Paul:
Anyway, Paul and I dated for
six years, married for two, divorced for one,
and then we had good memories
of each other. So what do you think we
did? No, we didn’t remarry, we
dated again, which is exactly what you want to
do when after you been married
and divorced. Samuel Johnson once said
that
remarrying (and he’s not
talking about remarrying the same person just
remarrying) is the triumph of
hope over experience. So for me remarrying the
same person would be the
triumph of nostalgia over judgement.
While all of
this is clearly (and intensely) personal, Simon, in an interview with writer
Bill Flanagan in Written in My Soul, argued a song’s factualness matters
not:
Maybe
‘Train in the Distance” is literally true and maybe it isn’t.
What’s
the difference? The story isn’t really what’s important: the
***
While I could elucidate several
other of the album’s motifs – like numbers and
gunshots,
and early rock ‘n’ roll, let me
simply touch very briefly on the photographs that tie the various threads
together.
First (in the order that they
appear on the album) are the photographs in “Think too Much
(b):”
The
smartest people in the world
Had
gathered in Los Angeles
To
analyze out love affair
And
finally
unscramble us
And
they sat
among our photographs
Examined
every one
And in
the end we compromised
And
met the morning sun.
Here, Paul
and Carrie’s relationship is the stuff of comprehensive and intensive analysis,
examining the past and looking at “every one” of the images. But a compromise (remember “negotiations and
love songs?”) is only reached when the couple themselves (the compromising “we”
as opposed to the analyzing “they”) go and meet the “morning sun,” the very
archetype of hope, of possibility, of a new beginning.
A photograph also plays a role in “Song about the Moon,” the track
about Simon’s art: songwriting. In it, Paul offers suggestions on how to write
about “the moon,” “the heart,” and “a face,” but, given the violent images that
accompany each (“gravity leaping like a knife off the pavement” and the heart
“explod[ing] like a pistol on a June night”), perhaps the song is more about
his overcoming the writer’s block that had plagued him before starting this
album and had led him to Dr. Gorney. No matter the original inspiration, it’s a
photograph that is key to writing about a face, but, instead of its being a way
to ensure accuracy in the portrayal, as one might expect, Simon’s photograph is, at best,
half-remembered, but unforgettable:
Hey, songwriter,
If you want to write a song about
a face
Think about a photograph
That you really can’t remember
But you can’t erase
Wash your hands in dreams and
lightning
Cut off your hair or whatever is
frightening
If you want to write a song about
a face
If you want to write a song about
the human race
Then
na-na-na-na-na
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Write a
song about the moon
Art
intended to capture human truth, in short, is rarely simple reportage or
documentary; it’s not even memory. Truth is an unshakable impression.
Which leads us to “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog
After the War,” which was, in fact, inspired by a photograph that
Simon had seen in a book (Flanagan 283). You
know Magritte, the surrealist. Simon’s song offers a surrealist portrait of the famous Belgian
painter and his wife in New York City.
He imagines the “immigrant couple” engaged in a variety of activities:
“strolling down Christopher Street,” the gay hub of Greenwich Village; “dining with the power
elite;” and dancing naked in their hotel room “to the deep forbidden music
they’d been longing for,” namely, records by such doo-wop groups as “the
Penguins, the Moonglows, the Orioles, and the Five Satins.” None of these details is based on actual
activities or travel by Rene or Georgette Magritte. They all stem from Simon’s
imagination, and he even changed the caption from “Rene and Georgette Magritte
with the Dog During the War” to “…. After the War” but not due to any logic,
Simon has insisted, but only for of the rhythm of the words (Flanagan 283-284).
The song, in short, smartly, but beautifully, captures and
reflects the irrationality of Magritte’s own surrealism (Kingston 268), and, by
doing so, celebrates both the left and right sides of the brain. Art criticism
and musical lyricism, all rolled into one.
The fact that, in real life, Rene and Georgette had married, split, and
then reunited perhaps adds poignancy, as well, to this album about Paul and
Carrie, as did their playing the Magrittes in the music video for the song
(Eliot 182).
The memory of another photograph plays a major role in the final
track of the album, “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” Simon’s very personal
reflection on the murder of John Lennon. In it he travels back to his home in
Queens in 1954, then forward to London in 1964, and ends in New York City on
the fateful night of 8 December 1980.
Simon begins with his “listening to a rock ‘n’ roll song” back
when it was all new and hearing on the radio of the sudden death of
rhythm-and-blues singer Johnny Ace. According to the song:
Well, I really wasn’t such a Johnny Ace fan
But I
felt bad all the same
So I
sent away for his photograph
And I
waited ‘til it came
It
came all the way from Texas
With a
sad and simple face
And
they signed it on the bottom
“From the Late Great Johnny Ace.”
Simon then
fast forwards to 1964, “the year of the Beatles” and “the year of the Stones,”
and how in London:
It was the
Year of the Beatles
It was the Year
of the Stones
The year
after JFK
We were
staying up all night
And giving the days away
And the music was flowing
Amazing
And blowing my way
The final
verse recalls how he and the stranger who had told him the news of John
Lennon’s murder went to a bar and:
Stayed
to close the place
And
every song we played
was
for The Late Great Johnny Ace.
The song, and
album, conclude quietly -- with a string coda composed by Philip Glass, but, as
we listen, we hear the power of music and memory, of intelligence and emotion,
of love found and lost, of commerce and art, of photographs real and
re-imagined, of the rock ‘n’ roll life, and of the death of rock ‘n’ rollers.
All these threads Simon has “woven together” on his most personal, and, in my
opinion, his single best album.
As I stated at the top, as One-Trick
Pony had done just two years before, Hearts and Bones flopped
commercially,
and his marriage ended quickly, too, so a psychically bruised-and-battered
Simon sought refuge in the township music of South Africa.
And why, you may ask, did that tape, Gumboots:
Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II, attract
Simon so? Simple: because it reminded
him of his earliest love – ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll.
Works Cited
Bennighof, James. The Words and Music of Paul Simon. Westport:
Praeger Press, 2007.
Charlesworth, Chris. The Complete Guide to the Music of Paul
Simon and Simon & Garfunkel. London:
Omnibus Press, 1997.
Eliot, Marc. Paul Simon: A Life. New York: John Wiley and Sons Inc., 2010.
Flanagan, Bill. Written on My Soul: Rock’s Great
Songwriters Talk about Creating Their Music. Chicago: Contemporary Books, Inc., 1986.
Jackson, Laura. Paul Simon: The Definitive Biography of
the Legendary Singer/Songwriter. New
York: Citadel Press, 2002.
Kingston, Victoria. Simon & Garfunkel: The Biography. New York: Fromm International, 1998.
Luftig, Stacey, ed. The Paul Simon Companion: Four Decades of
Commentary. New York: Shirmer
Books, 1997.
Morella, Joseph, and Patricia Barey. Simon and Garfunkel: A Dual Biography. New York: Birch
Lane Press, 1991.
Newman, Randy. “The Blues.” Trouble in Paradise.
Warner Brothers, 1983.
O’Neil, Thomas. The Grammys for the Record: The Ultimate
Unofficial Guide to America’s Top
Music Awards. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Runtaugh, Jordan. “Paul Simon’s Early Years: 10 Fascinating
Pre-Simon and Garfunkel Songs.” www.RollingStone.com.
Santosuosso, Ernie. “Record Sweeps.” Hartford Courant 12
May 1968: 22A.
Simon and Garfunkel. Concert in Central
Park. 20th Century Fox, 2003.
---. Concert in Central Park. Columbia Records, 1981.
---. Sounds of Silence. Columbia
Records, 1966.
---. Wednesday Morning, 3 AM.
Columbia Records, 1964.
Simon, Paul. Graceland. Warner Bros. Records, 1986.
---.
Hearts and Bones. Warner Bros. Records, Inc., 1983.
---. Lyrics 1964-2008. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
---. One-Trick Pony (Album). Warner Bros.
Records, Inc., 1980.
---.
One Trick Pony (Film). Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., 1980.
---. One-Trick
Pony (Script). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.
---.
Paul Simon, a.k.a. Jerry Landis: Work in Progress, Vols. 1-3. Bonus Records, 1995.
---.
Still Crazy After All These Years. Columbia Records, 1975.
---. There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. Columbia Records, 1973.
Simon,
Paul and Art Garfunkel. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel (Tom and Jerry, Artie
Garr,
Jerry Landis, True Taylor). Mam Records, 2011.
Whitburn,
Joel. The Billboard Book of Top 40
Albums: The Complete Chart Guide to Every
Album in the Top 40 Since 1955. New York: Billboard Books, 1995.
Zollo,
Paul. Songwriters on Songwriting.
Expanded Edition. New York: DaCapo Press, 1997.
Numbers and
references to numbers are pervasive: “Twelve going on
thirteen” from “Think Too Much (a);” “one and the same” and “cooks a meal or
two” from “Train in the Distance;” and 1954 and 1964 from “Late Great Johnny
Ace.”
E.g., “explode like a pistol on a June night;” “Shoot at the
moon;” Johnny Ace (self-inflicted gunshot would); JFK; John Lennon
The Penguins, the Moonglows, the Orioles, the Five Satins;
The year was 1954 / and I hadn’t been playing that long
Compare the unreality of photographs in
“Kodachrome” (1973): Kodachrome / They give us those nice bright colors / They give
us the greens of summers / Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh
yeah….If you took all the girls I knew /When I was single / And brought 'em all
together for one night / I know they'd never match / My sweet imagination /
Everything looks worse in black and white
“No less a composer than Philip Glass called Paul the
greatest songwriter of our time” (Simon, Lyrics, xiii).
The album’s first single, “Allergies/Think Too Much
(b)” stalled at #44 in the US and didn’t chart at all in the UK, while the
second single “Think Too Much (a)” / “Song about the Moon” (released in
February 1984) “vanished without a trace” (Jackson 178). with “almost no” FM
airplay (Eliot 182).