“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.[1]

            But what, you may ask, could have caused a famous and successful singer-songwriter and celebrity[2] 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..[3]

***

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,[4] 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[5] – as Jerry Landis, True Taylor, and even Tico and the Triumphs (Luftig 3)[6]. 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.”[7] 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”).[8]

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)[9], 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.” [10]  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.[11] 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[12] 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;[13]

c) Paul’s close affiliation with the Saturday Night Live team,[14] 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[15]

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[16].  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,[17] 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 play the Ace of Spades[18]

            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.”[19] In it, Simon nicely channels the innocence and simplicity of his own early protest music,[20] 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.[21] 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,[22] Simon had never come close to “experienc[ing] rejection of this magnitude before” (Morella 205).[23]

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[24] 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.[25] And the very existence of the tour, coupled with the success of the Concert in Central Park video and album,[26] 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,[27] 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[28] 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.[29] 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[30] 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.[31] 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,”[32] 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[33]

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”[34] 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:

Urgent Urgent

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:

After all is said and done

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

point of it is.[35]  (282)

***

            While I could elucidate several other of the album’s motifs – like numbers[36] and gunshots,[37] and early rock ‘n’ roll,[38] 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[39] unscramble us

And they[40] 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, [41]  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[42] 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).[43]

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.[44]  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,[45] 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,[46] 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. 20^th 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.

---

[1] Check out the 2012 documentary Under African Skies, which captures Simon’s return to South Africa for a 25^th Anniversary Graceland reunion concert.

[2] By 1980, for example, Simon had appeared on Saturday Night Live five times, including in its debut in 10/11/75, and twice as host (10/18/75 and 11/20/76) and twice as musical guest (10/29/77 and 3/15/80). He also appeared in Annie Hall in 1977 as the sleazy record producer Tony Lacey.

[3] It spent eight weeks on the chart reaching only #35. Only two subsequent albums, 1997’s Songs from The Capeman (#42) and 2018’s In the Blue Light (#70), have performed worse (Whitburn 280).

[4] Tom and Jerry briefly reunited in 1960 with four recordings, but none met with any success. (Jackson 33) 

[5] Here he came into contact with such hit-makers as Carole King, Gerry Goffin, and Neil Sedaka (Jackson 32-35).

[6] In England he used “Paul Kane.” Art Garfunkel recorded occasionally as “Artie Garr” (Luftig 3).

[7] On 1964’s Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., the song is entitled “The Sounds of Silence.” On 1966’s Sounds of Silence, it is “The Sound of Silence.”

[8] According to the 12 May 1968 Hartford Courant, Simon and Garfunkel had the #1, 2, and 6 best-selling albums on the Billboard Chart: The Original Soundtrack from The Graduate; Bookends; and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (Santosuosso 22A).

[9] Not to mention Greatest Hits, etc. (1977), which included 2 new songs “Slip Slidin’ Away” and “Stranded in a Limousine.”

[10] Garfunkel also released on CBS Records three top-20 albums in the 1970s: Angel Clare (1973); Breakaway (1975), which also included “My Little Town;” and Watermark (1978).

[11] Remember the lines from Graceland’s “Boy in the Bubble:” “It’s a turn-around jump shot; it’s everybody jump start; it’s ever generation throws a hero up the pop charts.”

[12] Simon had written two songs for Warren Beatty, but the director used neither “Silent Eyes” nor “Have a Good Time” (Eliot 140).  Simon would record both and release them on Still Crazy After All these Years

[13] In some places, the two films even played in theatres side-by-side (Kingston 218; Eliot 168)

[14] See Note 3.

[15] All lyrics are taken from Paul Simon, Lyrics 1964-2008 (except where noted).

[16] Shout-out to girlfriend Carrie Fisher!

[17] As part of a televised 1960s retrospective.

[18] An allusion to “Ace in the Hole,” the song at the center of the conflict between Jonah and the record company.

[19]  The song was not included on the original soundtrack release but was included with two different versions of other songs on the cd release in 2004. Its omission on the original soundtrack could be seen as a further signal that even Jonah’s craft has advanced well beyond this now.

[20] Bennighof disagrees: “this is not exactly the kind of song Simon probably would have written in the 1960s” (94).

[21] It was referred to as ‘noble, but failed experiment” and a very wide range of both more and less positive things, nothing savage, but nothing glowing (Livingston 219-220; Morella 204-205).

[22] The film was $5 million over budget (cite?).

[23] “Before the film’s release, Paul had been cavalier: ‘If you don’t risk a couple of really good audacious flops, you get fat and lazy. I’m proud that I made up a movie, that I wrote it and actually starred in it, and that’s hard enough without being…good’” (Morella 205).

[24] 16 June 1979

[25] Paul demanded that his solo songs be performed, so, for a time, the concert was going to be half solo-Simon and half Simon-and-Garfunkel. The reasons were several. First, Simon couldn’t physically do an entire concert of just Simon, Garfunkel, and guitar. Simon had calcium deposits in his fingers which prevented it. Furthermore, Simon really didn’t want to be an opening act for Simon and Garfunkel (Charlesworth 115).  Simon’s following Simon and Garfunkel simply didn’t make “show business sense” (Kingston 236).  In the end, Artie agreed to Paul’s vision: his learning and performing many of Simon’s solo works.

[26] It reached #6 on the Billboard album charts in 1982.

[27] March 5, 1982

[28] Except for the doo wop vocals performed by the Harptones in “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War.”

[29] Simon briefly had touched upon this theme in One-Trick Pony in the song “Oh, Marion:” The boy’s got brains/ he just don’t use ‘em / and that’s all/ The boy’s got brains / he just refuses to use them, that’s all / He says “the more get I get to thinking/the less I tend to laugh”/The boy’s got brains/ he just abstains.

[30] In “Hearts and Bones,” “two people were married / the act was outrageous / the bride was contagious /she burned like a bride”

[31] Self-deprecation had never been much of a feature in Simon’s music, but label-mate Randy Newman, with Simon – on backing vocals, no less – makes fun of the songwriter’s glum persona in “The Blues” on 1983’s Trouble in Paradise (Warner Brothers Records, 1983).

[32] This was the first song Simon started writing during his therapy with Dr. Gorney (Eliot 170).

[33] Clearly an allusion to the calcium deposits in Paul’s fingers that prevented an entire night of acoustic Simon and Garfunkel, the way Artie would have preferred the Central Park concert.

[34] Very much of a throw-back term to the writers of the Great American Songbook, like Berlin, etc.

[35]Simon also refers to the title track of Hearts and Bones in this discussion.

[36] 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.”

[37] E.g., “explode like a pistol on a June night;” “Shoot at the moon;” Johnny Ace (self-inflicted gunshot would); JFK; John Lennon

[38] The Penguins, the Moonglows, the Orioles, the Five Satins; The year was 1954 / and I hadn’t been playing that long

[39] Among the lyrics printed in the album, and in Lyrics: 1964-2008, the line is “And possibly unscramble us,” although Simon clearly sings “finally.”

[40] The lyrics are misprinted in the original LP release (and then in the CD booklet) with a “And we sat…,” even though Simon sings “And they sat…” Lyrics 1964-2008 has the correct word.

[41] 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

[42] By German photographer Lothar Wolleh.

[43] Joan Logue directed (Electronic Arts Intermix).

[44] On December 25, 1954

[45] “No less a composer than Philip Glass called Paul the greatest songwriter of our time” (Simon, Lyrics, xiii).

[46] 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).