But two bits of news about the singer-songwriter over the last week may well bring to a close his remarkable pop career.
First, Simon released Seven Psalms, a CD that is, by all accounts, not a pop recording at all. With his continual quest to experiment with musical textures (including from outside North America), there is a real question if he cares to return to the rock ‘n’ roll or folk genres that inspired him in the first place.
The second bit of news is the report that, during studio sessions for Seven Psalms, he “quite suddenly” and mysteriously lost most of the hearing in his right ear. After nursing for several weeks the unsuccessful hope that his condition would soon improve, he now wonders if he will be able to perform live ever again.
Certainly other singers and musicians have dealt for years with hearing impairment (indeed, I was astonished to discover, from this 2018 AARP article, just how extensive that list is—everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to Barbra Streisand).
But, at 81 years of age and following a nasty bout of COVID-19 as well, Simon’s opportunities to take the stage will diminish, while his periodic bouts of insecurity and depression may very well increase. In that case, even the creative energy needed to compose a song may well ebb. So it becomes an open question whether we will hear from him in any creative forum.
The Wall Street Journal review that first alerted me to the release of Seven Psalms noted that it was only the 15th studio album of Simon’s six-decade career. If it turns out to be an unexpected career valedictory, it makes it all the more worthwhile to retrace his artistic evolution--including There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, the second album in his solo career.
In a post from last year, I expressed my abiding enthusiasm for “American Tune” as a powerful lyrical statement on the state of the country, both at the time of its composition (the divisive Vietnam-Watergate era) and today.
I did not realize until further researching the song now, however, that it was based on the 18th-century J.S. Bach chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (translated, appropriately enough, as “O Sacred Head Now Wounded"). The mood is one of resignation amid “the age’s most uncertain hour.”
It is a distinct outlier for an album otherwise brimming with looseness, optimism, and humor, reflecting Simon’s joy as a husband (“Something So Right”) and new father (“St. Judy’s Comet”).
In contrast, the album’s first single, “Kodachrome,” is a rollicking retrospective just before the onset of middle age, with the narrator recalling his school days and life as a bachelor. Its jaunty, carefree tone would have been one that other Americans who, like Simon, came of age in the Fifties would have identified with, as the nation indulged in a nostalgia craze that saw the Broadway premiere of Grease, the movie premiere of American Graffiti, and, on TV, the first episode of Happy Days.
“Going Home” was the original title of the song, but it was only a temporary phrase. As he told veteran deejay Scott Muni in a 1988 interview, "I was thinking as I was doing it, 'Well, I'm certainly not going to call the song 'Going Home,' there must be 250 songs called 'Going Home.' That's not going to do anything.
Knowing his ambivalence about any association with his days with Garfunkel, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he also resisted any comparison with their hit “Homeward Bound.”
“Kodachrome” turned out to be a felicitous replacement, at least lyrically. (The use of a branded name led the song to be banned from the BBC.) From it emerged those “nice bright colors” in the refrain, and “everything looks worse in black and white” as a wry comment on the women he knew when he was single.
A couple of years after “Kodachrome’s” release, at an assembly at my high school, the opening line—“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school”—provoked many students to leap to their feet, undoubtedly to the discomfort of the administration and faculty.
There Goes Rhymin’ Simon represented something of a studio departure for Simon, both in the number of multiple producers (not just Simon and his longtime producer from the albums with Garfunkel, Roy Halee, but also Phil Ramone, Paul Samwell-Smith, and even the accomplished Alabama studio musicians, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section) and the number of multiple voices (also including the New Jersey folk music duo Maggie and Terre Roche, as well as the gospel quintet, the Dixie Hummingbirds).
In general, I prefer Simon’s songs from his collaboration with Garfunkel to his solo work. But his penchant for trying out new sounds and musical directions (demonstrated even more dramatically with Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints) is something to be respected, and the results in these cases, as with the best of There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, are entirely admirable.
The public certainly
embraced it. “Kodachrome” and “Loves Me Like a Rock” each shot to #2 on the
singles chart, and the album as a whole sold two million copies in its first
year alone. A late friend of mine said she regarded Bob Dylan as America’s pop poet
and Simon as its pop psychologist. By that standard, Simon was expressing the
mood of a generation transitioning from youthful protest to something approaching
private happiness—still tentative, but hopeful.
Paul Simon released his mournful anthem “American Tune” in the year that America finally tallied the costs in lives lost from the recently concluded Vietnam War, investigated a criminal President, and experienced the shock of quadrupled oil prices within three months over a foreign conflict.
Simon recognized that public ordeals have their inevitable consequences in private trauma, in ways we can only begin to sense at the time.
Nevertheless, each generation,
before and since, though weary at the unexpected challenges in which it finds
itself, sings its “American Tune.” Let’s hope that despite ourselves, there
will be another generation after us to repeat the process.
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.”— “The Boxer,” written by American singer-songwriter Paul Simon, released by Simon and Art Garfunkel on their Bridge over Troubled Water LP (1970)
Happy birthday to Paul Simon, born 80 years ago today in Newark, NJ.
Some years ago, a late, dear friend of mine described Bob Dylan as the master poet of his generation and Simon as the master psychologist. There was more than a bit of the poet in Simon, too, but time has borne out that the Grammy-winning musician is indeed an explorer of the soul in all its rootlessness and alienation.
From “The Sound of Silence,” his first big hit with Art Garfunkel, through “American Tune,” the wistful elegy he created in the Watergate era, Simon—for all his concern about the nation’s politics—has largely preferred to comment obliquely on what’s roiling the country through meditations on what lies beneath rather than explicit protests.
Even “The Boxer,” which he admits to writing in a period of frustration over harsh criticism of his songwriting (the pugilist’s departure from the ring paralleled his half-hearted wish to exit the music scene), has come to take on a different cast. The title character “disregards” the warnings of others away from his change of life and embrace of a violent occupation, in favor of what he prefers: the “lies and jest.”
It’s not a bad forecast
of what contemporary politics has become: groups refusing to listen to others,
putting aside history and wiser counsels for more seductive siren calls,
leaving them none the better for the experience.
CBS
Sunday Morning featured a segment on Art Garfunkel today. The timing could hardly seem better: not only
in support of his new memoir, What Is It All but Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man, but also right on his 76th birthday. (He
was born in Forest Hills, Queens, for those who don't know.)
“Take
your burdens to the Mardi Gras
