Flashback, May 1973: ‘Rhymin’ Simon’ Continues to Propel Paul’s Post-Artie Career

The 50^th anniversary this month of the release of There Goes Rhymin’ Simon would have been reason enough to write about this LP that cemented the commercial strength of Paul Simon apart from longtime partner Art Garfunkel.

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 15^th 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 18^th-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.

Song Lyric of the Day (Paul Simon, on the Fallout From an Earlier “Most Uncertain Hour”)

"I don't know a soul who's not been battered
Don't have a friend who feels at ease
Don't know a dream that's not been shattered
Or driven to its knees."—American singer-songwriter Paul Simon, “American Tune,” from his There Goes Rhymin' Simon LP (1973)

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.

Song Lyric of the Day (Paul Simon, With Insight Into Contemporary Thought Processes)

“All lies and jest

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.

Flashback, June 1968: ‘Mrs. Robinson’ Climbs to #1 on Pop Charts

More than six months after the film that inspired it premiered, “Mrs. Robinson” reached Number 1 on the Billboard pop chart in June 1968, where it stayed for three weeks. The single by Simon and Garfunkel expanded—and, in many ways, fundamentally recast—the lyrics used in a shorter version in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. Starting as a fragmentary salute to a former First Lady, it had undergone a metamorphosis into a wistful reflection on the loss of American values and role models.

According to Peter Ames Carlin’s 2016 biography of Simon, Homeward Bound, Nichols had seen Simon and Garfunkel’s last LP, Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, as reflective of the same sort of malaise afflicting the emotionally confused protagonist of his film. Nichols’ pitch to the duo had an additional element that must have surely appealed to their ambition: creating a score that, unusually for this period, would be rock ‘n’ roll based.

But Paul Simon did not have an easy time of it. Not only was he mired in a bad case of writer’s block, but he also had to deal initially with rejection. After turning down “Punky’s Dilemma” and “Overs,” Nichols asked Simon what else he had. The songwriter, perhaps feeling slightly chagrined over Nichols' coolness toward his initial original efforts, said he just had a few chords, nothing else.

It was Art Garfunkel who later divulged to the director that there was at least somewhat more. It had a catchy “de-de-de-de-de” section, and even an opening line: “Here’s to you, Mrs. Roosevelt.”

Nichols, initially struck by the surname so similar to the seductress in his film, urged the duo to develop what they had quickly so he could sneak it into the movie, now in its late production stage. It would be the final piece in a soundtrack that, without being plot-specific, fit the sense of malaise and alienation besetting title character Benjamin Braddock: “Scarborough Fair,” “April, Come She Will” and “The Sound of Silence.”

While able to complete the music for the song, Simon could only manage to finish one verse, a shortfall that Nichols bridged by having the duo sing that de-de-de-de-de as the connective tissue across several scenes toward the end. That sparse version appeared in the film and the bestselling soundtrack that capitalized on it, but Simon was not through with it.

The lines that Simon came up with, for the duo’s LP Bookends, while striking, are also something of a satiric collage, reflecting his working method. He tended to obsess over songs, tinkering with words and chord changes, before returning to his notebook to pull out a line here or there that he could slip in somewhere.

The version of “Mrs. Robinson” that appeared as a single and on Bookends feels less like a direct commentary on the character than a speculation on her life, before and after the events of the film.

“We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files” is the kind of seemingly innocent statement that the administrators of a mental health or substance-abuse facility might make to a new entrant. “We’d like to help you learn to help yourself,” continuing in the same vein, sounds even more sinister, a way to anesthetize the pain of the bored, cynical woman with little interesting to think of besides revenging herself on her husband with his business partner’s son. Alcohol abuse and a loveless marriage have combined to bring her to a bad pass—most likely after Ben and daughter Elaine have contrived to run away,  

Thus, “going to the candidates’ debate” had nothing to do with any plot point in the film. Mrs. Robinson doesn’t evince the slightest interest even in voting, let alone listening to politicians hash over issues.

So, why this reference? It might be a leftover from the inspiration for the song, Mrs. Roosevelt, who sat through all kinds of debates during her life. But 1968 was an election year, and a few months after the release of Bookends occurred a very important debate between Democratic Presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, which would play a pivotal role in the California primary.

In what way can “Mrs. Robinson” be thought of as the theme for The Graduate? Leave aside the title and it becomes trickier. The closest the song comes in the second verse, referring to a period before Benjamin may even be born: “Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes/Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes.”

What is being hidden could be a liquor bottle, or what The Rolling Stones called “Mother’s Little Helper”: a pill to calm her down when she gets to feel “What a drag it is getting old.”

Mrs. Robinson has more than a few reasons to feel this way. As a result of an affair, she became pregnant, then was forced to leave college and enter a loveless marriage. It is not merely “a little secret, just a Robinson affair,” but a relationship leaving vast wreckage, big enough so she feels the need to “hide it from the kids.”

In a year marked by social cleavage among Americans, it was not surprising that even the sports world was affected. The most significant sign of this was the greater division within sports itself, with Muhammad Ali, for instance, exciting controversy with his defiance of the draft because he had “no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

Through his father, Paul Simon had been raised as a diehard Yankee fan and especially franchise cornerstone Joe DiMaggio. By the time he came to write “Mrs. Robinson,” however, the cultural landscape that had once cheered the 56-game hitting streak of “The Yankee Clipper” as a momentary release from a world engulfed by war had changed utterly.

Casting about for a hero in a simpler time, Simon thought of childhood idol Joe DiMaggio. The reference that incorporated this—“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”—attracted an unusual amount of attention, perhaps surpassed only by Jimmy Webb’s startling image in “MacArthur Park”: “Someone left the cake out in the rain.”

Actually, only one person was really discombobulated by Simon’s lyric: DiMaggio himself. “‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’” the slugger remarked plaintively to friends, quoting the song’s line before remarking, in a tone as puzzled as it was annoyed: “But I never went away.”

But many other listeners knew instinctively what Simon meant because of the line that immediately followed: “A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” An earlier verse had asked Mrs. Robinson to contemplate the “sympathetic eyes” all around her.

Intentionally or not, with that subtle change of an adjective, Simon had captured the sense that America was now losing traction. The mood by the late Sixties had shifted under the pressure of events—violence, changing sexual mores, and the campus unrest that leads Ben to be briefly but ludicrously suspected of radicalism. By this time, Americans felt that time is out of joint, with the middle-aged wondering what had ever happened to their hope of happiness and the young feeling confused about a future whose promise consists of a single word: “plastics.”

Some time after the song’s release, Simon and DiMaggio ran into each other in a restaurant, and the aging Hall of Famer finally got to vent about his consternation about the reference to himself. Simon responded, “I don't mean it that way...I meant, where are these great heroes now?” Hearing this, DiMaggio “was flattered once he understood that it was meant to be flattering," Simon recalled years later.

The baseball legend must have been very flattered indeed. In 1999, to honor this player so used to obeisance that he would only be introduced last at Old Timers Day as “the greatest living Yankee,” the organization prevailed on Simon to play “Mrs. Robinson” as part of a tribute on “Joe DiMaggio Day,” the last time the ailing hero would hear the roar of the crowd.

Video of the Day: Art Garfunkel, ‘All I Know’ Live—on the Sublime Singer’s 76th Birthday

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 76^th birthday. (He was born in Forest Hills, Queens, for those who don't know.)

As I listened to CBS’ Rita Braver interview the pop legend, I felt a vague sense of familiar unease when Garfunkel explained the motivation for his retrospective: “I suppose, if I examine my inner mind, I would say, 'Time to come out of the shadow of Paul Simon and establish yourself as a thinking artist who can sing.' I know myself to be a creative guy, and I think my profile out in show business is 'the guy over Paul Simon's right shoulder.'... I thought I was playing it too deferential to Paul."

My disquiet turned into an old sinking feeling as I heard Garfunkel acknowledge, late in the interview, that he and his onetime partner were at "one of their low points." (There goes any joint concert appearance for a while!)

As sensitive about the value of his solo career as he is articulate about his influences (“When in the temple, it's got a high ceiling, it's got wood walls—these are great for a singer, 'cause I thrive on the reverb”), Garfunkel craves affirmation of his work apart from What’s-His-Name. I, for one, don’t mind in the least providing that.

In mulling over which of his solo performances to highlight, I thought of a heart-rending mid-Seventies work, “Second Avenue.” I also carefully considered a comparative rarity, his theme sung over the opening credits to Gary David Goldberg’s gone-way-too-song comic valentine to his Fifties childhood, “Brooklyn Bridge.” (Oh, heck: just click on this YouTube link and see if you don’t get a lump in your throat as you listen to him warble the nostalgic lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman about “that place just over the Brooklyn Bridge/It’ll always be home to me.”)

But ultimately, I selected the biggest hit from his first post-Simon release, Angel Clare (1972), a cover of Jimmy Webb’s “All I Know.” Recorded live in 1996, this performance on YouTube is not only one of the best renditions of a seminal tune by one of my favorite pop singer-songwriters, but also gains vibrancy from its setting: Ellis Island, as special to Garfunkel as to those of us who grew up loving his angelic voice, a sacred place not unlike the temple where he first became aware of his God-given vocal gifts.

Song Lyric of the Day (Paul Simon, on When to “Let the Music Wash Your Soul’)

“Take your burdens to the Mardi Gras

Let the music wash your soul.”— Paul Simon, “Take Me to the Mardi Gras,” from his There Goes Rhymin' Simon LP (1973)

Song Lyric of the Day (Paul Simon, on His Camera Brand—And Mine)

“I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph.”—Paul Simon, “Kodachrome,” from his There Goes Rhymin’ Simon LP (1973)

A little less than two weeks ago, preparing to go on vacation, I bought, with the expert assistance of a friend who’s a talented photographer, a new camera so that I could have a record of my trip, as well as any others I might take in the future.

I ended up purchasing the model in the image accompanying this post: a Nikon Coolpix S3000, even down to the green color. (With me being Irish-American and all, how could I resist that tint?) I wanted something a) digital, b) comparatively inexpensive, and c) most important, as uncomplicated as possible given conditions a) and b).

I can’t say that I’ve become the next Ansel Adams, but I HAVE been assiduously taking as many photos as I had hoped a few weeks ago. In the coming weeks and months, I hope to roll out some of the fruits of my handiwork.