Many's the time I've been mistaken/And many times confused/Yes, and often felt forsaken/And certainly misused
"American Tune" by Paul Simon
Paul Simon made me cry last week, and I'm not sure why.
He played a song that I don't even like that much, "American Tune," from his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin' Simon. And I bawled. Hot sloppy schoolboy-crush tears. Good thing I was working from home.
Though if I hadn't been working from home, there would have been no reason for Simon to sing that song that way and to have it delivered over the internet. So it wasn't just the song — it's never just the song. It had to do with my complex feelings about Simon and the United States of America and other people in general.
It's OK to have complex feelings about these things. Maybe they're the only feelings grownups should have about other people, seeing how much we are a product of terrors and hopes, and how sometimes our motives seem obscure.
I don't know Simon, but I have heard and read things that give me pause.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVYPVvS-mI4 ]
For instance, Graceland is a beautiful and problematic album. There are real questions about how Simon treated some of his collaborators, and while I don't want to get into a discussion about what constitutes inappropriate appropriation and where arranging stops and songwriting begins, I think that if Simon acted in the ways some people allege he acted, he's a jerk. (If you do not know what I'm talking about here, type "Los Lobos Paul Simon" into an internet search engine.)
Which fits the cliched idea of the artistic genius as a selfish monster, a trope I don't really believe in, not because there aren't a lot of great artists who are jerks but because being a jerk has nothing to do with how talented and accomplished you are.
Maybe if you're not so talented or accomplished you have to be more careful about the circumstances in which you let your jerk flag fly, but experience suggests that the percentage of jerks is slighter higher in the pool of mediocre artists. It is possible to be both a great artist and a nice guy, though both are a lot rarer than some people think.
So my feelings about Simon are: He's a great artist, probably a genuine genius-level songwriter, who has written a handful of songs that absolutely crush me. He's one of my cultural heroes, whose work I admire and whose facilities I envy. I wish I had his musicality, and his clear pocketknife of a voice might be my favorite of all the male pop-rock singers I've ever heard.
But I don't want to meet him or hang around with him or get his autograph. He probably can be an unpleasant guy. I have no idea whether, if we somehow met under circumstances that had nothing to do with his stardom or fandom, we'd get along or not. He likely has friends and family who love him, who see a side of him he doesn't present to the world. Pablo Picasso was famously an ogre, but he had friends.
I don't know a soul who's
not been battered
I don't have a friend who
feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees
These complicated feelings were very much present last week when I was watching the livestream concert broadcast over the internet that replaced what would have been Willie Nelson's eighth annual Luck Reunion music festival had it not been for the cloistering necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic.
It was expected to draw some 4,000 people to Nelson's ranch in Luck, Texas. As it was, dozens of artists from all over the world including Lucinda Williams, Neil Young, Kurt Vile, Margo Price, Willie and his sons Lukas and Micah (who closed the show with an acoustic set performed in Dad's living room) either performed live from their homes or sent in recorded clips to be played.
Asleep at the Wheel's Ray Benson hosted from a recording studio in Austin, asking for Venmo contributions which went to the artists' favorite charities. (You can still see the concert at arkansasonline.com/329luck)
[LIVESTREAM: Check out the concert held in the homes of the artists » arkansasonline.com/329luck]
Simon appears 4½ hours into the 6-hour 15-minute stream, after a set by L.A. -based folk-punk artist Sunny War. Simon and his wife, Edie Brickell, provided recorded clips from their house on the Hawaiian island of Maui. He plays "American Tune" in the first segment, which seems to have been shot outside.
Now an old man, creased and gray and perceptibly tiny at age 77, in a baseball cap promoting the naturalist E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth Project — a plan to stave off the mass extinction and preserve the biodiversity of the Earth by dedicating half the planet's surface to nature — Simon appears in front of a translucent blue marble wall. Birds are singing on-key with his performance, which is confident but not particularly showy.
Simon's left hand works up the neck of one of his signature Martin acoustic guitars (from the understated logo on the headstock it looks to be a PS-2 rather than the more ornate OM-42PS), starting out with a basic C chord.
"American Tune" is a song that, if you look at the guitar tablature, should be easy to play, with most of its chords being in the repertoire of your average strummer. But there are some deceptively quick changes and voicings (A minor and E7 chords) placed up around the fifth fret.
And Simon's finger-picking pattern, the thumb coming down on the bass note followed by fingers flicking up on the treble string on the held chords, a quick squeeze of the right hand on the quick ones, is tricky.
A lot of his songs are like this — when you see them laid out with lyrics and chord symbols, they look manageable. But he's playing some of those familiar-looking chords as fretted triads rather than first position open chords.
And if you try to play Hearts and Bones or Graceland you might begin to appreciate the nuances of his rhythms. He's an underrated acoustic guitar player, though he developed calcium deposits in his hand in the mid-'70s, which limited the time he could spend playing guitar and caused him to increasingly rely on expert session players, especially in the studio.
Anyway, in this video, it looks like Simon is simply tossing off an old song, complying with the spirit of the downsized event.
It's all right, it's all right
We've lived so well so long
Still, when I think
of the road
we're traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
As I said, I've never really liked "American Tune" or the album it first appeared on, There Goes Rhymin' Simon (1973), all that much; though it is very well-reviewed, it might be my least favorite of all of Simon's solo records.
It came out when I was a sophomore in high school, and we all got a kick out of "Kodachrome" (one of my teachers was offended by the song's — and album's —wonderful opening line: "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school ...") but I thought it was a disappointment compared to 1972's Paul Simon (which I mistakenly assumed had been his solo debut; it wasn't until years later I found out that was The Paul Simon Songbook, released in the U.K. in 1965 but not available here until 1981).
Rhymin' Simon was probably too musically sophisticated for me, with its excursions into gospel music and New Orleans R & B. And while over the years I've come to love some things about the album that evaded me as a kid —Simon's singing on "Tenderness," a faux doo-wop number that also features a lovely low-key horn arrangement by Allen Toussaint, now seems to be one of his best vocal performances — but "American Tune" is guilty of lyrical overreach. I cringe every time I hear the line about the "Statue of Liberty/Sailing away to sea."
My 14-year-old faculty marked this as some residual Simon & Garfunkel poesy, a regression back to the word-drunk lyricist who could write facile lines such as "silence like a cancer grows" (from "The Sound of Silence") and bad songs like "The Dangling Conversation" and respond bitterly to Bob Dylan's misapprehended impressionism with something as peevish as "A Simple Desultory Philippic." (Twenty years or so ago, I saw Simon share a stage with Dylan; allegedly they have never liked each other. That's not hard to believe.)
On the other hand, Simon said this to the New Yorker's James Stephenson in 1967 when he was 25 years old, near the peak of Simon & Garfunkel's success: "A lot of the things we've done have been hack. I don't take the title of 'poet.' It would be a slap in the face of Wallace Stevens to do that. But I see the possibility now that I could be one, and that pop music could be an art form."
Which tells you something about what Simon wanted to do: kick his writing up a level. He wanted the New Yorker to be able to publish his lyrics and poetry (and, in the 21st century, they did).
Then, in a 1982 interview with Song Talk magazine's Paul Zollo, included in Zollo's 2003 book Songwriters on Songwriting, Simon says this about his 1981 album Hearts and Bones: "I was beginning to understand about writing on that album. How to do it, when to use ordinary language, and when to use enriched language."
Exactly. Hearts and Bones is where Paul Simon becomes a genuinely great lyricist. Before that he'd written many good songs but too often, as in "American Tune," he'd leaned too heavy on the enriched language, straining for poetry.
His best work either succeeded despite the lyrics ("Bridge Over Troubled Water") or employed an offhand conversational tone ("Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard"). While sometimes his aspirational lines landed ("Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you" from "Mrs. Robinson") more often they betrayed a certain callowness. His rewrite of E.A. Robinson's "Richard Cory" feels like an earnest student exercise.
Simon knows this, he has talked about it in interviews over the years. Some of his '60s hits feel like juvenilia to him now. "American Tune," reportedly written as a reaction to the re-election of Richard Nixon, isn't a bad song, it just has a couple of clunker phrases in its mix. As a lament for a battered nation, it might have been a touch on the nose for the occasion.
"Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard" might have been a better, cheekier choice — what with its line "Goodbye to Rosie, the Queen of Corona" — especially if he could have coaxed Brickell into attempting the song's whistle solo, as she has sometimes done in concert in recent years.
But it was the old dirge, with its melody borrowed from Bach, from a chorale in Saint Matthew's Passion that was a reworking of the 17th-century German composer Hans Leo Hassler's secular song "Mein G'mut ist mir verwirret" ("My Mind's Confused Within Me"), which lent its melody to the Latin crucifixion hymn "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded."
Yet when Simon started to sing, in a voice still boyish, "Many's the times I've been mistaken ..." something flooded up in me. I've watched the performance — it's on YouTube here: bit.ly/2wnBa7H — a dozen times, and there's nothing extraordinary about it, just an old songwriter running down one of his old tunes:
We come on a ship they call the Mayflower
We come on a ship that sailed the moon
We come in the nation's most uncertain hour
And we sing an American tune ...
It got to me.
I listened to a lot of people sing over the internet last week — local folks like Adam Faucett and Isaac Alexander (who put out a track called "Prove the World Wrong" on YouTube) showed up on my Facebook newsfeed. I downloaded Drew Jansen's cover of Lalo Schifrin's "Theme from Mannix." This is the way we will do things for the next weeks and months; I'll sit at home in my sweatpants, surrounded by dogs and guitars, and have complex thoughts about other people and the world.
Right now, I'm trying to get some rest.
That's all, I'm trying to get some rest.
Email:
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
Style on 03/29/2020