SIMON AND GARFUNKEL
important work in color
1966: Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. * Sounds of Silence * Parsley,
Sage, Rosemary and Tyme. 1968: The Graduate * Bookends. 1970: Bridge Over Troubled Water. 1972: Greatest Hits. 1982: The Concert in
Central Park. 1990: Collected Works.
PAUL SIMON: 1972: Paul Simon. 1973: There Goes Rhymin' Simon. 1974: Live Rhymin'. 1975: Still Crazy After All
These Years. 1980: One Trick Pony. 1983: Hearts and Bones. 1986: Graceland. 1988: Negotiations and Love Songs. 1990:
The Rhythm of the Saints. 1993: Paul Simon. 1998: Songs from the
Cape Man.
Back towards the beginning of rock music as we know it, Paul
Simon
flirted with profundity and failed worse than most. Although
Simon and Garfunkel's harmonies and Simon's delicate songwriting
had beauty and grace, pretensions (hippie pretensions, arty
pretensions, satirical pretensions) crept into songs like
"Sparrow," "He Was My Brother,"
"Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.," "Patterns,"
"Homeward Bound," "The Dangling
Conversation," "A Poem on the Underground Wall,"
and "I Am a Rock." It was the kind of pretension that
gave profundity a bad name. Yet mixed with Simon's misses were a
few hits and the duo seems to have served as Simon's
apprenticeship under the pop music muse. Wednesday Morning, 3
A.M. is all Jesusy and folksy with "You Can Tell the
World," "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,"
"Benedictus" and (gulp) "Go Tell it on the
Mountain. " The duo was treading on Smothers Brothers'
territory. Paul Simon, as we would soon know him, was represented
by "Sparrow," a song art Garfunkel professed not to
like in the liner notes to the record album. "Sounds of
Silence" is the high point, but the tune doesn't express
adolescent angst quite as accurately as Eddie Cochran's
"Summertime Blues" or Brian Wilson's "In My
Room."
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme is better. The best moments are the lightest: "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" is beautifully sung; "Cloudy" is a carefree joy; "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" is simple and earthy. The worst moments are the heaviest: "Patterns" which sounds like Mickey Spillane imitating a beatnik; "The Dangling Conversation" which is easy to mistake as a song about old people (like "Old Friends"), but is actually about two of the gloomiest college kids one's likely ever to run across; and "A Poem on the Underground Wall" which displays the type of songwriting that probably gave Simon sweat dreams years later (what did he write on the wall anyway?) "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her" and "Homeward Bound" represent the earnest sincerity that people so admired about the duo.
Bookends and Bridge Over Troubled Water find Simon getting the knack, leavening the messages with humor, subterfuge and lighter arrangements on "America," "Fakin' It," "Hazy Shade of Winter" and "Old Friends." Side one of Bookends is weak, and "At the Zoo," "Mrs. Robinson," and "Punky's Dilemma," given their reputation, have skimpy narratives. But the playing and the melodic arrangements make most of the album enjoyable rock 'n' pop. Simon and Garfunkel's last studio album, A Bridge Over Troubled Water, is the most consistent. The weakest songs are right at the end of the record. On "Keep the Customer Satisfied," "The Boxer," and "The Only Living Boy in New York City," as on the earlier "America" and "Bookends," pretension had given way to wisdom; Simon was starting to consistently make the kind of music that resonated emotionally. His days as a novice were long, but they were over.
*************
Paul Simon has pulled off some tricky artistic moves as a solo artist. He's managed to tap into trans-national musical styles without showing the strain: only someone profoundly moved by ethnic music could have perpetuated the ecstatically perfect Graceland, or the inspired cohesion of diverse elements found on The Rhythm of the Saints and Songs From the Capeman. Charges of exploitation might fit if Simon was merely a pop mediocrity or an awful musician (i.e. he's a fascinating guitar player), but his serious intellectual nature, leavened as it is with American pop's lightness of spirit and rock's surprising depth, brings as much to these cross-cultural collaboration as it gains. Irritating eclecticism could have been the result, and the seamless style of Simon's music is a more formidable achievement than might be reckoned. Cajun, Tex-Mex, Indian, South American, Jamaican, Latin American, raggae, doo-wop, gospel, r&b, and other styles, are somehow compatible in Paul Simon's hands. Simon's canny taste is recognizable in his choice of bands. He couldn't have pulled off this great music without them, but, again, credit for good sense seems to belong to Simon.
Also unlikely to succeed is the way Paul Simon fuses everything together thematically. Still Crazy After All These Years was baby-boomerish in its preoccupation with growing older, lover affairs in dissolution; the album toyed with the idea of the 60's freedom-lover's inability to settle down. Still Crazy featured one of Paul Simon's blandest backup bands and the religiose underpinnings of songs like "Gone at Last" and "Silent Eyes" seemed quaintly pious. But religiosity is a thread. Simon's songs are laced with words and phrases like "prayerbook," "starry crown," "pilgrims," "Pentecost," "the Blood of Christ Mountains," "I have seen a glorious day," "shot of redemption," "Take this child, Lord," "forever blessed," "talking about God at the church of St. Augustine." In "Jonah," the musical muse leads those who would follow into the whale's belly; in "One Trick Pony," a musician moves like "God's immaculate machine;" in "American Tune," a soul rises unexpectedly; while the mother and child reunion is only a motion away. Titles include "God Made the Movies," "God Bless the Absentee," "Graceland." This could be troublesome if the exotic musical underpinnings, along with Simon's compelling subtexts, didn't give everything a pan-nationalist, universal flavor. Christianity or Judaism are used as metaphor. Simon's characters are found at the extremity of yearning, hopefulness, self-awareness: they are spiritually interactive, but even Simon's darkest themes - i.e. the death and dissolution on Hearts and Bones, the murderer at the center of Songs from the Capeman - never burst out of pop's graceful modality. He seems a master of voice - less exotic and removed than Van Morrison and less cynical and fundamentalist than Dylan.
If Simon's oeuvre has a relative flaw, it's that he's not prolific: he's released seven albums since 1972. Although his songs sound effortless, inspired spontaneity is marginal. He's the Stanley Kubrick of the rock world, perhaps. Hearts and Bones is moving, especially the title track and "Rene and Georgette Magritte with their dog after the War;" but the album's highly poetic, confessional verbosity makes it less tuneful than his best albums. Songs from the Capeman suffers from the narrative stops, starts and gaps endemic to rock opera, as well as from some mundane social/political commentary and a tinge of short-cut sentimentality. As with Joni MItchell, Paul Simon's inconsistency is mitigated by songs that reach a pinnacle of pop art.
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