PAUL SIMON’S RETURN TO GRACE

PAUL SIMON’S RETURN TO GRACE

FEATURES

by Glenn A. Baker

While Bob Dylan was calling a heartless world to repentance in the ’60s, Paul Simon was more concerned with the state of his own heart...and intellect. Dylan was awed by the dustbowl laments of Woody Guthrie and initially rendered harsh blues songs, but the ever-literate Simon was mentioning Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost in lyrics crafted with almost academic deliberation. “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why,” he cried in “America.” In the ’80s, he mused: “I am young, in good health and famous. I have talent, I have money. Given all these things, I want to know why I’m so unhappy.”

In the wake of Graceland, his most successful album ever, he had reason to keep wondering. The slight, serious and assiduously articulate Simon drew condemnation from the African National Congress, certain corners of the United Nations, and a highly-vocal London pressure group comprised of mostly British-born African musicians and performers. His detractors insisted that, in journeying to Johannesburg to record with Soweto street musicians, he contravened the letter (if not necessarily the spirit) of the U.N.’s cultural boycott of the Republic of South Africa. The attackers seemed less concerned by the act of recording in the shunned nation, which was sanctioned by the black Musician’s Union and marked by an unprecedented arrangement for generous session fees and royalty sharing, than Simon’s seeming failure to adopt a radically anti-apartheid stance. It underlined their poor understanding of a creative force who has eschewed all but the most intensely human politics from his music for 30 years.

The closest Simon has come to a strong public statement on apartheid was his Grammy acceptance speech last year, when he expressed admiration for the musicians who assisted him: “They live with other South African artists and their countrymen under one of the most oppressive regimes on the earth today and still they are able to produce music of great power, nuance and joy. They have my respect for that.” Later, he confirmed, “I’m not going to begin writing protest songs for them (his critics). I’m also not going to raise my fists and say ‘follow me.’ It’s not my style. There are often political implications in cultural events, but I think it’s important to maintain the integrity of art and not let it get swept away by politics. Pop music is usually so pretentious when it tries to be political.”

The litmus test for Simon’s bold musical experiment was the taking of it to Zimbabwe—as close to its source as practicality would allow. Almost 3,000 white South Africans streamed across the border to form part of a wildly enthusiastic crowd of 40,000 at Harare’s Rufaro Stadium, the biggest multi-racial gathering in the nation since its independence ceremonies eight years ago. Surrounded by exiled South African superstars Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, male Zulu choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo and a slew of African musicians and dancers, the diminutive star appeared, in the words of one reviewer, as the calm center of a musical hurricane. He led his 25 performers in an emotional rendition of the ANC anthem and smiled shyly as Makeba told the audience: “One day we will be able to invite Paul Simon to Johannesburg in a free South Africa.”

None of this placated the ANC. A spokesman in Lusaka thundered: “I think he has been an opportunist. He knew very well that Graceland was going to be a success and he has made a lot of money out of it.” In fact, Simon knew anything but. After being signed by Warner Bros, to a $14 million, seven album deal, the commercial standing of the man who has sold over 40 million albums and picked up nine Grammies (only he, Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra have won the “Best Album” award three times) was looking decidedly shaky until Graceland, only his third proper album in 10 years, headed toward the five million mark. His semi-autobiographical One Trick Pony film bombed and his second Warners LP, Hearts And Bones, was a bona fide flop, shifting less than half a million units.

What pulled his faltering career back onto the rails was an abiding love for roots music, first displayed by the use of the Peruvian group Los Incas on the 1969 Simon & Garfunkel song “El Condor Pasa. His first solo hit, Mother And Child Reunion,” was recorded in Jamaica well before the international reggae boom began. As he has gained confidence in his ability to relate to non-rock musicians who sometimes don’t speak English, Simon has cast far afield for exotic sounds, working with the Dixie Hummingbirds, Urubamba, the Onward Brass Band, the Oak Ridge Boys, Stephane Grappelli, Los Lobos, Good Rockin’ Dopsie & The Twisters and the Jesse Dixon Singers. ‘‘He respects blacks and our music,” says Dixon. ‘‘He also respects the culture behind it.” Miriam Makeba has pointed out: ‘‘I am now 55 and have been in the U.S. since 1959.1 worked for a long time with Harry Belafonte but I was never asked by American artists to work with them. When Paul did ask me I said ‘Hallelujah! I’ve graduated.’ He cares about everybody and how they’re presented.”

It was during a 1982 Simon & Garfunkel reunion tour of Australia that Paul first began listening to tapes of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and the Graceland odyssey commenced. Any fears of alienating the millions who bought the haunting “Sounds Of Silence” or jaunty “Mrs. Robinson” had long since evaporated. “When you’re young, what you think and what your generation thinks is very much the same,” he told me. ‘‘But the older you get, the more complex your work tends to become. Then your vision becomes more private, more personal and when that happens it’s hard to find a mass following. It’s also a little frightening. It’s great to be part of a community, you feel very reinforced. It’s more scary to go off and say, fuck it, this is the way I feel, I believe this and that’s it. Then, at a certain point, it doesn’t matter to you what you’re supposed to believe. I think it comes somewhere in your 40s. You say this is me, take it or leave it, and you start to feel more at peace with your convictions.”

I suppose I really wanted to ask him what it had been like being married to Princess Leia but, somehow, the opportunity never arose. The tiny yet imposing Simon tends not to let conversations with strangers drift far away from music. After months of beint forced to defend his actions from the ceaseless snipings of political zealots, the toll was beginning to show and I was delighted to start off in just the manner he desired.

The breadth of your music is quite extraordinary. Was South African music one style on a long list that you’re slowly tickihg off?

Believe it or not, I never actually thought of South African music as—well, now I’ve done that, I’ll go on and do all this. I just go where it’s interesting to me, I pursue what I like to listen to. I’ll tell you the music I’m listening to now: I have a couple of Milton Nascimento tapes from Brazil; some early Johnny Cash Sun material and ‘‘Hey Porter,” “I Walk The Line” and ‘‘Folsom Prison Blues”; Sam Cooke Live From The Harlem Square Club, an Ethiopian record of a singer who accompanies himself on the gourd—very pretty music; some Zaireian music; a bunch of doo-wop groups from the ’50s; and Songs Our Daddy Taught Us by the Everly Brothers.

Your Everly fixation has endured as many decades as they have. I thought it was a nice touch to feature them on the Graceland title track.

I’m a tremendous fan, I think everybody knows that. I thought ‘‘Graceland” was a perfect Everly Brothers song of the ’80s. When I wrote it I said, there are two artists that can do this, really. One is the Everlys and the other is Willie Nelson. But Don and Phil had a bit of a hard time working on it with me; I don’t think they heard it. I said here’s the harmony—well, it’s not my harmony, I copped it right from you—just sing those Everly harmonies, y’know be the Everly Brothers. And they’d say, oh, I really don’t hear that.

You’ve insisted that the song was a metaphor for the search for inner peace, yet the lyrics seem deliberately ambiguous. You specifically mention Memphis. Did you go to Presley’s home and line up for the guided tour with all the other fans?

Sure did. First, I told myself I’m not going to write the song about this, I’m gonna change the lyrics. But after they persisted and I couldn’t change them, I said I better go to Graceland because maybe I am writing about it and don’t even know it. But I wasn’t. By the end of the song Memphis is gone from the chorus. Going down there was good anyway because I got that first verse about the Mississippi delta shining like a National guitar. That came from driving up from Louisiana through the delta with my son.

I’ve been impressed by the way you interact with practitioners of so many diverse music styles. No other contemporary white pop performer has recorded with such a disparate array of people, from Stephane Grappelli to the Oak Ridge Boys. Is the basis of your communication always the same?

It’s the music. I’m interested in what they do and so they’re interested in what I do. I’ve found I can interact with a lot of different musicians. I’m musical, so I come up with ideas and some of those ideas are interesting, even to guys who are used to it. The first solo tour I did was with Los Incas and the Jesse Dixon Singers—a pretty big leap right there; most people had never heard either group. But a lot of the music I’ve worked with is not as disparate as someone looking from the outside might think. For me, it all resonates with something that is a part of my early life. The styles of music I have the greatest affinity for usually have some connection to what I was hearing in my adolescence or early adolescence.

I started out singing in a cappella groups and I can remember very well how to sing in a group. I like to sing with others and blend voices. Working with Stephane comes from the fact that I’m a guitarist, so of course I know Django Reinhardt. And when you know Django, of course you know Stephane. The Oak Ridge Boys are basically a gospel quartet and I’m very comfortable with quartets. It goes back to those early groups again, the ones that had no name. That was before the Passions and Tico & The Triumphs— they weren’t from my formative years, I was working then, learning my craft.

It’s been over 22 years since you wrote your first hit, “Sounds Of Silence.” What sort of changes have occured in your approach to songwriting over that time, apart from a lessening of your self-confessed tendency to over-intellectualize?

“I was essentially making up the rules as I went along. ”

I approach it differently now in that I’ve done it so much that a lot of my technique is so natural I don’t have to think about it any more. My imagination has less restraint upon it because I no longer have to figure out, “Now how do I do that?” Because I’ve already made that mistake.

Every time you make a mistake and you’ve finished being embarrassed by it, you say “Now I see what went wrong, I should have tried it this way.” The mistakes that I made experimenting on Hearts And Bones are what set up Graceland. I’m sure that if I hadn’t done that work on Hearts And Bones, I wouldn’t have written the songs in this particular way.

I believe that, with Graceland, you reversed your normal writing procedure.

What I did was record all the music tracks first and then write the songs around them. I had done that in the past with a few songs, like “Cecilia” and “Late In The Evening,” but usually I would sit with a guitar, write a song and then go into the studio. With Graceland I went in with the musicians and mapped out the form of the track, then took it home and had as much time as I wanted to write it.

This was a collaboration, so I let the melodies and the words be guided by the tracks. When the track was grander or more portentous, then I was more serious in my subject matter, as in “The Boy In The Bubble.” When I collaborated with Joseph Shabalala I was writing directly in a political vein. Keep in mind that this was long before anybody had any opinions about how political or apolitical something was supposed to be. I was essentially making up the rules as I went along.

Were you surprised by the broad scope of appeal of a work as specific and relatively unfamiliar as Graceland?

The graph curve was kids to old people—it’s weird. The music is all major key and very happy and I think people responded to that. The grooves are infectious and township jive is very understandable. It touches people in ways they don’t understand. I felt an affinity from the beginning and it just grew. I’m sure that there will be elements of this experience that I will take with me to the next piece of work, though I don’t yet know what they are.

Graceland was only your third studio album in 10 years, which hardly puts you in the prolific category. Did this have anything to do with the disappointing response to One Trick Pony?

I really didn’t think it was going to be a hit, so I wasn’t disappointed by it. What disappointed me was that the film was never released outside of the United States at the time and now that I’m hot again it’s finally being seen in places like Australia. Even though I think it is a flawed piece of work, it belongs within the body of my work and it should have been seen in the time frame in which it was created. It did take a long time to do; I wrote the music first and then it took a couple of years to write the script, so by the time it all came together, music had changed a bit. But no, three albums in 10 years is not my natural pace. My normal rate is an album every two years—about every two years a new bunch of songs start to come. That’s the way it’s been.

At a press conference, you once stated: “The role of the artist is to be discomforting.” Would you like to expand on that?

People settle into their perceptions and opinions and after a while they calcify. But the world is always changing, slowly and imperceptibly, until it’s not the same set of circumstances that you thought it was—so you have to keep the ability to change your perspective. A lot of people can’t change their opinions because they’ve got into this very righteous position and they don’t want to have someone tell them, sorry, you’ll have to move off that spot of moral righteousness, somebody else has got it.

You’re obviously referring to the political criticism of Graceland, which seems to have bothered you.

Every once in a while I got really brought down by the attacks. They started off as accusations of “cultural imperialism” and then it was that I didn’t pay anyone on the tour. It’s the Goebbels philosophy of, if you keep repeating a lie long enough, a certain percentage of people are going to believe it. Most of the criticism came from political or politicized people, not from musicians, for the most part.

You’ve commented on what you see as the unfairness of the attacks.

Yes, because it’s rarely mentioned I had turned down Sun City twice. And that before going tq Johannesburg I called and consulted with Quincy Jones and Harry Belafonte, who have close ties with the South African community. They both encouraged me to take the trip. I was just following my musical instincts in wanting to work with people whose music I greatly admired. I approach all my work seriously and try to talk about what I see in as truthful a manner as I can. I didn’t even know if it was gonna be an album, it grew into that. There was a naturalness about it from the beginning that continued into the tour. It just seemed to have a roll to it and that roll is something that we followed. For the most part, the Graceland record and tour were widely accepted and critically praised.

“A lot of people can’t change their opinions because they’ve got into this righteous position. ”

So where do you go from here— Graceland II?

I’ve thought about it and I feel very sure the thing I should do is stop completely. Stop for a while so I can let this pass, think freshly and find out what is personally meaningful to me out of the whole experience. Then, if I want to do Graceland II, alright. But I don’t want to do it because of the momentum of Graceland. This is a mistake I’ve made in the past. I do something good and the natural inclination is to continue. But I only want to do something if I’m genuinely interested in it.