"A Time of Innocence . . . "
This week I’ve been listening to an audiobook by Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam entitled “Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon.” In it, the authors get Simon to talk about some of his songs (going all the way back to the early Simon & Garfunkel years), his musical influences, and his creative process. They even get him to demonstrate on his guitar how he put some of the songs together. The audiobook brought back a lot of memories of the music that influenced me as an idealistic young man and aspiring musician.
It started when I was in junior high. A student gave an oral report in one of our classes about Simon & Garfunkel’s first major hit, “The Sound of Silence.” He posited that the song was symbolic and that the real theme was the evils of communism. I eventually came to understand that he was wrong, but he opened my eyes to the power of music to address serious, contemporary issues.
He also made me a Simon & Garfunkel fan. They were one of the first famous musical acts I saw perform live, perhaps the very first. A friend and I had started learning guitar around that time and we taught ourselves how to play some Simon & Garfunkel tunes. The album “Bookends,” which came out in 1968, made a huge impression on us, around the same time as the concert we attended. “Bookends” was a more creative album than most I had listened to by then, with the exception of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” of course. The “Bookends” theme appeared twice in the album, along with recordings of old people talking about aging and memory. When my friend and I got together, we would sometimes play “A Hazy Shade of Winter” from that album, which had a guitar lick that lent itself to two-player performance. Later, when I was in college, another musician friend and I would play “America” when we performed on campus. Gladwell pays appropriate tribute to that beautiful, melancholy song that so artfully captured a generation’s growing sense of alienation and disillusionment.
“Bridge Over Troubled Water” came out when I was in high school, and it frequently played on the jukebox in our student lounge. I eventually learned to play “The Boxer” and “Song for the Asking” on guitar and performed them a good bit, but there is at least one chord in the latter that I no longer remember and I haven’t tried very hard to find it again. As much as I might like to imagine that I can play guitar as well as Paul Simon, and maybe can fool some non-musicians into thinking I can, the truth is that I don’t even come close, as his brilliant little performances in the audio book definitively confirmed for me.
Between the fall and winter quarters of my senior year in college, I stayed with some friends in an old, drafty house in our small college town. Two of my strongest memories from that brief interlude are the cold water I was subjected to in the makeshift basement shower (it felt like the shower head was connected to a garden hose), and our playing and replaying of the “Still Crazy After All These Years” album on a friend’s very good sound system. (Does anyone here remember Phoebe Snow joining Simon in “Gone at Last?” Or Art Garfunkel re-joining him in “My Little Town?”)
I could go on and on about the profound influence Paul Simon had on me as a young amateur performer and songwriter, not to mention later, like when my wife and I saw S&G perform a reunion concert in Foxboro, Massachusetts in the early 1980s, the thrill of hearing “Graceland” and watching the video of the live performance from South Africa, and the creative joy of writing and performing parodies about partners in my law firm based on some of Simon’s songs (like “See you me and Hugh Jones down by the schoolyard.”)
I could go on about such things, but I won’t. I’d rather relate my experience to something more current.
You see, I was seventeen at the time of the first U.S. release of a solo album by Paul Simon, a high school senior who, like many of my friends, was focused on deciding where I would go to college, finishing and enjoying what remained of my senior year, playing guitar and performing in high school music and theater productions, finding my identity, and searching for the meaning of life. To borrow from “Bookends,” it was “a time of innocence, a time of confidences.”
I was, in other words, the same age Kyle Rittenhouse was when he bought an assault rifle, traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and shot three people, killing two of them. The young Paul Simon might have written some profound song illuminating the culture that produced the damaged teenage soul who embarked on such a hideously reckless and ill-fated journey.
The first Simon song that came to mind as I thought about Rittenhouse was “Save the Life of My Child,” from “Bookends.” Then I read an interview of Rittenhouse’s mother. Maybe that song would work logically, but after reading the disturbing interview, I no longer had the stomach to connect the song to the person.
Still, I wanted to end this piece with a fitting quote from one of Simon’s songs, so I turned to “A Hazy Shade of Winter.” There’s a part that goes
Hear the Salvation Army band
Down by the riverside
It’s bound to be a better ride
Than what you’ve got planned.
Carry your cup in your hand.
When I looked for the online lyrics, the site I found had transposed “cup” to “gun.” I guess that’s an easy mistake to make when you’re listening with 21st century American ears. Easier still after seeing the videos from Kenosha.
Hang on to your hopes my friends.
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The early years with my first guitar, circa 1968. Check out the poster over my left shoulder.