Miracle and Wonder
I don’t think about him often, or elevate his music to quite the same level as the music of Bob Dylan, but Paul Simon was instrumental to my development as a music fan and as a budding musician.
It started with a classmate’s report in a junior high school English class about why he believed “The Sound of Silence” was about communism. It continued with: buying all of Simon and Garfunkel’s albums and learning some of their songs on guitar with another budding musician and close friend during our junior high and early high school years; seeing Simon and Garfunkel at what may have been my first live concert of any well-known musicians; learning that Simon grew the fingernails of his dominant hand somewhat long for purposes of finger-picking (a practice which I then copied and which worked well); hearing songs from the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” album play repeatedly over a juke box in my high school’s student lounge; frequently listening to the “Still Crazy After All These Years” album during a long winter break my senior year of college; performing several songs from his S&G and solo albums at coffeehouses I played at in the 1970s through 1980; going to an outdoor Simon and Garfunkel reunion concert at Foxboro Stadium sometime in the 1980s; writing and performing a parody of one of his songs at a law firm dinner, and making it about one of my favorite senior partners from that firm (as in “See you me and Hugh Jones down by the schoolyard”); and purchasing the “Graceland” concert video as one of the few music videos I have ever owned. It’s safe to say that the music of Paul Simon was a significant influence in my musical development.
I’m not even counting the years I had an office next to one of the senior partners in my first law firm who was a close college friend and personal lawyer to Art Garfunkel (I can still hear his assistant call out that “Arthur” was on the phone). Nor will I count one of my more embarrassing moments, when a blind friend and classmate in law school came to my room, heard me playing guitar when he arrived, and asked me to play a song for him. I foolishly chose “Kodachrome,” not really thinking about the subject of the song or its lyrics. When I came to the part about “nice bright colors” and “greens of summers,” I wanted to find a hole to crawl into, but I did the only thing I felt I could do in the moment – play on to the end. My sightless amigo was a good sport and seemed to like it anyway.
One of my favorite Simon albums has always been “Graceland.” Its upbeat, joyful music by South African artists who presented a fresh, rhythmic sound that most of us had never heard before, combined with Simon’s catchy melodies and wry brand of lyrics, took the music industry (and me) by storm. The album, which is estimated to have sold 16 million copies and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1987, still gets me rocking whenever I hear it.
I’ve been thinking about that album because of its opening track: “The Boy in the Bubble.” To describe it prosaically, the song is about “miracle and wonder” at technological advancements. The title comes from the marvelously alliterative line about “the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart.” (It reminds me of Little Richard’s “bob bopa-a-lu a whop bam boo,” and the Beach Boys’ “Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Barbara Ann.”) Some of the advancements the song mentions are destructive – the first stanza describes a blast caused by a bomb in a baby carriage that was wired to a radio. But the line that says that “[m]edicine is magical and magical is art” takes us to a hopeful place where medical advancements save lives in new and miraculous ways. Here is the live performance from The African Concert of 1987: The Boy in the Bubble
“The Boy in the Bubble” was written more than thirty years ago, yet we are still reaping the benefits of scientific progress in the medical arts. The COVID vaccines that have been developed with new technology and in record time could not have arrived soon enough. The world hasn’t seen a pandemic like this one for 100 years, and although many have died from it, many more will be saved by these wondrous drugs.
These life-saving medications were made possible by science, working in ways and at speeds that most of us never imagined. But applied science is not some disembodied abstraction. It is the product of centuries of human study and experimentation, continuing to and through the present. The vaccines that are restoring us to some semblance of normalcy are the creations of thousands of people around the world, standing on the shoulders of all who came before them, and devoting their lives to the healing and prevention of devastating diseases. These crucial innovations reach us through the good work of countless volunteers and paid workers who put themselves at risk to deliver shots to large numbers of untested strangers. And they come to us on top of the heroic efforts of those brave workers on the front lines of the pandemic who have been treating the millions of symptomatic patients struck down by the virus in the first place.
All of this work since the pandemic began, and all of the study and experimentation that preceded it, are reminders of the amazing things we humans are capable of. They point to the enormous value education delivers when it is combined with a dedication to the common good and generosity of spirit. After a dreary year in which many of us were stuck in our homes and bombarded with televised images and sounds of illness, death, and mayhem, we finally are emerging to enjoy the fruits of the quiet but steadfast labor of those who have committed themselves to lifting us out of the darkness we just endured. And for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, we are doing so just as the sun is getting a little brighter and the temperature a little warmer.
And so, we have special cause to celebrate this Easter Sunday and the unfolding of Spring. Towards that end, I would like to close with a poem I wrote four years ago. It’s short and nothing fancy, and its final line borrows from a song from the ‘60s, but I think it captures in its own simplistic way the hopefulness of this time as we begin to turn the corner on the lost year we just endured. I hope you enjoy it, and I wish you all the gifts of miracle and wonder on this early April day.
Requiem
Death and birth
I like to think of them in that order
What was, is gone
But oh, what is to come!
Night leads to day
Sunset to sunrise
Darkness to light
Tears to laughter
Sadness to joy.
One child born to carry on.
After writing this missive, I learned that Paul Simon last week sold his entire song catalog to Sony Music Publishing. The sale comes on the heels of Bob Dylan selling his songwriting catalog to Universal Music in December. Other artists that have made similar deals include Stevie Nicks and Neil Young. I’ve written a few songs in my time, but I’m pretty sure they would not net me enough to buy a cup of coffee. Of course, if you know someone who’s buying . . . .
One thing I’ve been doing this week to cope with the pandemic is to get re-focused on baseball. On Friday, I watched the Boston Red Sox opening day game against the Baltimore Orioles. Although I was disappointed by the Red Sox loss (a shutout, no less), I was inspired by the opening ceremony. It included a tribute to people in a variety of fields who have contributed to our emergence from the depths of despair during the pandemic. As if anticipating the themes of today’s newsletter, Fenway Park piped in the original track of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” while showing photographs of doctors, nurses, hospital staff, elderly care workers, vaccine developers, people who administered vaccines, postal employees, courier employees, grocery store workers, and so on, who not only were shown in photographs but who also held signs identifying the services they’ve been providing throughout the pandemic. It was a great match of song and tribute to our unsung heroes that brought a tear or two to this writer’s eyes.