(This is a dialogue between writer Barry Alfonso and me regarding the song 'American Tune" by Paul Simon from his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin' Simon. The chat was published in The San Diego Troubadour , keenly edited by good friend Liz Abbott, the best friend a music scene could have. Barry begins introduces the conversation with some concise and salient background, and then off we go.)
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Paul
Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, a mostly good-humored LP that contrasted with
the often-melancholy tone of the singer-songwriter’s earlier work with Art
Garfunkel. The exception to Rhymin’ Simon’s sunniness was “American Tune” an
elegy for lost dreams set to a Bach chorale that overshadowed everything else
on the album. I can remember the impact of the song on me as a teenager. And I
remember also the reaction I had to reading a review of Rhymin’ Simon that
appeared in the July 12, 1973 edition of the San Diego Reader, written by a
cogent, sharp-elbowed critic named Ted Burke. Burke dismissed much of the album
as “diffuse, distracted,” the work of an artist “mumbling to himself.” Ouch!
However, Ted pronounced “American Tune” brilliant—and it was and still is.
Remarkably, it has endured in popularity and significance, transcending its
immediate relevance to the loss of 1960s’ idealism to be revived again and
again to mark the national heartaches of the moment. Simon went on to write
other outstanding songs, of course – and both of us went on to become friends
at college and remain enduring partners in aesthetic crime ever since.
Recently, we got together at a coffee spot on 30th Street in South Park to
trade thoughts about “American Tune,” Paul Simon, and related matters in true
rock critic codger fashion, still contentious after all these years…
Ted Burke: There’s nothing like 20/20 hindsight, which means
I would have written a less severe review. In the ’70s I had the unfortunate
habit of reviewing albums by favorite artists that didn’t rise to my standard
as a personal betrayal, a conscious act of bad faith. Over time, post review, I
had to admit that all of Simon’s skills as a songwriter were present throughout
the disc, although I think that my original opinion was on target, that it was
an honest attempt in song to venture beyond the elegantly constructed tunes
regarding loneliness and encroaching despair. Lyrically, the stuff that was at
the expressive heart of Simon’s oeuvre was weak tea for the most part. I think
it’s the honest effort of a gifted writer trying new things, new voices.
Ted: It’s a great song and one that works in that it’s an
effectively whimsical reminiscence of his days in high school. In a way you can
say that it’s one of the first times Simon has expressed disappointment with
the adulthood he’s grown into. The line that “everything looks better in black
and white” is revealing in that the tune uses a Kodachrome camera as a device
through which to wax poetic about a simpler time, with the suggestion that his
picture taking captures a world he knows is disappearing with time and
maturity. “Everything looks better in black and white” comes across as a sigh,
a soft admission that despite glaring color of the pictures he snapped of the
things he remembers, his thinking about them is literally black and white; life
was fun and simple and full of adventure and then suddenly it became hard, full
of jobs, families, debt, responsibilities, and the pains of aging. Simon does
the cool trick of slipping in a subtle admission, a confession maybe, that the
way his narrator is regarding his past is idyllic and untrustworthy, even to
himself. This foreshadows what I consider Rhymin Simon’s best song a
masterpiece, I think, which is “American Tune.”
Ted: I never realized that Simon had borrowed the music from
Bach until I heard it on the classical station we play inside the bookstore
where I work. That was a small but important revelation, and I could very well
imagine how Bach’s doleful composition might have inspired Simon to write the
lyrics in the tone and gravity he did. It might well have been the thing that
gave him the stimulation to express some long-gestating notions that he until
then couldn’t quite find the rhyme or reason for. This is rare and the melody
inspired the tone of the lyrics, which was a mixture of nostalgia,
disappointment, and melancholy, but it was always sort of softly played, and
everything was still hopeful. You know, kind of like “I wanna go where all the
good people go to sleep and wake up tomorrow, because tomorrow is another day.”
Barry: Yeah, it was from The English Patient: “The heart is
the organ of fire.” You reacted to a spring in the theater seat that had
stabbed you in the butt!
Barry: As I recall, “Abraham, Martin and John” meant a lot
to people at the time. Listening to it was participating in an act of public
mourning. I don’t know precisely what Simon’s motives were, but I suspect that
it came out of his experience with the McGovern for president campaign. We saw
Richard Nixon, the embodiment of all these terrible things, being reelected in
the landslide. And Simon got back together with Garfunkel, whom he had rather
bitterly broken up with to do a benefit for McGovern. He was all in for
McGovern and watched him get wiped out in November of ’72. 1973 really felt
like that was the end of the ’60s. And so “American Tune” came out in May of
’73 and it sounded like an elegy for everything that went before. I think that
Simon had a stake in it personally. When I hear him singing about the dreams
being shattered and driven to their knees, he’s not just talking about the
workaday world, he’s talking about these bigger things that Americans just
didn’t seem to live up to.
When you’re a hero, you’re supposed to become the person everybody thinks you should be. I remember A.J. Weberman, the self-described “Dylanologist” who would go through Bob Dylan’s garbage and claimed that he had created a new science or sociology, all of which was based on his conviction that Bob Dylan wasn’t just a songwriter and poet but also a seer, a philosopher and prophet of things to come. I remember reading, with interest, a self-published squib he produced where there was a lot of tea leaf reading and how particular lines of Dylan songs forecast grave, epochal disruptions. The obsession with Dylan, the cottage industry of producing books about Dylan, biographies, interpretations, and all these other gratuitous additions to the prose committed to that, that this songwriter was disrespectful to the artist himself, because Dylan wanted to be left alone…
Ted: Simon was also under pressure to produce a hit album.
Barry: His first post-Garfunkel solo album was successful but not a huge hit. [It reached Number 32 on the Billboard Album Chart.]
Ted: I think his solo career is nearly flawless in terms of
albums. And in terms of Rhymin’ Simon, of the albums he’s put out that I’ve
listened to, it’s the one I care for the least.
Ted: I thought Graceland was Simon’s best record. It probably is one of the masterpieces of its time. “The Boy in the Bubble” has one of my favorite lines of all time—after all these surreal imageries and all these references to technology and media and the Age of Miracle and Wonder, he says, “This is the long distance call.” Yeah, it’s such a throwaway line, but it’s beautiful.
Barry: No, it’s great. He could go widescreen when he wanted
to, quite successfully. So, ultimately, what do you think people still get from
“American Tune” when they hear it now?
Ted: I think people are nostalgic. And there’s always this
useful past that they long for. I think most people I know—eventually everybody
talks about the old days and just things just aren’t the way they used to be,
or the way they should be.
Ted: What do people still relate to in “American Tune”? I
remember having conversations, many of them, with my friends and classmates in
the late sixties and seventies that, as high schoolers, our generation was
smarter, more enlightened, that we were hopeful and had a moral compass that
would change the culture, end racism and war, and undo the evils of capitalism.
I remember reading The Greening of America by Charles Reich, wherein a lapsed
academic prophesied an Eden on Earth because the younger generation would make
the world irrefutably fairer and better in every regard. It was a real head
trip and likely made some of the crowd I ran with a might smug and maybe even a
bit delusional about what they thought they deserved. I had heady expectations,
and there were no shortage of writers, activists, and media sorts reinforcing
the idea that the Youthquake, as many called it, would tip the scales toward
Heaven. And we were enlightened by many different sources: the hippies, early
formations of New Age ideas, civil rights, politics, religious ideas because
we’re an enlightened species, but also an awful lot of us at the time were in
school and had a lot of leisure time; we didn’t have a lot of adult
responsibilities. I’m speaking for many of us, not all of us, but the magazines
reinforced that we can just keep doing all this stuff. We can just do it ad
infinitum; this will never end and we’ll just get better and better, but it
never did, because we became adults. People started having children, so they
had to get jobs and pay mortgages. They had to pay income taxes and they had to
accept that. I think a lot of people miss the days when they didn’t have many
responsibilities.
Ted: It’s implied. Simon’s narrator in the tune has equal measures of ennui, depression, melancholy, and disappointment. This works as a soliloquy of someone in the second half of life. It’s poetic, reflective, and woeful, a recollection of experiences that have brought us no closer to Heaven. We kind of see that in more recent history with the Slacker attitude or in the glorified hype about “Silent quitting,” of doing only the bare minimum required at a job because it’s a deadening, heartless routine. It’s interesting to contrast this with “A Change Is Gonna Come,” where the singer and the audience share the hard and bitter history of oppression, violence, and discrimination as Black Americans, yet they still get out of bed with the conviction that despite it all they will work even harder for the better world they believe in. The sad fact of the matter is that the generation Simon sings of in “American Tune” sounds like they miss the days when their job wasn’t to pay the rent. They, we, didn’t expect to be breadwinners and now we’re saddled with all this stuff. Well, what have we become? Have you become your parents? Yeah, you’re supposed to be the adult now.
Barry: Maybe that is the true source of weariness and resignation in “American Tune,” the realization that it is time to grow up!
It’s worth noting that sometime recently Simon rewrote some of the key lines in “American Tune” to reflect a wider historical understanding. He changed “We come on a ship they call the Mayflower / we come on a ship that sailed the moon” to “We didn’t come here on the Mayflower / We came on a ship in a blood red moon.” Rhiannon Giddens sang those new lyrics at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival with Simon backing her up on guitar. This reference to the horrors of slavery and the middle passage changes the whole meaning of the song. Was the poison in the American apple from the very beginning? It’s not that the apple went rotten. The poison was in there all along.
Ted: It’s probably the one time I can think of where a revision helps the song in terms of making it even more timeless.
Barry: Yeah, because the song could always be accused of—well, this is the evil of the privileged life. They are the regrets of people that he met at the McGovern cocktail party. Rich liberal angst.
Ted: Yeah, your memories, your own nostalgia, your despair, your anger over the way things turned out are products of a privileged set of expectations. As opposed to the “blood red moon” line, which I think just broadens the spectrum.
Barry: I don’t think there’s a neat resolution to what Simon
is dealing with in “American Tune.” Earlier, you talked about how the song is
capacious enough to hold your own interpretations of its imagery. There is the
image of the Statue of Liberty, smiling at you as you’re sailing away to sea.
What does that really mean? It’s in a dream. And it’s very ambiguous. You can
read a lot into that. Does it mean that you’re protected? Does that mean she’s
waving bye-bye, and her protection has been lifted? It’s not clear what that
means.
Barry: Speaking of being hip, Paul Simon was never considered the hippest songwriter. And yet a song like “American Tune” can endure and be meaningful to people for 50 years.
Ted: His best work, the major portion of his output, began with the release of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends album. Simon developed his ear for speech and stopped straining to be poetic and ceased his attempts to make big statements about the human condition. His best songs resonate because Simon wrote credibly, in clear and freshly uncluttered language. You can note his increasing sense of irony, of taking himself less seriously, in expressing relatable experiences in concise, coherent, and pithy ways that were filled with all kinds of melodic hooks, segues, and choruses. Whatever one has to say about Simon, his songs have stood the test of time. I think he’s good because the songs are good. Once he got out of the Simon and Garfunkel cage, as he was starting work on Bookends, he attained the particular genius we know him for.
Barry: He would say that a lot of those songs on side two (“Fakin’ It,” “Hazy Shade of Winter,” and “At the Zoo”) were failed singles. He was not particularly proud of those songs and wouldn’t perform them live. That was his take on it.
Ted: The album had some psychedelic Sergeant Pepper-ish
stuff for certain elements of the crowd, but besides that I thought it was a
very strong album. In the song “America,” it’s become cliché “to look for
America.” But I thought the song was just beautifully constructed.
Ted: “It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw.”
That’s a line you remember, just a nice use of the place name. And when he does
get to his confession, it doesn’t it doesn’t ring false.
Barry: Any final wrap-up thoughts about “American Tune”?
Ted: I think “American Tune” is a masterpiece by not trying to be a masterpiece. I think it works better than, say, “A Day in the Life.” I think it works better than that as a work of art. It’s something that is sophisticated and subtle, with interesting progressions that come from a Bach chorale. It’s poetic without seeming like it’s trying. It’s professionalism in the best sense. It sounds like a song that Simon cared about. I don’t think there’s a wasted word in there. There’s not a gratuitous line. There’s not a bad image. I think it’s very spare without seeming chintzy. I think it’s poetic without seeming arch. I think it’s transcendent of the conceits of its own time. And it doesn’t drown in its own despair.
Barry: I agree. There’s a clear-eyed facing up to reality that’s brave in a way.
Ted: It’s a song by or about somebody who is resilient. But being resilient doesn’t mean that you’re thriving. It just means that you’re able to get up and continue.
Barry: Well, you know that there’s a new set of facts on the table. And you need to find a new way to engage reality. As the song says, “I’ve certainly been misused.” It’s talking about your bigger involvement in society and, yes, you’re going to keep living. And, yes, you’re going to rest your bones and work. But as far as how you participate in the bigger world, you’re going to draw back a bit; there’s a line that’s been crossed and you’re not going to do that anymore. It seems that America has faced this again and again since “American Tune” was first released. Maybe that’s why the song has never gone away.
Ted: And the mystery is, is that line going to be crossed?
Are you going to be the one to cross it? Or is it going to be for someone other
than me, really? Have you done things in this life that will create another way
of approaching life situations as they present themselves? A different way of
thinking? I think in a lot of ways we have. I think that despite what I’ve said
that we have made progress in various fields and parts of the population that
have benefited over the last 50-60 years from legislation and activism. But how
does that continue from here?
Ted: So I hear…
No comments:
Post a Comment