I’m starting to try and put together a Spotify playlist of
songs to accompany my forthcoming locked-down “big” birthday. Given my age and
my era, it’s predictable that most of the candidate songs will have originated
in the golden decade of pop music, which coincided with my teenage years. It
can’t in any way be exhaustive, or even representative of all my favourite acts
from that period (and others), but I’m hoping to achieve some sort of balance.
In the nature of things, most songs will be British or American.
One - or arguably two - of the biggest acts in American
music in the whole of the twentieth century was/were Simon and Garfunkel. It
took me a while to catch on, but once I did I liked the fact that they were
sort of collegiate, popular across US campuses, slightly culty, intelligent,
and very tuneful. Not overtly political or angry, they were highly articulate
observers, commenting obliquely on what it was like to live in America during
that momentous decade. I hadn’t yet visited the US at that time, but it was a
country that had long fascinated me. One could not be a young person fully
alive in Britain at that time without being to some extent American.
Essentially I think it was the poetry of urbanity in several
of S&G’s songs that appealed to me. Since quite early on I’d been mildly
obsessed with New York, its architecture, its transportation infrastructures,
the nomenclature of its thoroughfares and neighbourhoods, the whole quality and
ambience of the place – imagined from afar. Simon and Garfunkel fed into this
fixation. “Homeward Bound” (supposedly composed while awaiting a train at
Widnes railway station on Merseyside), “I am a rock” (references to a deep and
dark December) and “The Boxer” (the New York City winters) were, whatever else,
poignant references to their home city, to the enclosed psychological safety of
the metropolis. Later, when Guy Peellaert’s “Rock Dreams” illustrated book of
imagined musician scenarios was published, S&G were portrayed squashed into
a packed NYC Subway train, with text (by Nik Cohn) alluding to the sounds of
silence and the graffiti on the subway walls. Perfect, I thought. The following
year I went there for the first time, and rarely have I been more excited to
arrive anywhere.
But what for my playlist? “Bridge over troubled water” is
generally regarded as their masterpiece, but I felt it was slightly too long,
over-familiar and ponderous; “El Condor
Pasa” (as I suspect I've mentioned before) had become for me the subject of a mischievous deliberate
dyslexia, as El Codnor Pasa, alternatively known as That Codnor Moment,
experienced whenever I passed through the small town of Codnor, Derbyshire;
“Call me Al” was also too familiar, with its strong beat routinely perceived as
telegraph poles lining a long street in somewhere archetypically, informally
America; “Cecilia” reminded me of a girl from Eastbourne I sometimes partnered
with in zoology practicals; “Frank Lloyd Wright” was too wistful and delicate;
“Mrs Robinson”, mm, maybe ….
But no, none of them. For me, far and away their greatest
achievement is “America”, dating from 1968, a love song, a road trip song, a
song on many levels. Trouble is, it makes me cry, and always has done. Partly
it’s a response to its sheer overall beauty, but any song that contains a line
like “and the moon rose over an open field” - to anyone with a visual
imagination and a strong affection for the US - is going to be uncontrollably lachrymatory.
With its references to boarding a Greyhound
in Pittsburgh, and counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, it
reminds me of happy transcontinental bus trips long ago. “Empty and aching” for
this vast, wonderful, beautiful country with its immense distances and endless
horizons, it’s the musical equivalent of what Edward Hopper did in paint and
Thomas Wolfe analogously in print. Impossible longings and yearnings, reliable
triggers for tears, an insatiable ache for … everything. Ordinary folk on trains and in all night diners, staring from the window, staring into their
coffee, waiting, lonely, alone. Whole worlds. All lives matter.
“It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to”. Well, I don’t
want to. Lesley Gore, who had a hit with those lyrics, had been born in
Brooklyn, the next borough to Queens, which is where Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel grew up, where they became
friends, starting to write and perform songs together. I wonder, did they
realise, that only a couple of miles to the east of them, about five stops on
the Subway, and five years younger, one Donald J Trump was also growing up?
Growing up in a country that, one day, he would promise to make great again.
I try not to do politics, but when I listen to “America”,
and when I look at America now, it’s hard not to cry.
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