Outside Counsel

I was just thinking about "The Capeman", actually. Derek Walcott, with whom Paul Simon collaborated on the doomed Broadway project is coming to Buffalo as part of Just Buffalo's Babel series, and I was thinking about at least checking my calendar for it. Now, come to find out BAM is featuring a Simon retrospective, and "Capeman" leads it off.

In the Voice article linked to above Mike Powell notes:

"Simon once said he thought "Graceland" was his best song. It probably is. When he first heard South African music, he was floored; when he found out where it was from, he remembers wishing it had been from anywhere else. "Graceland" tells the story of a divorced man dragging his son on a journey of self-discovery through the slave-state home of America's most overexposed pop figure. By setting that vision to the bounce of an oppressed people, Simon was able to transpose his complicated passion for South African music into a story about muted redemption. In 1978's "The Big Country," the Talking Heads weighed the same subjects—the urban perception of purity in the Middle-western and Southern states, the allure of their simplicity—but, tellingly, placed its narrator on an airplane. And while David Byrne's characters might never sound as pitiable as Simon's, Simon's would never be so disengaged. In his career's weaker moments—see the bulk of The Capeman—he tries very hard to appear weighed down by the plight and place of his characters, but in his best—"Graceland"—he sounds genuinely upset. For someone so cherished, it's remarkable how little Paul Simon actually smiles."

I think that gets it just about right-- Simon is mostly about the sort of pain that comes from minor slights and major personal catastrophes. Everything wounds him-- but I'd say that Powell misses a bet when he fails to note that Simon is capable of optimism in one form. The man writes great lullabies. As melancholy as his trip with his son "to the cradle of the civil war" might have been, like Holden Caulfield Paul Simon wants to keep kids safe from the world's hurts-- and consider the personal growth represented over the progression from "America"-- an earlier, similar road trip ballad-- to "Graceland". I don't know what ever happened to "Kathy" in the former-- Simon confides to her that he's lost,empty and aching although he knows she is asleep. In contrast, his nine-year old companion in the latter, "the child of my first marriage" may or may not be awake, but it doesn't matter: Simon has "reason to believe we both will be received in Graceland". As a New Yorker he is cosmopolitan in his own environment, and a fish out of water outside of it-- but he has acquired some faith along the way. Some of that faith, it seems to me comes from knowing that even though romantic relationships can fail, the relationship he has with the child of his first marriage will be an enduring, lifelong one.

I'm doing some Dylanology at the moment, and one interesting contrast between the two is that Simon's releases do not have the same out-of-control, throw it against the wall and see what sticks quality that a good deal of Dylan's work does. When Paul Simon puts out a record, even if it is something as blah as "One Trick Pony"-- or as catastrophic a flop as "The Capeman", it represents the full flowering of his creative effort at that moment. Dylan-- also a quintessential New Yorker in many ways-- is prepared to be more experimental. Even so, even though the higher gloss on Simon's work sometimes seems to diminish it, it is a body of work that puts him in the first rank. I wish I was able to go to the BAM thing-- an evening like that could put some of the surprise back in some of those songs, in the same way that Dylan tries to do when he reworks his catalogue in his live shows.