Monday, January 2, 2012

Graceland

While a trip to Elvis Presley's (in)famous Graceland estate is the set-up for this song, it's more about a state of grace than an actual, geographical place. Like Graceland itself, it is a place in which all are welcomed. (I even know the couple who had the mansion's first Jewish wedding; the skullcaps given to guests where made of-- what else-- blue suede.)

The trip that sets off the stream-of-consciousness lyrics seems to proceed northward from the "Mississippi Delta," perhaps down Nawlins way (that's "New Orleans," with the local accent), upstream along the river itself, through the former Confederate States, to "Memphis, Tennessee." So the word "down" in "down the highway" is to be taken as "along," not "southward"; perhaps it should be "up the highway," but in songs it's always "down the highway."

National is a brand of guitar. The maker specializes in the "dobro" a guitar with a steel plate mostly covering the soundhole (You can see one on the cover of the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms). This guitar can be played vertically or horizontally, usually with a slide and thimble-like picks (called "plectrums") and is known for its tremolo, or warbling, twangy sound. Simon is comparing the sunshine reflecting off the Delta wetlands to the shiny steel plate on this guitar, favored in country music.

"Poorboys" could be taken as "poor boys," simply "needy people," the kind that throng to a shrine like "pilgrims." But a "poorboy" is also local slang for a kind of large sandwich elsewhere known as a "hero" or "submarine" sandwich (or a "hoagie" or "grinder"). By adding some local slang, Simon is trying to evoke a sense of place. As it happens, the "Civil War" is in this area known as "The War Between the States"... but "Civil War" rhymes better with "National guitar."

Another way Simon proves his Southern bona-fides on the track is including The Everly Brothers themselves on high background harmonies (called "descants," technically). Don Everly was born in Kentucky... then Phil in Chicago, but still.

Who are the pilgrims in thos speaker's car? Himself and his son, who-- if the speaker is Simon-- is Harper, the "child of [Simon's] first marriage," to Peggy Harper. I have not done the math, but "nine years old" seems reasonable.

"But I’ve reason to believe/ We both will be received/ In Graceland." There could not have been a doubt about his son, an innocent child, being thus received. The doubt, which is here brushed away, must have been about himself, now a double divorcee.

This thought leads to its source, the memory of his love's leaving: "She comes back to tell me she’s gone." She seems to come to collect her things and let him know that her leaving is, in fact, permanent. He fumes at the insult to his intelligence: "As if I didn’t know my own bed." He knows her so well, he knows what "the way she brushed her hair from her forehead" means.

Then she makes an interesting observation-- a divorce, the loss of a love, is a public matter. As if being able to peer through "a window in your heart," everyone will know that you are devastated, "blown apart." Furthermore, those people will also feel the impact and shock wave: "Everybody feels the wind blow.”

Here, the website, liner notes, and book dispute the line. These first two sources have "Everybody sees the wind blow," which would imply people appreciate the impact but are not affected by it, which the Lyrics book says they are. Here's how this dispute breaks down, also taking the repeat of the chorus into account. The website has "Everybody sees the wind blow" both times; the liner notes have "sees" and then "feels"; the book has "feels" both times!

So we listen to the song. Simon sings "sees" the first time and "feels" the second time. The liner notes win. And this makes sense. The first time thinking the incident through, a person might only focus on himself: "Everyone sees my devastation, and I am exposed." The second time, he might see what impact his sadness and anger have had on those around him: "Everyone feels my devastation; I should be compassionate toward them, too."

And, on the second time through, the speaker realizes that he has more in his car than himself and his son. He has the skeletons from his closets, "ghosts and empty sockets."

The throw-away line that repeats changes "empty [eye] sockets" to "empties," usually a reference to empty cans or bottles of beer, as in "We should return these empties for a refund at the store." The sight of all the empties of beers consumed during a period mourning over a lost love, strewn around the floor the following morning, is a sobering thought. (Don Henley has a song with the lines: "If you still want to hold her, you must not be drinking enough.")

What else might keep someone out of grace, aside from losing love, and so now having no love? What about too much love? We'll have to find someone who has that issue and ask them. How about a girl who is, um, "bounced" on so often even she calls herself "The Human Trampoline," as if she were a circus sideshow attraction?

The speaker, who does not have that sort of chaos in his life, nevertheless knows "turmoil" of the kind a trampoline causes: "falling, flying... tumbling" in uncertainty. Yes, yes-- even someone that tumultuous can, um,  "bounce" into grace.

And now the speaker is ready to admit that he was not the only one impacted by the explosions in his life. To be fair, when his former lover told him this to begin with, she may have been speaking about herself, or telling him what to expect, from her own experience.

Simon, in interviews, has said that, when he was a teen, he wanted to be Elvis (Simon has admitted to the song being influenced by Presley's "Mystery Train"). So the idea of making a pilgrimage to Graceland, the source of his artistic inspiration, at a time of reassessment, should not surprise him so much: "For reasons I cannot explain/ There’s some part of me wants to see Graceland." Isn't this album, recorded on a trip to Africa-- the ultimate source of even Elvis' music-- just a further exploration on that same journey?

So what does grace mean? The word "unconditional" often precedes the word "love," but we have just seen that romantic love is not necessarily unconditional. There are everything from divorces to one-night stands. And what if "I may be obliged to defend/ Every love, every ending," worries the speaker, so used to-- so conditioned to-- conditional love. "What if I can't justify or excuse my actions well enough-- won't I be refused?"

And then the key realization dawns and the beginning of grace is achieved. "Or maybe," he wonders, "maybe there’s no obligations now." Maybe love is conditional when it is human love, and only God's grace is pure, obligation-free, and unconditional.

If that's true, it's true for everyone: "Maybe I’ve a reason to believe/ We all will be received/ In Graceland." All. Everyone. Even him.

IMPACT:
The song won the Grammy for Record of the Year, which goes to the person or people who performed and recorded the song (as opposed to Song of the Year, which goes to the songwriter. That year, 1988, that went to "Somewhere Out There," from An American Tail.). (Album of the Year is for the entire album. We'll see if that's phased out as downloads take over...)

The song hit charts internationally, going to 81 in the US, 98 in the UK, and 70 in Canada, and all the way to 27 in Ireland. It also cracked the top 100 in Australia and The Netherlands, and the Top 40 in New Zealand and Belgium.

It has been covered by everyone from Willie Nelson and Coldplay's Chris Martin to, inevitably, Elvis impersonators. Also a band with the clever, if sad, name of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

Next Song: I Know What I Know

19 comments:

  1. Listen to "Mystery Train," which Paul has frequently cited as his favorite rock 'n' roll song ever, then listen again to the rhythm track on "Graceland." Hat tip, much?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Okay, I just found Alison Krauss's version of this, which Paul praised in an interview, and I was Blown Away. She took what's really a rather bitter song and made it sound like a redemptive hymn. Pure grace and beauty. The one thing that jars me is hearing her sing the lines like "She comes back to tell me she's gone/As if I didn't know that, as if I didn't know my own bed..." Clearly written by a man, so it's just odd for those lyrics to be married to Alison's voice. But I guess it's not as bad as Krauss and Shawn Colvin singing "I get no offers, just a come-on from the whores on 7th Avenue" (!)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Paul Simon is visiting Emory Univ. to give lectures and a short concert in Feb. 2013. To celebrate, we've started a video project in which people talk about their favorite Simon songs and memories. Here's our first entry... on "Graceland."

    http://tinyurl.com/9czk84e

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hal- Halfway through this talk, I realized that I had not made clear the implication that the "she" is likely the partner of his "first marriage," and that this "child" is also hers. Just so that's clear.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Also, the lecturer wonders why the Civil War reference, if that is historically inaccurate? Then I realized, maybe the whole South evokes the Civil War, and he's connecting the idea of two halves of a country going to battle against each other with two people breaking up. Even Lincoln compared the situation to a familial strife, "a house divided."

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh, and Hal-- Thanks! This was fascinating.

    ReplyDelete
  8. "I even know the couple who had the mansion's first Jewish wedding"

    Not that weird. Elvis had Jewish friends from his youth.

    "Elvis Was Our Shabbos Goy" By Vox Tablet on August 25, 2014
    http://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/182703/elvis-was-our-shabbos-goy

    "How Elvis Presley Missed His True Calling — As a Cantor" by Anne Cohen and Sigal Samuel September 8, 2014
    http://forward.com/culture/205079/how-elvis-presley-missed-his-true-calling-as-a-cantor/

    ReplyDelete
  9. "And my traveling companions
    "Are ghosts and empty sockets
    "I’m looking at ghosts and empties"

    A ghost is a soul without a body. An empty socket is a body without a soul; a/k/a a zombie.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Fat Man-- I don't pretend to be an expert on Presley, but I have heard that he even had some Jewish ancestry. As he was someone who sang several albums of gospel material, I doubt Elvis felt close to that part of himself.
    As it happens, many non-Jewish celebrities had connections with Jewish neighbors, fellow performers, employers, etc., from Louis Armstrong to Colin Powell.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Fat Man-- I understand your interpretation of a body as a "socket" for a soul, but I'm afraid I don't share it. The part of a person called a "socket," aside from that for a shoulder or hip joint, is the eye.
    It could as well be an electric socket, but I doubt that as well...
    Still, the zombie imagery works insofar as the southern setting of the song-- better for New Orleans than Memphis?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Many years too late to reply but I'm going to do it anyway. Paul Simon had just left New Orleans or at least Louisiana somewhere down there he was recording something down there and so that could tie in with his comment about the the zombie or aspect of it that phrase always bothered me and I couldn't figure it out

      Delete
    2. Unknown-- Well, Simon does like New Orleans' music. He references it in Take Me to the Mardi Gras, and in That Was Your Mother, and probably other songs.
      But this song begins in the "Mississippi Delta." While the maximal extent of this region stretches from the Gulf coast of Louisiana to the southern tip of Illinois, most people using the term mean a much smaller region in NW Mississippi. This region does border Louisiana, but not the Gulf coast and the New Orleans area.
      Also, the song's pedal steel, the references to Elvis, and the presence of the Everly Brothers, all put it in the geography of country music, not zydeco or Cajun music.
      So ghosts are mentioned, but Cajun/ Caribbean zombies are not. Once again, I don't think a "socket" is a zombie. I think it means an empty eye socket, as with a skeleton.

      Delete
  12. Huh. I always thought the line went "And I've raised him (the child) to believe we all will be received in Graceland" which made total sense to me: the father handing down his Elvis obsession.

    ReplyDelete
  13. What a kitty!-- I can see how that would make sense. But both Rod Stewart and Bruce Springsteen have songs titled "Reason to Believe." It's somewhat a cliche.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Thing is, Misissippi Delta regers to NW Miss. rt nr Memphis. Chk yr Google. It's a well known blues region.

    ReplyDelete

  15. According t Wikipedia...

    Mississippi Delta
    Not to be confused with Mississippi River Delta.
    This article is about the geographic region of the U.S. state of Mississippi.

    The Mississippi Delta is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi which lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth"[1] ("Southern" in the sense of "characteristic of its region, the American South"), because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history. It is 200 miles long and 87 miles across at its widest point, encompassing circa 4,415,000 acres, or, some 7,000 square miles of alluvial floodplain.[2] Originally covered in hardwood forest across the bottomlands, it was developed as one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the nation before the American Civil War (1861-1865). The region attracted many speculators who developed land along the riverfronts for cotton plantations; they became wealthy planters dependent on the labor of black slaves, who comprised the vast majority of the population in these counties well before the Civil War, often twice the number of whites.

    As the riverfront areas were developed first and railroads were slow to be constructed, even after the Civil War most of the bottomlands in the Delta were undeveloped. Both black and white migrants flowed into Mississippi, using their labor to clear land and sell timber in order to buy land. By the end of the 19th century, black farmers made up two-thirds of the independent farmers in the Mississippi Delta.[3] In 1890 the white-dominated state legislature passed a new state constitution effectively disenfranchising most blacks in the state. In the next three decades, most blacks lost their lands due to tight credit and political oppression.[3] African Americans had to resort to sharecropping and tenant farming to survive. Their political exclusion was maintained by the whites until after the gains of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

    African Americans developed the musical forms of blues and jazz. The majority of residents in several counties in the region are still black, although more than 400,000 African Americans left the state during the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century, moving to northern, midwestern, and

    ReplyDelete
  16. Proofreading Nerd-- Heavens to Betsy! Thank you so much for that geographical insight. I never would have known that. The area you discuss is not, as I said in the post, near New Orleans but farther north and in another state, although still south of Memphis and Graceland. Thanks again.

    ReplyDelete