Wait

This one, sadly, is not too hard to understand.

Simon is in his 80s. Many of those who began in music when he did are gone, and very many far before an age the average life expectancy statistics would have predicted. 

Further, many his age-- and some even younger-- have had to stop performing or recording because of some illness. 

Simon himself, in interviews for the Seven Psalms album, said that he lost the hearing in his left ear over the course of recording it, and can no longer perform onstage, at least not with a band. 

Nevertheless, he can still write, compose, and record; as he says in this song: "My hand's steady/ My mind is still clear." 

And, like Beethoven, he can still hear music in his mind, and synthesize new music from it. "I hear the ghost songs I own," he sings. Does he mean songs he owns the copyrights to, because he wrote them? Or the songs he owns recordings of? Likely the latter, given what he says next.

What is "ghostly" about them? They are probably not about ghosts, like "ghost stories" told around campfires. Are they by people who are gone? Are they songs that are simply unheard these days? Are they songs that people have heard of, but would not really be able to sing if you asked them to? 

He also says these songs are "jumpin', jivin', and moanin'," which makes me think of jazz. So it's possible that the songs are ghosts because the memory of them has faded. 

Then he seems to turn away from whomever (or Whomever) he is asking to wait, and-- for the chorus-- to turn toward his listener, to offer some advice and observations. First, he compares life to a "meteor," falling fast and burning brightly, a brief flash.  

He urges us to "let [our] eyes roam," and explore as a wanderer would. This could have gone the other way-- life being short, one might just as easily be advised to focus on a single goal and not get distracted. But Simon advises, "Go on, get distracted. There's a lot to see." 

Then comes one of his most poignant lines: "Heaven is beautiful/ It's almost like home." The key word here is "almost." Even Heaven itself cannot match the pleasures of home. Nevertheless. he urges-- now adopting a gospel verbiage-- "Children! Get ready!/ It's time to come home." 

A line ago, Heaven was not quite home. Now, it is "home." Well, it's going to be, so we might as well start calling it that now.

Last, Simon lays out two requests for how he wants to "transition" to... whatever is next. His first is that he wishes for a "dreamless transition." Most want to pass away while sleeping, but Simon is afraid of his dreams and what lurks in his subconscious mind. So he asks for a dreamless sleep, so he won't have to, in his final moments, be troubled by his "dark intuition."

This whole album, he has struggled with the idea of God and Heaven. He wants to believe because he craves the comfort he expects that will give him. But he also is a cynic and has a hard time believing. What if, at the last second, he has... doubt?

So for his second request, he asks for help. For someone to help him take that step across the final threshold. Now, he turns away from us and from God-- to his wife, Edie, to whom he has been married for 30 years now: "I need you here by my side/ My beautiful mystery guide." (It could also mean an angel, or that he is calling her one.)

The chorus repeats but this time, and we expect to hear, again (the word is repeated 4 times so far), "Wait."

Instead, we hear-- and this is the last word on the album-- "Amen." Of course. 

These were not songs, they were Psalms all along. They were prayers. And what do you say when a prayer is finished? "Amen."

The word's derivation is Hebrew, from a root meaning "faith." After a hearing a prayer, the listener replies, basically: "Faith." We have faith that the prayer just offered will be heard and received and accepted. 

Poet Dylan Thomas told us to "rage against the dying of a light." Simon is not raging, here. He is not begging or even bargaining. 

But he is asking. With calm dignity, he is praying for death to wait.

He is not ready to go-- and we are not ready for him to go, either.

May his prayer be granted. Amen.

Next Song: Billy Boy

Slip Slidin' Away

[Note to Readers: These next several posts, before we head on into the Hearts and Bones album, will be dedicated to some of Simon's material which was written before this point, but did not appear on any of the regular albums up to this point. So expect to discover some lost treasures .]

In keeping with the chronological idea of this blog, this song should have been discussed before One-Trick Pony. It was intended for Still Crazy and now appears (albeit in demo form) on the CD reissue of that disc.

It was first released on Greatest Hits, Etc., and was the lead-off track on that compilation, which was issued in 1977, two years after Still Crazy and three years before Pony.

So, if this blog ever turns into a book, the order will be: "Silent Eyes" (the last track of Still Crazy), then "Slip Slidin' Away" and "Stranded in a Limosine"... and then "Late in the Evening" (the first track of Pony).

That bit of housekeeping taken care of, on with the show...

This song is an expansion of John Lennon's dictum, "Life is what happens when we're making other plans," or the expression "Man plans and God laughs" (which is found in Yiddish, but I can't believe exclusively.)

It has a nihilistic theme that presages the Kansas song "Dust in the Wind"... and an episodic structure that prefigures Springsteen's "Glory Days" (further, both songs first present a man, then a woman, then a father [in a lesser-known concert version of the Springsteen song], then a philosophical conclusion).

The song begins, in fact, with this famous chorus: "Slip slidin’ away/ You know the nearer your destination/ The more you’re slip slidin’ away." Often, Simon is not so declarative of the message of his song.

First, we meet a man who is a martyr when it comes to love. The first clue to this Christ imagery is the word "passion," which at first we think just means "lustful affection." But then comes the image of the "crown of thorns" Jesus was forced to wear during the Crucifixion, which causes us to reinterpret the idea of "passion" to also mean something more like a "Passion Play."

In his protestation, he explains that his love for her is so intense, he is in danger of losing his sense of self: "My love for you’s so overpowering/ I’m afraid that I will disappear." So, the "nearer" he gets to her, the more his self "slips away." Imagine an ice cube in love with a lit candle-- the closer it gets, the smaller it becomes, until it is no longer ice at all, let alone a cube.

The second verse is about a woman who lives in regret. She has already lost herself. She's not a woman who "got married," she "became a wife." As if that meant she was no longer a "woman" unto herself, but now defined by her relationship to a man. A good day, to her, is not even one that is "sunny," but simply one that "ain’t got no rain,” which is a pretty low standard for nice weather. Meanwhile, when it does rain and she is stuck in the house (because she can't buy a raincoat or umbrella?), she simply wallows in regret: "I lie in bed/ And think of things that might have been.”

In her case, she is not in process of "slidin' away"; it may be fair to say she has already slid. She is not beyond hope, however, as she is aware of her situation, and may someday grow tired of it and reassert her own identity.

Now, the man and woman in the first two verses speak. The third verse presents a father who intends to, but does not: "He came a long way/ Just to explain/ He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping/ Then he turned around and headed home again."

His silence is immense. The child does not even know that his father was there. We can only imagine that the "boy" in question is relatively young to receive that appellation, and is not married in any case. Is he a child or teen, still living with his post-divorce mother? Probably. The other possibility is that the son lives alone, in which case, he is in college or is working and living in an apartment. But how did he fall asleep and leave the apartment door unlocked for his father to enter? Did his roommate let his dad in?

The first scenario seems more likely-- a wayward father (maybe like the one in Springsteen's "Hungry Heart") returns, wants to explain himself, then considers the possibility that the son has gotten over him and that his return will only prove disruptive. Who is he doing this unburdening for, anyway? If it's for himself, maybe he should leave well enough alone. Certainly, waking a child up with, "Hi, remember me, your dad? Anyway, here's why I left. OK, then... back to sleep, now," is not something any therapist would recommend.

He has reached his "destination," only to realize that the distance between himself and his son is not measured in miles (or kilometers); he is right there, yet as far away as ever.

The last verse is the "...and God laughs" part. The key word here is "gliding." Not "driving"; we are at least self-aware enough to know we are not in control. But we do believe we are savvy enough to ride the road like an albatross does the air currents or a surfer does the waves-- able to change with the curves and even use them to increase our forward momentum... to "glide."

Even this level of control, Simon explains, is an illusion: "God makes his plan/ The information’s unavailable/ To the mortal man" (think of God's response to Job: "Were you there when I made the universe?"). We think we are headed toward our "destination," say, in our career or financial plan. But no, even as we reach our retirement or monetary goals, overcoming the curves in the road, we are missing the point.

We spend our time planning when we have no control over God's plan for us. We have no control over natural disasters or elections or wars or Wall Street or diseases or accidents or most other things. We can be "gliding down the highway" in entirely the wrong direction, but it matters not, as we will ended up where we were Intended to be regardless.

This song is about providence and predetermination. It is about fortune and fate... even fatalism. It's beautiful, yet a very sad and resigned shrug about mortality and the futility of human action. Everyone in the song tries for a goal and not only misses it but loses him- or herself in the process of aiming for it altogether. People lose themselves in the pursuit of love, stability, or money; even the father who went off to find himself now only sees what he lost in doing so.

This post began with a suggestion of which songs this one influenced, but writers as early as King Solomon concluded: "...all is vanity, and striving after wind."

IMPACT:
Amazingly, for such a somber number-- and one without a proper album to support it at that-- the song went to #5 in the US. It remains a radio mainstay, even if it is still only available on compilations (and, of course, online).

Along with "Fifty ways to leave your lover," "Mrs. Robinson," "Bridge over troubled water," and "Still crazy after all these years," the phrase "Slip slidin' away" has become part of the American linguistic landscape.

Next Song: Slow Man

Everything Put Together Falls Apart

An uncharacteristic bit of advice-giving from Simon. In the same year when Neil Young sang about "The Needle and the Damage Done"-- 1972-- Simon discouraged drug use with this somber number. (Originally posted incorrect date; corrected by a comment [see below])

"Paraphernalia," as in drug paraphernalia, "never hides your broken bones," our speaker explains. But most songs, at this point, might encourage the listener-- instead of turning to drugs-- to "get high on life" or perhaps find religion.

Not this speaker. He discusses, instead, the concept of entropy, the physics truism that states, as the title indicates, that "everything put together sooner or later falls apart." Yes, everything... from planets to forests to elements.

The Gershwins put it: "The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble." Not just "may," Simon insists, but "will." William Butler Yeats agrees, writing in his poem, "The Second Coming": "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold." Nothing can reverse the process of entropy.

You might think, the speaker says, that drugs could ease or maybe mask the pain of this deterioration. But they cannot "hide your broken bones." The speaker also does not hold out the hope of support by friends, society, or God: "It's plain to see you're on your own."

Nevertheless, one should still not turn to drugs to wake "up" or lie "down," since they "change your style." One should not attempt to mask suffering or mortality by drugging, as that does not even provide an effective hiding place-- all they do is make you less yourself. "Some folks are crazy," the speaker admits, and some nearly so. But you are not; you are still rational. So why take drugs and become crazy? It's foolish.

"You can cry/ You can lie," but it will not help one bit. Instead, one should recognize that one is mortal, but not dwell on the matter, and simply get on with the business of living. Since "everything put together sooner or later falls apart" anyway, "spare your heart" the angst of focusing on that inevitability.

You are helpless to change, veer away from, or prevent your dying. Everyone and everything dies. And why think "Well, if I'm just going to die anyway, I might as well kill myself now" ("You can die")? Why not just live already?

Dorothy Parker agrees. Her poem, "Resume" assesses various suicide methods and reaches the same conclusion:
"Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live."

"When... they lay you down for dead/ Just remember what I said," about everything falling apart. So, first, stop avoiding the issue with drugs, and wasting time with them, advises the speaker, and just live the life you have left.

"Everything Put Together" is not a nihilistic or fatalistic song. Rather, it is an open-eyed assessment of the fact of mortality. As Kafka said, "The meaning of life is that it ends." And the best response Simon can find to that inevitability is to not waste what time he has left dwelling on that issue: "If I am going to die some day, I only have so much time to get things done, so I'd better get busy now."

In his book of philosophical essays The Myth of Sisyphus, novelist Albert Camus discusses despair and hope. Since we don't know what will happen tomorrow, both despair and hope are equally absurd mindsets, he reasons. But if one despairs, one might as well kill oneself today. Since the outlooks are equally absurd, he decides, one might as well hope and live.

Centuries before, the author of Ecclesiastes-- believed by many to be King Solomon-- also wrestled with the meaning of life, and death. "As the one dies, so dies the other... All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." Therefore, "The best thing we can do is eat and drink and enjoy what we have earned."

Simon doesn't state it in Camus' or Ecclesiastes' terms, but he might agree. Since entropy/mortality will get you in the end anyway... "spare your heart." You might as well live.


Next song: Run That Body Down

Old Friends

There are only a handful of songs in the rock canon that deal with the elderly or aging. "When I'm 64," by the Beatles. "Father and Son" by Cat Stevens. "Old Man" by Neil Young. And, of course, "Old" by, well, Paul Simon.

Rock is obsessed with youth. Most rock songs that do mention age share The Who's sentiment: "Hope I die before I get old." Mick Jagger once opined that he'd rather be dead than singing "Satisfaction" when he was 45. Yes, that was a while ago.

"Old Friends" is a closely observed portrait, almost a "word painting," of two elderly gentlemen sitting on a park bench. They have "high shoes" with "round toes." They have old overcoats now so large that their shrunken bodies are "lost" in them.

And what do they do, in the park? Reminisce about the good old days? Observe the people around them and comment? Brag about their grandchildren? Fume about corruption and politics? Feed the pigeons breadcrumbs? Play chess?

No. They sit, motionless, a bit apart, like "bookends." Ones with no books between them depending on their support. But there is a great deal more than empty air between them.

A "newspaper" tumbles by to land on their shoes, its "news" already history. They do not bother to toss it in the recycling bin or even brush it away. Nor do they react at all to the "sounds of the city," which simply "settle like dust" on their "shoulders."

So what are they doing out there? "Waiting for the sunset" in the "winter." These times are both literal and figurative. They are waiting for the inevitable, the ends of their days and years.

And they are friends, so they don't even have to say what is on their minds. They remember the "same years," and so do not need to rehash those events. But neither can they bring themselves to mention the ever-present thought that would make the all else pale into meaninglessness. They are "silently sharing the same fear."

It's not as if they are busy living, at the moment. But perhaps, having lived, they are now exhausted and enfeebled and just plain worn out. As the song "Old Man river" put it, they are "tired of living, but scared of dying."

This is a far cry from the Beatles' ditty about "rent[ing] a cottage on the Isle of Wight" and dandling "grandchildren on [one's] knee" in one's golden years. And the Cat Stevens and Neil Young songs are the voices of young people trying to express themselves to their elders: "How can I try to explain?" and "I'm a lot like you were."

The observer of the old friends-- perhaps on the park bench opposite-- from the first verse, turns to his own, young friend. "Can you imagine us," he asks him, living that long? Being friends that long? Being that old? It must be "strange" and "terrible."

Yet, he stops short of saying (as The Who did) that he hopes that he would die before getting old. It's not a sense of hope, or fear of suicide.

Rather, it's a preternaturally mature attempt to find some acceptance around the idea that for most of us, to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eloit, our world will end "not with a bang but a whimper." This is reflected in the music, which after the lyrics, surges in a swirling swell of unsettling strings... only to resolve in a single violin note that seems like the flat-lining tone of a hospital heart-rate monitor.

We grow up, we grow old. If we're lucky, we get to do it with a friend.

NOTE:
I have, since posting this entry, heard from a reader, one I have mentioned earlier who himself has published a book on Simon's songs (The Words and Music of Paul Simon (2007) by James Bennighof). His interpretation of the "Bookends" line that has befuddled me for years is straightforward and sensible, so I felt I should pass it along-- "Memories/They're all that's left you," he feels, should be read: "Memories are all that's left to you [after a dear one has passed away]." So, thanks to Prof. Bennighof for that insight.

IMPACT: The song, while not a huge, defining hit, is nonetheless one of the more popular among S&G fans.

"Old Friends" also served as the title for the recent S&G reunion tour and its attendant CD and DVD.


Next Song: Bookends Theme

Leaves That Are Green

The first song on S&G's second album, Sounds of Silence, is its title track, "The Sound of Silence"... and the pluralized title of the album forever threw the exact title of the song itself into doubt. Further complicating the matter was the fact that, as a single, the song's title was "Sounds..."

(Why people think it's "...Waters" when every presentation of "Bridge" is consistently titled "Bridge Over Troubled Water" is just people relying on memory instead of bothering to check.)

But, as we already dealt with "The Sound of Silence" during its first appearance on the debut album, we will pause only to say it is this electrified version of the song that went to #1. The stoy behind the (as we would say today) "remix" is fascinating, but it has been already covered many times and in many places.

Now, we will proceed directly to the first new original song on the second album, "Leaves That Are Green." This is one of Simon's simplest songs to understand. While it does present a number of metaphors for its theme, it also states that theme outright: "Time hurries on." Further, it continues, all things must end.

Our age-- both the number we give to our years and our historical era-- passes. Leaves and other growing things wither. Love ends, either because it dies or one of the lovers do.

There is a term, now, for the feeling Simon relates. We have all heard of the "midlife crisis" faced by those in, well, midlife. But recently, the term "quarterlife crisis" has been used to describe the feeling twentysomethings get, often around college graduation. They realize that while they might have 70-some years of life they can expect, meaning fifty or so more years, how many of those are "quality" years in terms of health, attractiveness, and earning power?

Simon was way ahead of them, writing about mortality itself when he was only, as he says, 21 years old.

The saddest verse is probably the third. The love lost in the second verse at least existed before it was lost. There is a memory of shared time that two people have, albeit bittersweet. But the third verse speaks of a wholly ineffectual act. The "pebble" sinks, the "ripples" fade, and there was not even a satisfying "plunk" to mark that the action had ever taken place. It recalls Keats' epitaph, the low-self-esteem-classic: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

The song ends with a series of hellos and goodbyes: Hello.../ goodbye.../ That's all there is." There is a story that King Solomon asked his advisers to come up with a statement that was always true. They responded with the phrase: "This, too, will pass." Solomon reportedly liked this so much he had the statement engraved in gold and placed above the door to his throne room, so that he could always see it while sitting on his throne.

Structurally-- and musically, with its harpsichord accompaniment-- the hearkens to the olden-time British ballads. But watch how the deteriorating rhyme scheme marks this as a modern creation:
The first verse's lines end: "song/long/on," very close rhymes.
Then comes: "girl/night/write." Two out of three.
And lastly: "brook/away/sound."

The increasingly looser rhymes mirror the poem's theme of entropy. This term from physics is defined by Simon himself quite well on his first official solo album, with the title "Everything Put Together Falls Apart."

What's intriguing is Simon's simple acceptance of this fact. Simon-- for he seems to (for once) be the speaker, simply notes the facts that time flies and things pass. He agrees that this is sad, but does not seem to have much of a reaction to the fact ... or beyond that, to tell us that we should have one.

He does not cajole, like Robert Herrick, to "gather... rosebuds while [we] may," or like urge, like Dylan Thomas, to "rage/ against the dying of a light," or even sigh like Ecclesiastes that "all is vanity and pursuit of wind."

Simon simply notes that all things end. He laments this reality, but simultaneously accepts it. It is one thing to ponder mortality at age 21. It is quite another to be so... grown up about it.

IMPACT:
This album came out in 1966, a year before the Beatles single "Hello, Goodbye." It also presaged the line "Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes" in Billy Joel's song "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" by a decade.

Rolling Stone Magazine considers this a song Simon wrote for someone else first, a singer named Doris Henderson; her version came out earlier that year, 1965. It was also covered by Ronnie Hawkins in 1971, and JD Crowe in 1973. 

It was also paid tribute by folk aficionado Billy Bragg, who opened his 1983 song "Looking for a New England" with the verse:

"I was 21 years when I wrote this song
I'm 22 now, but I won't be for long.
People ask me, 'When will you grow up to be a man?'
But all the girls I loved at school are already pushing prams."

("Pram" is short for "perambulator," the British (which Bragg is) term for baby buggy.)

While Simon's song is about endings altogether, Bragg is specifically thinking of ending a particular relationship. The chorus is:
"I don't want to change the world,
I'm not looking for a new England--
I'm just looking for another girl."

Next song: Blessed