Virgil and the Warden

In his classic comic lament, "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," Hank Williams sings: "Everyone's ag'in' me and it's got me down." Well, almost everyone is against Salvador, too, but instead, it gets him fired up.

At the moment, his opposition is a guard named Virgil. We met him in his eponymous song a couple of tracks back. 

Here, he continues his persecution of Salvador. The song opens with him chastising Salvador for playing his music too loudly, only he adds the insult "spic music"; later, he throws words like "si" and "senior" at Salvador like slurs. 

Salvador retorts that he is using headphones, and furthermore, "Why don't you just go to Hell?" Salvador further threatens to issue another formal complaint to the warden about Virgil.

Virgil responds, basically, "Oh, you're gonna write me up? Yeah, you're a big-shot writer now." He taunts Salvador about his fame as an author and his "liberal lawyers." He calls Salvador a "hernia" and tells Salvador that his report to the warden will fall on deaf ears. 

Virgil's hatred of Salvador is based on several factors. Virgil feels that he himself should have more opportunity and success. After all, he is a working man and a family man, while Salvador is a murderer! Oh, and also a immigrant and a non-native speaker. Further, because they are in the South, Virgil is seen by many outside the South as a "rube," which he feels in an additional unfair slight; in fact, as a white American, he should be ahead of Salvador in the race for success as a matter of course. How awful it must feel to be rigging the game and still losing!

It is very even-handed of Simon to show the reaction by many to Salvador's success. After all, Salvador became famous originally for being a cold-blooded killer... and now he's back on TV, but not on the news. He's on the talk shows, shilling his book. That a convicted murderer of any background should be celebrated so is upsetting to many. Add to this the unfairness felt by the people who went to work to pay taxes for Salvador's incarceration-- and now he's getting out, going to college, writing books, becoming respectable... just who does he think he is?

On top of this is the general hatred many, sadly, feel toward those of a different background, race, language, or national origin, and you can see how a resentment of Salvador's literary pretensions was nearly inevitable. It is a shame that those who protested the musical did not see it, for in this song Simon upholds many of their doubts about the worthiness of such a man as the focus of, for instance, a Broadway musical.

Now Salvador and Virgil have their meeting with the Warden. Before they enter his office, he says to the audience that he is paranoid about someone doing violence to him while he sleeps, and says that if anything does happen to him, he will be sure Salvador is blamed regardless: "Shadows cross my bed/ My blood is on your head.""

Then to Salvador, he says that he has read his writing, and feels that it is revisionist: "You treat your crime as fiction/ When the opposite is true." He then tells Salvador that his parole hearing is in just five months, so he'd better not screw up before then. 

Only he tells him that, it seems, in front of Virgil! Which gives Virgil permission to provoke Salvador as much as he likes, while Salvador dare not retaliate for fear of losing his chance at parole. Five months is a long time to put up with such treatment.

Or to enjoy engaging in it, as Virgil now does. As he escorts Salvador back to his cell, he tells him what he told us in his earlier song about his rifle: "I like that gun for deer... but if it came down to me/ I'd use it right here."

Salvador retorts that it will be hard to aim at a non-existing target: "If this harassment goes on... I won't wait for my parole, I'll be gone." Yes, he tells his guard he plans to escape. Perhaps not the most discreet move.

Virgil gets the last word, which is, more or less: "Good luck with that." Salvador should not feel himself too powerful, despite his fans and high-class friends. On a day-to-day basis, he will be dealing not with them but the man who has the keys to his cell. 

Racist though he is, Virgil does make one valid point: The moral high ground is hard to assert when you are in a dungeon.

Next Song: Trailways Bus/ El Malecon

Time is an Ocean

This song, which takes its title from the last line of the previous song, is a duet, but of an unusual sort; the voices are those of Sal as a young man in jail, and an older version of himself whose fate has not yet been revealed by the plot. The older Sal goes by Salvador, so we can keep then straight. (This song is track 10 on the Songs from the Capeman soundtrack.)

The song tells the story of how young Sal, a punk kid, turned himself into the mature Salvador, a writer.

Sal starts us off, confessing that "the evil that we do can't be blamed on our destiny," and so taking responsibility for his actions. Later, however, he does blame racism for his situation at least somewhat.

He tells us that he has, in the image borrowed from Psalm 23, "walked through the valley of Death Row."

Salvador now makes this observation: "It took me four years to learn I was in prison, not a church," and then two more years until he started to write his autobiography. But, "when I wrote my story/ The words flew from the page/ And my soul in solitary [confinement]/ Escaped its iron cage." By taking ownership of his own story going backward, he takes control of it going forward.

Sal takes back over, writing a letter to his mother and telling her to return to Puerto Rico, since she is so  homesick, singing her lonely Aguinaldo carol. "Go back, don't you worry/ I am your grown up son."

Salvador then observes the "politics of prison/ are a mirror of the street... the politics of race." The prison guards, he explains, are notably paler of complexion than those they control, just as the police were outside. As Sal puts it: "A forest and a prison/ Where the snow and guards are white."

He then issues advice to his younger self: If you want to keep your sanity/ You'll teach yourself to write." He had to grow up fast, once inside: "You were a child of sixteen/ With a twelve-year-old mind/ You came here numb and battered."

Young Sal takes up this artistic and psychological challenge, and the two sing: "I'll take the evil in me/ And turn it into good/ Though all your institutions/ Never thought I could." Sal, of all people, challenges the "correctional facility" he is in to live up to its cynical promise... to correct him!

Then Sal and Salvador say "good-bye," promising to "keep your image in my eye/ 'Til the day I die." But whose image? The prison's (the "your" in the last verse)? His mother's (she does sing one line near the end)?

Or... does the old one promise the young one he will not forget his suffering? Does the young one promise the old one that, if he waits for him, he will make it to that age some day?

Throughout, the title line is repeated: "Time is an ocean of endless tears." Sal cries for his crime, his mother cries for him... and the older Sal cries for the two lives that he he took lives that day-- his victim's, and his own.

Next Song: Wahzinak's First Letter/ Killer Wants to Go to College

MUSICAL NOTE:
The older Salvador is sung by Ruben Blades, an Panamanian singer-songwriter accomplished in both English and Spanish. his songs are alternately poignant and pointed, sometimes in the same piece. Like Billy Bragg, he can be both political and personal within the space of one line. He also has been compared to Springsteen.

But like Simon, Blades was a devotee of doo-wop in his teens, but the realities of his nation stirred his political spirit. If anything, his government forced his hand, closing his college and thus somewhat pushing him to pursue music in the US. Blades also narrowly escaped a legal career! Instead, he worked for a record label-- first in the mail room, where he auditioned!-- and then as a composer and band leader.

His album Siembra sold three million copies and spawned the biggest hit in salsa history, "Pedro Nvaja." But his political songwriting got another song banned from Miami radio. Blades also began writing songs for films, and then acting in them. Probably his best is the funny and powerful Milagro Beanfield War. It's hard to find, but very worth it (and I'll keep the director a surprise!).

Blades has continued to write and perform music (five albums in the 1990s alone!). But to start, I'd  recommend the mostly-English Buscando America for his songwriting and Nothing But the Truth-- with songs by Elvis Costello, Sting, and Lou Reed-- for his vocals.

Along the way, Blades he went to Harvard and earned a master's in international law, started a new Panamanian political party, and ran for president there... coming in second. Their loss.

El Coquito/Born in Puerto Rico

[Readers: We have come to Simon's musical, The Capeman. There are, by my count, 40 songs in this musical, and I write on one song each week. Ordinarily. I do not wish to write about this one musical for the better part of a year, and I am fairly certain you do not want to read about it for that long, either, wonderful as it may be. So I have broken the musical down into 16 sections, most with more than one song, and will write about one of those sections each week; it is not uncommon to find an album with that many tracks. So we will visit with this musical for four months instead of ten.

As for the album Songs from The Capeman, since I will be discussing all of the songs in the musical altogether, I will of course cover those in the process. However, the songs on that album do not follow the order of their presentation in the musical itself. As the musical tells a story in a particular order, including  flashbacks, I will preserve the song order of the musical. If you have listened to the album, perhaps listening to the songs in the "right" order will help you appreciate the musical in another way. In 11 of the 16 weeks, I will be writing about a song from the album; as there are so many more songs in the play than on the album, there cannot be an album song covered each week. However, as Simon highlighted these songs by including them on the album, I will only cover one album song in any given entry, to give it its proper due.]

The first song in the musical is an innocent one called "El Coquito." The Lyrics book explains that it is a Puerto Rican folksong by one Olcutt Sanders. It is about a "Little Tree Toad," named for its cry, and in the song the children imitate it. My limited Spanish indicates that the toad sings at night, and the children imagine it sings them a lovely lullaby. The notes also indicate that the song is sung by children who are offstage. 

Then Salvador, our protagonist, sings a brief verse about being free-- we soon learn, from jail. But then he adds, ominously: "But there's the truth that still needs to be spoken."

The first full-length song, "Born in Puerto Rico," is the second track on the soundtrack album. The first verse is pure biography. Sal relates where he was born, that he moved to New York City as child, and that "before I reached the age of sixteen/ I was running with a gang, and we were wild."

The book and the soundtrack differ on the next line, which changes the meaning of the lines that follow. The book has Salvador remembering his own youth and the sights and smells of the barrio evening. The album has the more eyebrow-raising: "He keeps looking but he don't recognize me," as if "he" should. 

Then the chorus, which addresses "you," a party we are yet to meet, unless he or she is onstage; I only have the lyrics, not the "book" of the musical with stage directions. "No one knows you like I do/ No one knows your heart the way I do/ No one will testify to all you've been through, but I will." Again, it would help if we knew whom was being addressed.

The refrain is sung by Salvador and his gang, The Vampires. They repeat the title, then add "And my blood is Taino" (say: tah-EE-no) which the liner notes correctly capitalize (the book does not). This is a proper noun; the Taino people are the natives of Puerto Rico. 

Salvador then picks up the biographical thread, noting how unprepared they were as immigrants (yes, Puerto Rico is part of the US politically, but culturally, significantly distinct)-- "We came here wearing summer clothes in winter"-- and yet, equipped with "hearts of sunshine in the cold." The thrust of the musical, we will see, is how the "cold" won and conquered Sal's spirit, and how he tries mightily to get his "sunshine" back.

The "you" is now revealed to live on the upper floors of a certain apartment building, and to be the stepchild of a Pentacostal preacher. And then again the chorus of "No one..." this time ending "...but this will."

Salvador ruminates: "Small change and sunlight, then I left these streets for good." So he was poor, yet hopeful, and then left. For where? And why?

First, the other Vampires introduce themselves. Salvador says all that is left of them is "blurred... grainy photos" in the newspaper. Then we get a partial answer. Salvador lists the places he was incarcerated; in the book, we get the length of each stay in each place, but in the soundtrack just a list of places, starting with a "school for criminal children" and including infamous prisons like Sing Sing and Attica.

"Twenty years inside, today we're free." The "you" is his partner in crime, then? Salvador says that there was so much written about the case that he did not have a chance to read it all before lights-out in jail... "The night you took The Capeman for your name."

Well, Salvador is The Capeman. So who is he speaking to? To "Sal"... his younger self. In the musical, two different actors play this character at different ages. They are differentiated on the page as 'Sal,' the young punk, and 'Salvador,' the middle-aged ex-con he matures into. 

The older self promises his younger self he will remember him, testify for him. The book's version hinted at this structure with the line "I see myself, those summer evenings..." And so he alternately sings in the first person, and to his younger self as "you." So his own stepfather was a preacher, and so forth.

The newspaper stories "pile up in shame," but there is a note of hope: "...the words release you." But which words? Are these the words of the judge commuting his sentence? Some words Salvador writes? We shall see.

The song ends, in the liner notes with a coda, sung in Spanish: "I was born in Puerto Rico/ My heart... My dear is Puerto Rico." This is attributed to a character named Lazarus, and this is the first time we meet him.

Simon artfully introduces us to his main character(s), Salvador/Sal. In Salvador promising Sal he will "testify" on his behalf, we begin the musical with curiosity and some compassion.

Note: While the CD of Simon's versions of some songs was distributed as the CD Songs from The Capeman, a full original-cast soundtrack, I am told, is available on iTunes.

IMPACT: This is one of Simon's most ambitious projects, and sadly, possibly his biggest professional disappointment; the movie One Trick Pony at least spawned the hit "Late in the Evening." Despite a tremendous cast and production team, whom I will introduce in subsequent posts, the musical was met with protests (which usually fuel ticket sales!) and poor reviews, and closed shortly after it opened. 

My understanding is that it was a major financial loss, more than $10 million. Afterward, Simon did many things I would never have expected. He reunited and toured with Garfunkel, releasing a CD and DVD of that tour. He re-released all of his solo material, with bonus tracks. And more. 

While this material is welcome to all his fans and probably won him many new ones, I cannot wonder if these maneuvers were meant to cover some of his losses. It is simply unlike Simon to look backward like this for so long. It makes me think of Willie Nelson's efforts to pay back the IRS, including the album Who Will Buy My Memories? While Simon never used such an obvious title, these efforts feel to this writer like his asking that question. I say this only as an observation, not a criticism; if Simon did do these things for this reason, thank goodness he had tremendous quantity of outstanding material to do it with!

Next songs: In Mayaguez/ Carmen/ Santero/ Chimes/ Christmas in the Mountains