Forever and After

This tender break-up song represents a leap forward in Simon's writing capability. It presages the folk-guitar songwriting that defines, for many, the Simon and Garfunkel sound.

The opening verse is in the traditional a-b-a-b rhyme scheme. It also contains what is called a "concrete" image. Rather than some vague musing about missing a sweetheart and some poetry about dove or rainbow, it gives the listener a real-life, daily-life "metal picture" to symbolize the passage of lonely time: "How long am I going to miss you?/ How many cigarettes will I have to burn?"

(Think of later concrete images of Simon's: "She crept to my tent with her flashlight" from "Duncan,"  "Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike," from "America" " and "Laying out my winter clothes" from "The Boxer.")

The first half of this song, in fact, is a series of questions, a technique used in every song from "Close to You" by The Carpenters to Dylan's signature "Blowin' in the Wind." The speaker here continues, "When can I make my lonely heart realize/ That you will never return?"

Then we have a couplet that seems to imply that it will be the refrain: "How long will I hear your warm laughter?/ I'm afraid-- forever and after." This is a nice gloss on the overused "forever and ever" or "forever and a day."

Since the title of the song is "Forever and After," we presume that we will next have another quatrain, again followed by this couplet.

We're wrong. We have another two lines; still, we think these might be the second half of the chorus, especially since they continue the question motif:  "How many times do I hurry home to you/ To find you gone, to find you gone?"

This repetition of a phrase is very reminiscent of the folk songwriting style. Think of "We Shall Overcome," "Kumbaya" or "This Little Light of Mine" ("Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine").

Then, we have two more verses, but each has six lines, with the third and sixth rhyming. The first of these is "Each time I held you near me/ I hear you say you love me/ More than the day before/ You'd smile when you would see me/ Take your kisses to me / And go on wanting more." [The emphasis on the rhyme is mine.]

In this verse, we hear the speaker rehashing the relationship, as in many break-up songs, missing both his sweetheart and the feeling of being in love. We hear him think on the good times, as we expect.

Next, we assume he will wonder "what went wrong." Did he make a mistake? Did she? Was there someone else? Did they simply outgrow each other... or get pulled apart by fate?

But all we get is: "Though things sometimes went wrong/ It never, never lasted for long/ It wasn't worth the care." In this case, that expression means means "it wasn't worth the bother, the trouble." When there were fights, they were brief and unimportant. So as far as he is concerned, the reason for the break-up remains elusive.

There seems to be a grammatical disagreement between the plural "things" and the singular "it." But consider the "correct" alternative: "Though things sometimes went wrong/ They never lasted for long." That's just not how people talk. "It," we know, refers to the particular disagreement, whatever it was about, not the "things" that went wrong.

The song ends with the reason the fights were short: "For then we had each other's love/ We had so much, so much to share, so much to share." There's that internal repetition again.

There is only sadness here. No anger, no finger-pointing or name-calling. Just a wonderful, tender love that... ended. Perhaps if the speaker knew why she left, he could get what we today call "closure," and find a lesson to carry forward into his next relationship: "Well, I won't do that again" or "I won't fall for someone who does that again."

But we all know that, sometimes, there is no answer, no closure. And when that happens, we can find ourselves wondering, "If it was so great, why did it have to end?" We reminisce, question, smoke another cigarette, and wonder... forever and after.

By altering his verses' shape in mid-song, and presenting a potential chorus and then not actually repeating it, Simon does two things. One is to symbolize the song's theme-- expectations going unmet-- in its very structure.

The other is to begin to delineate his signature style. He begins, here, to explore the idea of altering a song's structure midstream, of fusing two songs into one. He also sings solo, to an acoustic guitar-- not a "pop music" move.

This is a Tom and Jerry song, to be sure. But it's one of the few that, had it appeared on a Simon and Garfunkel album, would have been completely at home there. Yes, it has elements of The Everly Brothers wistfulness, and the melodic folk tradition, and the new grittier folk style.

But it fuses these elements, then adds a confident intelligence and a willingness to not find answers to the questions it raises. With "Forever and After," we really stop hearing the pop star-wannabe that was Jerry Landis... and we start recognizing the mature Paul Simon we know today.

When this song was written, he could have been no more than 18. As if we weren't impressed enough already. No, Simon was not finished trying to be Elvis or Dion... or an Ink Spot, an Everly Brother or Brill Building teen idol, as we shall see (and it's possible that, in his 70s, he's still trying!).

But he was starting to come into his own, find his voice, and define himself as a songwriter. It's still the 1950s when this song is recorded. But "Forever and After," in style and substance, is a 1960s song. More importantly, it's a Paul Simon song.

Next Song: Aeroplane of Silver Steel

A Charmed Life

This is an interesting song, because it seems as it it may go one way, but in fact goes the opposite.

The chorus is just two lines: "Some people, some people never have no storm or strife/ Some people, some people, they lead a charmed life."

This implies that it's other people who do, not the speaker. So we settle in for a rehash of Hank Williams' "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," another shrugging litany of "I've had a lot of luck, and it's all been bad."

This expectation is nurtured by the music, which is as sad as a sigh in a fog.

The first verse is about these "some people," using the third person, again fostering the notion that, as Rod Stewart sang, "Some guys have all the luck,"... and it's not us: "When Trouble knocks upon their door, they always show such cheerfulness/[Trouble] scratches his head and away he goes, saying, "Guess I have the wrong address."

The rest of the song is about how, in fact, it is the speaker and people like himself who do in fact lead a charmed life. For instance: "A wealthy fisherman can hold all the equipment in the book/ Then people like us, we just come along-- catch 'em with a pole, a string, a hook." The next example is of a farmer who "nearly kills himself with toil," but when "people like us" start to scratch the same dirt, "What do they discover? Oil!"

The next verse is unclear. The story it tells seems like bad luck. "A man like me, he picks out a girl and she buys her wedding gown/ Their wedding day comes but his luck holds out-- just as he arrives, the church burns down." The implication is that he is lucky that the wedding could not take place. It seems he didn't want the wedding to happen, perhaps because she was rushing the relationship so much.

[Later, in the song "A Church is Burning," Simon would treat the subject of a burned-down church with an entirely different attitude.]

Then a female singer comes in and says that it's "kids like us" who are saved from the final exam-- the one they didn't study for-- by the arrest of the teacher by the police.

The last verse summarizes, in politically incorrect fashion: "A raggle-taggle gypsy band who never stays where they are put/ That's us-- and we're glad that we're us, because we're as lucky as a rabbit's foot."

It's hard to know what to make of this song. The happy, even comical, scenarios it relates are at odds with the doleful melody and harmonies. It is clever, but it would have been better served by a more upbeat presentation, like The Everly Brothers' "Wake Up, Little Suzie." Someone as charmed as the speaker claims to be should be more, well, charming.

Also, why talk about "some people" having a charmed life, implying others do... when it's the speaker and his own band of merry gypsies who are in fact charmed?

This track shows a humorous side of Simon that one wishes was packaged more humorously.

Next Song: Forever and After

Up and Down the Stairs

There is no metaphor here. (Also, no chorus or bridge.) The whole song is a kvetch about schelpping "up and down the stairs at school."

There is no romance-- he doesn't pass someone on the stairs all day long and flirt with and/or get ignored by her while never getting the chance to actually converse because he is always rushing to class.

There is no bullying by being pushed down the stairs as he's climbing up, or class warfare (as in the British TV show Upstairs Downstairs)... or anything else.

Just a student weary of all the stair-climbing he is doing every school day. The repeated line is: "Up and down the stairs is driving me crazy!"

"Who thought education could be cruel?" he moans. "In the morning you'll find out that you'll/
Start out on the highest floor/ Then it's French in 104," presumably all the way down on the first floor.

"I would like to know who made the rule," he further bewails, "That each classroom, [from] door to door/ Is ten miles from the one before."

Like in the song "Wonderful World" (the Sam Cooke one, not the Louis Armstrong one), we also learn about the speaker's classes. Aside from French, he says, "I don't mind geometry/ English or biology" (one of Simon's weaker rhymes) and "I can wade through history/ Though it's just a mystery." So that's five classes' worth of stairs, plus lunch... and most likely, gym class.

As if he hasn't exercised enough for one day, poor dear.

That's really all there is to this cute little novelty number, with its nursery-rhyme score. You might expect it in the soundtrack of some movie set in a 1950's high school, like Grease. Although on-screen, there might be more happening-- on the staircases between classes-- than there is here.

Next Song: Charmed Life

Lighthouse Point #1 & #2

This is a fun dance number about the other thing hormonal teens like to do when they are not dancing: i.e., "making out," "necking," or-- if it's done in a parked car-- "parking."

There are two recorded versions of this song; #2 is slightly faster than #1, but the tracks are otherwise identical. The melody is not far from "At the Hop." But the song is notable in the Tom and Jerry catalog for the use of backup singers. Lyrically, almost every line contains an internal rhyme.

Now, when teens park, they need a good place to do so. One is the drive-in movie, at which the sound of the film covers over any suspicious sounds they may be making. Another is simply somewhere far away from civilization, the darker the better.

Well, the teens near Lighthouse Point have hit the jackpot. This spot, presumably at the end of Lovers' Lane, is "way down by the water." So, naturally, "It's so nice to park when it's dark down at Lighthouse Point." One may associate a lighthouse with brightness, but a lighthouse sends its lantern's light far at sea, while in its shadow it is dark.

Lighthouses are also equipped with sound-makers like foghorns, in case it is too foggy for the light itself to be seen by sailors. The one at Lighthouse Point, instead, has a bell, which for the teens serves the same purpose as the soundtrack of the drive-in movie: "You kiss-kiss-kiss while the bell in the beacon goes 'bong bong ba-bong-bong-bong.'"

Not they they are looking at it for long, but "There's a beautiful view for two at Lighthouse Point." And isn't is supposed to be too "dark" to see the view? Nevertheless, one can hear "the waves pound, pound all around." One need never have read a romance novel to know what the pounding rhythm of the waves is meant to represent.

But Simon makes an excellent point. Without such places, how and where would young couples... couple? There must be a garden for love to blossom in: "Let's go, I know/ That 'bong bong' bell will bring wedding bells in the Spring."

Still, he the speaker is using generalities: "There is" this place, "where it is" nice to park, and "there is" a view for two-- any old two... hint, hint...

Clearly, he hasn't been persuasive enough to his girlfriend about the charms of this spot in general, because the speaker now goes in for the hard sell: "Tonight when the moon shines bright at Lighthouse Point/ Hey, baby, come a-hold me tight at Lighthouse Point/ And we'll kiss-kiss-kiss..." et cetera.

Perhaps it is good that adults make it hard for teens to find places to canoodle. It makes them wily and resourceful. Which are good skills for them to develop, because after the "wedding bells in the spring" come, well, baby rattles. And parents need all the cleverness they can get. Especially parents of teens.

Next song: Up and Down the Stairs

Looking at You

"Just one look/ That's all it took," sang newly minted Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Linda Ronstadt. Love at first sight has long been a favorite topic of songwriters, but here all that happens is two people looking at each other.

Oh, and noticing that the other one was looking back.

The line "I was looking at you when were you looking at me" is the first and third of every chorus. They repeat so often, it took several listens to realize that in the last chorus, the clauses reverse: "You were looking at me when I was looking at you" [emphasis mine]. In other words, "Oh, so you were looking at me as much, and in the same way, as I was looking at you."

Perhaps a more accurate word would be "scoping," or even "ogling," in the sense of "evaluating positively." Or, the pre-teen speaker rates her: "I was looking at you while you were looking at me/ Baby, you're OK!"

Cupid's arrow is swift, indeed: "It took just one glance... I didn't stand a chance," he admits, and "I took one look at you/ My heart took flight/ I saw those eyes of blue/ All I did was... sigh."

There are no missing words at that ellipsis, just a dramatic... pause. It is also to be noted that most song subjects are blue-eyed, if only because more rhymes with "blue." In "Brown-Eyed Girl" and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man," those phrases do not end on, and so force the songwriter to rhyme, the word "brown."

We also find out the precise time frame for this tennis game of glances happening: "My heart began to pound/ When class did start/ When class was through, I knew/ I had lost my heart." So, an hour or so, when they were supposed to be listening to the math teacher.

On the next chorus, we have the question, "Did you catch my eye?" when we know for absolute certain that she did, because that is the entire message of the song. It could be rhetorical... or just amateurish. A better phrasing might be, "You sure caught my eye." Or even, "Oh, did you catch my eye" inflected to mean, "Did you ever!"

This time, the story has a happy ending-- the interest seems mutual: "The bell rang, you got up/ And walked out of the door/ Then you glanced back at me/ Now I know for sure."

Simon deserves praise for not writing "walked right out the door," which would have been obvious and lazy, but would have sent the entirely wrong message-- that she was upset at having been ogled, and stalked off, nose skyward. But he would have to learn that "glanced back" is too hard to sing.

During class, he was trying to catch her looking at him without her catching him trying to-- a near impossible game of cat-and-mouse. But then she glances back and him and he feels reassured. And of course, extremely happy that his interest is returned, and by such an "OK" person at that.

He saw her "looking at [him]" when he was "looking at [her]", and bang-- without a word exchanged-- they are in a relationship. "Now I know you're mine," he smiles, confidently.

Yes, folks, it's just that easy.

Whole textbooks have been written about the communicative nature of sight. Seeing is powerful, which is why animals have such incredible vision and why people have spy-scopes. Being seen is weak, which is why animals have camouflage and people have tinted windows.

Except when, of course, when being seen is powerful, which is why birds have stunning plumage and we have stages and TV cameras.

The fact that she is willing to let her see him look back at him lets him know that the attraction is mutual. If he plays his cards right when he actually speaks with her, and he pays off his positive first impression, his confidence may prove out.

It would be interesting to use this song as a catalyst for class discussion about the way seeing and being seen are communicative by themselves, even without words: How do you present yourself; what do you want people to think when they see you? How does it feel when people look at you positively, or negatively? What do you see, in the mirror? Are you careful in how you look at other people? How do you feel when you catch someone looking at you, like in the song?

And how are all of these questions answered differently by teenage boys and girls?

These are all things we know intuitively, yet saying them openly might really help kids, well, watch how they are looking!

Next Song: Lighthouse Point

Surrender, Please Surrender

Another Everly Brothers pastiche.

In this one, a young man pleads with a young woman: "Come on, give your love to me." The assumption is that she has "love," and can give it to whomever she chooses. He has love, too, and he wants to give it to her, but that goes without saying.

"Surrender, please surrender," he cajoles. In this metaphor, she has-- or is-- a fortress he is trying to invade, land he is attempting to conquer. He knows he will keep advancing until he wins her over, but it would be so much easier if she would just... give up already!

At least he is willing to make a commitment: "Always and forever/ So true, the way a love should be."

So that's the chorus, and the set-up. In the first verse, he tries his first tactic. He says he has been "waiting all [his] life/ To find a girlie just like you." So, he explains that she meets his criteria, and he's certainly earned her consideration, not having gone after other women until his ideal one-- she!-- has come along. (And he hopes that she will overlook his condescendingly calling her a "girlie.")

"Now that I found you, Love/ I'll play the game/ And try to make you love me, too." Once again, we have a metaphor of competition. There is a "game," and if he plays it well enough, he'll win the prize. She's just a puzzle he has to solve, that's all... a code he must crack, a challenge he must overcome.

Telling her up front about this does not seem to work, for some reason.

Onto the second tactic. Or, maybe, his first play in the "game." Rather than simply state he has earned her by waiting for her, passively, he tries to actively earn her... by offering her something in exchange for her "love"-- namely, "fun." He enumerates: "We'll laugh and stay out late/ Drinkin' at a soda shop/ Dancin' at a record hop." Surely, this is a fair trade, one she cannot refuse!

And, yet, she seems to. Curse her intransigence! What more can he do...? He comes up empty.

Onto tactic three: Conceding defeat. "I'm beggin' down on my knees," he weeps. "Come on, give your love to me."

Despite the seemingly dramatic emotions herein, the song's arrangement is up-tempo-- cute and flirty, not desperate or lugubrious. Perhaps the speaker is presenting these options to her as if to say, "Yeah, I could try all these shopworn methods, run through the motions. Or we could just cut to the chase."

One pictures Romeo, sighing beneath Juliet's balcony, acting as if he must shower her with poetry to win her... when they both know they are already in love.

It's the only way to reconcile the sprightly arrangement with the clumsiness of the woo pitched in the lyrics. Either that, or the speaker is just really not good at this, and is going to lose the game he thinks he's playing, before he even starts.

Next Song: Looking at You

Noise

In the deservedly obscure movie Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, a secret document is supposed to be transferred between spies... onstage, during an opera. Naturally, the movie had to show the opera. It opens during a party scene. The women in the chorus-- all in high, white powdered wigs and elaborate ballgowns-- sing the following, supposedly a translation from this (imaginary) opera's original Italian:

"We're at a party, we're dancing! Dancing at a party! Party party party-- party! Dancing dancing dancing-- dancing!"

From what I know of opera, this might not be far off from the actual dialogue in some cases. Just to make the audience clear that what they are observing is, in fact, a dance party.

The point is, people at a party seems to want to hear songs about... being at a party. Lionel Richie has "All Night Long." Pink has "Get This Party Started." Kool and the Gang has "Celebration." Miley Cyrus has "Party in the USA." The Black Eyed Peas have "I Gotta Feeling." Sam Cooke has "Havin' a Party," and even mellow old James Taylor covers Cooke's "Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha."

Here, Tom and Jerry stage a rave-up, 1950s-style. "Are you coming to the party tonight?/ Are you ready for the party tonight?/ We're gonna yell and we're gonna shout/ We're gonna make some noise-- watch out!"

The next line could also be from any party song-- "Everybody's gonna be there"-- but the following one "dates" the song to its era of inception: "Stompin' 'til the break of day." The Stomp was a dance step of the time. There is a line in Chris Montez's 1962 "Let's Dance": "We'll do the Twist, the Stomp, the Mashed Potato, too/ Any old dance that you wanna do."

It's hard to remember that rock was once controversial altogether. It was the music of youthful rebellion, reviled by parents and the establishment in general (like swing before it and rap after). In the 1960s, people were still burning rock records. (An accurate treatment of the hatred rock engendered is captured by John Lithgow's performance in the movie Footloose.)

Here, Tom and Jerry turn from calling for a party to warning such opposing forces, and assuring their fellow revelers: "Nothing's gonna get in our way."

Decades before the Beastie Boys' told us is ""You gotta fight for your right to party," Tom and Jerry lobbed this shot across the bow of the "squares": "Everywhere that I've been lately/ People say, 'Be quiet.'/ I'm gettin' tired of all that jazz/ And I'm gonna start a riot."

Now, who are the "people" saying this? Librarians, sure, but also parents, teachers, the clergy, the police and other governmental types, and of course the self-appointed morality-imposing pundits every generation must endure. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, there is a whole display on anti-rock quotes from everyone from preachers to Sinatra.

The line "all that jazz" is an idiom for "such nonsense," but it is also a glancing blow at jazz music itself, by then a somewhat sedate musical form, calmed down from the Louis Armstrong fun and not yet subject to the abstraction of the Miles Davis era. Naturally, there were still some experimental jazz composers at the time, like Dave Brubeck, but even their music was relatively sedate compared to, say, that of Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis.

But yes, like all teens, Jerry Landis here forgets that the music of his parents-- in this case, jazz-- was once just as eyebrow-raising and hand-wringing as his own generation's.

After the word "riot," we get sax and drum solos. Again, the teens thought they had invented such things, when in fact jazz musicians like Cannonball Adderly and Gene Krupa already had done so decades before.

Our song started with "Are you coming to the party tonight," and now we turn again to the addressee of that remark. "Don't be afraid, little girl/ It'll be out of this world/ I'll rock you, come on let yourself go/ And we're gonna make some noise."

Is this using dancing as a metaphor for sex? It would be foolish to deny it. And yet, it could just be about dancing, which has its own charms. Even rock's opponents might agree.

An illustrative joke comes to mind: A groom is required to meet with his clergyman before his wedding. "There will be no dancing at the wedding," he is told. "It's... inappropriate." The groom protests, but the topic is immediately changed to the wedding night.

The clergyman says that the missionary position is ideal. "Can the woman be on top?" asks the groom. "It's not preferred, but it is acceptable," comes the reply.

"Can the man be... behind?" he asks. The man of the cloth sighs. "It is the way of animals, but there is nothing written against it."

Last, the groom ventures, "What about standing up?" "ABSOLUTELY NOT!" the clergyman thunders. "It could lead to dancing!"

Performance Note: Marty Cooper, the Tico of Tico and the Triumphs, sang lead on this number.

Next Song: Surrender, Please Surrender