Dec. 23: Lightning in a bottle

Paul Simon's Graceland might be one of the best albums of the 1980s. Somehow, he took a concept album - creating a pop/rock songbook that blended African music with American folk - and wound up tapping into the existential angst of the baby boomer generation. Graceland and George Harrison's Cloud Nine are the only two modern rock albums that my father actually went out and purchased. That's saying something since his music of choice has always been country music from the 1970s and earlier.

For a while, Graceland was the soundtrack of our house when I was a teenager. It was so beloved by him that my brother and sister even did a lip sync act to the album's lead single, You Can Call Me Al. I didn't like Graceland but I didn't dislike it either. At the time, I found more relevance in the music of Alice Cooper. But now I am older - older than my dad was when he discovered Graceland, in fact - and I can tell you that Graceland comes on my car stereo a heck of a lot more than Alice Cooper. Now that I'm older, maybe I have a greater appreciation of what Graceland stands for.

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I don't know about my dad, but I have spoken with at least three men - all older than I am - who say they weep openly at the lyrics to Graceland. To wit:

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
As if I'd never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead 

 It is helpful to know that all three of the aforementioned men have been divorced. I pressed one of them for an explanation and he told me something like this:

"There is a great pain in getting divorced, even if both of you know that it is absolutely the best thing you can do. It's because you're letting go of someone - and sometimes it's someone you still love - and you know that it's highly unlikely that you'll ever find someone you'll be able to know as fully as the person you originally married. It takes a very long time to know someone on a deep and intimate level, right down to the particular way a person brushes their hair from their forehead."

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Well I have never been divorced, but I can appreciate the pain that the narrator of Graceland (the song) is feeling as he and the nine-year-old (a child of his first marriage) are driving to Graceland. You get the impression that the drive is stilted and awkward - that the dad doesn't know how to talk to his son, that the dad suspects the child is mad at him for abandoning his mom. But hey, when they get to Graceland, everything will be fine because they will be too occupied to address all the emotions that may or may not be bubbling beneath the surface.

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I'm going to say something that might be vaguely racist but I'm going to say it anyway because it's something I have long believed: Jews make the best poets. Jews make the best storytellers. They definitely write the best song lyrics. If you don't believe me, check out the words of Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, and even David Lee Roth (most underrated lyricist in rock and roll.) In the Old Testament, God describes the Jews as His chosen people ("chosen for what?" David Lee Roth once asked) and, if I may, I might opine that he chose them to use the arts to show humanity a better way. I have said before that Ecclesiastes is the best thing that has ever been written. It was not written by a Baptist. 

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The song from Graceland that slapped my in the face most is That Was Your Mother, the penultimate song on side 2. It's written from the perspective of a father talking to his teenaged son and the song opens with: "a long time ago, yeah, before you was born, dude, when I was still single and life was great..." I remember thinking about that song when I was 15 or so and meditating on how, at one time, both of my parents lived child free and relatively fun lives. It was only when I came around that things became more stressful.

The song then describes the courtship with these ingenious verses: 

Along came a young girl
She’s pretty as a prayer book
Sweet as an apple on Christmas day
I said, “Good gracious can this be my luck?
If that’s my prayer book
Lord, let us pray”

Yeah, I don't think I'll ever write another word. Thanks, Mr. Simon.

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That Was Your Mother ends with the narrator telling his son "You are the burden of my generation, I sure do love you, but let's get that straight."

It's my opinion that That Was Your Mother should be played whenever a teenaged son or daughter gets all sulky because they're not getting their way. I can't listen to that song very often because it whisks me away on a whole boatload of wormholes in my mind. I wonder if my parents would like me if I could go back in time and meet them before I was born. I think about the stupid decisions I have made that must have stressed them out so bad. It took a Paul Simon song to do that. Paul Simon succeeded where Sunday School failed.

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Graceland ends with The Myth of Fingerprints, which is a fantastic title for a song. The lyrics are enigmatic, almost dreamlike. We are told that over the mountain and down in the valley lives a former talk show host who is known by everyone. This talk show host says "there is no doubt about it, it was the myth of fingerprints, I've seen them all and man, they're all the same."

From there, we visit an abandoned army post whose existence, I assume, was to provide a temporary shelter amidst bloodshed. The army post also testifies that "the myth of fingerprints" is the reason for it, though we don't know what it is. I assume it's the war and all the people who died in said war. Perhaps that war could have been alleviated if we didn't believe the myth of fingerprints.

And maybe the myth of fingerprints is that no two sets of fingerprints are identical and so that means that no two people are identical either. And by perpetuating this myth - that we are all irreconcilably different - we will continue to foster division.

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Well, hey, it's a fine way to end an album. When Paul Simon wrote Graceland, he captured lightning in a bottle. I am not surprised that he has not been able to duplicate that success since.

 

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note: Yes, I know that December is over, but I have still given myself titles for all of those days. I will complete the project, though not as timely as I did in the past. Yes, I know that I'm cheating a little, but time can get away from you over Christmas.