not a carpetbagger
kapeman
An Outsider at the Center of a Musical Universe
By JON PARELES
Published: March 28, 2008
It may be hard to think of Paul Simon as an outsider. He rode high on
the pop charts for three decades, has collected a dozen Grammy Awards
and was a shoo-in for various halls of fame. He can sell out arenas
whenever he decides to reunite with his 1960s partner, Art Garfunkel.
He wrote and starred in a movie and mounted a Broadway musical. He has
gone globe-hopping and drawn musicians who are national heroes to sit
in as sidemen.
His music stays restrained, ever tasteful. He sings gently in his own
meticulous productions, and his songs can share radio formats with the
most soothing soft-rock. He's more than welcome at established
institutions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is presenting
"Love in Hard Times," a monthlong, three-program tribute and
retrospective from Tuesday to April 27, full of other people singing
his songs along with Mr. Simon himself.
Yet the thread running through Mr. Simon's songs is estrangement. From
"I Am a Rock" to "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" to "You Can Call Me Al"
to the cranky reflections on his 2006 album "Surprise," he has sung
about being alienated, misplaced, restless, disillusioned. Moments of
solace or satisfaction are far outnumbered by misgivings and regrets.
The material comforts that he recognizes are his -- as a wealthy man,
as a pop success, as an American in a wider world -- don't bring him
peace of mind. Neither does the finicky craftsmanship that has always
marked his music.
Yet that sense of estrangement hasn't kept him isolated, as the
rosters for the Brooklyn concerts demonstrate. From his teenage
partnership with Mr. Garfunkel -- which has been a publicly
contentious, on-again off-again proposition since the duo broke up at
the beginning of the 1970s -- through his 10 solo studio albums
beginning in 1972, Mr. Simon has made a far-flung social network of
his music, surrounding himself with first-rate players from across the
world.
The programs for "Love in Hard Times" group Mr. Simon's songs and
collaborators geographically, an appropriate choice for such a well-
traveled musician. "Under African Skies" (April 9 to 13), which is
already sold out, gathers his African and Brazilian-flavored songs
with appearances by the resonant South African men's chorale Ladysmith
Black Mambazo, the Brazilian songwriter Milton Nascimento and others.
"American Tunes" (April 23 to 27) includes the Roches, who harmonized
on "There Goes Rhymin' Simon" in 1973, along with younger admirers
like the neo-Appalachian songwriter Gillian Welch, the harmony-loving
indie-rock band Grizzly Bear and the popera singer Josh Groban.
The first program, "Songs From 'The Capeman' " (Tuesday through April
6), revives some of Mr. Simon's least performed repertory: "The
Capeman," his 1998 Broadway musical (including lyrics by the Nobel
Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott) about a Puerto Rican gang member who
killed two teenagers. The concerts will feature the Spanish Harlem
Orchestra, whose members appeared on the original recording, and the
doo-wop group Little Anthony and the Imperials. With frequent four-
letter words, a Hispanic murderer as its central figure and a subtext
of Santería symbolism, "The Capeman" was a hard sell on Broadway,
where, for all his pop recognition, Mr. Simon was definitely an
outsider.
Throughout his career Mr. Simon has been a convenient target,
sometimes for good reason. He has made magnificent albums and duds;
his songs can be ingenious and emotionally telling or pretentious and
whiny. He can be an eerie, evocative lyricist -- writing gorgeous lines
like "Long past the midnight curfew we sat starry-eyed," from "Peace
Like a River" -- or a prosaic and hectoring one.
Abandon isn't part of Mr. Simon's palette; he's terse, controlled,
more than a little uptight. His music is for listeners who appreciate
the crafty details nearly as much as he does. He has always been the
smart, bourgeois, fussy wimp who makes some self-styled rockers want
to kick sand in his face. But his approach keeps resurfacing, lately
via this year's New York rock success story, Vampire Weekend, whose
debut album leaped from indie-rock blogs to the Top 20, drawing on Mr.
Simon's vocabulary of collegiate allusions, bouncy rhythms and African-
tinged guitar licks.
Mr. Simon was never a doctrinaire folkie, or any other kind of purist.
Growing up in the 1950s, he was drawn to Elvis Presley, doo-wop and
the Everly Brothers, and in many of the songs he has written as an
adult, a phrase of doo-wop melody is shorthand for fleeting bliss. His
early recordings -- with Mr. Garfunkel under the name Tom and Jerry,
and by himself -- aimed to be pop-rock hits. Although Simon and
Garfunkel emerged as a coffeehouse-style duo backed by Mr. Simon's
lone acoustic guitar, he was soon slipping complex jazz chords between
the folk rudiments. His fondness for rhythm gradually resurfaced,
growing stronger during his solo career.
Some of the songs Mr. Simon wrote for Simon and Garfunkel in the 1960s
have not aged well. The smiley-faced chorus of "The 59th Street Bridge
Song (Feelin' Groovy)" grew dated along with its slang, and songs like
"Bleecker Street" and "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her" are
painfully precious. Mr. Simon had to find a looser, more colloquial
voice, and he did at times on Simon and Garfunkel's later albums and,
decisively, on his 1972 album "Paul Simon," with irresistible but not
quite explicable songs like "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard."
"Paul Simon" -- which included a song recorded with reggae musicians in
Jamaica ("Mother and Child Reunion") before most Americans were aware
of reggae, and one with the French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli
in Paris ("Hobo's Blues") -- was also a harbinger of Mr. Simon's
worldwide musical itinerary. In a way he is a consummate New Yorker,
representing a city where innumerable cultures brush up against one
another.
Actually "Paul Simon" wasn't his first batch of travel souvenirs. He
lived in England in 1964 and played the folk-club circuit there,
picking up traditional songs and learning from musicians like the
singer Martin Carthy and the guitarist Davy Graham. (Mr. Simon played
Mr. Graham's instrumental "Anji" on Simon and Garfunkel's 1966 album
"Sounds of Silence.")
When Simon and Garfunkel interwove the traditional "Scarborough Fair,"
learned from Mr. Carthy, into "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" on the album
"Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme," the first grumblings arose about
Mr. Simon as a cultural carpetbagger, an outsider exploiting the pop
potential of local scenes.
Another Simon and Garfunkel hit, "El Cóndor Pasa," put new words to
the melody of an old Peruvian song. And Mr. Simon regularly drew on
varieties of Americana, particularly gospel.
But it was "Graceland" in 1986 that made Mr. Simon controversial. He
had been through a fallow period with his albums "One-Trick
Pony" (despite its Caribbean-flavored hit, "Late in the Evening") and
"Hearts and Bones." Hearing the three-chord bounce of South African
township pop unlocked something in Mr. Simon's songwriting, reminding
him of the simple pleasures he had gotten from early rock 'n' roll
and, as he turned African grooves into songs, inspiring some global
perspective in the lyrics.
He wrote his own melodies and lyrics atop songs already recorded by
South African musicians. He also recorded new songs in Johannesburg
with South African musicians during a cultural boycott against
apartheid in that country. (The United Nations Anti-Apartheid
Committee ruled that he had not violated the boycott because he
supported black musicians, not the government.) Mr. Simon scrupulously
shared credit and royalties with his collaborators and introduced his
worldwide audience to South African music -- in retrospect, an
undeniable boon.
"Graceland" sold millions of copies and won Grammy Awards, but it also
stoked arguments about international cultural relations. Was Mr. Simon
a colonialist, expropriating the precious resources of the third world
for his own advantage (shared royalties aside)? Was he adding
something to his South African sources by placing his own words and
his small voice in the foreground, or just diluting African music for
uninformed pop tastes? Would listeners accept Mr. Simon's songs as
South African music and look no further, dismissing an entire culture
once his album was off the radio? Was he just a tourist, bringing back
musical knickknacks torn free of context?
Those arguments can seem quaint now that the world's music cruises the
Internet and countless songs are built by cut-and-paste. The decades
proved Mr. Simon's instincts were right. Just as he had used English
folk songs, doo-wop and gospel, he used African music -- and later the
Brazilian music that fueled "The Rhythm of the Saints" in 1990 -- but
by no means used it up. The sounds he drew on were far more durable
than that. And his African collaborators, like Ladysmith Black
Mambazo, found new, eager listeners for their own material worldwide.
Mr. Simon has turned out to be not a carpetbagger but a connoisseur
and, at best, an alchemist. Being an outsider led him to choose
musical ideas that didn't need explanation, that could survive and
propagate away from home. And as a craftsman he has tweaked what he
borrowed, personalizing and hybridizing it. From "Scarborough Fair" to
the Afro-reggae beat he recorded in Bahia with the Brazilian drummers
of Olodum, Mr. Simon has been sharing ideas, not confiscating them.
He has been one embodiment of the pop process, that mixture of
instinct and calculation that scouts cultural and geographical fringes
for the next mainstream treat. And being Paul Simon he doesn't
simplify what he finds. He adds his beloved musical convolutions and
verbal conundrums, his layers of New York cosmopolitanism, anxiety and
striving. It doesn't always work, but when it does, for a few
precisely constructed minutes, Mr. Simon's music gracefully holds
estrangement at bay.
"Love in Hard Times: The Music of Paul Simon" begins Tuesday with
songs from "The Capeman," running through April 6 at the Harvey
Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, (718) 636-4100,
bam.org; $30 to $65. The full series continues through May 5.