Download Paul Simon You Can Call Me Al
Jacalyn Nier
As biographer Marc Eliot recounts in Paul Simon: A Life, "Paul likely got the title from something he overheard at a party he hosted, where he met the conductor and composer Pierre Boulez for the first time. As he was leaving, Boulez called Simon 'Al,' and the humor of the situation stuck with him."
"That was very fortunate, because at the time Columbia didn't have any rock & roll artists, per se," Halee remarked when I first interviewed him back in 1997. "They either dealt with classical or what they called 'legit pop acts' such as Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis. Dylan, on the other hand, was their first folk-rock act, and on the strength of that job I got a bit of a reputation in the city. A six-minute single was unheard of at that time, and basically I don't think they really liked it at Columbia Records. It was foreign to them, but then, when the damned thing took off, it turned a lot of heads and he exploded.
"You see, although I was a classically trained musician, I had more fun doing rock because I could experiment with sound. You couldn't with classical, at least not at Columbia. This is where the microphones went and you couldn't change anything, and that was the way it was."
"The sound in the control room was, of course, enormous," Halee recalled. "Evidently they were hip to the idea that if you play a little softer with greater dynamics you get a bigger sound when it's recorded. I myself always made musical suggestions when I was taking care of the technical side, but in those days that was expected of us, and Columbia didn't even give engineering credits."
"Musically, engineering-wise, we were a team, and as a result of that we were able to do a lot of innovative things. You know, linking up two eight-track machines to make 16, and going out and making work tapes. The second eight-track would be used as a work tape to go and overdub voices in the church; do it as a remote, bring it back to the studio and overdub on it. That wasn't being done at the time, so it was great. It was innovative and very, very creative from an engineering standpoint. Not to mention the enormous contributions of drummer Hal Blaine, multi-instrumentalist/arranger Larry Knechtel and bass player Joe Osbourne."
Roy Halee at the desk in Columbia, mid-'60s. They really don't make them like that any more."For me, that project started with Paul telling me, 'Roy, I've got to play you something that is just great,'" Halee recalls as we now sit in the basement music-room of his home in Boulder, Colorado. The 'something great' was a cassette recording of the Boyoyo Boys instrumental, 'Gumboots', lent to him by singer-songwriter Heidi Berg, which he would subsequently re-record with his own lyrics. "It was the most infectious thing I'd ever heard, as catchy as hell," Halee continues. "He said, 'We have to go over there and record it.' I said, 'Where?' 'South Africa.' 'OK, great.'"
Which was fortuitous for Paul Simon when he opted to lay down a lyrically complex vocal amid all of the different sounds on the busy, extremely involved track that was 'You Can Call Me Al'. His attitude: "We've got to make this work." And Roy Halee did, after initially feeling exasperated and then labouring on it for quite awhile.
"It was my idea to end the tune with the excitement of having live horns playing the part that had already been played several times by Rob Mounsey on the synth," Roy Halee recalls. "I then also doubled that part by sync'ing them back in at the mix stage. However, it was Rob who wrote it down for the horns. It was his arrangement, and the groove that's going on in that song is Rob's groove. He played the groove in the verses, as well as the synth lines at the beginning and throughout the number, and it was that groove which turned the song into a monster, although the brass contributed quite a lot, too."
NEW CANAAN, Conn. (CBSNewYork/AP) -- A newly-released police report on Thursday said it was Paul Simon who made the 911 call that led to the arrest of both him and his wife on disorderly conduct charges.
After a confrontation at their home in New Canaan, Conn., police came to the home of Simon, 72, and his wife, Edie Brickell, 48, around 8:20 p.m. Saturday. Someone had called 911 and hung up, police said.
The song, called "Like to Get to Know You," features the lyrics, "I see other couples all the time, holding hands and laughing," and, "I wouldn't trade places with anyone, none of them, 'cause I'd like to get to know you again."
It\u2019s an August night in 1991\u2014by all accounts a perfect summer night, the sky clear after threatening rain all day, the temperature hovering at a classic all-American 82 degrees that refuses the sticky inclinations of most New York summer days\u2014and Paul Simon is singing about Memphis, Tennessee to thousands of New Yorkers when suddenly they erupt in cheers so loud they nearly drown him out. Reports of just how large the sea of people packed tightly into Central Park\u2019s Great Lawn that night vary; some estimated it to be as large as 750,000, while others placed the number at a more conservative 48,500 (the Lawn\u2019s capacity, apparently). In their review of the show, the New York Times likened the crowd to \u201Csome vast teeming ant colony.\u201D Whatever the size, when Paul Simon sings \u201Cthere is a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline\u201D and they explode with hometown pride, their individual shouts and whoops and applause converging together, I am almost certain that that number is closer to the former than the latter. I am almost certain that I have never heard a sound so joyous. Tears are not the appropriate reaction to have to sound this happy, but when I hear it lately, that\u2019s all that seem to come out.
Simon frontloads the concert with some of the most depressing of his then-newest songs: \u201CShe Moves On\u201D, \u201CThe Boy in the Bubble\u201D, \u201CTrain in the Distance.\u201D Lyrically speaking, they\u2019re real bummers, songs about divorce and disappointment and global despair, but well-received when fed to the audience sugarcoated in danceable beats or mellow soft rock. It\u2019s hard to digest the lyrics, hard to have a bad time listening to them, when the music is so right.
But lately it\u2019s been harder to find the miracle and wonder in all this. It\u2019s hard to remember that those who once marveled at long distance calls are now in awe of Zoom\u2019s ability to instantly connect us with anyone in the world via video when you\u2019re staring back at the thumbnail of your reflection in the corner and willing the screen to not drain all your emotional energy. It\u2019s hard to think medicine is magical when a vaccine seems not only so far away, but likely to end up at the mercy of monied interests, saved for the highest bidders rather than the most vulnerable. Has this generation thrown a hero up the pop charts who hasn\u2019t been canceled yet?
chick
Nov-26-2012, 22:54 GMT
United Kingdom
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Switched on the tv and caught the opening bars of Paul Simons You can call me Al on a Christian tv show on the BBC, but the rest of the song was a piece of Christian music called Over all the earth that people were singing in a church. The introduction to the song was exactly the same as You can call me Al, using the same instruments and syncopations. Is this an official collaboration? I looked up the show on the net and its called Songs Of Praise. The church band was fronted by a black guy called Steve Thompson. Has anyone else seen this, or got any more information about Paul Simons religious beliefs?
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Throughout his entire career, Goldberg was be proud to call Masekela his friend and contemporary. They toured all over North America together between 2003 and 2010. Last month, he performed a tribute to his late friend at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival.
I write about music from around the world; covering everything from Latin to K-pop, Afrobeat to Arab pop, and the artists buzzing throughout Africa, Asia, the Americas and anywhere else. My work has appeared in the New York Times, Billboard, Rolling Stone, NPR, Teen Vogue, BuzzFeed and beyond with my expertise called up by CNN, The Washington Post, Good Morning America, USA Today, ABC News, MTV and more. I'm a freelance writer based in New York City, with my work bringing me to South Korea, Japan, England and around the world. I'm always listening for something that sounds good and always looking to discuss what gets a listener excited.
The Graceland album, along with Paul's follow-up project called The Rhythm of the Saints (recorded in South America), are quite refreshing to one with a wide cultural world view. Everything here is so damned Americanized, and we almost force our culture and language upon visitors and immigrants. As Paul Simon realized, there is so much to be enjoyed by indulging in the language, music, and culture of others.
@madawab I watched a recent video where Paul Simon said that his first band in junior high school was called, Alvin and the Chipmunks. His classmates called him Al after that and Paul didn't mind and told them it's okay. That's the same time he met Art and they formed Tom & Jerry as a play on the same theme. The other elements of the song refer to his years spent drinking alcohol and drugs and sex, as a sort of playful metaphor of terms.
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