Fact #141057

Paul Simon: If it wasn't that Gumboots led me into the whole project, I would have dropped Gumboots from the album. Because I think it's the weakest of the South African cuts. But it was that track of Gumboota that I heard on an album called Gumboots Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II. That's what led me into the whole project. That's how I found out about Township Jive and from Township Jive I learned about the other South African music. Boy In The Bubble is Sotho and I Know What I Know is Shangaan. Black Mambazo is a kind of Zulu choral singing. Gumboots is what brought me in there. We extended the track and added a sax solo. Otherwise it was the same record as what I heard.

When I started making what was to become Graceland I set out to make really good tracks and then I thought, I have enough songwriting technique that I can reverse this process and write this song after the tracks are made and if I have a really good track and I write a good song well then my chances of making a good record are vastly improved over the other way of working. And in the process of working in that way, I discovered different ways of turning the form around, from constantly listening to the way African guitarists and the bass players were altering what they were playing from verse to verse. Graceland is like that because choruses didn't have to always be the same. They could repeat, they could use material from a verse, they could introduce some new lyric idea and retain elements from one chorus to the next like in that song Graceland. None of the choruses are exactly symmetrical.

I was trying to let that kind of enriched language flow naturally, so that you wouldn't really notice it as much. I think in Hearts and Bones you could feel it, that it was coming. You could sort of see it. Whereas in Graceland I tried to do it where you didn't notice it, where you sort of passed the line and then it was over. And let the words tumble this way and that way. And sometimes I'd increase the rhythm of the words so that they would come by you so quickly that all you would get was a feeling. And so I started to try and work with moving feelings around with words.

Roy Halee (engineer) : In the very beginning of the Graceland project, I loved what we were doing. But I was not convinced that it was going to be great. In the beginning, anyway. I loved the music that we were recording. But there were no songs written yet, so it was shaky ground as far as I was concerned. But I loved the feel of that stuff. And then we brought it back and edited the hell out of it. The digital editing worked very well for us in that respect. It makes doing involved editing much easier. On that project, without it, I would have been in serious trouble.

For a long time, Boy In The Bubble was my favorite track on Graceland. It most represented that feel and that record. Then I'd switch over to Graceland and keep switching around. But I think Boy In The Bubble is probably my favorite on the record because it encompasses the whole magilla to me.

Paul Simon : I found myself writing a song called Graceland, and I really was resistant to it. I didn't want to write a song called Graceland, but I couldn't get rid of it. It just stayed with me and then I thought maybe I'm going to write a song about Graceland and I really don't know really what I'm writing about yet. And it probably makes sense to go there and see if in fact what I'm looking for is in Graceland. I was in Lafayette, Louisiana, and I drove up to Northern Lousiana to the Mississippi Delta, and up to Mississippi, and then up to Memphis. That trip was the opening verse of the song.

To me it was a father-and-son trip, and I don't know whether I'm writing about. Me and my son? Or me and my father? It doesn't really matter, it's all mixed up, the same. And it's about a reconciliation, a reconciliation with a big event in a life : losing love. And the setting of Elvis Presley's home is like a pilgrimage for people.

I think that Ladysmith Black Mambazo has that sound, three-chord a capella group except that Black Mambazo has it at such a sophisticated degree, that would be a super-doo-wop group, and it was 10 members and the usual groups is 4 or 5 people.
I think the reason it seems corny is that the 50's as it's been depicted - I mean a show like Grease - that was nothing like what it was - so that's a parody, and it's a comedic parody, and so it seems like it's a joke.

What it was and what was so exciting about it was that it was the first time that middle-class white America heard black culture, and the energy and the stimulation that occurred from that was explosive, that's Elvis Presley, his great contribution is that he is the synthesist that brought together those two strengths of a culture, in his case it was country music and rhythm'n' blues - southern rhythm'n'blues. but in the cities, it was doo-wop.

Graceland is a story song and, in story songs, I don't know… I think I get very comfortable when I find myself in a story song. I never set out to tell a story. I find the story coming along, characters emerging. But in "Hearts and Bones" the characters are very near to autobiographical.

That line (There's a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline) came to me when I was walking past the Museum of Natural History. For no reason I can think of. It's not related to anybody. Or anything. It just struck me as funny. Although that's an image that people remember, they talk about that line. But really, what interested me was the next line, because I was using the word Graceland but it wasn't in the chorus. I was bringing Graceland back into a verse. Which is one of the things I learned from African music: the recapitulation of themes can come in different places.

You Can Call Me Al starts almost like a joke. Like the structure of a joke cliche: ‘There's a rabbi, a minister and a priest.’ ‘Two Jews walk into a bar...’ ‘A man walks down the street.’ That's what I was doing there. Because the beginning of a song is one of the hardest parts about songwriting. The first line of a song is very hard. And I always have this image in my mind of a road that goes like this [uses hands to signify a road getting wider] so that the implication is that the directions are pointing outward… It's like a baseball diamond; there's more and more space out here.

I want to have a first line that has a lot of options. And the other thing that I try to remember, especially if a song is long, you have plenty of time. You don't have to kill them, you don't have to grab them by the throat with the first line.

In fact, you have to wait for the audience -- they're going to sit down, get settled in their seat... their concentration is not even there. You have to be a good host to people's attention's span. They're not going to come in there and work real hard right away. Too many things are coming at you: the music is coming, the rhythm is coming, all kinds of information that the brain is sorting out.

It starts with that synthesizer, which is playing what was really a Ray Phiri guitar lick. I tried like hell to get that synthesizer sounding better, but I couldn't. But the lick is immediately recognisable as You Can Call Me Al. It has such a light happy feel to it that I think people tend to think of it as a funny song where in fact it has an interesting development -- the character starts off a totally self-absorbed guy who's worried about how fat he is, and ends up a guy in a strange world looking at angels in the architecture. It evolves through all those tum- bling, jammed up lyrics and falls into that. It took a long time to write, which probably makes sense because there's a lot of words in it.

Easy words and easy thoughts. Let it move along and let the mind get into the groove of it. Especially if it's a rhythm tune. And at a certain point when the brain is loping along easily, then you come up with a thought or image that's different. Because it's entertaining at that point.

So, You Can Call Me Al, which was an example of that kind of writing, starts off very easily with sort of a joke: ‘Why am I soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?’ Very easy words.

Then it has a chorus that you can't understand. What is he talking about, ‘You can call me Betty, and Betty, you can call me Al?’ You don't know what I'm talking about. But I don't think it's bothersome. You don't know what I'm talking about but neither do I. At that point.

The chorus, the bodyguard part, I always thought was the weakest phrase, but sometimes whatever comes to your mind won't leave and then that's what you have to do. If I could have found another chorus I would have, but I couldn't. But then because it became a kind of a hit with kids, it turned out that kids very much liked the idea of bodyguards, were very familiar with the idea. That's the violence of the world that we live in - kids know about bodyguards. A lot of times kids will go, Did you do that song, Bodyguard? So, actually it turns out to be a good hook for a chorus.

The second verse is really a recapitulation: A man walks down the street, he says... another thing. You know?

And by the time you get to the third verse, and people have been into the song long enough, now you can start to throw abstract images. Because there's been a structure, and those abstract images, they will come down and fall into one of the slots that the mind has already made up about the structure of the song.

So now you have this guy who's no longer thinking about the mundane thoughts, about whether he's getting too fat, whether he needs a photo opportunity, or whether he's afraid of the dogs in the moonlight and the graveyard, and he's off in, listen to the sound, look what's going on, there's cattle and... and these sounds are very fantastic and, look at the buildings, there's angels in the architecture... And that's the end of the song. It goes "Phooon!" and that's the end.

Paul Simon: There are two other Crazy Loves that I know and I'm sure there are more. There's the Van Morrison song, so I wanted to distinguish it from that. And the other [meaning] was that that romance had started, stopped, had come back, and stopped again. So it was like that, volume two.

I remember I liked the image (in Crazy Love Vol 2) of sloping into a room. It had a very clear and amusing mental picture for me. But I don't know where Fat Charlie came from, or the Archangel. It doesn't represent anyone.

When I was working on Graceland, I was thinking, "If I don't make this interesting, I will never get my generation to pay attention." They are not paying attention anymore to records. They were at a certain point, certainly around the time of Bridge over Troubled Water, but they no longer look to records to have their lives illuminated. They look to movies, or literature. I said, "Here is a group of people already attuned to the language of rock 'n' roll. They are used to listening to information, but they've stopped listening to the music because in their minds it's no longer saying anything to them." I thought, "If I don't make this record interesting, nobody's going to listen to it.

You can have a hit album without a major hit single, as with Graceland. But I think if you ask people, the public perception was that You Can Call Me Al was a big hit. Everybody knows it. But a lot had to do with the video. But the popularity of it was real.
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Bakithi Kumalo (bassist, Graceland) : Paul Simon's people called Hendrick Lebone, one of the best guys producing in South Africa. I'd been recording with him, playing with traditional groups. Then, Paul met with him and they started to talk about musicians. At that time, I was looking for a job to fix cars or something because my mother, she's getting sick. The producer asked me, 'Hey, do you know Paul Simon?' I said 'I don't know who Paul Simon is.' He started to sing 'Mother And Child Reunion'. Everybody knew that song! So, he says, 'Paul Simon is looking for a bass player and I think you're the guy for the music.' I thought, 'This is great! Paul Simon from America! But maybe he's going to ask for some American music and I don't know American music!'.

I went to the studio and I was nervous. I showed up there with my bass. I was the only one who played the fretless bass in South Africa. I met Paul and we started to play around with songs. Paul liked my playing and that made me so comfortable! He really loved the music and we started to work with some other musicians and Paul told me that we're going to New York and finish the rest of the record! This had been my dream - to go to New York! So, that's how it happened.

It was different for me, just to be at the airport! I'd never been on a plane before. My first flight was Johannesburg to New York and it was a long flight. The day I got here, I just went to sleep because I was so confused. And my English, I couldn't even talk to people, because I was, like, 'What am I going to say? They're going to laugh at me.'

Working with Paul Simon was a great thing, because I knew that this is a business. It's not Paul doing me a favor or I'm doing him a favor. He was easy, I mean, he was open. I would come up with ideas and when I would play something nice, Paul would love it.

I don't see anything wrong. I tell people, 'Listen, this is my life. I'm a musician. Whoever calls me and says, hey, let's play South African music' - why not? Because that pays my bills, you know, that takes care of me! I mean, music is a language, that's like me learning to speak English! I don't see any problem with Paul learning and getting involved with South African music. If he didn't do it, I don't think anybody else would!
(Source : interview with Christina Roden at http://www.rootsworld.com/rw/feature/kumalo.html)

Billy Bragg : He was on the wrong side of the argument despite his good intentions. The cultural boycott was part of the economic boycott that brought South Africa to heel. Paul Simon set his own terms, and that had to be done by people on the ground.
(Source : interview with Robin Denselow, in The Guardian, March 16, 2012.)

Jerry Dammers : I still believe he was wrong to go there and contravene the boycott, but that's in the past. It's the time not to forgive and forget, but to remember and forgive.
(Source : interview with Robin Denselow, in The Guardian, March 16, 2012.)

Dali Tambo (founder of Artists Against Apartheid) : I forgive him, though he was going against the policy of the UN and the ANC, inside and outside the country. In our discussions he explained his naivety at the time. I believe his heart was in the right place, even if his actions were not correct. I hope there's a graceful acceptance on his part that cultural exchange takes place between free people, and the people of South Africa were not free at that time.
(Source : interview with Robin Denselow, in The Guardian, March 16, 2012.)