Gonna be Up for a While

On his solo debut, Paul Simon left home

In 1972, Simon and Garfunkel were officially over.   They performed a benefit concert for George McGovern (Simon cried when he lost and wrote “American Tune” to keep going) and posed for the photo of Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, but they were already archival.  Garfunkel did not play an instrument or compose, but his harmonies defined the sound of Simon’s songs, and Simon always took the lower part.  Garfunkel was a backup singer who acted like a lead singer.  Simon wrote all the songs.  Garfunkel was taller.  They loved and hated each other like brothers.  It was time to leave home.

Garfunkel appeared alongside Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge and had every reason to expect that a director other than Mike Nichols would keep giving him work.  Paul Simon’s back was against the wall.  He was just on the other side of 30.  The Beatles had broken up, Dylan was hibernating, Stevie Wonder was beginning his renaissance, Joni Mitchell was in the midst of one, but would only be widely recognized for it later.  What would Paul Simon, the solo artist, do?   A couple of years later, Simon would appear on Dick Cavett, who would ask him, “Who are the geniuses in your field?”  Paul Simon, ever competitive, couldn’t think of any—not Lennon, not Dylan—himself included.  He thought everyone was mediocre and overpaid; Gershwin, Kern, Rogers, Berlin and Porter were better.

But Paul Simon was still going to aspire.  Bridge Over Troubled Water, the last Simon and Garfunkel album, sold over 25 million copies, and he knew he could never match it on his own, and Clive Davis at Columbia was bracing for disaster.   He was not just going to record his latest songs.  He was going to make a statement and show the world that he was liberated from the S&G gauntlet.    

For “Why Don’t You Write Me,” a deep cut on that album, Simon asked the LA studio musicians to play ska, which they didn’t know, and while there’s nothing wrong with what they did, it wasn’t exactly what he was looking for.  This time, he went to Kingston, Jamaica to play with the guys from Toots and the Maytals.  Simon walked in to be the perfectionist he always was, but then he inhaled, and it set the tone for what he would do on Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints—create magic with rhythm tracks and worry about the vocals later.  He told them he wanted to make a ska record.  They told him ska was over; everyone was doing reggae.  “What’s reggae?” he asked. 

“Hello, darkness, my old friend,” opened the first Paul Simon song that would last, and many of the Simon and Garfunkel songs kept it dark.  I am a rock, I am an island. Nothing touches me.  Richard Cory put a bullet in his head.  Save the life of my child, cried the desperate mother.  Kathy, I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping.  So much brooding, so much seriousness, a little bit of levity—a splash of “Punky’s Dilemma,” “At the Zoo,” even using the word “groovy” on the “59th Street Bridge Song”-- just enough to break the mood.  But those guys in the Richard Avedon cover of Bookends are stylishly not having much fun.

When I was 10, I thought that the worst thing that ever happened was the breakup of The Beatles, and I wasn’t completely wrong.    The Beatles were better together, and I thought the same of Simon and Garfunkel, whose reunion I watched daily on the family Betamax, and when I saw Garfunkel rock a harmony to Simon solo songs, I thought he just made them better.  I had friends who were children of divorce, and parental reunion fantasies were common, and reuniting The Beatles or S&G were in that spirit.  I was a misfit 10-year-old boy whose best friend was a misfit 16-year-old girl, and we were dropped off at the Cotton Bowl to see them on their reunion tour, but the show started late, and we had to leave early because my parents were waiting in the parking lot.  I cried and cried.  For a moment, I turned into a child.

As time went by, I continued to love Simon and Garfunkel’s harmonies, but I also realized that Paul Simon was a writer, and he needed to keep exploring, and that rhythm became as important as harmony, and the kinds of songs he was growing into were his and his alone.  “The Boxer” was already about solitude, but “Peace Like a River,” a much less well known song, embodied its perils and pleasures.  In “The Boxer,” the fighter still remains.  In “Peace Like a River,” fighting back is a greater struggle.  The song lives under martial law, but the inspiration does not run dry.

Ah, peace like a river ran through the city
Long past the midnight curfew we sat starry-eyed
Ahoh, ahoh, we were satisfied
Ah, and I remember misinformation followed us
Like a plague
Nobody knew from time to time if the plans would change
Ahoh, ahoh, ahoh
If the plans would change

There’s a curfew at midnight, there’s propaganda around the clock.  Where does the party go?  And yet the lyrics are upstaged by the extravagant guitar work and those lovely extended vocal lines, where the diphthongs say more than the actual words.  The repression drew Simon inward, and it is here he sings the most memorable lines of the song.

Ah, four in the morning I woke up from out of my dream
Nowhere to go but back to sleep but I'm reconciled
Ahoh, ahoh, ahoh
I'm gonna be up for a while
Ahoh, ahoh, ahoh
I'm gonna be up for a while
Ahah, ahah, ahaah
I'm gonna be up for a while

“I’m gonna be up for a while.”  Hello, darkness my old friend yet again.  “This machine kills fascists” said Woody Guthrie’s guitar case.  Misinformation follows us like a plague, but what comes out of that guitar is endless.  When Paul Simon can’t sleep, he writes another Paul Simon song.

The serious songs are a variation of the playful ones.  “Me and Julio by the Schoolyard” has been on Sesame Street.  A child could love it.  But it is about a couple of guys that got into a lot of trouble.   They could have been members of the Weather Underground needing advocacy from radical priest Daniel Berrigan, SJ. But there are many variations of trouble out there.  Simon has two songs—both of them exquisite—about taking too many uppers and downers.  He’s worried about himself.  His named checked wife Peg is worried about him.  He’s worried about her.  Ron Carter walks the bass on “Run that Body Down,” keeping sublime time when Simon does what he does best and worries.

“Everything Put Together Falls Apart,” says the song.  Ain’t that the truth.  Simon was feeling it.  Go out and party, then regret it.  Or those Paranoia Blues will make you stay in and brood.  Write about tanks in the streets, or write about an Armistice Day that never comes.  This album came out 50 years ago.  Some very cool technology has come along—you are reading this on such a device—but so much feels worse.  If you have read a newspaper in the past week, you know what I am talking about.  It makes me want to press play and listen again about being up for a while.  After he recorded the rhythm track for “Mother and Child Reunion,” he found the title on a Chinese restaurant menu.  And when you hear the song, you hear the ultimate separation made whole again. I cried when I had to leave the Simon and Garfunkel reunion, but then I grew up and learned more about what it takes to be an artist.  Simon left home to make this album.  He imagined getting into some major trouble, and sang not one, but two songs about needing to take better care of himself.  He went all the way to Kingston, Jamaica just to get that sound.  You may have gone a long way from home, and you may think that the further you go, the better.  You may prosper, you may have to go underground, you may need to go into recovery.  You may be up all night, writing a masterpiece when the tanks are outside. You will keep going, but you can’t deny it.  That peace like a river is leading you somewhere. Inevitably, everything put together falls apart. You may be decaying, but you still need love.  The mother and child reunion is only a motion away.