A Quiet Celebration

A few weeks ago, my wife Lisa and I attended a live Paul Simon concert, titled:  A Quiet Celebration.  Paul played some of his newer songs the first half of the concert, tunes I had little familiarity with, and after the intermission played some of his hits from the past.  Although Simon has had a prolific career in writing many songs, I will address only a few of my favorites, some of which he did play the night of the performance we attended.

Prior to singing Homeward Bound, Simon mentioned he had written this song when he was 24 years old with apparent fond memories.  The opening words are:

I’m sitting in the railway station

Got a ticket to my destination

On a tour of one-night stands my suitcase and

Guitar in hand.

With all of Simon’s success in churning out music in a variety of locales, there remains this underlying wish to return Home where his girl friend or as he writes his “love lies waiting.”  Sometimes the luster that fame brings cannot replace the familiar sights of one’s native environment when one’s sense of loneliness becomes pervasive.  The fans his concerts bring forth meld into one-night stands with little value next to the things Simon misses and loves.

Another favorite of mine, If I Could, is Simon’s preferences by comparison, all of which have a rhythmic chime to them with the first stanza being the following:

I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail

Yes, I would

If I could

I surely would.

The last three lines of the stanza repeat themselves in all but one of the four stanzas of the song.  Much of this song, like so many melodious tunes, resembles the fine language of poetry.  The second stanza begins and ends with the same three lines as the first stanza.

The link between the two stanzas appears to be Simon’s yearning for movement and action over passivity and inertia as reflected by a sparrow and a hammer vis-à-vis a snail and a nail.   The rhyming of the objects adds to the beauty of the song.  The author appears to be seeking a certain freedom as opposed to being stuck in one’s circumstances.  This is elaborated in a different manner in the last comparison made by the songwriter when he desires to be a forestthan a street.  The forest brings us the image of nature unsoiled by the decay of urbanization as personified by a street.

The song ends, not with a comparison, but in the following way:

I’d rather feel the earth beneath my feet

With the same refrain as the above comparisons completing the stanza. I believe those last four lines summarize the theme of the song that represents the active process of fully taking in and appreciating our natural surroundings.  Rather than move with little consciousness nor awareness, it brings us inestimable joy when we actively experience the beauty of our environment.

Mrs. Robinson was perhaps the most famous song that Simon wrote.  We all remember it for appearing in The Graduate, the film that brought Dustin Hoffman immediate fame.  Simon had worked on the song with the intention of it reflecting the past, its tentative title being Mrs. Roosevelt.  When Mike Nichols liked the sound of it, he asked Simon to score it for the movie, The Graduate, that he was in the process of directing.  How different the character of Mrs. Robinson is than that of Eleanor Roosevelt.  In the film, Mrs. Robinson is a middle aged unhappy alcoholic woman preying on Dustin Hoffman, a recent college graduate.  She is the symbol of the lust and tumult of the ‘60’s when the film was made and takes place.  The song depicts Joe Dimaggio, the New York Yankee star, a hero gone and replaced by the looseness and immorality of the present.   The lines of the song reflecting this loss are:

          Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

          Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you

          Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away

          Woo, woo, woo

          What’s that you say Mrs. Robinson?

          Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.

In the film, when Mrs. Robinson (played by Anne Bancroft) seduces Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman’s role), he loses his innocence.  The metaphoric loss of Joe DiMaggio represents a hero that reflects another time, when life was simpler and not complicated by the hustle bustle and unending cries of contemporary culture.

The irony of these lines was that DiMaggio himself did not understand the symbolism behind the above words.  When Simon and DiMaggio met by chance in a restaurant the latter pointed out to Simon: “I’m a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and I haven’s gone anywhere.”  After his career as a Yankee had ended, DiMaggio’s past stardom gave him the opportunity to do the T.V. ads for a popular bank in New York City. 

At their meeting, Simon explained to Joe that the lines were not meant literally but rather to point out to DiMaggio that he was a true hero of the past where in the present such individuals are in short supply.  According to Simon, DiMaggio accepted the explanation and they shook hands and parted amicably.  Of course, like the song, and indeed to many, DiMaggio’s deeds as a great baseball player were a thing of the past.

Simon finished the concert with one of my favorite songs he and Garfunkel had written:  The Sound of Silence.  The title of the song stands out as it has an oxymoronic ring to it for how can silence sound?  The songwriters express the lack of communication felt by all when they sing: 

          People talking without speaking

          People hearing without listening

          People writing songs that voices never share

          No one dared

          Disturb the sound of silence

When I first heard the song, the imagery of the “flash of a neon light,” a human artifice, only appeared to exaggerate and bring to the forefront the sound of silence.  But, more so, the intensity of the song comes from the oxymoron, sound of silence, that is repeated throughout the song.  That silence has so much power that it appears to have a voice of its own, stifling the will to break free of it by rendering us all in a state of paralysis.  When we hear the words sung so brilliantly by Simon and Garfunkel, we recognize how important communication is and how the lack of it can sorely affect us all.