The Top 35 Or So Songs of the 80’s
Guest Post: Paul Simon - Graceland
[Today’s entry is a guest post from Scott (pgwp) of Pretty Goes With Pretty. He is writing a book about Slint’s Spiderland for the 33⅓ series—i.e. to call him “cool” is redundant.]
I was ten years old when I first heard “Graceland,” and though I knew of Elvis, I wasn’t sharp enough to connect him to the song. Maybe it was because the cover of Paul Simon’s 1986 album of the same name features a medieval-looking painting of a spearman riding a decorated horse, as if Graceland were a place sought by the Crusaders. Maybe it was because the song itself had nothing whatsoever to do with Elvis. As Simon sang of this place, this land of grace, I envisioned somewhere unreachable, almost mythical—Eden, Valhalla, Oz. “I’ve reason to believe,” Simon sings, “we all will be received in Graceland.”
Of course it’s also in Memphis, Tennessee. Simon says so earlier in the same chorus. Graceland is both earthbound and unattainable, real and abstract. There is an echo of “America,” Simon & Garfunkel’s iconic song written eighteen years earlier; each is about travelers headed for a real place but looking for a concept.
You could say “Graceland” is about distance traveled, via car, and distance kept, via language. The song is about two journeys: one by a man and his son “following the highway by the river through the cradle of the Civil War”; the other by the same man, alone, through his own mind. There is a tension between the two revealed through the language of the lyrics and how the narrator avoids saying anything clearly. He’s going to Graceland, yes—the one in Memphis—but he’s not going to Elvis’ home. Elsewhere he tells us, “my traveling companion is nine years old, he is the child of my first marriage.” Why not “my son”? Why so clinical, so impersonal? The answer might be found in the subsequent verse, which veers from the road-trip imagery into the past, of a woman (his first wife?) leaving him. This man is escaping heartbreak—escaping the people who know he’s heartbroken (“everyone can see you’re blown apart”)—in search of some kind of salvation.
Really, what road trip isn’t a combination of this kind of dual journey—the reverie evoked by the open highway and the intent of getting to one’s destination? And the music matches the schism set by the lyrics. Right off the bat “Graceland” sounds like a traveling song, with the steady, rolling rhythms and a simple, shimmering pedal guitar line courtesy Demola Adepoju, on loan from King Sunny Ade’s band. Simon literally makes the connection between the music and the imagery in the opening line, “The Mississippi delta was shining like a National guitar.” When the narrator’s lyrics drift into memory, the music moves at a relaxed pace—you can feel him stare out the window of his car—only to jolt into a oddly metered rhythm for the chorus, as if the narrator had shaken himself out of his loneliness and reminded himself of his destination. The rhythm of the chorus is one of intent, of focus: “I’m going to Graceland!” Me too—aren’t we all? (postpunk)
Ashamed pseduo-confession: I don’t know anything about music. Exhibit A., I fairly detest this song. More to the point, I fairly detest how this song sounds. The version that stands out to me as most superior is the Casiotone cover. I get somewhat into what I dislike about the song in that post, but it amounts to it sounding generally too ‘cool.’ Like a it’s all channeled through a cheap-o Danelectro Cool Cat pedal or something. At least the Casiotone version lets the beauty of the lyrics shine with its apocalyptic-yet-minimal instrumentation and speak-singing.
Yet I am somewhat getting into the song as I sit here listening to it typing down these ill-conceived, likely wrong thoughts about the canonical Simon version. The problem, maybe, that I have with the original is that it is (as Scott pointedly brings out, above) it is not an overwhelmingly happy song but it sounds very happy. This sort of incongruity is normally praised in popular music, but here it always fails to work for me. It sounds like a celebration, a stage in a staging area on an upward spiritual journey. And maybe it is; it’s a little ambivalent. But damn me if I can’t completely get it.
