My Pop Life #130 : America – Simon & Garfunkel

America   –   Simon & Garfunkel

Let us be lovers we’ll marry our fortunes together

I’ve got some real estate here in my bag

So we bought a pack of cigarettes

and Mrs Wagner pies

and walked off to look for America

It was some time in early 2015 when I became aware of the two Swedish sisters Johanna & Klara Söderberg who call themselves First Aid Kit covering this evergreen classic.  Clear, bright, bel canto voices with a precise harmonic shiver  : the song lived again in their youthful rendition.   It marked our first year living in New York City, two English actors who’d packed two suitcases and one cat each and upped and flown to the Big Apple on a whim in February 2014.   My wife Jenny and I had moved six times by the time I heard this cover of Simon & Garfunkel‘s song, from Harlem in the snow, to the top floor of a brownstone in Washington Avenue in Brooklyn in the deeper snow (and an encounter with fairy godmother Johanna), across the street to a sublet in an apartment block, to the Village in Manhattan, then Air Bob in Bed-Stuy, to Hall St in Clinton Hill, now next door in Fort Greene.  It was our third major stint looking for America.  First – 1992 Los Angeles for three years, Venice, West Hollywood and Green Cards.  Next – 2002 Los Angeles for another two years – Los Feliz.  Now New York.  Coming up for two years as I write this.

My first experience of America was in 1976 when my best friend Simon Korner and I hitch-hiked from New York to Los Angeles to Vancouver to Cape Cod.  It was our gap year – though it was called “a year off” back then.  We’d done our A-levels, got our University places sorted – him at Cambridge, me at LSE.  I’d then left home and gone to work in Laughton Lodge as a Nursing Assistant, a period I outlined briefly in My Pop Life #58.

Essentially I was required to keep an eye on a ward-full of 30 men of differing shapes and sizes, but all classified in 1975 as ‘Mentally Subnormal’.  Some of them were dangerous.  Some were catatonic.  Now they would be called clients with a learning difficulty.  All this for a later blog, but I mention it in passing.  I worked there from October through to April 1975, saving money to fly to New York with Simon, to go and look for America.

It was terribly exciting, we were 18 going on 19 and from a small Sussex town called Lewes.  Seeing the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the Smithsonian, the wide open prairies of Nebraska, the Rocky Mountains, Monument Valley and the Arizona desert was an unparalleled experience for two young men, and it changed and bonded us both.    Paul Simon did a similar trip with Kathy Chitty in 1964, inspiring this song.   I kept a diary of our trip and at one point in New Mexico wrote a kind of Ode :

America ! America ! The skies all seem to say !

Or are they saying something else, like : “Let’s be on our way” ?

 It’s rather hard to tell because it’s cloudy out today

But Ralph and Sigh don’t mind because they’re IN THE USA !!

Fairly safe to say there wasn’t a budding Paul Simon hiding within at that point.   It’s more of a Soviet Farm Song satire.

Perhaps not surprisingly this song always makes me feel emotional for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.  The ultimate line :

“…counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America…”

is so simple and ordinary yet it has a poetic magic that lifts the song into a mythical hymn for the soul.  Of all those people searching for their best life on this vast continent.  Plenty wrong with the USA of course which I won’t rehearse here.  this is about the other side of the coin.   The optimism of America, constantly encouraging, constantly asking you to make the very best of yourself.  The reason why we keep coming back.    The hope.  The interior yearning made physical reality.

We had Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits in our house all through childhood, Mum must have bought it.  This song didn’t stand out to me at the age of ten or eleven, I was hooked on Sound Of Silence, Parsley Sage Rosemary & Thyme, Homeward Bound.  But it must have crept under my skin because it has become one of my favourite songs of all time.  Again, I’m not sure why, but it has a strange ineffable power : unusually there is no rhyme at all in the lyrics, and the chorus is just one line, slightly altered each time “…look for America”.    Paul Simon evidently knows that from the specific and the individual experience comes the universal : the details of the Greyhound Bus trip from Pittsburgh which had started as a hitch-hiking journey from Saginaw, Michigan, the cigarettes, the jokes, the youthful joy which turns to melancholy in the last verse :

“Kathy I’m lost” I said, though I knew she was sleeping..I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why“

the reference to smoking pot “some real estate here in my bag” and the the space between the two voices above all lend this three-minute masterpiece a unique power.  In particular the middle verse :

“So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine and the moon rose over an open field..”

has no equal in pop writing for me.  There is just so much space in the song, and the listener fills it with their own fantasies, desires and feelings.  But mainly with their own bruised optimism.

graffitti on an abandoned building in Saginaw

I thought I would post the First Aid Kit version because I became rather obsessed with it, but after a few months of listening to hip hop and electronica I went back to it.  It still sounds bright and beautiful, but it is in the end a cover of a classic.  There are technical issues – chopped bar lines and other things I won’t bore you with, Paul Simon’s song is best served in the end by Art Garfunkel and himself, some acoustic guitars, a wandering soprano saxophone and a melodic bassline.  Larry Knechtel on Hammond organ and Hal Blaine on the drums join them on this recording, but essentially the space created between all of these elements is where the song’s beauty lies, which the Swedish sisters have understood so well.  David Bowie made a similar empty echoing version immediately after 9/11 which I post below.

My other memory of this song is the film Almost Famous of course, a film about music with one of the finer soundtracks I can remember.  The closing credits roll over The Beach Boys’ “Feel Flows“the closing song on their 1971 LP Surf’s Up and well outside the 20 Golden Greats arena.   Simon & Garfunkel’s song accompanies the young hero leaving home, looking for America.  One of those cliches that always lands.

Simon & Garfunkel 1966

Paul Simon is one of the finest songwriters of any era.  I sang his solo praises in My Pop Life #89 .  The combination he had with Art Garfunkel was immaculate though and unlikely to be bettered as a vehicle for his amazing songs.  I think they fell out probably – and unspoken issues kept them apart aside from one remarkable song My Little Town and a concert in Central Park in 1981 when they tried to heal the rift to no avail.

Carousel Singers at the Unitarian Church Brighton 2013

Towards the end of my Brighton period, around 2013 I suppose, I joined a group run by Julia Roberts called The Carousel Singers.  I was suggested by ace percussionist Paul Gunter who played for a while with The Brighton Beach Boys and is a senior graduate of Stomp – because Carousel – or rather Julia – were looking for a pianist who could accompany a choir of learning-disabled adults.  My year with Carousel was extraordinary, funny, moving and occasionally sad.  We’d meet every Wednesday evening in the Unitarian Church on New Road in the centre of Brighton.  Julia, Paul, another musician Gabrielle, graduate Karis and me.  My instinct was always to push the singers further, assume that they could do things that perhaps they hadn’t been asked to do before, stretch them out a bit.  And we used to write songs together, as a group.  In particular the choir members would come up with the lyrics, and I would supply some kind of tune and chords to go with them.  The first time we did this, for a song we called Song For Iain,  I used a simple descending F to C bassline which pleases the ear and sounds very POP, but for the second song I just couldn’t get ‘America‘ out of my brain, and blatantly lifted chunks of melody for the choir to sing.  Fran in particular got it, and always remembered the tune from one week to the next.  Others joined her.  Others again could scarcely talk let alone sing, but it was a group which looked out for each other and didn’t judge, but always supported each other.  I learned a huge amount from working with these people, who just 40 years earlier would have been on a locked ward in a Mental Hospital being dosed-up with various drugs.   The Carousel Singers all have a level of independence, and a huge reservoir of compassion combined with a lack of judgement of other people’s ability and capability.  It was extraordinarily moving.  I do believe that we could learn a great deal from adults and children with learning difficulties.

Meanwhile I’m still looking for America.  Wish me luck.

Simon & Garfunkel :

First Aid Kit get an ovation from Paul Simon :

the David Bowie video isn’t available.  But here’s the Central Park gig :

My Pop Life#85 : The Undercover Man – Van Der Graaf Generator

The Undercover Man   –   Van Der Graaf Generator

here…at the glass…all the usual problems…all the habitual farce..

you ask..in uncertain voice..what you should do..as if there were a choice..

..but to carry on..miming the song..

..and hope that it all works out right

Lyrics burned into my brain.   The man who wrote them, Peter Hammill was a constant companion of mine through the 1970s.  I’d bought H to He from Simon Korner in 1971, quite possibly my first album that was all mine;  terribly weird, prog, heavy, jazzy, literate and dense.   I loved it, still do.  I first heard this on the John Peel show late one night in my bedroom in Hailsham.  Van Der Graaf Generator were so underground and unloved at school that I was astonished to hear their name and their music on the radio.  This album Godbluff  and the follow-up Still Life are exquisite.   There is something about the intensity of Hammill’s lyrics, his uncompromising vocal delivery, his fury, his passion and his focus that drilled through the teenage me, through all the layers of coping, pretence and bearing up, all the capability that I summoned at each maternal nervous breakdown, each visit to the phone box to call the doctor and complain about the latest bottle of pills prescribed to Mum, each battle in the kitchen over food, washing up, coal, cats, milk bills, noise, TV channels or haircuts.  The music exposed my innermost panic.  It cut through the pop fluff and the melodic flair to the gritty bone of loneliness that was my very private world.  In a way it was good that no one else in school liked Van Der Graaf Generator because I didn’t want to share those feelings with anyone.   I used to feel that my spectacularly dysfunctional family was a kind of pin-up of affliction, that the cross I bore, heavy and splintered and surely too much for one teenage boy to carry, was heavier and harder than anyone else’s.   It was a badge of honour, a hidden scar that I would only reveal to girlfriends: look, this is who I really am, then they would want to make it better, and they did.

Now an adult I see my childhood as just another suburban tragedy. Everyone has one.

I bought this in late October as the leaves fell from the trees.  I’d left school, left home and been left by my girlfriend in the same week (see My Pop Life #58).

My first day of work on B Villa, Laughton Lodge I had thirty strange faces staring at Mr Brown – the new nursing assistant in a white coat with name badge.  The friendliest bloke Martin had Down’s Syndrome and immediately introduced himself “hello sir!” with a strong lisp.  He shouldn’t have been in there.  But who should ?  Described on the entrance hoarding as a “Hospital For The Mentally Sub-Normal”, Laughton Lodge in 1975 was what local people called the loony bin, ‘bedlam’ or the madhouse.   On B Villa all 30 men could walk, feed themselves and take themselves to the toilet.   Critical distinctions.   It meant our work was watching for epileptic fits, walking the hyper Michael Payne round the grounds because he upset the other “residents”, taking a select group to ‘work experience’ or maybe into Lewes, sorting out problems and helping with tying of shoelaces, distribution of drugs (I wasn’t allowed to do this except with another nurse) and subduing of violence.  The drug of choice was Largactyl, the chemical cosh.  Half of the ward walked around like zombies under the effect of this powerful sedative.  The other half either behaved, or were headed the same way.  Ian was severely autistic and didn’t speak, kind of yelped when he was upset.  He had memorised all the puzzles in the day-room, he would pick up a piece and know where it went immediately.  Ronnie was a 19-year old murderer,  a pyschopath with a sickly grin.  Gerald was a big dangerous intelligent man who would explode with violence from time to time, attack other patients, one day he smashed the acquarium, it would take six male nurses to hold him down.  When a patient went “up the wall” they acquired superhuman strength from deep within and furniture would go flying.  We had largactyl injections, straightjackets and a padded cell upstairs.

Michael Payne was the saddest case. A handsome gentle man in his thirties, he’d witnessed a motorbike accident at close quarters and his mind had cracked.  Somehow through the system he’d found his way onto B Villa Laughton Lodge.  He talked incessantly and we would take it in turns to walk him around the grounds, never quite sure what was a memory and what wasn’t.  “Did you see that tiger on television last night Mr Brown?  Scratched me right down my face!”   Charge Nurse Ray Lucas explained that he was on a decreasing cycle of experience, his ups and downs getting closer together.  At that point he was three days up (walk around the grounds talking incessantly), three days down (slumped in green plastic armchair).  As the wavelength got shorter he would be more difficult to manage and when the up and the down met eventually he would short-circuit, burn out, and become like the monosyllabic zombies. 

The whole place was incredibly sad.  There were psychiatric patients mixed with murderers.  One fella Nick got picked up by his Mum and Dad every Saturday and brought back every Sunday night.  Apart from a twisted hand and club foot he was perfectly fine: intelligent but damaged.  The nurses were compassionate and coped well.   There was no abuse or piss-taking that I witnessed.   All the patients, and some of the staff were institutionalised – stuck in routines and ways of thinking.   I was only there for nine months, I couldn’t change anything.  Eventually one of the nurses from C Villa (the women’s ward) invited me to dinner one night in Ringmer.  While she was cooking, she handed me a book saying “this is what I’m interested in“.   Christine Glinkowski – a Polish woman in her late 20s – had given me “The Joy Of Sex“.  Readers, I was 18 years old.  “We can’t have sex on the first date” said Christine, “but we can do this…”

After work I would walk across the fields to the Nurses Home, a huge manor house divided into living quarters for the staff.  I shared a kitchen with two Mauritian gentlemen who cooked gentle curries and were very sweet, occasionally they would offer food, I would accept.  I would read a book, watch TV or play records on my little record player.  My first independent flat.  No surrogate mum.  Just me and my dope and cups of tea and vinyl LPs : Van Der Graaf, Wings, Joe Walsh, other white people. Pretty much.  To be fair I had a box of singles too, 45s which were nuggets of gold, among them Al Green & Sly Stone.  But yeah, East Sussex is white.  And so am I, kind of.

Van Der Graaf were the original pretentious art-rock prog band par excellence.   The voice of Hammill which goes from an angelic whisper to a blood-curdling scream, from a sweet melody to a harsh monosyllabic bark is one of the wonders of the world, and has influenced many singers.  The solo albums are more introspective and personal, while the Van Der Graaf catalogue is often science fiction speculation, Hammill being a fan (like me!) of Philip K. Dick.  For all their arch beauty the band soothed me through my troubled teens.   Perhaps just knowing that someone else felt fierce anguish and wasn’t afraid to express it was enough.  I was always afraid to express it.  I still am.

My Pop Life #58 : St Elmo’s Fire – Brian Eno

St. Elmo’s Fire   –   Brian Eno

Brown eyes and I were tired
We had walked and we had scrambled
Through the moors and through the briars
Through the endless blue meanders.
In the blue august moon

In the autumn of 1975 I had a crisis – my girlfriend had left me and meant it, I had left home and gone to live in the nurses’ quarters of Laughton Lodge Hospital, and I walked out of my Cambridge Entrance exam, and thus finally left school. All of these things happened in the same week.  It was a sudden collapse of the House Of Cards – woman, home and education all gone, finished.

Simon Korner and I were doing the Cambridge Entrance exam together but I was finding it particularly stressful – both the expectation of the school and my Dad (who went to Downing College, Cambridge).  Conrad Ryle’s brother Martin who lived in Brighton gave Simon and I extra lessons in English Literature and Quadrophenia, but we still never got around to William Blake who was set sight unseen in the exam.

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

 

*

“Discuss”

 

 

I didn’t know what he was on about to be honest.  I found it disturbing.  I wrote some guff or other.  Then in the afternoon the paper was even more obscure and I drew some cartoons on it and left the room, and the school, and went down to the nearest pub – The King’s Head in Southover St and bought myself a pint of beer.  Had a fag at the bar.  Freedom.  School, dad, Simon would all have to be disappointed.   I wouldn’t be going to Cambridge.  I had a place at LSE anyway to read Law.   Fuck Cambridge.   This self-sabotage led me to leave home within days for Laughton Lodge, a hospital for the mentally disabled.   Conrad and Tat from Rough Justice were already working there and my interview for the job was mainly about not getting involved in any sexual scandals with the nurses (I did), so in two shakes of a lamb’s tail I was employed as a Nursing Assistant or NA.  I had a white coat, a blue badge, and that was it.

 

I had a nice high-ceilinged room in the Nurse’s Home –  I took my clothes, my record player, my books and my records. Here I have to acknowledge brother Paul who had picked up the Roxy Music baton with a teenage vengeance and run with it all the way to strutting around Hailsham school with his mate Vince in tear-drop collars, fat ties and huge platform shoes, then religiously following Brian Eno’s solo career, starting with Here Come The Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy).

Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy

They were both scratchy rock-ish albums which I’d found quite hard to get into, but which I now adore.   We had them at home.  By then Paul and Mum were fighting badly and she eventually kicked him out with a solicitor’s letter – he was 16 years old.  He went to my Dad’s flat in Eastbourne but no joy there.  Paul ended up renting some flat somewhere in Eastbourne and working for the tax office.   I think that season of his life scarred him more than this week of mine did.   Paul probably owns all of Brian Eno’s albums.

 

 

This is from Brian Eno’s third LP Another Green World which was more electronic than the first two,  released in September 1975.   Only a few songs had vocals – one of which is St Elmo’s Fire.  His voice has a strange latent eerie quality that I absolutely adore, but which I understand can drive other people up the wall.  I can play this LP over and over again and never tire of the sounds coming out of the speakers.  And that is true for most of his records.   If you don’t have any Brian Eno records, I would suggest that this be your introduction.  It’s also an essential listen as an influence on the next 30 years of electronica and pop.  St Elmo’s Fire itself – a strange electrical weather phenomenon – is a beautiful bubbling wickedly playful piece of music.

 

Brian made Another Green World in London using his Oblique Strategy cards which he would consult to keep things random. Phil Collins plays the drums, Percy Jones is on bass on most tracks but on St Elmo’s Fire it’s Brian on everything including ‘synthetic percussion‘ and ‘desert guitars‘ (although “Wimshurst guitar” is credited to Robert Fripp).  It is a song that’s easy to love.  He comes across as an egghead professor of ambient music, but his music has always been hugely accessible.

 

You may think it strange that I left my mother who was being treated for psychiatric problems, on various drugs and treatments and regular hospital visits, to go and work in a Mental Hospital.   She’d been diagnosed by this point in my life as Manic Depressive, Schizophrenic, Paranoid Schizophrenic, they hadn’t come up with BiPolar yet, still testing drugs and side-effects.  But it didn’t scare me by then.  I was actually perfect for the job.  And – it was just a job.  And it was temporary.  I was saving to hitch-hike round the USA with Simon next summer….

 

 

My Pop Life #55 : Help! – The Beatles

Help !   –   The Beatles

…when I was young, oh so much younger than today,

I never needed anybody’s help in any way 

but now these days are gone I’m not so self-assured

now I find I’ve changed my mind I’ve opened up the doors

A version of this blog will be appearing in my forthcoming book Camberwell Carrot Juice. Check back for more details.

RB