FEATURE:
Something So Right
Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin' Simon at Fifty
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I am looking ahead…
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul Simon performing in Amsterdam in May, 1973/PHOTO CREDIT: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images
to the fiftieth anniversary of Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin' Simon. The third studio album by the legend, it ranks as one of his greatest ever. Arriving the year after his eponymous album, There Goes Rhymin' Simon was nominated for two GRAMMYs in 1974 (for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male and Album of the Year). A bigger hit than its predecessor, it reached two on the Billboard 200 chart. In the United Kingdom, the album peaked at number four. I wanted to celebrate the fact that There Goes Rhymin' Simon turns fifty on 5th May. I am not sure whether there is any anniversary release planned, but this is an album that everyone needs to hear. One of the greatest songwriters who has ever lived, Paul Simon’s gifts are all over There Goes Rhymin' Simon. Kodachrome, Take Me to the Mardi Gras and Something So Right are highlights from the album’s first side. On the second, we have American Tune and Love Me Like a Rock. Even the deeper cuts are fascinating. Simon would follow There Goes Rhymin' Simon with Still Crazy After All These Years in 1975. Another very different and genius album, this was a very fertile period for Paul Simon. One of the finest albums from 1973, I wanted to highlight a couple of positive reviews for There Goes Rhymin' Simon. Before that, Ultimate Classic Rock wrote about Paul Simon’s third studio album back in 2015:
“After spending several years dabbling in global rhythms and songforms – and kicking off his solo career in the wake of Simon & Garfunkel's dissolution – Paul Simon returned to his American roots for his second solo album, 1973's There Goes Rhymin' Simon, resulting in one of the biggest hits of his career.
The album, released in May 1973, found Simon leading a peripatetic series of sessions that took place in a number of far-flung locations, including London and Mississippi. But the place that truly colored the album's sound – and tied together its nimble explorations of gospel, folk, and dixieland – was the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, located in Muscle Shoals, Ala.
Already the nexus for a series of classic soul recordings throughout the '60s (including Wilson Pickett's "Mustang Sally" and James & Bobby Purify's "I'm Your Puppet"), Muscle Shoals would ultimately become something of a pilgrimage for a long list of rock artists. Still, when Simon started the sessions for his sophomore solo studio project, he had no idea what to expect.
In fact, legend has it that Simon only sought out the studio because he liked what he heard on another track cut there – the Staple Singers' "I'll Take You There" – and showed up expecting to find a group of Jamaican musicians. Surprised to find a largely white crew, he rolled tape on what he thought would be one song: "Take Me to the Mardi Gras."
"We did it on the second take," bassist David Hood later recalled. "He's got all this time left over, and he's not going to pay four days' worth of studio time for one song. So he says, 'What else can we record?'"
Continued Hood, "So he sits and plays and we tape 'Kodachrome' and a few other things. He was amazed, though, because he has always taken so long recording things, he couldn't believe that we were able to get something that quickly. But we had our thing down to a real science by the time we started working with him, because we had done so much stuff, we could make a chord chart and get you a really good track in one or two takes. Songs we'd never heard before, we could do that."
The band's loose feel (as well as its signature quirks, such as the sanitary napkins Hood says they taped to the ceiling in order to ward off a leak) lent There Goes Rhymin' Simon an irresistible warmth. That was entirely appropriate for a series of songs that, while not without a certain wearily mournful vibe, offered listeners a glimpse of Simon exploring themes of fatherhood ("St. Judy's Comet"), domestic tranquility ("Something So Right"), comity ("One Man's Ceiling Is Another Man's Floor") and plain old happiness ("Was a Sunny Day").
The result was an immediate hit, spinning off a pair of Top 5 singles in "Kodachrome" and "Loves Me Like a Rock" (the latter featuring stellar background vocals from the Dixie Hummingbirds) while nearly topping the album charts and picking up Grammy nominations for Best Male Pop Vocal and Album of the Year.
Like the rest of Simon's solo albums, Rhymin' Simon was more of a stylistic detour than a document of lasting change; although he'd invite some of the same personnel to join him on some tracks for his next record, Still Crazy After All These Years, he was already moving on to his next sound”.
Widely acclaimed and celebrated, There Goes Rhymin' Simon has not aged at all. At the time, one or two reviewers felt there was a lack of spontaneity and excitement to be found. I think that this is one of Paul Simon’s most interesting and enduing albums. This is what AllMusic said when they reviewed it. I think I first heard There Goes Rhymin' Simon when I was a child, and it has definitely stayed with me ever since:
“Retaining the buoyant musical feel of Paul Simon, but employing a more produced sound, There Goes Rhymin' Simon found Paul Simon writing and performing with assurance and venturing into soulful and R&B-oriented music. Simon returned to the kind of vocal pyrotechnics heard on the Simon & Garfunkel records by using gospel singers. On "Love Me Like a Rock" and "Tenderness" (which sounded as though it could have been written to Art Garfunkel), the Dixie Hummingbirds sang prominent backup vocals, and on "Take Me to the Mardi Gras," Reverend Claude Jeter contributed a falsetto part that Garfunkel could have handled, though not as warmly. For several tracks, Simon traveled to the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios to play with its house band, getting a variety of styles, from the gospel of "Love Me Like a Rock" to the Dixieland of "Mardi Gras." Simon was so confident that he even included a major ballad statement of the kind he used to give Garfunkel to sing: "American Tune" was his musical State of the Union, circa 1973, but this time Simon was up to making his big statements in his own voice. Though that song spoke of "the age's most uncertain hour," otherwise Rhymin' Simon was a collection of largely positive, optimistic songs of faith, romance, and commitment, concluding, appropriately, with a lullaby ("St. Judy's Comet") and a declaration of maternal love ("Loves Me Like a Rock") -- in other words, another mother-and-child reunion that made Paul Simon and There Goes Rhymin' Simon bookend masterpieces Simon would not improve upon (despite some valiant attempts) until Graceland in 1986”.
I am going to wrap up soon. It is surprising that there are not that many articles out there about There Goes Rhymin' Simon in terms of its creation and legacy. It is such a huge and legendary album; I do feel it needs more words written. Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary in May, I wanted to bring attention to Paul Simon’s masterpiece. Rolling Stone provided a deep and thoughtful review in 1973:
“THERE GOES RHYMIN’ Simon is the logical second step in Paul Simon’s solo recording career, and it is a dazzlingly surefooted one. Despite its many light, humorous moments, the core theme of his first album, Paul Simon, was depressing: fear of death, its focal point a sung poem, “Everything Put Together Falls Apart,” that while worthy of comparison with the best work of John Berryman, could hardly be called “easy listening.” Since the album dealt with anxiety, it communicated anxiety and was difficult in places to accept as entertainment. This isn’t true of Rhymin’ Simon. Like its predecessor, it is a fully realized work of art, of genius in fact, but one that is also endlessly listenable on every level. Simon has never sounded so assured vocally. He demonstrates in several places pyrotechnical skills that approach Harry Nilsson’s (in embellishment of ballad phrases) and John Lennon’s (in letting it all hang out), though for the most part, Simon’s deliveries are straight — restrained and supple, bowing as they should to the material, which is of the very highest order.
Rhymin’ Simon shows, once and for all, that Simon is now the consummate master of the contemporary narrative song — one of a very few practicing singer/songwriters able to impart wisdom as much by implication as by direct statement. Here, even more than in the first album, Simon successfully communicates the deepest kinds of love without ever becoming rhetorical or overly sentimental. The chief factor in his remarkable growth since Simon and Garfunkel days has been the development of a gently wry humor that is objective, even fatalistic, though never bitter.
Thematically, Rhymin’ Simon represents a sweeping outward gesture from the introspection of the first album. Simon has triumphantly relocated his sensibility in the general scheme of things: as a musician, as a poet of the American tragedy, and most importantly as a family man. Rhymin’ Simon celebrates, above all, familial bonds, which are seen as an antidote, perhaps the only antidote, to psychic disintegration in a terminally diseased society. As an expression of one man’s credo, therefore, it is a profoundly affirmative album.
The chief new musical element Simon has chosen to work with — one he has hitherto eschewed — is black music: R&B and gospel motifs are incorporated brilliantly both in Simon’s melodic writing and in the sparkling textures of the album’s ten cuts, more than half recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The opener is “Kodachrome,” a streamlined poprock production that uses the image of color photography as a metaphor for imaginative vitality. The song opens with a couple of Simon’s most pungent lines: “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school/It’s a wonder I can think at all.” Next is “Tenderness,” a late-Fifties-styled doo-wop ballad in which Simon tells a friend: “You don’t have to lie to me/Just give me some tenderness beneath your honesty.” In addition to boasting one of Simon’s loveliest vocals, “Tenderness” has a nicely subdued horn arrangement by Allen Toussaint and soulful R&B backups by a gospel group, the Dixie Hummingbirds.
“Take Me to the Mardi Gras” is sheer delight — a Latinflavored evocation of abandon in New Orleans that fades out in joyous Dixieland music by the Onward Brass Band. This sensuous flight of fancy is followed by “Something So Right,” Simon’s love song to his wife in which he tells her he can hardly believe his present happiness, since he is by nature a pessimist. A ballad that begins in an offhand, almost conversational tone, it builds slowly into a declaration of great eloquence. Side one closes with a witty, R&B piece of homespun city philosophy, “One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor.”
“American Tune,” which opens side two is the album’s pivotal moment. A flowing ballad with the chordal structure of an American hymn-tune, its magnificent lyrics give us Simon’s definitive reflection on the American Dream. Writing from a state of exhaustion in England (Paul Samwell-Smith co-produced the cut in London, and Del Newman provided the stately string arrangement), Simon sees the country as a nation of “battered” souls, but still “home,” and the American Dream either “shattered” or “driven to its knees.” In an apocalyptic reverie, he equates his own death with the death of America and sees “the Statue of Liberty sailin’ away to sea.” The song, which has instrumental touches that deliberately recall Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” is the single greatest thing Simon has yet written, a classic by any standard.
“Was a Sunny Day” reshuffles images from “Kodachrome,” treating them playfully in a semi-reggae setting. A “high-school queen with nothing really left to lose” makes love with a sailor whom she calls “Speedoo but his Christian name was Mr. Earl.” “Learn How to Fall” has an opening melodic phrase similar to that of Bette Midler’s now-famous intro, “Friends,” but a different message: “You’ve got to learn how to fall/before you learn to fly.”
The album’s last two cuts, “St. Judy’s Comet” and “Loves Me Like a Rock,” complete the thematic cycle of songs avowing familial devotion. In the exquisitely tender acoustic lullaby, “St. Judy’s Comet,” Simon enters into the imaginative life of his son, who wants to stay up late to watch for the mythical comet of the title. Simon concludes: “‘Cause if I can’t sing my boy to sleep/Well it makes your famous daddy/Look so dumb.” In “Loves Me Like a Rock,” a hand-clapping, call-and-response gospel anthem with the Dixie Hummingbirds providing the response, Simon resurrects his own childhood relationship with his mother. Since the anxiety-laden “Mother and Child Reunion” was the opening cut on the first Simon album, it is fitting that this incredibly powerful song of love and gratitude, reminiscent in spirit of “When The Saints,” should close the second.
Rhymin’ Simon is a rich and moving song cycle, one in which each cut reflects on every other to create an ever-widening series of refractions. Viewed in the light of the first album, Simon seems ultimately to be saying that acceptance of death is only possible through our ability to honor our human ties, especially those formed within the family structure. Only through the mutual affirmation of love can we redeem our imaginative powers from despair and be able to live with the breakdown of the wider “family” structure that is the American homeland without ourselves breaking down”.
There are some incredible albums turning fifty this year. No doubt that There Goes Rhymin' Simon is one of the most important from 1973. With songs from the album played to this day, it is clear there is a lot of love from one of Paul Simon’s greatest works. On 5th May, we will celebrate fifty years of…
THE magnificent There Goes Rhymin' Simon.