The greatest rock song Paul Simon ever heard is a 1955 classic
It’s hard to really call everything that Paul Simon ever made as distinctly rock and roll.
There are many tunes in his catalogue that are certainly indebted to the kinds of tunes that Chuck Berry and Little Richard started out making, but when looking through all the twists and turns he got up to throughout the rest of his career, it’s not like he was going back to his roots whenever he wrote a tune like ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’. He wanted to give people more avenues to work outside of standard rock and roll, but that didn’t mean certain songs couldn’t still touch his heart.
Even if he only had an acoustic guitar in his hand, Simon was a student of those early days of rock and roll. The entire construction of Simon and Garfunkel wasn’t going to happen if he didn’t have a lot of lessons listening to Everly Brothers, and there are even a few turns of phrase in his tunes that are indebted to the storytelling aspect that you’d find in a lot of Berry’s greatest tunes. But everyone was aware that neither of the duo were ever going to be an Elvis Presley-type figure or anything.
They were a lot more soft spoken than Presley ever was, and when you look through a lot of ‘The King’s greatest works, subtle isn’t an emotion that he held onto nearly as often as he should have. Everything was big for the sake of being big, and although a lot of people may have loved that side of him, Simon had more of a soft spot for when he was still a kid trying his hand at making the same blues songs that he heard as a kid.
You have to remember that Presley didn’t start off making some of the greatest rock and roll tunes of all time, and even if he managed to make teenagers come alive whenever he danced, he was still trying to make the most of every song he sang. Nothing mattered to him more than getting all of his songs right on record, and when Simon heard the song ‘Mystery Train’, there was never anything that could have compared to it.
Despite going through countless iterations of his sound over the years, Simon still felt that ‘Mystery Train’ had everything that a great rock and roll song needed, saying, “My first recollection was I was in the back seat of my parents’ car and they were going grocery shopping. The radio came on and the announcer said, ‘Here’s a singer and they say every time he sings in the South, there are riots and his name is Elvis Presley’. And I thought that was the strangest name I had ever heard. I did love Elvis’ sound, and in particular, ‘Mystery Train’, which is my favourite record in rock and roll.”
But what often gets lost when talking about Presley’s voice is how spooky it could sound under the right circumstances. Presley was always known for being the Vegas sideshow act during the latter half of his career, but when he was left to his own devices with just a few members of a band standing around him, he could turn any studio into the same smoky clubs that he was playing when he was bashing the hell out of his guitar.
And it’s that kind of mystique that makes Simon’s ‘Graceland’ work so well. A lot of what Simon was chasing after was about telling stories of different people’s lives, and even if he didn’t personally have the same relationship that this boy and father did when making their way to Presley’s home, it’s easy to see why someone would consider Presley to be the almighty icon of America that everyone wanted a little piece of.
So while anyone could try and copy what Presley had done, Simon knew better to stay away from anything that Presley was singing for fear that he would somehow taint that style of singing. This was clearly someone in their element playing the best tunes they knew how, and he wasn’t going to get in the way and make tunes that sounded like a poor man’s version of that.
