John Lennon, Lorne Michaels, and the 1983 song Paul Simon calls his proudest moment
Paul Simon has always known he has a power with words, and so it’s difficult for him to pinpoint just one moment in which they landed with the most weight.
You could argue this to be the case on any number of Simon & Garfunkel smashes, from ‘The Boxer’ to ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’, and obviously ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. But to an extent, you need to put all of that out of your mind now: it was the 1960s, a microcosm that protected the young from real life until it dawned on them that they had to face the world on stark terms.
And frankly, there could be nothing starker or more symbolic about the death of that moment than the murder of John Lennon in 1980. It was almost like from the second those fatal gunshots rang out, the warm memories of the swinging ‘60s dream collapsed as the man who was at the forefront of it was gone forever.
For obvious reasons, that had a profound effect on anyone who was anyone, but it took Simon a good few years to fully turn over all the thoughts in his mind, link them to the other striking sights of violence he had seen, and create a song out of it. That was the straightforward story of ‘The Late Great Johnny Ace’, but it was a track that stuck in the songwriter’s mind more than many others.
It’s such a powerful name for a song, lamenting the rhythm and blues guitarist who died by self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1954, that even wondering how Simon came up with that part leaves the mind boggled. “I had the title of that song for a long time, but I didn’t connect it with that melody. Actually, I had it with another,” he explained in a 1984 interview, “I was going to write it as a play about Johnny Ace and John Kennedy. Then Lennon died in December of 1980, and I wrote the basic song the following summer; he became the third character.”
But it was an interjection from a close friend that changed everything, and effectively made Simon a political vehicle to say something of worth. He recalled, “Lorne Michaels suggested I write it as a song to see if I could say, in a condensed form, everything I wanted to about violence and the degree to which we have become inured to, or anesthetised by it.”
Given the weightiness of the subject matter, it would have been a delicate balance to pull off for most other writers, but given a man of Simon’s skilful craft, you would frankly never know the precision and detail that went into it. There was a very good justification when he said it was “the best work I’ve yet done”.
You could plainly see that ‘The Late Great Johnny Ace’ was a labour of love for Simon, defying the convention of his usual songwriting process by taking years, rather than mere months, to complete. But he had to make it just right for Ace, Lennon, and John F Kennedy, all those who had lost their lives to gun violence in one way or another, and whose legacies came to be known by that cornerstone.
Simon only hoped he could do that justice in the moment when he was writing the song, but the decades that have passed since, in which appreciation for both the song and his efforts behind it have only continued to grow, it proves that it wasn’t all for nothing. Ace, Lennon, and Kennedy may have been mortal legends, but their deaths were never in vain.
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