The number one album Paul Simon was told was a “ridiculous mistake”
The career trajectory of Paul Simon was never about trying to follow the trends of the day.
He already had a niche market that loved him for Simon and Garfunkel, but when he started making his solo material, he figured that it was time for him to start thinking about his songs in a different way and toy with what a singer-songwriter could do. The world was his oyster, but that didn’t mean that everything that he made was necessarily greeted with open arms whenever he had an idea.
Then again, the idea of either him or Art Garfunkel having a solo career after they split up was going to be anyone’s guess. Although Garfunkel did have a fair bit of great material in his arsenal like ‘All I Know’, Simon was always the maverick looking to try things out whenever he could. It wasn’t out of the question for him to work on more rootsy records, but when looking at the jazz musicians he worked with later down the road, he was clearly concerned about how to keep his craft going.
There had to be more to life than playing a bunch of cowboy chords and writing character portraits, and while There Goes Rhymin’ Simon did have a fair bit of praise back in the day, he was far more concerned with listening out for whatever new sounds were out there. And when he started to focus on the rhythmic aspect of rock and roll when working on Graceland, he knew that he needed to find the right musicians to get behind him.
Although the idea of going to South Africa during apartheid and working with a backing group was going to be a gamble, it wasn’t impossible to pull off, either. Simon had spent years trying to write music in the traditional format, but if he had world musicians working off of him, he could find a way of taking the opposite approach and get a lot of his musical cues from how the rest of the band was interpreting his music every single time they sang.
Before the record was even out yet, though, Simon was already facing major backlash from people for naming the album after Elvis Presley’s estate, saying, “They were just hoping that I had made some kind of ridiculous mistake and hadn’t thought. ‘How could you name an album after Elvis Presley’s estate which was an antebellum home in the South that used to have slaves?’ And because I went to Graceland, I knew the history. I said, ‘Look, Graceland was built in 1939 by a podiatrist whose wife’s name was Grace. What’s your case against me if you don’t have the facts right.’”
And when listening to the record, none of the songs were about trying to exploit the musicians that Simon was working with, either. He saw many of the tracks as a two-way musical conversation half the time, and when listening to the way that the band plays off each other on tunes like the title track or the beautiful ballad ‘Under African Skies’ shows what can happen if two genres are able to work happily together.
It’s not like Simon was the only one getting on that bandwagon, either. Around the same time, you would see people like Peter Gabriel starting to branch out into different musical styles, whether that was using Manu Katche on So or bringing in Youssou N’Dour to have a guest spot in the middle of the song ‘In Your Eyes’ a few years later.
Although Simon, Gabriel and even acts like Sting might not be the first people that would pop into people’s heads as “world musicians,” what they were doing was never about trying out new sounds for fun. If they were going to make music of this calibre, they knew it had to come from a place of respect, and no amount of false information from the critics was going to get in the way of that.
