“Strange times”: The Paul Simon anthem that captured the 1960s better than any other song of the era
When I was growing up, absolutely nobody was waxing lyrical about the virtues of pasta water. But times change. Sometimes the changes are subtle, sometimes the changes are stark. In the 1960s, they were stark enough to give an idle passenger whiplash. Paul Simon was not one of those passengers.
The diminutive songwriter was transfixed by the transitioning scenery, gripped by the gravity of a new dawn as he set out on a road trip in 1964. Four years later, he captured it all in one beautiful song called ‘America’.
Songs were the leading way the times were captured in the ‘60s; now we have memes and short videos, often depicting cooks ladling cloudy water into pasta sauces. In years to come, this sudden reverence of an erstwhile starchy throwaway might be seen as a desperate attempt at authenticity at a time when artificiality is everywhere.
In the age of technopoly, starchy water is an inevitable attraction to the old ways from the old country. “I’ve gone to look for America“.
In the 1960s, the inverse was true. People were striving to find the “new” ways in the “new” country. And nothing signposted that quite like Jack Kerouac’s classic 1957 novel, On the Road. Pick up any modern copy, and you’ll find the following testimony from Bob Dylan inscribed on the inside sleeve: “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.”
America was evidently in a state of flux with new technologies, possibilities, drugs, and haircuts all abounding. Sitting in a pampered office peddling taut and stilted prose seemed remiss in this climate, so Kerouac went out to capture the new America on the wing. He set out on a feverish pursuit of the soul of a post-war world still in the process of inventing itself. That pursuit inspired a whole host of beats thereafter.
But finding new ways is inherently ‘a search’. And amid searches, you can become lost. What happens if you don’t find what you’re looking for? By the end of the ’60s, that question hung over counterculture like a cloud, and nowhere was it rendered more poignantly than in Simon’s ‘America’. “Kathy, I’m lost”.
Simon’s song was not alone in asking that question. By the end of the decade, uncertainty itself had become a defining cultural mood. As the ‘60s hurtled to a close, Hunter S Thompson mused on the decade as time careened around the bend, “It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era – the kind of peak that never comes again.”
His chin-stroking, cigarette-toking, coke-sniffing rumination continued, “San Francisco in the middle ’60s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”
Thompson had mused a lot during the decade, but that closing remark – “Whatever it meant” – has proven to be his most prophetic, and arguably, in its inextricable mysticism, profound. Even today, endless polemics continue to try and catch the soul of the decade like Fisher-Price nets trawling the Atlantic in search of a white whale.
The dastardly ‘60s were elusive by nature, flitting between dreams and nightmares, certainty, and a deep sense of dislocation. “Michigan seems like a dream to me now”.
There was no definitive manifesto to pin it all to. No Das Kapital at the heart of it besides ‘Peace and love, dude’, and the thousands of ways bands found to phrase that saying. Amid that waywardness, the phrase became an idiom of diminishing returns. Ultimately, the vagueness of peace and love was part of the point. Like Simon hitchhiking across the States simply because he “had to see what a city named Saginaw looked like“.
The search itself remained far more compelling than any destination. Actual politics, policies, and answers were far too stuffy and confining, like a black and white printed recipe from an authentic Italian chef as opposed to a contextless, tasty video of pasta water’s starchy deployment. That is precisely the tension that sits at the heart of ‘America’. The ’68 masterpiece is less concerned with finding answers than documenting what it felt like to go looking for them.
When Simon set out on the genuine road trip behind the song in ‘64 with his girlfriend Kathy Chitty, he was only 22. He had been living in London, but Tom Wilson, who was producing Simon & Garfunkel’s debut album, Wednesday Morning 3 AM, beckoned him back to America for the record’s final mix. So, Simon thought it offered a good opportunity to show Kathy the country, in every which way.
Jack Kerouac would often say that On The Road took him seven years to live and three weeks to write. Well, Simon’s very own musical version of the novel consisted of a five-day road trip with Kathy, a gig in Saginaw in ‘66, and a further two years to pull together, and it is only three minutes long. Alas, concision is a skill, and ‘America’ packed more of the zeitgeist into its slight runtime than perhaps any other song of the era.
In truth, it is less of a song in the traditional sense and more so a short story set to music. Inspired by the track, Gerry Beckley would go on to form America the band, and he explained that Simon and Garfunkel’s classic is, in fact, entirely “prose. There’s not one line that rhymes,“ he says, “and I will tell some of the best songwriters you’ve ever met that particular element and you can see them stop and go through it in their head.”
He told SongFacts, “We’re oblivious to that being an ingredient because we’re so involved in the story. You’re not sitting there going, ‘That didn’t rhyme, wait a second.’ It’s not an issue.”
And like all great story songs, the tale far extends beyond its runtime. Each line contains something pertinent about the times. In fact, you can go through it line by line and find a corroboration.
“‘Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag’
(It begins with the Kerouacian dream of no possession and the open road.)
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs Wagner pies
And walked off to look for America
(Yet, American culture is still underpinned by products and brands.)
‘Kathy,’ I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
‘Michigan seems like a dream to me now’
(The onset of dislocation as the idealism of the trip is befallen by abstraction.)
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America
(The endeavour of the quest is what mattered in the ‘60s.)
Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
(There are times when the search feels carefree.)
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said ‘Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera’
(But there’s always the creeping paranoia that the carefree utopianist will be upended by the authorities.)
‘Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat’
‘We smoked the last one an hour ago’
(The hardships are ultimately puny, but nevertheless, ordinary life and its issues always rear their head.)
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field
(The couple drift apart into separate experiences. All the while, the landscape remains beautiful, but it offers no revelation. Time goes on.)
‘Kathy, I’m lost,’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
(The spiritual drift of the age and its inability to openly admit it reveals itself.)
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all come to look for America
(The personal search becomes a collective one. Every passing car contains its own hopes, ambitions, and uncertainties. All of them as vague as the next.)
All come to look for America
All come to look for America”
The repetition of the final point is a pertinent one. Everyone was searching for answers in the ’60s, and they remained irreconcilable. The track’s musicology, darting from haunted and humble to grand and liberated embody this. But it is a simpler element of the musicality where the message truly lies.
As Simon told Paul Zollo of the moment he harmonises with Garfunkel in unison, “That has a real upright, earnest quality because we both have the identical soul at that moment. We come from the identical place in our attitude, and the spine that’s holding us up, we are the same person. Same college kid, striking out.” They were far from the only two.
Today, people scour social media for signs of authenticity in ladles of cloudy pasta water. In the golden age of the British invasion, sitar, and LSD, it wasn’t just young Americans but people all over the world who were searching for something equally difficult to define, only their gaze was fixed firmly on the horizon and something vast instead of the past and something rudimentary.
Simon captured his particular era’s brand of yearning better than anyone with the aptly named ‘America’, more of an idea, like the concept of starch being a conduit to flavour, than anything else. As Simon said when he introduced the song for what seemed like the final time in 2018, “Strange times, huh? Don’t give up.” Times change. Nothing changes.
