The Simon and Garfunkel song inspired by Lenny Bruce
Much has been made of Simon and Garfunkel taking a swipe at Bob Dylan in the song ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’s Into Submission)’. The track’s most famous line is “He’s so unhip when he says Dylan / He thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas”, a not-so-subtle send-up of the people who lionised Bob Dylan as the new poet laureate while ignoring the entirety of the art form’s past. The fuzzy ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ backing track certainly didn’t make the point any less clear.
Paul Simon had been hoping to add a bit of sarcasm to ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic’ when he recorded it for his debut solo album in 1965 and then with Simon and Garfunkel a year later. But Simon found that he wasn’t really capable of doing so. “One of my deficiencies is my voice sounds sincere,” Simon later told Rolling Stone. “I’ve tried to sound ironic. I don’t. I can’t. With Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. He’s telling you the truth and making fun at the same time.”
In a song that mentions The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Ayn Rand, and Andy Warhol, Dylan became the central focus, especially as Simon ends the song by playfully making reference to “Folk rock”, calling out, “I’ve lost my harmonica, Albert”, making a direct allusion to Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. But it was another person referenced in the lyrics that Simon was channelling throughout the song: comedian Lenny Bruce.
“I was having fun,” Simon added. “I thought it would be funny to use those unusual words ‘desultory’ and ‘philippic’, in a song title, and I also wanted to sneak in some Lenny Bruce, who was my favourite comedian. That line, ‘How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission,’ is pure Lenny.”
With his socially conscious style and boundary-pushing rhetoric, Lenny Bruce was the template for anti-authoritarians around the world. It’s no surprise that Simon was feeling more connected to Bruce than Dylan while writing ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic’. After all, Simon does claim that he “learned the truth from Lenny Bruce”, one of the only complimentary lines in the entire song.
Simon’s two versions of ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic’ were drastically different. In Simon’s original solo recording, he starts with a spoken intro of the song’s title that claims he was “Lyndon Johnson’d” into submission instead of “Robert McNamara’d”. Figures like John Lennon and Walk Disney are also referenced in the original song, whereas they remain left out in the Simon and Garfunkel version. Simon’s original recording is less explicit in its Dylan parody, but the bones of the track are still there.
Check out the Simon and Garfunkel version of ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic’ down below.
