The 1986 song Paul Simon couldn’t stand performing: “I got to get out of here”
The art of writing a great song was never lost on Paul Simon whenever he made a new record.
Ever since Simon and Garfunkel broke up, every one of his records was meant to be a new creative endeavour every single time he performed them, and even if not all of them reached the best audience, it was much better for him to make music that he felt sounded right than to try to pander to whatever his audience wanted. But sometimes the experiments ended up working a bit too well when some of the songs became larger than life.’
Anyone would have killed for a hit single back in the day, but even after Simon stopped working with Art Garfunkel, he understood that there were peaks that he was never going to reach again. He was a much different person than the guy who wrote ‘The Sound of Silence’ and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, and he was going to spend the rest of his life trying to reinvent what being a singer-songwriter was supposed to be.
There was no rulebook saying that he needed to stay within one genre, and when he started working with jazz players, he finally seemed at home playing some more advanced music. It was never an issue for him to go in a completely new direction if the songs called for it, and even when looking at his more acclaimed albums, it’s not like everyone was ready for an album like Graceland to come out of him.
He was the fixture of what softhearted guitar balladry was supposed to be back in the day, so the idea of him delving into world music and travelling to South Africa was bound to be a gamble. But even if there was a barrier between some of the musicians’ approaches to music, everyone got to settle on at least one common language when looking at how they played off each other on ‘Diamond on the Soles of Her Shoes’.
But even during this time, Simon couldn’t outrun the legacy of a song like ‘You Can Call Me Al’. Other bands have been known for much worse songs, to be fair, but when looking through the entire track, it’s not like Simon was putting his best foot forward lyrically. This was a fun song meant to be a little bit more cheeky than usual, and despite that amazing bass break, Simon remembered growing a bit resentful of the song after playing it one too many times on tour.
The crowd might go wild every single time it comes on, but he did have those few moments where he felt like he would rather be anywhere else but onstage playing that song, saying, “‘You Can Call Me Al’ should be called my national anthem because everybody stands up. It’s not my favourite song to sing. It’s usually the one song that makes me stop touring. Usually in the middle of the tour, I’ll start singing ‘You Can Call Me Al’ and start thinking, ‘What am I doing here, man? I got to get out of here.”
But it’s not like Simon doesn’t have a lot to be proud of with that song. There are more than a few times where he has that one clever turn of phrase that no one else would have thought of, and even if he didn’t want to be the one singing it every single night, the backing band are the ones doing the heavy lifting every night that he sang it, especially when he brought out original bassist Bakithi Kumalo to play that famous break.
Every artist is bound to have those few songs that make them start thinking about retirement, but whereas most people’s best tunes can be their most saccharine, Simon’s signature song is still one of the finest tunes in his catalogue for a reason. There simply weren’t that many people who could blend styles this well, and making a song like this was the perfect way of introducing the US to the concept of world music.
