O/T The Music Thread

We can never know what was still inside those brains. Some artists burn out, and some just keep on going. Some are more amenable to doing music written by someone else, while others are only comfortable with their own tunes and tales. Different muses, too. Childhood, love, hatred, war, fighting, law-breaking, beauty of nature. Some to a hard metal beat, some to the violin. Some refrain from satisfying their personal agenda to make money, some walk away from the money to do what they most enjoy…

Some artists appear to lose some magic once they become more sophisticated with arrangements and musicianship.  Paul Simon wrote so many great songs early, and he has had success later in his career as well; however, Simon almost sounds resentful when asked about those old tunes.  He has said in interviews that he is a much better musician and song writer than he was back then, but there is something about those early tunes that never grow tired, stale, or out of sync.  

Simon is one of those artists that doesn’t stand out in my thoughts, yet he never seemed to create a song I didn’t like. It was interesting how he evolved from his Simon and Garfunkel days to a solo act and even an adaptation to a sort of African/rumba mixture.

He not only could sing the phone book and make it entertaining, he’d find a way to make it make sense.

Here, he catches intrigue right away:
“First thing I remember” and “my mother laughed the way some ladies do”. It brings his very birth into question, not to mention his mother’s habits and life style. I have very early memories, too. And I suppose that most of those do involve my mother and to a lesser extent my older siblings. I don’t know if I would have been cognizant of my mother having a man in her room. I’m sure she did, as I recall her boyfriend leaving when I was about two or so. Yet I remember nothing else about him. Just his car. I can still see the rear end of a green Studebaker through the window, heading down the road as mom said “Ray is leaving, and he’s never coming back.” She was probably crying, though I can’t say I noticed. They were together a couple years. He bought her a new kitchen stove at some point, and probably her wringer washer and a toaster. I believe one of my brothers once said he bought the kerosene space heater we stayed warm with…

But a musical artist can weave all that into music, which I find amazing. I can’t. I don’t know how well I can tell the story, but it wouldn’t be through music…

I suspect Simon was pretty stuck up which explains his comments. Garfunkle pointed out just how desperately he wanted credit for the songs.

In the sixties you could be experimental, by the 80's it was a business. It is harder to be original in that environment I suspect. And taste change. The sixties was amazingly diverse because people would pay for more diverse songs (and different eras overlapped, so Sinatra and Dean Martin could still have major hits, which is unlikely today).

You're right, music was much more fragmented by the 80s, even by the 70s, than it had been in the 60s.  In 1964, the same station that was playing "It's All Over Now" by the Stones would also be playing "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime" by Dean Martin.  I always thought it was illustrative of the time that the last Billboard Number One before The Beatles overwhelmed everything in early 64 was "There I've Said It Again" by Bobby Vinton and the song that ended their run of holding the top spot for several months was "Hello Dolly" by Louis Armstrong.  And a lot of the same people were buying all of those records.

The sixties is my favorite era for music. There are some misremembered "facts" about it. One is that in began in 1960, in fact much of what we think about the music of the sixties does not start until Feb 1964 when the decade is almost half over (and it continued well into the seventies, decades are artificial constructs we give meaning to by ignoring history).

Another is all the supposed protest music, particularly anti-war songs. While they existed, sky pilot comes to mind, few were popular in that decade. Fighting Men of the Green Beret was the number one song I think in 1965. And it was not anti-war.

Armstrong's popularity, it continued to his death, was remarkable for a generation which stressed youth and often ridiculed earlier artists (often with scant knowledge of facts, the big band era was seen as the ultimate in old foggie music, at the time it was produced it was often seen as a radical challenge to the existing culture). Music was one of the few places before the sixties that minorities, women, and rural types could have significant cultural influence.

Especially the “Old Foggies”. That one could come close to matching “BangWaggon” for all time greatest malapropisms of the forum…