SIMON SINGS!
New York Post, December 9, 2000
If there’s anything that could be called the New York City sound it must surely be Paul Simon, in full, somewhat plaintive, somewhat querulous voice, standing in front of his driving all-sorts band. The ever-youthful, baseball-capped, 59-year-old Simon is as Yankee as the Stadium, as New York as the Mets, and as Manhattan as Zabar’s.
And he came home triumphantly Thursday night –the third and final concert is tonight- to a sold-out house at the gorgeously dilapidated Beacon Theatre.
How long does it take a legend to become icon –or should it be the other way ‘round? Simon’s career has maintained its upward curve –despite that unlucky bump with Broadway’s ‘The Capeman’- ever since his restoration to artistic grace after ‘Graceland’.
He is a wonderful performer, with an unexpectedly powerful stage presence. Basically he’s a dumpy, wimpy, Woody Allenish sort of a guy.
Yet he moves like a wippet, and his waving hands –doing Indian-style ballets in the air- keep him at the focal point as securely as more flamboyant figures like Michael Jackson or Prince.
While his is not the original voice of, say, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan or John Lennon, he has made his own voice intensely individual.
Simon has found a unique sound by synthesizing elements, such as South African Soweto music, reggae, Latino, a touch of New Orleans jazz with the folksy rock that marked his great partnership with Art Garfunkel, which broke up 30 years ago.
Today he is a master, and leads a band of superlative quality. At present, they are all on what is known as the ‘You’re the one Tour’, to market their latest, and admirable, CD of the same name.
Of course, Simon is far too shrewd a showman to put too much emphasis on the new album, knowing that while he’s got to sell it, he’s also got to put out a program suitable for an audience heavy on nostalgia.
As one guy sitting behind me put it to his friends: “I’ve been coming to these concerts for more than 30 years –and look! The audience is growing old, too.”
Simon himself has this ongoing preoccupation with growing older. One of the numbers he offered from the new album is naturally called ‘Old’, and although jaunty enough, starts out with a reference to Buddy Holly!
Jaunty,
in a sense, is not a bad word for the new album, although musically it is as
complex, and possibly as rewarding, as ‘Graceland’.
Simon is a balladeer, as much a poet as composer. He spins stories, and as he puts it “some stories are magical, meant to be sung.”
The title song ‘You’re the one’ is beautiful, bluesy and almost a simple torcher. Other of the newcomers introduced here, such as the whimsical but savagely satirical attack on capital punishment, ‘Pigs, sheep and wolves’, have that social protest element always intrinsic to Simon.
Personally I was very taken with funny/sad story of ‘Darling Lorraine’, but throughout all these numbers you were happily aware of the immense musical sophistication and sheer professionalism wrapped around them so gracefully.
Simon –whose concert went on an unstintingly generous,
intermissionless 21/2 hours- also gave, to everyone’s delight, a number of
oldies, even going back to ‘Mrs. Robinson’ (still the best Beatles song The
Beatles never wrote) and, a bit more recently, ‘Fifty ways to leave your lover’.
But perhaps the major hits of the evening were ‘Graceland’ items, with their beat and originally, their total artistic fusion of Africa and the United States.
With these present musicians, ‘Diamonds on the soles of her shoes’, ‘The boy in the bubble’ and ‘Graceland’ itself, to me sounded almost better live than on the album.
I noticed, regretfully, that there was nothing from ‘The Capeman’. Has Simon exorcised its memory? I hope not. He had a bad time on Broadway, and worse still, a bad look.
But he should try again. He is a lyricist-composer capable of giving the theatre back the days of miracle and wonder.