How Did We Get Here?

So…. last time I managed to get no farther than the first minute, with the grim face of aging Hollywood star Robert Ryan appearing on TV screens on November 30, 1969, promising the following Simon and Garfunkel special would be worth watching. And yes, yes it was. Watch it here, if you haven’t.

One of the basic rules of good art is if it’s really good, you don’t need to explain why you’re showing it, you just show it. So why was Ryan explaining?

Corporations Are Corporations

When Charles Grodin, the director of Songs of America, showed a prebroadcast copy to AT&T’s marketing department so they could see what their $600,000 sponsorship had bought, they exploded.

It was too radical, it wouldn’t work in the South, and they wanted out. Ask yourself — what might have been in a problem in the South in the 1960s? Your imagination isn’t wrong.

And nobody talked back to AT&T in those days. So Simon and Garfunkel, Columbia Records, and CBS scrambled for a new sponsor. They found Alberto VO-5, the slick hair care products company, and they tacked on the intro from Robert Ryan.

The Anti-John Wayne

As I mentioned in a previous Food You Can Eat, well-known Hollywood heavy Robert Ryan was actually a committed liberal, going back to the late 1940s. Nonetheless he was a fixture in war movies like The Flying Leathernecks and The Longest Day, where he was a costar with John Wayne. And he had known Simon and Garfunkel from his time the previous year promoting a fundraiser in honor of Woody Guthrie, and from his work on behalf of Lyndon Johnson’s anti-war opponent Eugene McCarthy. So Ryan represented a way to bridge the gap between an older generation that loved Westerns and respected tough guys, and a younger generation that wanted out of the Vietnam War. He was a natural choice to fill in the gap when AT&T ran away.

The Sound of Silence

And so the TV special starts. With dead air.

There’s a saying in radio that no matter what, you never want dead air. If a song couldn’t be cued up for any reason, if a record ended with a super-long fadeout, it was the DJ’s responsibility to improvise patter to cover up the quiet. So what did Simon and Garfunkel’s Songs of America start with? Dead air.

Nothing but silent shots from the air of mountains, and maybe, just maybe, if your TV’s volume was turned all the way up you might hear the wind. Then, cutting in and out, was just the sound of the unaccompanied voices of Simon and Garfunkel, singing the last verse of America. The scenes at first were snowcapped mountains, the Grand Canyon, forests, shots that looked something like this:

Gradually the instrumentation of the song America was added to the soundtrack. And then the scenes changed.

The singing stops, and we hear Paul Simon saying he feels like something is going on around him, but he can’t figure out what it is. And then we’re back at the first verse of America. The shots came to earth, and Grodin showed at first farmland and rivers from the viewpoint of a car. But once again the last verse plays, Simon sings about the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, and the shots change to crowded highways, a chemical plant, a landfill, slums, and riots.

You can start to see why AT&T didn’t think they got what they paid for. But they should have known.

The Song America

America is easily my favorite song they ever did – it manages to highlight all of their best qualities while avoiding their worst impulses. The music is simple, lovely, and memorable, a semi-waltz in 3/4 time, and the lyrics are heartfelt and smart, and sneakily inventive.

The music starts with an acoustic guitar, drums, bass and organ, and Simon and Garfunkel wordlessly harmonizing. And then the singing starts, with Simon describing a meet-cute rom-com scenario of a guy and Kathy. As they start laughing and inventing stories about passengers on their bus, and a soprano sax enters the mix toodling along, you can almost imagine Kathy as an archetypal Manic Pixie Dreamgirl.

But then it all crashes. They run out of things to say to each other, and possibly in an echo of the melancholic end to Yeats’ Adam’s Curse, the moon rises over silent would-be lovers. Kathy falls asleep. It’s an image that reinforces the tendency of most of the group’s work to be extremely chaste. Technically the woman sleeps with the man, but not in a way that would ever cause a censor to complain. All that’s left for him after six or so hours on the bus is to tell Kathy he’s lost and can’t understand anything, and then numbly count all of the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, everyone just like him. Kathy didn’t save him and she turned out to be something different from that Manic Pixie Dreamgirl ideal after all.

One thing that’s interesting about the music is that it reverses the usual pattern of Simon and Garfunkel’s “serious” songs, which tend to add more and more instrumentation to build to a more and more ornate, often bombastic close. America sticks to its simple instrumentation, and the saxaphone disappears entirely. But even more impressive is something I didn’t notice until multiple listenings.

The words are very lyrical and melodic, everything matching the beat and the tune, with no frivolous melisma covering up for poor word choices. But nothing rhymes. America is one of the tiny number of pop songs which refuses to rhyme any of the verses, but because Simon is so good at writing lyrics to match his tunes, it’s incredibly easy to miss. He makes everything seem natural and effortless.

Songs of America

Songs of America was shown once, never rerun, and then was largely unavailable until it was rereleased on DVD in 2011. But something odd happened before that.

On October 20, 2001, David Bowie sang a mournful cover of America at The Concert for New York City, a benefit for the families of people who died on September 11. You can see it here:

One thing that stands out is the vibe of the crowd is really off, and their reactions that have been recorded to other parts of the concert suggest how the country was headed off the tracks in the Bush years.

But more relevant to this post is how much Bowie’s background video echoes what Grodin had done — fleeting images mixing the beautiful and hard sides of America, combining to suggest some kind of unknowable, difficult portrait of the country.

Had Bowie or his team somehow known of this obscure 1969 broadcast? Or is there something about the song that drives people to make videos that echo what Grodin did? Or do all of them draw on an even earlier tradition in broadcasting? I don’t have an answer.

What I can say is that after the special was rereleased on DVD, this presentation took off. The Swedish duo First Aid kit released a video in 2014 which used actual clips from the 1969 special.

And then, in 2016 Bernie Sanders released a very popular campaign ad, with signoff from Simon and Garfunkel, featuring America which clearly echoed what Grodin had created.

Whatever is happening here, I don’t think it’s all a coincidence. But this post has gone on long enough, so it will need to continue another time.