Deadsplinter Watches – Simon and Garfunkel Songs of America – Part 5

7/1/24 blue dogcollar 11
Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon
Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon / Bernard Gotfryd / ca 1965 - 1970 / source: https://www.loc.gov/item/2020733114

Making AT&T Even Madder

So we’re back from the first commercial break, and a million viewers are said to have switched over to watch a Peggy Fleming skating show. The nationwide premiere of Bridge Over Troubled Water, the greatest hit Simon and Garfunkel ever had, couldn’t hold audiences. But to be fair Peggy Fleming was a great skater.

And now, instead of the visuals of recently assassinated leaders, we see the band getting ready for their next tour. Paul Simon practices At The Zoo, while Art Garfunkel hammers out concert logistics on the phone. There’s a cut to Garfunkel practicing a verse of America solo (on the recording, Simon was the lead and you barely hear Garfunkel) and it’s quite stunning. You wonder what could have been if they had cut a second version.

Then we see a glimpse of the documentary that might have made sponsors happy. Simon and Garfunkel ride along a little road in a car and walk in the countryside with Simon’s first wife, Peggy Harper, saying some fairly innocuous, incoherent things about people wanting things a little better.

But the interlude doesn’t last. Charles Grodin began showing scenes of happy young people kissing and holding hands at Woodstock, intercut with scenes from the Vietnam War, accompanied by their version of Scarborough Fair.

We then see Garfunkel expounding somewhat clumsily about the absurdity of the war (he had recently finished filming Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Catch 22). He seems a bit arrogant, a bit lecturing, but it helps to realize that the country had gone completely off the rails, and much of the country stubbornly refused to acknowledge the plain, obvious truth of just how pointless the war was.

The war loomed over everything at the time. Just one day after Songs of America aired, the first draft lottery was held on December 1, 1969. A year earlier Nixon and Kissinger had launched a backdoor effort to scuttle an end to the war in order to ruin Hubert Humphrey’s chances to win the 1968 election. In a few months, Nixon and Kissinger would engineer the takeover of the Cambodian government and start even more escalation of the war.

Draft Lottery / Warren K. Leffler / August 5 1971 / source: https://www.loc.gov/item/2017646351

Economic Activism

And then the show took possibly its strongest stance. Paul Simon’s take on the Peruvian song El Condor Pasa starts to play, and Grodin began showing images of African American children living in poverty, and added the voice of Coretta Scott King saying “I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Supressing a culture is violence. Neglecting schoolchildren is violence. Punishing a mother and her children is violence.” Words that are now banned in many schools.

Less than a year after her husband’s assassination by the white supremacist James Earl Ray, this was too much for AT&T. Grodin recalled later how their PR flack demanded that he lower the volume of her voice. Grodin asked how far they wanted to go, and they said they wanted it “inaudible.”

As the song played, Grodin first showed footage of United Farm Workers Union leader Cesar Chavez leading a march.

Cesar Chavez / Marion S. Trikosko / 1979 / source: https://www.loc.gov/item/2016646413

By 1969 Chavez had become a national figure as a labor organizer, and was a hated by California’s big farmers, who provided Nixon with a great deal of financial support. The UFW Union had won the first major union contracts for migrant workers, and right wing hatred for Chavez increased due to his backing for civil rights activists and the anti-war movement.

Then Grodin switched to showing the 1968 Poor People’s March on Washington. By this point, Martin Luther King had expanded his original focus beyond civil rights to both calling for an end to the Vietnam War and pushing for economic justice, and he had hoped to make the new March on Washington to be the centerpiece of his movement, only to be lost forever that April in Memphis. King’s team followed through and launched the Poor People’s March, only to see it lose a crucial backer when Robert Kennedy was gunned down in May, and then bit by bit the movement fell victim to external repression and internal dissent.

The Breakdown

And then it all stops. As if to acknowledge how hard it is to sustain a movement, Grodin shifts gears. The music changes to the largely nonsensical song Punky’s Dilemma, with Simon singing about how he wished he was a Kellogg’s Corn Flake, and the scene changes to some inconsequential Senate meeting.

And then we’re back to Simon and Garfunkel rehearsing for their new tour. We see and hear Art Garfunkel launching into a lovely version of Bridge Over Troubled Water, and then we see what looks like an odd version of Paul Simon, messing around in front of the camera, much more playful and expressive than we’ve seen him.

Because it’s not Paul Simon, it’s his brother Eddie. We see Eddie Simon impishly imitating Garfunkel, running around, mimicking playing a guitar and disrupting the scene. Simon tries to harmonize with Garfunkel, only to have his microphone fail, and both Garfunkel and then Simon yell out in annoyance, while producer Roy Halee wanders around puzzled by the confusion.

They hadn’t come to grips with the situation, but Simon and Garfunkel weren’t sustainable, and this little scene gives a hint that their bonds weren’t going to hold.

Next Time: Moving On

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11 Comments

    • One of the under-remarked things in his recent obits was how badly he had negotiated the peace agreement with North Vietnam. There’s a reason that South Vietnam collapsed three years later. Kissinger had negotiated terms essentially similar to the agreement he had scuttled in 1968 with his backdoor dealings, except by 1972 North Vietnam was in a much stronger position compared to how weakened they were by the post-Tet counteroffensive.

      Simon and Garfunkel couldn’t have known the details, but the sense that the Nixon administration was spiralling into nihilism wasn’t wrong.

  2. …apologies…since this strays off-topic pretty quick…but the part where the opening line of a fifth installment reads

    we’re back from the first commercial break

    …aside from getting a laugh out of me also brought to mind a passage from david foster wallace’s short story “good old neon” about the seemingly infinite quantity of thoughts & feelings & associated sensations that can somehow fit into the blink between instants like time’s arrow bound by xeno’s paradox

    Once again, I’m aware that it’s clumsy to put it all this way, but the point is that all of this and more was flashing through my head just in the interval of the small, dramatic pause Dr. Gustafson allowed himself before delivering his big reductio ad absurdum argument that I couldn’t be a total fraud if I had just come out and admitted my fraudulence to him just now. I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough material can rush through your head just in the little silences when people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presentation that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting just to try to put a few seconds’ silence’s flood of thoughts into words.
    This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head sof ast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. — and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way — exponentially faster, unimaginably faster — when you’re dying, meaning during that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about people’s whole life flashing before their eyes as they’re dying isn’t all that far off — although the whole life here isn’t really a sequential thing where first you’re born and then you’re in the crib and then you’re up at the plate in Legion ball, etc., which it turns out that that’s what people usually mean when they say ‘my whole life,’ meaning a discrete, chronological series of moments that they add up and call their lifetime. It’s not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn’t really mean a finite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we’re alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life isn’t even close to what we think we’re talking about when we say ‘my life.’ Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox

    …but…from there it was hard not to recall that a lot of that story (including some of the autobiographical details, iirc) is an attempt to grapple somewhat with the sorts of narcissistic behavior there was some talk of over on the DOT today

    finally came out and told him about being a fraud and feeling alienated (I had to use the uptown word of course, but it was still the truth) and starting to see myself ending up living this way for the rest of my life and being completely unhappy. I told him I wasn’t blaming anybody for my being a fraud. I had been adopted, but it was as a baby, and the stepparents who adopted me were better and nicer than most of the biological parents I knew anything about, and I was never yelled at or abused or pressured to hit .400 in Legion ball or anything, and they took out a second mortgage to send me to an elite college when I could have gone scholarship to U.W.–Eau Claire, etc. Nobody’d ever done anything bad to me, every problem I ever had I’d been the cause of. I was a fraud, and the fact that I was lonely was my own fault (of course his ears pricked up at fault, which is a loaded term) because I seemed to be so totally self-centered and fraudulent that I experienced everything in terms of how it affected people’s view of me and what I needed to do to create the impression of me I wanted them to have. I said I knew what my problem was, what I couldn’t do was stop it. I also admitted to Dr. Gustafson some of the ways I’d been jerking him around early on and trying to make sure he saw me as smart and self-aware, and said I’d known early on that playing around and showing off in analysis were a waste of time and money but that I couldn’t seem to help myself, it just happened automatically. He smiled at all this, which was the first time I remember seeing him smile. I don’t mean he was sour or humorless, he had a big red friendly face and a pleasant enough manner, but this was the first time he’d smiled like a human being having an actual conversation. And yet at the same time I already saw what I’d left myself open for — and sure enough he says it. ‘If I understand you right,’ he says, ‘you’re saying that you’re basically a calculating, manipulative person who always says what you think will get somebody to approve of you or form some impression of you you think you want.’ I told him that was maybe a little simplistic but basically accurate, and he said further that as he understood it I was saying that I felt as if I was trapped in this false way of being and unable ever to be totally open and tell the truth irregardless of whether it’d make me look good in others’ eyes or not. And I somewhat resignedly said yes, and that I seemed always to have had this fraudulent, calculating part
    of my brain firing away all the time, as if I were constantly playing chess with everybody and figuring out that if I wanted them to move a certain way I had to move in such a way as to induce them to move that way. He asked if I ever played chess, and I told him I used to in middle school but quit because I couldn’t be as good as I eventually wanted to be, how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know what getting really good at it would be like but not being able to get that good, etc. I was laying it on sort of thick in hopes of distracting him from the big insight and question I realized I’d set myself up for.
    But it didn’t work. He leaned back in his loud chair and paused as if he were thinking hard, for effect — he was thinking that he was going to get to feel like he’d really earned his $65 today. Part of the pause always involved stroking his mustache in an unconscious way. I was reasonably sure that he was going to say something like, ‘So then how were you able to do what you just did a moment ago?,’ in other words meaning how was I able to be honest about the fraudulence if I was really a fraud, meaning he thought he’d caught me in some kind of logical contradiction or paradox. And I went ahead and played a little dumb, probably, to get him to go ahead and say it, partly because I still held out some hope that what he’d say might be more discerning or incisive than I had predicted. But it was also partly because I liked him, and liked the way he seemed genuinely pleased and excited at the idea of being helpful but was trying to exercise professional control over his facial expression in order to make the excitement look more like simple pleasantness and clinical interest in my case or whatever. He was hard not to like, he had what is known as an engaging manner.

    …you know…like the charisma thing from the other thread?

    …either way I’m digging the indiana-jones-ness of this archaeological jaunt through a singular AV artifact…it’s a fascinating lens through which to watch a retrospective time capsule

  3. Those draft lotteries were horrendous. My oldest brother was a prime candidate. 18, not in college, not married, so he would have had no exemption provisions. And he wouldn’t have minded going. That’s really the shocking thing about it, how popular the Vietnam War was at the time. And my father would never have supported ducking out of military service. Meanwhile my aunt had a son about the same age, and she and my father got into a huge screaming match. “[Dad’s brother, her husband] served in the Pacific, like you did. If [her son, their only child] gets called up I’m going to drive him up to Canada myself. It’s one thing to incinerate half of Japan but what did the Vietnamese ever do to us?” I was 5 or 6 years old. We were a very frank/no-filter kind of family. And no topic was off-limits.

    She was quite a character, that aunt. I miss her terribly.

    • The lottery in 1969 was an attempt to get rid of most exemptions that had turned the draft into a system that so wildly favored permanent grad students, but of course anyone with a friendly doctor like Donald Trump could come up with bone spurs.

      The ongoing inequities of the draft added to the sense of unease that kept coming up in Songs of America. Some people had a local board that approved almost no exemptions, while others would show blatant favoritism.

      The reality is that then and now, the politics around the draft and service have always been a mess. Reagan was governor of California when this documentary was made, and his 1967 election in large part was due to railing against draft dodgers, even though he had gotten a very cushy spot making movies for the military during WW2.

      Clinton was dragged over the coals for his deferment, even as top Republicans at the time had similar histories, and of course the same people on the right who attacked Clinton then failed to defend John Kerry when he was Swift Boated despite turning down a deferment and volunteering for dangerous duty.

      But then again there was no rallying by the right behind John McCain after Trump attacked his service during Vietnam, which is something the Democrats did not do.

      • It’s strange how folks like Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and notoriously Ted “I Shit Mah Pants to Escape Nam” Nugent spent a lot of time and effort to escape a war they supported.

        Considering their family connections (Nugent was born into a career military family!) the odds of them being sent to Vietnam would have been not high. Probably sent to Europe or found a cushy job as a staff officer or in the reserves.

        It is telling how they wanted other people to die for their “freedom.”

        I remember a friend (former Hollywood script writer now aviation historian) telling me about Buck Henry meeting Joseph Heller (author of Catch-22). One of the things we authors like to write in our books is what we would have done differently as opposed to what happened in real life. It is speculated that Catch-22’s Yosserian chose the path that Heller didn’t. Heller was described by Buck as one angry son of a bitch, the angriest he had ever met. Maybe Heller did take the deal that Yosserian refused and hated himself ever since.

        The reason I mention this is that this is why these scared white narcissistic men tried to mask and numb their fears with war mongering and violent hobbies like Ted’s hunting fetish-to take the path not taken. That is why they behave the way they do, but they think they’re hiding it from everyone which is why they were badly stung by the truthful accusations of “chickenhawk.”

        I think if I had been there at that time (plus based on my attitudes in my early 20s and family history) then I think I would have volunteered and if I had survived then become bitterly disillusioned with everything and everyone.

        • A friend of mine corresponded with Vonnegut about his thesis, and he was very gracious and helpful. But my friend said it was clear the war was painful all of those decades later.

          I think it says something good about McCain that he was able to be a strong backer of normalizing relations with Vietnam, and moving past the hatred. It’s the kind of thing the pundit class says they back, but the second a Republican goes to demogue mode, instead, they love it.

  4. But speaking of Deadsplinter watching things, on last night’s episode of “Hawaii 5-0” Loretta Swit is back and is on the 18th-floor ledge of the same high-rise that the Man of 1,000 Disguises was holed up in. Meanwhile a sharpshooter has set up shop in a room at the Ilikai Hotel, so that’s back. Steve McGarrett just happens to be driving by and decides to go up there because he thinks it is a suicide attempt. The plot is very convoluted but it involves illegal gambling, like so much “Hawaii 5-0” content does. Apparently that’s all anyone ever did in Oahu, play high-stakes poker and dice games. Also Steve gets to unleash a “Cool it!,” so that’s rewarding in and of itself.

    As the episode reaches its thrilling conclusion the villain is wrestling with Loretta Swit and almost manages to throw her over a balcony. I actually yelled at the screen, “No, you can’t kill Loretta Swit! She has to live to spend 20 years on “M*A*S*H” or however long it was.” But then Steve and my boyfriend Danno show up, guns drawn, and they save the day.

    Loretta Swit is still alive and 86. Alan Alda is 87. So they’re not suffering from that curse…I forget the show, but there were child actors who died at very young ages. They were three siblings. Anyway, that concludes my Classic TV recap.

    • …that reminds me…I keep meaning to mention that there’s a sort of podcasting federation of sorts that goes by the umbrella term “the incomparables”…tons of hours of geekery of one flavor or another…of which I know an adherent or two…& one string to their bow is a group who record themselves discussing particular episodes of magnum PI…the selleck one, that is…&…in the event that podcasts are a thing you listen to…they’re gentlemen of a certain age &…well…I think you’d probably enjoy those

      …just thinking ahead for when you eventually run out of episodes of 5-0 & need your dose of period-appropriate &/or appropriated hawaii…possibly with a side of middle-aged MST3K type commentary?

      • Magnum PI! My mother and I actually bonded over that show because we both thought Tom Selleck was so hot and he was often seen shirtless and/or in short-shorts.

        It’s nice to have common interests with your parents. Sort of. Drooling over Tom Selleck in the 1980s was a little weird but it helped pass the time.

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