POLL paul simon - the rhythm of the saints

i feel like i started another paul simon poll recently tho. how did that pan out?

I still own this on cassette, and since I can still play tapes in my car this is a regular. I've worn out "Cool Cool River."

i always make ppl wait for the horns on that

"cool cool river" is probably what i would vote at this particular moment in my relationship with the music of paul simon. but who knows.

plax, that bridge over troubled water thread was great; i never knew what i was missing!

either did i!

man when I saw him in '90 the horn stabs were accompanied by stabbing colored spotlights from behind the stage. It was so damn cool watching him sing while this happened, wearing a sports coat.

can ppl continue to call me plax btw

this album is fucking magic

fucking "the cool, cool river"

i know, right???

the melody of the vocal line in that song is so urgent it's almost painful.

The sequencing is so unexpected -- the record ends so quietly.

lol

btw the guitar line on "Spirit Voices" is magic. It's uncanny how well Milton Nascimiento harmonizes with it.

Saudocoes
Da licenca um momento
Te lembro
Que amanha
Sera tudo ou sera naoa
Depende coracao
Sera breve ou sera grande
Depende da paixao
Sera sujo, sera sonho
Cuidado, coracao
Sera util, sera tarde
Se esmera, coracao
E confia
Na forca do amanha

christgau's review of this album is so condescending:

his life in the bush of a fully-formed middle-class music scene more sophisticated than he'll ever be

i like how he has to implicitly declare his allegiance to MPB and distance himself from P.S, like there's a natural need to oppose the do as opposed to show how they might intersect of complement one another.

also kind of makes you wonder what he means by "sophisticated". more rhythmically sophisticated? i guess so. but the beauty of simon's record is precisely the often counterintuitive way he combines a very distinct way with melody with various elements of brazilian music. i don't think he's trying and failing to make a MPB album.

I understand him not liking this; the rhythm patters along unvaryingly if you're not in the right mood. His long Graceland essay proves he was hip to Simon's jive.

on some songs that's true, yeah. not on all of them. and anyway christgau doesn't explain himself, so there's no way to know if that's the nature of his objection. he just couches it in terms of cultural opposition.

what up yall its the real me

here's the story of how i decided to make a poll about paul simon's the rhythm of the saints

last night i was drinking beer in my bedroom and deej im'd me and said "the rhythm of the saints" is dope. i said i'd never heard it so he linked me to a few songs. i downloaded the whole thing and played it through like 3 straight times. i continued to drink beer. eventually i listened to "the coast" a few more times before "falling asleep"

then i made this poll

― swag serf (J0rdan S.), Saturday, June 20, 2009 5:13 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^cuet, imo

― horseshoe, Friday, February 10, 2012 9:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yah this is a beautiful story

It's poignant, like when Sonny idly thumbs through the pages of his yearbook. Some have died, etc...

"It got me thinking when that first popped out," Paul Simon says, sitting in the living room of his Manhattan duplex, watching an early moon come up over Central Park. " 'The cross is in the ball park.' "The first thing I thought of was Billy Graham, or the Pope, or evangelical gatherings. But I came to feel what that's really about is the cross that we bear. The burdens that we carry are doable, they're in the ballpark." -Paul Simon

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,971667,00.html#ixzz1OLgp7kSo

barf

So this is happening...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2GN3wdfqbA

I say why why why why
I say why

was like a pencil point
a love bite

Then I fall to my knees
I grow weak, I go slack
As if she captured the breath of my
voice in a bottle
And I can't catch it back

But I feel good
It's a fine day
The way the sun hits off the runway
A cloud shifts
The plane lifts
She moves on

it doesnt even bother me that he says "the rose of jericho"

I always heard it as more literal than that, and one of my favorite couplets.

A family of musicians took shelter for the night in the little harbor church of St. Cecilia
Two guitars, bata, bass drum and tambourine, rows of Jericho and Bougainvillea

But I was wrong: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/509803/rose-of-Jericho

i believe in the future
i may live in car
my radio tuned to the voice of a star
song dogs barking at the break of dawn
lightning pushes the edge of a thunderstorm
these old hopes and fears still at my side

ba ba ba ba ba ba Ba Ba Ba BA BA BA PROUST!

armies of engineers
to analyze the soil

I was thinking about something during the absurd Cohen/Simon smackdown thread, but just got round to finishing my thought.

I dug out the disc with bonus tracks to relisten and marvel again at the quality of the lyrics he throws away.

"The Coast" work-in-progress

This is the echo of the echo of the first song that lullabied /
The heartbeat of the host

"Spirit Voices" work-in-progress:

My horse and my saddle and my gracious companions /
We tripped over a mountain and we fell into a vast canyon

I mean, really. Maybe the songs as eventually released were fine, but those throwaway lyrics are as good as most people will ever write.

'Can't Run But' still sounds gorgeous. I love this album - even the lower-key stuff on the record (the title track, 'Further to Fly', 'She Moves On') got to me eventually.

Still can't believe 'Spirit Voices' and 'Born at the Right Time' didn't get votes - I'll take either of those songs over anything on Graceland at this point.

I think I missed the poll, but probably would have voted for either "Spirit Voices" or "The Coast."

Crap, or "She Moves On," or or or.

I like "Obvious Child" a lot but it's no longer my fave track on this lovely record

'The Coast' would have got my vote, definitely - Simon at his absolute best!

The gorgeous guitar lick, the wonderful vocal melody, the uplift of the chorus... it's just perfection. An all-time favourite.

I can't believe I never posted it to this thread - I know I've posted it before - but I remember reading about an alternate running order that WB made Simon change. It's even up on Wikipedia.

"The Coast"
"She Moves On"
"Proof"
"Born at the Right Time"
"The Cool, Cool River"
"The Obvious Child"
"Can't Run But"
"Spirit Voices"
"Further To Fly"
"The Rhythm of the Saints"

(also would have voted for "The Coast")

Those who are not familiar with the work-in-progress versions (bonus tracks on the rerelease) ought to give them a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkgxGpoFn8Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3-MAU7hj4

It's like those insane Townshend demos that could plausibly have been released as singles.

Yeah, that was the original track order but Warner Bros. wanted the lead single ('The Obvious Child') to open the LP... I think they were right to change the track order - the original order makes no sense to me.

spins on his crutches, says 'leave if you want if you want to leave'

xpost Fleetwood Mac has released those sorts of all but finished demos before, too. I have a hunch it's nowhere near the original demo and almost more like an alternate take with incomplete lyrics or something.

I like this live version of "Born at the Right Time" a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2rng43hdEw

The ascending guitar (poss. guitar synth, poss. Adrian Belew) line in “Cool Cool River” is my favorite thing on this record.

It's interesting, there are a million people on this and Graceland, so it's a little mysterious why they would even need Belew to blend in on guitar synth at all. I was trying to find an interview where he talked about his specific contributions. I found some neat stuff here:

https://guitarconnoisseurmagazine.com/wordpress1/2016/06/13/adrian-belew-everythihng-in-flux/

GC: Your working with Paul Simon, I’m completely ignorant of that, so could you talk about that for a minute?

AB: Through my friend Laurie Anderson, who I made three records with and one movie, she told Paul Simon that he should have me play on something with him, because she said, “He doesn’t play guitar, he makes sounds, and you might really like what he does.” So unbeknownst to me, Paul was making something called Graceland, which, once again is a seminal record, so he asked me to come into the studio in New York. I flew there and had four days there, and the first morning I arrived the engineer-producer Roy Halee put up some of the tracks and said, “Here, I’ll let you listen to this.” It was all African musicians playing, there was no…it sounded like the wrong tape, and I thought he’d made a mistake, I thought, “Well this doesn’t sound at all like Paul Simon; what is this?” And he said, “Yeah, Paul’s been doing some stuff with African musicians and you’re the first non-African to play on this.” There were no words; there was no Paul Simon on the record yet. If you can imagine what Graceland sounds like without his voice…

GC: That’s mind-boggling.

AB: It was very confusing at first. Then Paul arrived in the studio and I explained to him my concern and he was like, “Oh, of course, here let me put up this track and I don’t have all of the words but I’ll sing what I have.” So he would put up a track like You Can Call Me Al or Boy in the Bubble and he would stand right next to me, kind of quietly whisper-singing these songs to me, and it was giving me chills, of course. At the same time I instantly understood: “Oh my gosh, Paul Simon has reinvented himself and this is what it’s going to sound like;” it still gives me chills to think about it. So, we jumped in and there you go; it turned out to be a massive record, re-kickstarted his career, and once again sounded like nothing else anyone had ever done. Not many people know this but I have to tell people this: there’s a video with Chevy Chase and Paul Simon doing You Can Call Me Al and because Chevy Chase is pretending to play a saxophone, I think it misled everyone. The song, it has that part that goes, “Dah duh duhdut, dah, duh duhdut” and everybody thinks that’s a saxophone section; actually that’s my guitar synthesizer.

GC: Oh my God…

AB: (laughs) I have to say that now, I’m kinda proud of that, I was in Amsterdam not too long ago, sitting having a beer, when all of a sudden that song came on and I said to the bartender That’s me! And I never do that, but I just had to.

GC: That’s amazing.

AB: Really I’m proud of that moment, everybody knows that line, and Paul wrote the line, of course; I just played it.

Josh

I have a hunch it's nowhere near the original demo and almost more like an alternate take with incomplete lyrics or something

I think the explanation is that Simon's approach for Graceland AND RotS was to make finished instrumental tracks first, then experiment with different lyrics and vocal approaches on top of those finished instrumentals.

In one documentary he's like in a room in his house with a cathedral ceiling, bouncing a tennis ball against a high wall while brainstorming lyrics and vocals. Given that atmosphere, it is easy to imagine swapping out something like "this is the echo..." for "a family of musicians..." or whatever. It's not like he needs to call Vincent and everybody back into the studio.

^^ that was a 60 Minutes piece from 1990-91, if I remember right.

Holy fuck I'm old. Thanks A LOT, Eazy.

This is one of my all-time favourite records. I got to know it when I was 16 or 17, that was 22 years ago and it has remained in my personal top 10 ever since.
As a teenager, Further To Fly was always my favourite, but I lean more to the rest of the album these days. Now I think I'd name Cool Cool River, Can't Run But, Spirit Voices and Obvious Child as the absolute highlights. Imagine my astonishment and utter delight when exactly those four songs were performed at his farewell concert I attended recently!