Jon
May-08-2007, 17:35 GMT
IP:
USA - United Staates America
 | What exactily do you need to know?
Paul on the genesis of ´Graceland´.....
"I had this tape called ´Gumboots Accordion Jive Hits, Vol.II´ which I was playing in my car for months. It´s just an instrumental album. Then I noticed that I was singing when the album was playing. I was singing over it and then I thought, ´Oh, here´s one of those examples like ´El Condor Pasa´ where you know, I wonder who this band is?´ So then I tried to find out who the band was and it turned out that the band was from Soweto. Then I used Warner Bros. who had some contacts, to trace this band, which had broken up years before - it was an Old record - and they put me in touch with Hilton Rosenthal."
Paul....
"I liked several different styles of the music. So I called up Hilton Rosenthal and I said, ´Is it possible to record with these groups?´ and he said, ´Well I think so, but I´ll have to check it out - they´re all signed to labels´ and then he did and he said, ´Yes you can and I can set all of this up´."
Hilton Rosenthal...
"Obviously the fact that there was a cultural boycott was in the musicians minds and I know that it was spoken about pretty extensively. Then the first night that Paul was in town, I had a number of the musicians over at my house to meet him and I think that the guys felt pretty happy about his intentions once they´d sat down and met with him and gone over the whole project. The first indication we had that there were actually going to be some kind of problems was after a week or so where one of the groups, there was a fourth group involved in the original conversations, and that was Soul Brothers, and they were booked to come into the studio and we had a call one day saying the Soul Brothers had been called from New York and told that they shouldn´t perform on the sessions and that was the first time that the negativity of the boycott actually reared it´s head. It was never a cut and dried issue about recording in South Africa as far as the boycott was concerned in that nothing had ever been dealt with and I know that Paul had conversations with people in New York before he came, but at that point in time I really wasn´t aware - I was under the impression that certain things had been cleared in New York as far as Paul was concerned. I think that he was under that impression to an extent."
Paul....
"Well unbeknown to me, the Black Musicians Union of South Africa took a vote as to whether they wanted me to come there and they decided that they did - they wanted exposure. They were obviously unaware of ´Hearts And Bones´ had not been a hit, ha-ha, - they weren´t likely to get a lot of ´exposure´ from me. So that´s how I went there, feeling relatively comfortable about the move vis-a-vis the cultural boycott, because Simon and Garfunkel and Paul Simon as a solo act, had both been offered quite a lot of money to play in Sun City and we´d said ´No´ and my understanding of the cultural boycott was that it was about performances - live performances - athletic events, cultural or political events. So recording over there didn´t seem to me to be any problem."
Paul on ´Boy in the Bubble´.....
"That was one of the few lyrics that came to me while I was in South Africa. It came to me either as I was about to fall asleep or in a dream; the words, ´The way the camera followed him in slo-mo, the way he smiled to us all´ were the original words that came to me. I changed them slightly to, ´The way the camera follows us in slo-mo, the way we look to us all´ but I had this image, you know, those images of Kennedy? that strange slow motion image where you see somebody like they´re waving and smiling and then some violent thing happens and it´s still all in slow motion and the smile still hangs over and then they play it again and again on television. There´s something about that that stayed in my mind, plus the fact that I´d been thinking for some time that the most poetic language I was seeing was coming from the field of science. This metaphor of The Boy In The Bubble - somebody who had such a desire to live, but couldn´t live in the world without the protection of being in the bubble, because their life would be in jeopardy just by breathing the air - that desire to live and the fact that the bubble made them isolated seemed like an apt 20th- 21st century metaphor."
Paul on the albums title track......
"The drums on ´Graceland´, they belong to a track that I cut with Talamathseka (?) the accordion group, that wasn´t very good - the track wasn´t very good - but I liked the drums so I said to Ray, ´What can we play over these drums?´ and he started to play something that he said to me, ´This is like your style. I´m trying to play like the way you play now´ with a relative minor, you know, ´cos the relative minor is not a South African inclination - it´s really three chord and it immediately had that mysterious quality to it. It had that ´Sun Records´ mysterious quality to it right away. I think it was one of my favourites right from the beginning."
and..
"I had a lot of resistance -internal resistance- to writing a song called ´Graceland´. I couldn´t seem to stop myself and then finally I just said, ´Well, maybe you´d better go to Graceland. I dont know why I´m writing this but now it´s too late. I can´t stop. The song is ´Graceland´ to me. I don´t know what it´s about.´ I was recording in Louisiana and after I was finished I rented a car and I drove from Louisiana up to Memphis on Highway 61 across Mississippi, up through the delta, heading to Memphis to go to see Graceland and it´s just a beautiful drive - great drive. I´ve never made it before. Mississippi´s very beautiful. It was like, the late Spring, so it was hot and that´s how I got the opening verse, that landscape verse about the Mississippi delta shining like a National guitar. National guitars are those metal guitars that have a bottleneck that they play bottleneck, dobro guitars, and then I made my trip to Graceland and I just went with everybody else. I didn´t tell them in advance that I was coming and waited in line, bought my ticket, got on the bus, went through on the bus with everybody else, walked through with all the guides and everything. Waited to see if their was anything there I should know about for the song but it turned out that the song was really not about Graceland at all. It was about the journey. It was about the trip to it. It wasn´t about the place and it wasn´t about Elvis Presley, and Graceland was just a metaphor for a state of peace or grace. I realised that after I´d been there, that it wasn´t going to be specifically about that house or about Elvis Presley - much to my relief I realised that."
Paul...
"By the time I came back and I had five tracks cut, I realised that I would have to continue. Otherwise I would have an album that had one side South African based music and the other side who knows what, you know, New York session? it didn´t make sense. I knew I wanted to continue, so again I made enquiries to find out if I could bring the musicians out of South Africa and I brought the rhythm section - those guys from Soweto - I brought them to New York in May of 1985. They arrived in New York early in the morning on their flight. A limo picked ´em up and they were ´rock stars´. Isaac Mtshali said to me at one point, ´Where do we go to register with the police? and I said that you don´t, ´You don´t register with the police. You come and go as you please.´ They came to New York and we went to the studio that I was working in and we cut two more tracks. Those tracks later became ´Under African Skies´ and ´You Can Call Me Al´."
Paul S. 11/14/03 at 12:52 PM
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Paul on ´You Can Call me Al´.....
"I was married to Peggy and we were having a party and a composer friend of mine who we´d invited called up to say he was with Pierre Boulez(?) who was at that point the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and would we mind if he brought him over. So, of course I said, ´No, I don´t mind´, although Pierre Boulez fitting into that party was problematic, but he came and he stayed about half an hour and I introduced him to Peggy and that was it and he stayed about half an hour and then he left, and as he left he said to me, ´Well thanks for having me Al and say goodnight to Betty´. So I said, ´Ok, I will´ and that´s how he heard our names. He heard us as Al and Betty instead of Paul and Peggy and Peggy and I used to call ourselves Al and Betty, like, for a couple of weeks - it´s nice to have another personality. That´s what it is. I´m very proud of it in joke, but essentially it´s about if you trust me, then I´ll trust you. That´s about what it means...roughly."
Paul S. 11/14/03 at 02:06 PM
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Paul on ´Homeless´....
"I had heard Ladysmith Black Mambazo a couple of years before that, but didn´t realise that they were from South Africa. I heard them because of the ´Rhythm of Resistance´ film. I met Joseph when I was recording in Johannesberg. He gave me about twenty albums which I used to listen to every night and fall asleep with the walkman on. I was absolutely smitten with the group but intimidated - I didn´t allow myself the thought that I could record with this group and then finally, after some months went by, I thought it would just be great if they would come on the record. So I´ll ask if they want to do it, never imagining that he was gonna say yes, but he did say, ´Yes´. So then it was up to me to get the process going and I had written this line, it was in my notes, it was ´the sound of moonlight slapping on a midnight lake´, which I liked as an image and so I tried to get as much of it in as I could to that... ´moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake´ but the ´slapping´ is actually the part that I like because that´s what that sound is like if you listen to water, the way it hits that little ´slap´. So I began with that and I wrote that melody and I sang it like five or six voices, you know, in their style - bass voice and a high falsetto - kind of a demo of what they should do and I wrote a letter to Joseph saying, ´Here´s a sketch and you can do it exactly like this if you like or change the lyrics if you like or add your own lyrics or change the melody, whatever you want is fine and then let´s meet and we´ll meet in London and we´ll go from there´. So we did and he came in and they had that down and they had another verse in english and then they had it in Zulu and then I knew one of their songs from one of their other albums and I said, ´Let´s take that song, attach it to this´ and then I wrote ´Somebody say´- just very simple in almost the way they sing their english, you know, they always sing their english like pigeon-english. So I wrote that and then the last piece of the puzzle was Joseph said, ´We know an introduction. This old folk-song´ which he said, ´will be a great introduction´. I said, ´I believe you´. They sing right in tune every time."
Paul S. 11/14/03 at 02:21 PM
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Paul on ´Under African Skies´......
"I wanted to do a duet with Linda on that. I called her up. I said, ´I have a song on this album that I´m working on. I think it would be a good duet for us to do and are you interested in the idea?´ and she said, ´I´m interested in the idea but I´ve got to be honest with you that if I hear it and I don´t like it, I´m not gonna do it´. I said, ´Well that´s fine. I wouldn´t expect you to do it if you didn´t like it. It´s ok with me. Do want me to come and play it for you?´ So I played it for her and she liked it and then in order to make it more personal for her I asked her about her childhood and I said I would write this verse about her so she could feel that she was singing the song and relate to it - relate to the lyrics. Again the juxtaposition of Linda´s childhood and Joseph - not a lot of thought given to it and there´s no real reason that they should be juxtaposed ´cept for the fact that they both have lovely voices."
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