There is no real reason for this, except maybe the timing to a certain degree, no musical reason, but Simon And Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits comforts me and when I am feeling very stressed out I use it to help me off the ledge. Released in 1972 when I was 15 years of age it was the last year of my youth. Some people get longer childhoods, some people are children into their 20s, but I wasn’t that fortunate. My father died in 1973 and my mom remarried that same year and I was out on my own. That was that.
So when I listen to S&G Greatest Hits it takes me back to being a child and not just a child but a lucky child. It is not that I had discovered girls, I, like Woody Allen, don’t believe I ever had a latency period, I always dug girls, but in 1972 girls noticed me. And in 1972, I felt that weird safety that only the young can have, where death, disaster, loss –none of them are quite part of your make up. I was, if you will, innocent.
Life touches you if you’re young and stuff doesn’t work out right but if things feel permanent your sense of immortality and comfort, the length of a summer the same as the length of a life time, the drift of a summer like the arrogance of youth,, as though it would never ever end.
And once the rug is pulled out, at whatever year, and a year after, 1973, there was death everywhere around me, my dad, my 22 year old cousin, my 15 year old friend, my nannies THREE children, the six year old daughter of another friend, all died. Life suddenly became quicksand and the charmedness of life was gone. I realized, as you do, how impermanent every thing is. It was knowledge I didn’t want, I would rather have the grown up, not quite understood, songs of Paul Simon performed with he pristine vocals of Art Garfunkel, from some magical land I had never even thought of going to, New York City.
I spent the summer of 1972 listening to Greatest Hits and not quite getting it but getting the light to dark to light, from the doo wop “Mrs Robinson” so infectious its story of infidelity. If you knew the movie, and the catechism on the Graduate poster, “He’s just a little bit worried about his future” –already the 60s were over and the future could be help off just a little bit, just a hey hey hey, just a Dion retort, just a mother sleeping around.
Then the album proper kicked in, with two live American modern folk songs, and the “59th Street bridge Song” (what was a 59th bridge? Ten years later I’d be walking across it on weekend summer days) a dazey dozey summer song, “Homeward Bound” followed by “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, the latter a lonely, lost on the road of life song, with the sting taken off by the Gospel masterpiece that was “Bridge Over Troubled Water” –a song written to bring you peace.
A year later, in the summer of 73, nothing was the same and I turned to Carole King’s Tapestry to deal with all the deaths, the “sometimes I wonder if I’m ever gonna make it home again’ spoke volume to an insecure teenager and when everything is broken go with the broken album. BUT in 1972, “Cecilia’ was the greatest of jokes, of joys, to be making love in the afternoon with any one at all, and even cooler –someone else has taken my place!
The album had everything, it had an undertow I couldn’t completely get at, and an overhang of coolness. “Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat.” Is something like Humphrey Bogart, it is something Bogie might say.
And the hours became days became weeks and it never seemed ready to end. Beirut, so the weather was fabulous, and the Christian girls at the swimming clubs were Western, and me and my friends would be forever 15. Some are dead now, all are gone, we were too privileged to last in a civil war. We all went our separate ways. And my father was in hospital, he must have been 69 years old and he was tired, he was winding down. I was too young and self-centered I couldn’t see it. At the end of the summer I went back to boarding school, and then he was dead. People who die are gone, gone. Hello darkness my old friend.
But when I listen to Greatest Hits it isn’t the darkness I see, it is a past that hasn’t arrived yet. Comforted in a place where life is sunny and unchanging and life is a bridge over troubled water feelin’ groovy.
