Spice Boys (for Lambchop's Where It All Began W/O)
Written: Apr 17 '03 (Updated Jul 20 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Some great hits: Scarborough Fair, Cloudy, Homeward Bound; a dose of optimism and ambivalence.
Cons: A couple of forgettable songs. In the end, who can complain? This is a classic.
The Bottom Line: A seminal album. Some great songs, but a number of misses. Nostalgia bumps this to 5 stars, but it probably gets 4.5 in the cold light of day.
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| trust12345's Full Review: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme [Remaster] by Simo... |
Kind Reader: If you have stumbled on this review merely in search of recommendations about the album, I encourage you to skip straight to the section, Current estimation. For this essay really contains two reviews: a look at Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme from my perspective at age 6 and at age 32.
Lambchops has invited participants in her write-off to expose themselves in plain sight of thousands of other Members, hungry for the lowdown on Where It All Began: to wit, what was our first purchased or owned musical album? (Pardon all that innuendo.) I think she was hoping for some embarrassing revelations, but above all she has asked for the truth, the one point of departure that instigated our musical independence. On the down side, my Ur-album is almost wholly devoid of retrospective squirm factor; on the plus side, I wouldn’t have it any other way than to have begun it all with Simon and Garfunkle’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
The personal story of my first beloved album is quite simple. My one sibling (elder brother, David) and I won this seminal folk/rock LP in a raffle from our Francophone grade school’s auction. (OK, so we didn’t actually purchase the album, but that seems a mere quibble.) Considering this prize wasn’t chosen, but was rather random, we were obviously quite fortunate; it might have been a Pat Boone Christmas Jamboree, or Montavani’s Zillion Strings Do Broadway.
Let’s pause a moment for station identification:
Relevant Folk/Rock Music Timeline:
May, 1966: Beach Boys, Pet Sounds released
May, 1966: Bob Dylan, Blonde On Blonde released
September, 1966: The Beatles, Revolver released
October, 1966: Simon & Garfunkle, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme released
[…]
January, 1970: Final album of Simon & Garfunkle, Bridge Over Troubled Water, released
Relevant Personal Timeline:
October, 1966: My brother David is born.
May, 1970: I am born.
Sometime, 1976: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme acquired
As you can see, there are some interesting coincidences (no doubt preordained by Apollo or Dionysus): My brother was born in the very month our prime mover album was released. I was born not long after S and G’s last album and their break up. As I was a mere six years old the first time I heard these songs, I was only dimly aware of their lyrics’ meanings (superficial or deep), save for those of the extremely accessible Feelin’ Groovy. Nevertheless, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme left an enormous impression on me through its various moods (dark and light), all made palpable through the music itself. David and I played this record constantly for protracted months (possibly years), and so its catchy melodies and folk-jazz-rock-classical pile-up of timbres were hardwired into my conscious and unconscious mind.
It occurs to me now (listening to my handy CD) that my brother and I must have been a little lazy, because we apparently hardly ever turned the LP over to play Side Two. The strongest impressions were made by Scarborough Fair/Canticle, Cloudy, Homeward Bound and The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) (all from Side One). My current self, in simultaneous nostalgia and pure recognition of greatness, cleaves to these songs still. I feel the only things we missed out on from the flip side were The Dangling Conversation and 7 O’clock News/Silent Night, songs of subtly excoriating irony and satire (which would have been lost on me for a few years anyway). The others songs on the album seem dated and world-weary, whereas those mentioned are timeless statements of poetry fused with a socio-political awareness and utterly beautiful harmonies and melodies.
Current estimation:
One of the more remarkable facts about this album is that it lasts under 28 minutes. Considering that the majority of the 12 songs are shorter than two and a half minutes, I am all the more amazed at how much variety, drama, and narrative Paul Simon squeezed into his lyrics. The sounds are essentially folk with a rock underpinning. A few songs stand out as closer to late 60s rock with their harder drums, electric bass and Hammond organ palettes, for example the anti-consumerist song, The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine and the Bob Dylan/Rolling Stones parody, A Simple Desultory Philippic. This latter song, subtitled Or How I Was Robert McNamara’s Into Submission, is at once a tribute and a self-conscious jab at current political figures and peers such as Norman Mailer, Phil Spector, Ayn Rand, Lou Adler, Lenny Bruce, and Andy Warhol. The focus is on rival groups though, and I still find one line particularly amusing (“I been Rolling Stoned and Beatled till I’m blind”), though the song’s humor quickly wears thin.
Another politically specific song, 7 O’clock News/Silent Night , is much more successful in its message because the message is more subtly conveyed. We have the juxtaposition of a news broadcaster’s voice droning on about Vietnam War protestors, the death of Lenny Bruce, the Civil Rights bill, and the serial killer Richard Speck, set against the beautifully harmonized rendition of Silent Night that Simon and Garfunkle sing over a solo piano. One obvious reading is that this is not a silent night by any stretch, pointing up the yawning moral gap between reality and an ideal of peace on earth.
There are some definite misses on this album that for one reason or another don’t stand up. Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall has the relentlessly cheerful folk sound of the singers’ first album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., with the symbol-rich and ambivalent lyrics similar to their iconic Sounds of Silence, but without that song’s layers of meaning. A Poem On The Underground Wall expends a great amount of energy in its fast paced guitar licking and word spewing, but the subject matter (a loner scribbling graffiti) seems almost as forced as the implied religious symbolism:
And the train is gone suddenly
On Wheels clicking silently
Like a gently tapping litany
And he holds his crayon rosary
Tighter in his hand.
For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her, though considered a classic, rankles in its ultra-sensitive, poetic lyrics, with self-consciously beautiful poses and lyrics such as, “What a dream I had:/ Pressed in organdy;/ Clothed in crinoline of smoky Burgundy;/ Softer than the rain.” There are lovely touches in the lyrics, but the mood is too much a wounded-confessional, too syrupy (“I kissed your honey hair with my grateful tears”) even for my thenthative soul.
Two songs about which I’m on the fence: The Dangling Conversation and Patterns. The first is a great ballad about a relationship of sophisticates gone completely stale. It contains some of the finest lyrics on the album and ironically enough serves as an excellent poem (with subtle use of enjambment, assonance and metaphor) about poetry lovers (you know— intellectuals) who have grown apart:
And you read your Emily Dickinson,
And I my Robert Frost,
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we’ve lost. […]
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You’re a stranger now unto me
Lost in the Dangling Conversation…
What brings the aesthetic experience down a notch for me is the overproduced orchestration (complete with harp, soaring strings, and timpani) that conjures less a feeling of classiness than of cheesy elevator music. Apparently, it is Simon and Garfunkle’s collective nightmare to be stuck in an elevator forced to listen to their songs in Muzak versions, but in this case, they’re kind of asking for it.
Patterns is certainly fun to listen to: its main sound world is comprised of choo-chooing congas, beating out a frenetic ritual that more or less amplifies the foreboding mood of the lyrics. But a closer look at those lyrics reveals a rather hackneyed vision of life as a maze, with sentiments such as “For in darkness I must dwell” that worked for Renaissance composer John Dowland (who first used the phrase), but seem contrived and inflated, the posturing malaise of an adolescent. Also, a twee instrumental in the middle of the song sounds as though it were accompanying the Happy Dance of Merlin at the Medieval/Renaissance fair— not a terrible thing in itself (I guess), but kind of gratuitous nonetheless.
Ah, but then there are the masterpieces, Scarborough Fair, Cloudy, and Homeward Bound. Simon adapted/arranged the traditional poem “Scarborough Fair” by interweaving it with lyrics of his own (the part called Canticle) which were actually written for an early song called The Side of a Hill. The Scarborough text is a Medieval love ballad involving a jilted lover and the impossible tasks he must accomplish to win the hand of his beloved. Canticle describes the doomsday scene of a looming battle:
War bellows blazing in scarlet battalions.
Generals order their soldiers to kill.
And to fight for a cause they’ve
long ago forgotten.
As with 7 O’clock News/Silent Night, Simon smashes together the incongruous (in this case, simply put, Love and War), all the better to highlight their dissonant relationship. There is an anti-war message in here, but it by no means hits us over the head; on the contrary, the song seduces us with an extremely appealing sonic palette (harpsichord, bells and guitar, perfect for the love ballad) and electric bass and drums (befitting the war lyrics), aching vocal harmonizations and some of the loveliest counterpoint to be found outside Baroque music. The totality comes off as a soothing love ballad subtly punctuated with the absurdity of war.
Cloudy has the sound and effect of a lullaby with its enchanting bells, synthesized whistles, acoustic guitars and snapping. It’s no wonder this was my favorite song as a child. The melody is optimistic and breezy, outfitting lyrics that are quintessentially becalmed. The basic idea is that the singer’s mind and clouds are alike, both without borders and direction:
These clouds stick to the sky
Like floating questions, why?
And they linger there to die.
They don’t know where they’re going, and,
my friend, neither do I.
How many times in my life have these lyrics struck home? It would be too embarrassing to admit. But they capture something about Hippy culture that has nothing to do with Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, but rather with the resistance to definitive identification, “grown-up” specialization, and ideological fixity. Cloudy, such a delicate and cheerful song, is deep down a paean to the nebulous thinker, the poet wanderer, the drifter.
Homeward Bound is so easy to relate to, it is no wonder it is a universal hit, endlessly anthologized. Anytime one is away from home, particularly when traveling solo on a train, the song seems a perfect companion:
And each town looks the same the to me,
the movies and the factories
And ev’ry stranger’s face I see reminds me
that I long to be
Homeward Bound
I wish I was,
Homeward Bound,
Home where my thought’s escaping,
Home where my music’s playing,
Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.
It’s wonderful how the snare drum sparely strikes on every second and fourth beat during the song until each time the chorus returns, when it suddenly accelerates into excited fills, perfectly matching the lyrics’ emphasis on Home and all its attending pleasures. Coming back to this album year after year after year is always an eager homecoming, a space where my thoughts can happily mingle with two extraordinarily gifted musicians and visionary poets. Since long ago I’ve had no need to listen to my recordings of these songs; they are deeply a part of me. No matter where I am in the world, or how old I grow, this is always the Home where my music’s playing.
* * *
Recommended:
Yes
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trust12345
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Member: John Stone
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