Tall Gumboots At Graceland

By JAY COCKS

Paul Simon's rock 'n' roll has always been a little different. Raucous, unreconstructed and soul deep, rock is, first of all, about feeling. Or so it is thought to be. But Simon's songs are also about thinking, about the half- rational process of measuring out passion in small portions, like time- release capsules, detonating long after consumption. They are stately, funny and absurd, with elusive rhythmic changes and melodic surprises that come up fast and take the tune off in a whole new direction.

This is music for a great rock musical that has never been written. It would be a show that assumes a certain level of sophistication and psychological voyaging on the part of the listener, as well as an abiding interest in the melancholy, ruminative personality of the composer himself. Simon trafficks in arms-length introspection and sardonic social speculations as easily and elegantly as Carl Perkins tied up his blue suede shoes.

Simon is articulate about his craft. Many songwriters dodge interpretive discussions, but Simon will dig in, talking about a tune with the fluid confidence of a seminar master. Indeed, he has taught a few songwriting classes, and can cut loose about "pressure to keep music either raw and unsophisticated or to keep it young. On the one hand, that might make rock vital, but on the other, one reason my generation has stopped listening to music is that it doesn't have anything to do with their lives. In the '60s, it was what was happening in your life, in the life of your community. Now you hear what's happening in the life of an adolescent community. I wanted to say what I had to say, and have my generation say, 'This is about our life. Not about our children.' "

That sounds a little defensive, as well as prideful, for a past master songwriter who is passing 43. It may be that when Simon embarked on the project that was to become his splendid new album, Graceland, he was, in his own words, "not hot in any way." One-Trick Pony, the 1980 feature film he wrote and starred in, bottomed out at the box office. A 1983 tour with his old partner Art Garfunkel was a nostalgic about-face. Hearts and Bones, in 1983, did not even offer up one high-charting song, a novel situation indeed for the author of such classics as Bridge Over Troubled Water and Mrs. Robinson. What was needed, clearly, was something a little different. It was called Gumboots.

A musician pal of Simon's passed him a bootleg cassette of instrumental music with that intriguing name, subtitled Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II. Simon played it all during the summer of 1984, hearing in its unsprung beat echoes of old rhythm and blues, '50s style. The music on the tape turned out to be mbaqanga, or "township jive," from the streets of Soweto. Simon became obsessed. In January 1985, he took off for South Africa and began to record with Soweto's Boyoyo Boys, Tao Ea Matsekha (a group from Lesotho), and General M.D. Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters. "It was very interesting," Simon reports, "but very strange."

Few of the musicians spoke English, and when Simon called, "Let's go to a D chord," he discovered "they didn't know what a D chord was. Then I realized that they had a different language and musical description for what they were doing. I decided -- fine, let them play what they want -- I will solve this problem later." After two weeks, Simon returned to his apartment on Manhattan's Central Park West with six rhythm tracks. He listened to them, chasing through "lots of culs-de-sac. I would think the melodies were in one place, and I'd find them in another." (Five of the tracks were used on the & finished album.) He got passports for his three-man Soweto rhythm section to come to New York City for some additional recording, where "the same culture shock that I had experienced in South Africa, they experienced here. One of them asked me where they had to go to register with the police."

In the album's title track, Simon sings, "Losing love/ Is like a window in your heart/ Everybody sees you're blown apart," and, he now recalls, "once that 'losing love' line came out, that was a catharsis. Everything began to flow. That's when the funny songs came out." The rhythms of the album had also expanded. Simon had gone down to Lafayette, La., for the goofy good times of That Was Your Mother and out to California, where he recorded All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints with Los Lobos, a terrific Mexican- American band of rockers. He knew his aim had to be dead true this time out. "If I miss in the direction of head, I risk being obscure or pretentious," he reflects. "If I miss in the direction of heart, I risk being sentimental. I dread both. I dance in the penumbra. That's the thrill. When it's right, I can feel it." It's right on Graceland all the way through. You can feel it.

The title song, Simon says, is not about Elvis Presley or his Memphis home but about a "state of peace." Simon's double edge is at his keenest here, using a country boy's dream mansion, which turned into a mausoleum, as an ironic counterpoint to Homeless, sung a cappella with South African Gospel Group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The rhythms washing over Graceland are infectious and inflective enough to shame rap silly, from the lovely, funky arc of Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes to the spooky snap of The Boy in the Bubble. African musicians appear on nine of the album's eleven tracks, but Simon has pulled off something much more here than a little groovy ethnomusicology. He has found a new wellspring for his own writing and a pipeline for African music, from inside a country that is effectively closed, straight into the bright center of American rock. Take his word for it. It's like a window in your heart.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York