Dee de dee dee dee dee…

John Lennon was murdered 40 years ago today. Paul Simon wrote a song around that event. Even today, my mind gets teary when it lights on John Lennon’s death. He appears in Paul Simon’s song only obliquely, because the song isn’t about John Lennon, and it’s not about Johnny Ace. It’s about Paul Simon, and about you, and about me.

Hearts and bones. The soft and hard, that which can only feel pain, and that which can only be broken. The vital and the inflexible, the palpitating and the rigid. The pulsating, quivering, throbbing passions within us, and the structures and strictures and scaffoldings that hold it all up. It’s about how they cohabit within us – intimate, interdependent, synergetic, yet profoundly and inherently separate. Like a married couple.

Who would have thought that ‘feelings’, the notoriously amorphous and slippery quick of our inner lives, could be so precisely dissected, reconstructed, and formulated in a mere song? Paul Simon’s ‘Jonah’ will swallow you whole.

‘Surfer Girl’ is a schlocky, heartfelt ballad of unrequited teenage love, Brian Wilson clawing his way out of the gooey larva of his California pubescence. Paul Simon works his magic on it, tapping the genius that is Brian, elevating it to a work of great beauty.

What happens when three of the finest singers of our times get together to record a pop paean to pimply passion?

In 1967, Paul Simon said I resembled Art Garfunkel.
He was wrong.

A shaggy-dog tail from 1966 of Paul Simon mistaking Jeff for his singing partner, a frat band playing in Atlantic City, reserve duty in the Coast Guard, The Beatles last tour, an Australian folkie, a Pepsi Cola factory, and that unforgettable hit, ‘Red Rubber Ball’, by The Cyrkle.