4. Simon & Garfunkel - Concert in Central Park

During my junior year of high school I befriended a freshman who reintroduced to me The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel.  I had recently browsed my mother's old record albums and wanted to have recordings from some of them, namely the Beatles, but our record player's needle was missing.  James had one, so I brought the records to school so he'd take them home and record them onto cassette tapes, for himself and me, and he'd also copy his own Simon & Garfunkel Concert in Central Park for me, too.  All that year I never really listened to the radio full of alternative and grunge rock like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Mudhoney.  It'd be a few years after Kurt Cobain was dead before I would revisit the grunge rock bands.  For now, I was in full swing with the Beatles and S&G.  I watched The Graduate and understood the song "Mrs. Robinson."  I loved the story in "Homeward Bound" of traveling and meeting people.  Since he calls himself "a poet and a one-man band" I pictured myself as him, with notebook and suitcase on a bus traveling across the country as I watch the hills turn into plains, mountains, valleys, and beach.

I'm sittin' in the railway station
Got a ticket for my destination, mmm
On a tour of one night stands
My suitcase and guitar in hand
And every stop is neatly planned
For a poet and a one-man band
Homeward Bound, I wish I was
Homeward Bound

I distinctly remember listening to James on the phone talk about the lyrics for "The Boxer" and "America," thus reminding me to pay closer attention to the song because at that moment I was absorbed in "Homeward Bound."  When I think of "America" I think again of stories, bohemian and traveling to look for oneself, "to look for America." There's a mention of Vicksburg (Mississippi) so I bounced into the small joy of my home state being mentioned in a popular song. I learned the lyrics thoroughly and have sung it many times, over and over again, while driving from home to school or work or down some country road in Madison county.  There's railroad tracks that run through Madison into Ridgeland, and there's a road that runs alongside them for a long length of that distance.  I would drive up and down that hilly pot-hole infested road, sometimes too fast especially when grinning at myself racing the train blaring a song like "America."

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
"I'm empty and I'm aching and I don't know why"
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America
All come to look for America

And then there's "The Boxer." Another story of a vagabond who left one life for another, being a boxer, a fighter, and bearing the brunt of what that turns him into as he grows older. I know that my junior year I was finally figuring out that I loved literature, loved writing and working on the craft even if I knew I had no talent for it inspite of McKenzie's encouragement.  I appreciated the story, the character drawn so thoroughly and intimately in the song, and wanted to feel like I knew the story.  When S&G begin the sing-a-long "lie-la-lie, lie-la-lie" bridges between the choruses and verses, I was in the song.

Now the years are rolling by me
They are rocking evenly
I am older than I once was
But younger than I'll be
That's not unusual
No, it isn't strange
After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same
After changes we are more or less the same.

I believe that when I first began listening to the album I quickly became absorbed in the stories, the specific characters who sang in the lyrics and choruses, and these songs tended be a little more serious and ballad-like.  A peppy energetic song like "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard" finally captured my dancing feet when my mood changed and needed something happier.

Well, I'm on my way
I don't know where I'm going
I'm on my way I'm taking my time but I don't know where
Goodbye to Rosie, the Queen of Corona
See you, me and Julio down by the schoolyard

I was still listening to S&G a lot through my senior year of high school and then into my freshman year of college at Holmes Community College.  I had an awesome American Literature teacher, Steve Deaton, who often brought music into the classroom to compliment whatever we were reading and studying.  I remember him having us listen to "The Sound of Silence." I'd heard it before and liked it okay, but this instruction reawakened me to the song. I enjoyed anything that analyzed symbolism into or out of some piece of literature, and the use of the song and lyrics in our class reminded me of my old habit of transcribing the lyrics so that I could read and more fully understand their meaning. I sought out the double meaning, the lines between the lines, and of course the tools of poetry in song lyrics made me grin as I sang:

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence"

Every song on the live concert album struck a chord with me at some point or another, and it led me to getting the full Greatest Hits set so that I could discover "A Poem on the Underground Wall, " "The Dangling Conversation," "A Hazy Shade of Winter," and all the others.   And with the 1960s tunes of S&G, I followed Paul Simon with his Graceland album, stumbled back to other performers that aren't quite like S&G but just as wonderfully talented from that era.
Also, visit the Wikipedia articles on Concert in Central Park and Simon & Garfunkel, in addition to the band's website.