Paul Simon - Graceland (lala)
Big Star - #1 Record (lala)
And I see losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you're blown apart
Everybody feels the wind blow
- Paul Simon "Graceland"
Won't you tell me what you're thinking of
Would you be an outlaw for my love
If it's so, well, let me know
If it's "no", well, I can go
I won't make you
- Big Star "Thirteen"
Paul Simon is alive, just on my mind. I talked to a band yesterday whose music is commonly and unfavorably compared to that on Graceland and I just wanted to see if the comparison really fits. Sorta but not really, and even though it's been twenty years since that C-90 of Graceland and Peter Gabriel's So was worn out like a denim jacket, I still know every beat and word of that record. It's one I didn't think I even liked all that much, but peer here in the window of my heart and it's the one in the tape deck.
Big Star, I came to late, outside of that true obsession bracket where you get tunnel vision, let's-run-away-together-and-start our-own-church with a record, so my orbit is with those moony songs rather than the solar system. I saw Alex Chilton in concert only once, twenty years ago, and he was a holy terror, castigating the soundman for the lion's share of the show, leaving us KLSU newbies in attendance wondering, "So this is that genius?" No, he wasn't. He was however, willing to throw enough rocks at the window of your heart until you climbed your ass through and at least ran to the gate with him, turning over the idea of never turning back.
RIP Alex Chilton. Everybody else, be safe today. I'm going to do my best to not listen to that one Replacements song where it would be cool if he died in Memphis or "In Your Eyes" or anything that will dissolve me into a shapeless mass of maudlin sentimentality because already at ten in the morning
My traveling companions
Are ghosts and empty sockets
I'm looking at ghosts and empties,
But I've reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland
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