Music and Memory and Graceland
I was in love and purchased my first CD, Paul Simon’s Graceland. Ever since then, my music collection has grown to become a huge part of my life, mentally AND physically.
From Katydid’s post.
My mother, my sister, and I evacuated New Orleans for a hurricane in the early 1990s; it must have been Andrew. My dad’s decision to stay wasn’t something I interrogated at the time; back then, no one had yet realized what would happen to New Orleans if a major hurricane cut through it.
My mother is a deeply creative person, not simply in her various hobbies and crafts but also in an existential sense: she creates experiences where most see void. As an example: it is from her that I learned how wonderful a road trip can be, whereas for many driving is radically devalued time spent crossing radically devalued space, the stark highways connecting implicitly significant As and Bs. Not for her. Road trips with her are richly experiential.
Even in daily life, she doesn’t wait in lines; she makes friends in lines.
And she didn’t just leave New Orleans; she took us somewhere. As with much of what she does, she undertook our evacuation in a tongue-in-cheek way, deciding to turn it into a vacation of sorts; we didn’t fly to Cannes while Rome burned, though: we drove to Graceland, in Memphis.
By that age, I was already obsessed with Paul Simon. While I was still in the womb, my mother sang “Loves Me Like a Rock“ to me, and I’d taken very strongly to his music at my first conscious exposure; my parents were kind enough to immerse me in excellent music at a young age, my dad sharing with me Coltrane, Davis, and what classical I could handle. But it was Simon’s music, so percussive and complex, that sent me down the path to being a musician.
We listened to our little tape of Graceland on that trip so much that I am startled my mother didn’t go insane; we listened to it the way you listen to albums when you’re a teenager and can hear the same record twenty times in a night, the repetition making the music deeper, not shallower, more resonant, not less.
I’m going to Graceland, Graceland,
Memphis, Tennessee
I’m going to Graceland.
Poor-boys and pilgrims with families
And we are going to Graceland
And 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.
Naturally, the metaphor has grown more and more significant to me as I’ve aged, and I think the song is one of the most beautiful I know. I live in what Simon calls “the national guitar,” the Mississippi delta, and whenever someone slanders New Orleans and asks why we should bother rebuilding I think again of what we’ve given: of the birth of jazz and its fusion with blues and the Afro-Caribbean music of Congo Square, and I think of how Simon is a quintessential American, synthesizing so much of our national musical experience in such a simple way.
Andrew missed us and devastated parts Florida, although we certainly got our due thirteen years later. I can barely remember what the real Graceland looked like on the inside, only that I thought it was rather ugly. But I think Simon is right: we are all received there, in Graceland, the silly sprawling symbol of rock music, that nexus of mass consumption and obscure historical happenstance which came from slaves and jazz musicians as surely as from Berry and Presley; indeed, that music contains all the wandering poor-boys and pilgrims of America’s history.
That’s what’s so beautiful about great popular art: it isn’t elitist, and it receives us all.
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