A Bunch of Tricks for Dumping Bitches
Simon says: In your face Neal Sedaka. Breaking up, is really not at all that hard to do. In fact Paul’s got fifty ways to do the deed. The balance of the tutorial is anchored by session drummer, Steve Gadd’s, way-cool stick work on this post-divorce, revenge tinged fantasy which topped the charts throughout the spring of 1976. It remains, likely forever, Simon’s biggest solo hit.
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Featuring a killer brass section and Morris Goldberg on pennywhistle (Man that dude can wail!) this was the first single released from Simon’s groundbreaking 1986 album in which he employed the vast musical talents of a vast world, and named after the quasi-religious shrine that yet endures at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee.
MILF (aka, Joltin’ Joe’s Gone Lost His Swagga!)
Huge hit from the 1967 film, The Graduate, and released again in ’68 in its longer more familiar version for the single and then yet again for the Roy Halee produced Bookends album. The track arguably contains, some of the best-known lyrics in American popular music, though reportedly a confused and miffed DiMaggio did confront Simon in a Manhattan restaurant complaining that he had never “gone” anywhere, other than to do a few Mr. Coffee ads, at which point the Yankee Clipper then proceeded to dump a steaming plate of Scungilli into the songwriter’s lap admonishing him to “Put THAT in the pantry with your cupcakes!”
Hey, Emily…Got Something for Ya, Wherever the Fuck You Are!
An early showcase for Art Garfunkel, Simon’s erstwhile jewfro-bedecked sidekick, this gauzy dream-spun crooner pops up on the flip side of Dried Green Cooking Herbs, and was recorded in the same session as the 1966 album’s hilarious last track, a synergistic grafting of Franz Gruber’s familiar yuletide Carol and an Evening News monologue, ebulliently overdubbed as: Everything’s Going to Shit and Merry Fucking Christmas Too!
Not Enough Noise to Hear Nuthin’
Wafting about the narrow Village streets and cobblestones as early as 1964, the dark turtle necked duo planted this tune in pretty much everyone’s brain by the time it hit #1 on New Year’s Day, 1966 setting the reluctant folk bards onto a bumpy path towards a neon god from which there was no return.
Playing Games Down the Street with Someone More Ethnic Than Me
Released by Simon in 1972, and one of the first singles of the post-Garfunkel era, the song has variously been described as being about al fresco gay sexual encounters…with a guy named Julio, or perhaps with the Queen of Corona (alternatively referred to as Rosie) and possibly involving illicit drug use, or as Simon himself once said, “it’s just a bit of inscrutable doggerel.”
Getting Totally Stoked on the Queensboro Bridge
Simon’s feel-good paean resulting from a spleef enriched daybreak walk across the East River. Listen to it for too long and you too may Doo-it in doo doo.
So Yeah, I Continue to be Totally Fucking Nuts, Deal With It
Title track for Simon’s 4th studio album, released in October 1975, the song has served ever since as quasi anthem for an entire generation of balding, delusional, over-medicated, divorced men.
Yo! I’m Igneous
Produced in the UK in 1965 the Paul Simon Songbook opens with the sensitive Simon solo singing this simple, yet stoic, some would say, misanthropic hymn, earning for himself the moniker “Mr. Alienation.” Over the years there have been some whisperings that Simon appropriated the lyrics “I touch no one and no one touches me,” from the famed aging bank robber, Willie Sutton, whom he had bunked with during a brief lock up in Attica.
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Doug Bond, a simple man constrained by two monosyllabic names, resides along the Northern California coast in a foggy, windswept dune field once referred to as the Outer Lands, where he endeavors to keep all the hungry beasts with whom he is co-domiciled well fed. Additional confabulations and portals to virtual worlds may be found here: www.dougbond.me