Still, he felt the draw to go - and reached out to others who knew more about the situation than he did. I knew I would be criticized if I went, even though I wasn't going to record for the government of Pretoria or to perform for segregated audiences - in fact, I had turned down Sun City twice.” “South Africa is a supercharged subject surrounded with a tremendous emotional velocity. “There were people who said I shouldn't go,” he admitted to The New York Times in 1986. This was all happening during the Academic and Cultural Boycott, when the United Nations prohibited artists, academics, philosophers and other cultural influencers from participating in any activities or collaborations of any kind in the country because of the segregation policies of apartheid. It turned out that may have been the easy part. Simon violated the cultural boycott in South Africa So he did just that - he got on a plane in February 1985 with recording engineer Roy Halee to Johannesburg. I was so impressed that I inquired whether it would be possible to record with some of them. “Hilton also sent me records of around a dozen other South African bands. “The search began when my record company, Warner Bros., put me in touch with Hilton Rosenthal, a leading South African record producer, who identified the group on the tape as the Boyoyo Boys,” Simon told The New York Times during the album’s release. The only thing he knew at the time was that it was South African music, so he started to track down its exact roots. Paul Simon performs live on stage with fellow musicians from the Graceland tour at Ahoy in Rotterdam, the Netherlands on FebruPhoto: Rob Verhorst/Redferns “And that’s when things started to perk up.” “After a couple of weeks of driving back and forth to the house and listening to the tape, I thought, ‘What is this tape? This is my favorite tape, I wonder who this band is,’” he continued. His musical creativity took over and this was the inspiration he needed after his 1983 solo album Hearts and Bones hadn’t hit the mark. I was just singing along with the tape, the way people do.”īut of course, he wasn’t just like anyone else. “Even then, I wasn’t making them up for the purpose of writing. “I was listening to it for fun for at least a month before I started to make up melodies over it,” he added. The more he listened, the more invested he got in it. “It sounded like very early rock & roll to me, black, urban, mid-Fifties rock and roll, like the great Atlantic tracks from that period.” “It was very good summer music, happy music,” Simon told Rolling Stone. ![]() One day, while driving between Manhattan and Montauk, Simon popped the tape in and was completely taken by what he heard. To show Simon the sound she was going for, she gave him a bootlegged tape that she had found in a friend’s car that was marked “Accordion Jive Vol. When the show was canceled, Berg had stopped by Michaels’ office to ask about other music opportunities and Michaels pointed her down the hall in New York City’s Brill Building to see a “good friend” of his, who was Simon, according to Rolling Stone.Īfter being impressed by her music, Simon decided to produce Berg’s album. During the time that Michaels had stepped away from SNL to produce the short-lived The New Show in 1984, he had brought Heidi Berg from the SNL band to his new project as the bandleader. The ‘friend’ he was referring to turned out to be a connection Simon made because of Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. And so I went on a search to find out who they were and where they came from.” Simon was introduced to 'township jive' music thanks, in part, to Lorne Michaels “I thought that the group, whoever it was, would be interesting to record with. He became obsessed and wanted to trace down its roots, even though he didn’t know what it was at the time. “In the summer of 1984, a friend of mine gave me a tape of ‘township jive,’ the street music of Soweto, South Africa.” “My new album really came about by accident,” Simon told The New York Timesin 1986. A bootlegged cassette tape, Saturday Night Live and half of the legendary folk-rock act Simon & Garfuknel seem like the oddest of combinations.Īnd perhaps even stranger, they came together to lead Paul Simon to get on a plane to South Africa - a trip that laid the foundation for his 1986 album, Graceland, that would redefine his career, but not without controversy.
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