Paul Simon on Almost Everything, Chapter 5 of 5: "Errand to Brazil (1987-1990)"

"It’s taken a while," Simon said, "before people begin to realize that "Rhythm of the Saints" is more interesting than "Graceland" is."

“DR BYRNE, I PRESUME?” In Drew Friedman’s famous 1989 cartoon in Spy magazine, the world-music explorers David Byrne and Paul Simon do not look especially pleased to encounter each other in the bush, ie. “Hey, this is MY music to appropriate!” It would not be surprising if Simon and Byrne actually had crossed paths—in 1988, Simon was in Brazil recording The Rhythm of the Saints and Byrne was there, too. filming Ilê Aiyê (The Tree of Life), his 1989 documentary about the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé.¹

The Graceland tour ended in 1987 (though, as we saw in the last chapter, Simon would triumphantly bring the show to Johannesburg in 1992, ending the decades-long cultural boycott of South Africa).

What now? For almost 30 years, Simon had been drawn to the case of the so-called “Capeman,” a 16-year-old New York gang member, Puerto Rican-born, who’d been convicted of a double homicide and undergone an apparent redemption in prison. Simon saw it as a project with which he could test his mettle in yet another format, the Broadway musical.

As was his practice, Simon asked a handful of experts to help him flesh out his knowledge of, in this case, Nuyorican and Caribbean music. “After I finished Graceland,” he told the New York Times’s Stephen Holden in 1990, “[the Latin bandleader] Eddie Palmieri was helping me with the first stages of a musical that began in Puerto Rico in the 1940s and ends in New York in the 1980s.” Palmieri steered Simon in a unexpected direction, which immediately appealed to Simon. According to Palmieri, Cuba was where the great polyrhythmic drummers resided, the final stop of a musical diaspora that began in the 1600s with the enslavement of the Yoruban people of West Africa, who brought their music first to Brazil, then the Caribbean.

When he realized that the percussionist Youssou N’Dour, whose playing had ended “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” the last track that Simon recorded for Graceland, was Senegalese, ie. West African, Brazil looked more and more like a logical destination. In 1987, when the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento invited Simon to sing on Nascimento’s album Yuaretê, Simon was fascinated by Nascimento’s stories of the spectacular Brazilian drummers who believed that the entire pantheon of Yoruban gods lived in the drums used in religious rites. This was meaty material indeed; Broadway could wait. Shrugging off renewed accusations of musical tourism, Simon set his course for Brazil. His original plan was to follow the diaspora to its third stop, Cuba. But he was so thrilled by what he found in Brazil, and probably so exhausted by what turned into a two-and-a-half-year project, that he never got to Cuba. Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints stand as Paul Simon’s two great experiments with world music.²

Simon backstage at a 1993 concert with one of the later-20th-century’s great vocalists, Milton Nascimento, who sang on, and contributed lyrics to, The Rhythm of the Saints song “Spirit Voices.” (That’s Harper Simon, Simon’s first-born, at rear left.)

When Simon arrived in Brazil, Nascimento’s producer, Marco Mazzola, got things underway by introducing Simon to Grupo Cultural Olodum, the majestic drum troupe and cultural collective from Salvador, Bahia’s capital city, with whom Simon recorded the track that opens The Rhythm of the Saints, “The Obvious Child.”³

Above: Simon and the Bahian drum troupe Olodum perform “The Obvious Child,” the first track on The Rhythm of the Saints. I was impressed to learn that the fade that occurs at 2:30 was accomplished not via studio manipulations, but by Olodum itself. I was less surprised, but equally delighted, by a falsetto vocal lick, at 4:00, that Simon had clearly lifted from somewhere in his deep catalogue of Fifties doo-wop. Yes, he said, it was from “Deserie,” a 1957 hit by the doo-wop quintet the Charts. As in the song “Graceland,” in which the South African guitarist Ray Phiri had dipped, without thinking twice, into American country music, “The Obvious Child” was a true musical exchange (or, if you will, mutual appropriation).

Below: The Charts’ “Deserie,” which begins with, and later repeats, the falsetto lick that found its way into “The Obvious Child.” In Graceland, Simon had journeyed to South Africa in search of the wellsprings of the music he’d loved as a boy. In The Rhythm of the Saints, he found another source of his beloved doo-wop and R & B, and didn’t have to travel as far: the music had already made its way to the New World, courtesy of enslaved West Africans.

Whereas township jive, mbube, and the other South African genres that Simon incorporated into Graceland are secular, Simon saw The Rhythm of the Saints as purely and simply an exploration of its title (see interview segment #2, below). The Yoruba religion, Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ, recognizes a Supreme Being, Olódùmarè, from whom Olodum takes its name. Olódùmarè reigns over the orishas, or lesser gods, of whom there are anywhere from a few hundred to more than a thousand. Olódùmarè has no gender, but orishas can be male or female. It goes without saying that they have supernatural powers.

The orishas represent specific aspects of human or natural life. Ayelala is the female orisha of justice and punishment, Babalú-Aye, who is male, of illness and health. In an Afro-Brazilian rite, which typically involves drumming, singing, and dancing (beautifully captured in David Byrne’s movie) a worshipper calls on one or another of the orishas to inhabit his body. Every orisha has a specific rhythm associated with it, of a complexity, power, and seductiveness which left Simon entranced.

Between the 1600s and 1800s, enslaved Afro-Brazilians developed the religion they called candomblé, whose practitioners continued to worship the orishas, but conflated, or syncretized, them with Christian saints. Candomblé began as a subterfuge, as had the syncretic religions santeria and vodou, in Cuba and Haiti respectively. If a candomblé ritual was interrupted by a slaveowner who demanded to know what his slaves were so hopped-up about, he was told that they were worshipping St. Luke, St. Bartholomew, St. Peter, or St. John. The Christian counterpart of Aganju, for instance, the orisha of volcanoes and fire, is St. Christopher.

I don’t know if Simon set out to faithfully recreate candomblé’s rhythms. Does it matter? Yes, if he intended his album’s title to be more than loosely metaphorical, if wanted to capture more than candomblé’s mere vibe. I wonder if he can be accused of false advertising, that is, of writing and playing songs that are not invocations of orishas, but his own melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and the usual ruminative, insular lyrics of a New York sophisticate, thereby ignoring, and perhaps demeaning, candomblé’s function: calling on the orishas to bless one’s endeavors.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. I am not equipped to analyze the album’s rhythms, to discern whether or not they faithfully adhere to the candomblé originals. But I can say that Simon’s lyrics, or some of them, indeed hew to candomblé purpose: invoking the orishas, whom Simon sometimes even calls out by name. In the album’s final, title song, he sings of “Babalú-Aye spin[ning] on his crutches.” Babalú-Aye, you’ll recall, is the orisha of illness and healing, subjects to which the song “The Rhythm of the Saints” is not at all unrelated. When Simon sings about trying “To overcome an obstacle or an enemy/To dominate the impossible in your life,” he is, in effect, calling on Babalú-Aye for help in his struggle to lead a wholesome life. “The Obvious Child,” in which Simon’s concerns are, in Hilburn’s words, “aging and the uncertainties of life,” is equally easy to see as a cry for help from the beyond.

Beginning in the 1960s, Afro-Brazilians increasingly regarded candomblé as more than an invocation of the divine, but as a call to arms against racism and ruling-class exploitation, which is clearly on Simon’s mind in “The Cool, Cool River,” with its mock salutes to authority: “Yes Boss—the government handshake/Yes Boss—the crusher of language,” its portrayal of people so poor they’re reduced to living in their cars, and its refusal to abandon hope (“I believe in the future/We shall suffer no more/Maybe not in my lifetime/But in yours I feel sure”) despite moments of despair (“Sometimes even music/Cannot substitute for tears”). “Further to Fly,” in which “There may come a time/When you’ll be tired/As tired as a dream that wants to die/And further to fly/Further to fly/Further to fly,” is, as Simon says in audio segment #4, an exhausted person’s plea for the strength to keep going, to keep up the fight. Simon’s language may be elliptical, but it is not hard to grasp his intent: empathy with a subjugated people.

Simon and his 17-member band, his biggest touring ensemble ever, playing The Rhythm of the Saints’ optimistic “Born at the Right Time” on the tour of the same name that kept Simon & Co. on the road throughout 1991. Here, Simon and the band’s lead guitarist, the Cameroonian Vincent Nguini, open the song. Nguini, who came aboard on The Rhythm of the Saints, became of one of Simon’s mainstays until his sadly premature death in 2017. You’ll catch a glimpse of Michael Brecker, playing the saxophone-like EWI (electronic wind instrument), as well as the trumpeter Chris Botti.

As Simon and I signed off on our conversation about The Rhythm of the Saints, it was clearer to me than ever that, as I told him at 0:55 of audio segment #3, “What you did in those two albums [Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints] was to go back to your rock & roll roots by means of going around the world.”

“Because that’s where it came from,” Simon replied.

The Rhythm of the Saints was a massive project. It cost $1 million to Graceland’s tab of $750,000, and enlisted as many as 100 musicians. Prior to its October 16, 1990 release, Simon put together his biggest road band ever—seventeen players and singers—for the Born at the Right Time Tour, as it was called, which played internationally from January to December 1991.

Both album and show were embraced by critics. Reviewing the former, Rolling Stone’s John McAlley wrote, “The record requires several listenings before its abstract lines begin to emerge and take on flesh, but when Simon’s literary gambles pay off—as they do to best effect on ‘The Cool, Cool River’—the results are breathtaking.” Covering the show at the Nassau (Long Island) Coliseum, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote, “In the past, Mr. Simon has often come across as a meticulous, painstaking craftsman. Now, with his craft intact, he also makes his music sound like fun.”

Rhythm of the Saints climbed to #4 on Billboard’s Top 200 (Graceland had peaked at #3) and sold two million copies. But it did not capture the public’s heart as Graceland had. Whatever the controversies surrounding Simon’s trips to Johannesburg to record and finally to perform, the world ultimately embraced Graceland not merely as a superb piece of music, but for the part it played in an immense victory: the liberation of Black South Africans.

Graceland played an ambassadorial role as well. As Joseph Shabalala said at a press conference during the Graceland tour’s six-show stand at London’s Albert Hall, “Those who criticize Paul Simon and say he did wrong in South Africa… they themselves are now ashamed because so many people have said this is good. This was a good opportunity to disclose our music all over the world.” If Third World music, world music as a whole, became a heavily marketed, no doubt highly profitable product, and a significant topic of cultural discourse in “developed” countries from the late 1980s through the turn of the century, it was Graceland that got the ball rolling. More complex rhythmically and harmonically than Graceland, its lyrics more opaque (though Graceland’s aren’t exactly an open book), The Rhythm of the Saints has no songs with the crushing force of “The Boy in the Bubble,” the sleekness of “Graceland,” or the whimsicality of “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” The Rhythm of the Saints is hard to cozy up to. “The world hasn’t gotten it yet,” Simon said to me almost three years after its release. “It’s taken a while before people begin to realize that Rhythm of the Saints is more interesting than Graceland.” If it is, they still haven’t, and never will.

Our 1993 conversations were my last encounters with Paul Simon. He went his way, I went mine, he to bury himself for five years in the long-contemplated project he’d put aside to make The Rhythm of the Saints. I refer, of course, to the 1998 musical The Capeman, which Time magazine called “one of the biggest flops in Broadway history.” The Capeman, which cost $11 million to stage, an extravagant amount at that time, closed after a mere 68 shows, costing Simon’s backers, and no doubt Simon himself, untold millions.

Simon, typically, rebounded—recall that this was, and no doubt still is at age 82, “a hard-nosed little guy who refuses to be beaten.” Six studio albums appeared after “The Capeman” debacle, from You’re the One in 2000 to 2023’s Seven Psalms, all of them critical successes and most of them hits—some of them big hits (see note #2). Of the two that didn’t make money, they clearly weren’t intended to: 2018’s In the Blue Light consisted of remakes of 10 of Simon’s more obscure songs, and Seven Psalms was purely a labor of love. Post-Capeman, Simon has put out several live albums and a raft of compilation albums. He gave his final tour in 2018, aged 77; its final show was in his home borough of Queens.

So ends our encounter with Paul Simon, from the cradle to what I hope remains a very distant grave. These five chapters have taken me well more than a month to research and write, as well as to edit down the six hours’ worth of interviews that I conducted with Simon in August 1993.

I’m attaching five audio segments from those interviews. They are deceptively short—when your brain is as active as Simon’s, it doesn’t take long to fire off a plethora of ideas, reflections, and arguments.

—In Segment #1, Simon talks about how it seemed frivolous to end his exploration of Third World music after just one album, hence his decision to go to Brazil and make The Rhythm of the Saints.

—Segment #2 contain’s Simon’s explanation of candomblé, the syncretic religion created in the 19th century by Brazilians of African descent, ie. slaves. A good part of Chapter Five is devoted to an exploration of candomblé. I’ll refer again to David Byrne’s delightful 1989 documentary Ilê Aiyê, about the long-lived candomblé group of that name.

—Segment #3 is about Olodum, the candomblé drum ensemble with whom Simon recorded The Rhythm of the Saints’ first track, “The Obvious Child” One feature of “The Obvious Child” that was immediately obvious to me, and which Simon confirmed, is a vocal lick from a 1957 doo-wop hit that Simon loved as a kid, the Charts’ “Deserie.” He enjoyed smuggling of a bit of doo-wop into Brazilian music.

—In Segment #4, Simon offers his opinion that The Rhythm of the Saints is Graceland’s equal, if not superior—"more interesting than Graceland,” is the phrase he uses—and discusses a handful of what he considers The Rhythm of the Saints’ best songs.

—In Segment #5, Simon reluctantly discusses his hopes and fears for the project that was to follow The Rhythm of the Saints: the 1998 Broadway musical The Capeman, his greatest-ever failure.

There are a number of other segments which didn’t find their way into the piece but are nonetheless interesting, some very interesting. I plan to go through them and, within a few days, publish them as a “Postscript.”

1. Byrne’s film takes its name from, and is largely about, Ilê Aiyê, the original bloco afro, or Brazilian musical/cultural/political troupe, of which there are now many. Founded in 1974 in Salvador, the capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia, Ilê Aiyê remains very much a presence in the city. Blocos afro celebrate not merely Afro-Brazilian, but global, black culture. Like Olodum and other blocos afro, Ilê Aiyê varies greatly in size, from a few dozen celebrants to a few hundred, depending on the occasion. The blocos afro, especially Ilê Aiyê, are a major feature of carnaval, Brazil’s most popular holiday, which annually draws many millions (Rio de Janeiro’s 2018 carnaval alone drew 6 million celebrants). But the blocos afro assemble on many other occasions as well.

2. Simon’s 2011 album So Beautiful or So What, while not on the same artistic level as Graceland or Rhythm of the Saints, was, in part, an exploration of the, yes, West African music popularized by the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré on albums such as Touré’s 1990 African Blues. Touré, sometimes called “the African John Lee Hooker,” collaborated with a number of American blues and roots musicians, including, most notably, Ry Cooder on the 1994 album Talking Timbuktu. By the time Simon recorded So Beautiful or So What, it was too late to bring Touré aboard; he died in 2006. So Beautiful or So What, which also made forays into Indian music, became Simon’s most popular album since Rhythm of the Saints. It entered Billboard’s Top 200 at #4, Simon’s highest chart debut ever—until his next album, 2016’s Stranger to Stranger, which entered the Top 200 at #3. All of which showed that Paul Simon, seventy-five years old in 2016 (and still following his muse into genres largely unfamiliar to the Western public), had not lost his gift for combining quality with commercial appeal.

3. Like Ilê Aiyê, Olodum is not merely a musical troupe, but a cultural collective dedicated to celebrating and preserving Bahia’s African heritage. “The Obvious Child” was recorded in Salvador’s Pelourinho Square, which has an infamous history. “Pelourinho” is Portuguese for “pillory.” During and after Brazil’s years as a Portuguese colony, the square was the site of a whipping post; here, Afro-Brazilians were beaten for alleged crimes. And auctioned: Brazil achieved independence in 1822, but did not abolish slavery until 1888.

In order to record Olodum in Pelourinho Square, the engineer/producer Phil Ramone (Roy Halee, who recorded the rest of Rhythm of the Saints, was otherwise engaged) rented an elderly eight-track tape deck and hung microphones from the telephone poles that lined Pelourinho Square.