Homeward Bound: A Salute to the Songs of Paul Simon (Ken Ehrlich Productions, filmed April 2022, aired on CBS-TV December 21,2 022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 CBS-TV ran the awkwardly titled program Homeward Bound: A Grammy Salute to the Songs of Paul Simon. I had just started watching it when my husband Charles came home from work during the second song, the Jonas Brothers’ version of “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.” The songs of Paul Simon are among the greatest parts of our cultural heritage from the second half of the 20th century – he’s at the same level as John Lennon and Paul McCartney (jointly and severally), Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson and Stevie Wonder – but they’re also tough nuts for cover artists to crack because most of them admit to only one sort of interpretation. These lumbering tribute shows to various artists generally produce a few horribly awful or misguided performances as well as great ones; in last night’s Simon tribute there were no outright dogs but also very few performances that illuminate anything new to the songs. One terrific exception was the performance of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Stevie Wonder (his second song of the night, after “Mrs. Robinson” with Sheila E. and the Jonas Brothers). Wonder had already recorded “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at least twice, in 1970 at the Talk of the Town nightclub and later as part of a benefit concert called Help for Haiti (visible on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYscleK5hqo), but last night’s show (originally recorded in April 2022, which explains the smattering of audience members wearing masks) featured a dynamite heavy-set Black female gospel singer whose name I scrawled down as Lutecy.

My husband Charles was able to find her real name online – it’s Ledisi – and she delivered one of the best performances of the evening, really standing out in the second chorus of the song during which Wonder played, not his usual organ or synthesizer (on previous tribute shows he’s played a miniature synthesizer that looks like a laptop) but a normal piano. Wonder played it like a man possessed of the spirit, and like Aretha Franklin’s 1970 Live at Fillmore West version (which unfortunately omitted one of the song’s three verses) they returned the song to its Black church roots even though it was written by a white Jewish guy from New York. The concert began with Brad Paisley’s version of “Kodachrome,” the hit single from Simon’s second solo album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and he stuck close to Simon’s original version except for the added country twang in Paisley’s voice. Then the Jonas Brothers came out for “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and they did an infectious job on it. I particularly found the lead Jonas Brother’s electric blue suit – and the basket he flashed under it – appealing for aesthetic reasons, which is the whole appeal of a boy band even though, unlike most of the others, the Jonas Brothers do play their own instruments (some of them, anyway).

Before the Jonas Brothers performed Woody Harrelson, one of the many guest hosts sprinkled throughout the evening (they ranged from Dustin Hoffman, whose star-making film The Graduate included Simon and Garfunkel songs even though Hoffman got the film’s release date wrong – it was 1967, not 1968 – to Oprah Winfrey, who said she first heard “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” in high school as she was breaking up with her then-boyfriend), warbled a few bars of “Old Friends” in the middle of his talk. Afterwards the First Couple of Country Music, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, came out for a duet on “The Boxer” – and though I don’t recall ever having heard them in duet before, their voices blended beautifully even though his overpowered hers in the mix. The next song was “A Hazy Shade of Winter” by Susanna Hoffs, formerly of The Bangles, who brought a ferocious punk energy to what was already one of Simon and Garfunkel’s hardest-rocking songs. (Charles said he’d heard that song for years and not realized Paul Simon wrote it.) After that Sting came out for a version of “America,” the haunting travel song from the 1968 Simon and Garfunkel album Bookends, and Billy Porter dedicated his rendition of “Love Me Like a Rock” to his mother. He also explained he was brought up as a Pentecostal Christian and so mom didn’t take too kindly to him being Gay, though eventually she came around.

After that Stevie Wonder came out with “Mrs. Robinson,” and then Bonnie Raitt and Brad Paisley duetted on an early Simon solo song, “Something So Right.” Next on the program was that incandescent version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Stevie Wonder and Ledisi (whose full name is Ledisi Anibade Young and who has recorded, among other things, a cover of Nina Simone’s “Four Women”), and after that came a version of “Mother and Child Reunion” – an early Paul Simon solo song and, I believe, the first reggae song ever written and recorded by a white artist – by two genuine Jamaicans, Jimmy Cliff and rapper Shaggy. Afterwards the show organizers brought two legends of New Orleans soul, Irma Thomas and Trombone Shorty, for “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” (inevitably), and then Eric Church came on for a respectful version of the show’s title song, “Homeward Bound.” (I can’t hear that song without thinking of the anecdote between Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. Dylan asked Simon why he wasn’t performing live in those days, and Simon complained, “Because audiences would come and want to hear me do ‘The Sounds of Silence,’ ‘Scarborough Fair’ and ‘Homeward Bound.’” Dylan replied, “But if I went to a Paul Simon concert, those are the songs I’d want to hear you do!”) The next band featured was the country group Little Big Town, who did “Slip Sliding Away” and, as usual, their two women sang with far more power and emotion than their two men.

After that came a tribute to Simon’s ground-breaking 1986 album Graceland, which swept the Grammy Awards and won Album of the Year even though it had been controversial because Simon not only recorded it with South African musicians, he actually did some of the recording in South Africa, thereby violating the international boycott against apartheid. The controversy became sillier when Simon’s critics conceded that they’d have had no trouble with Simon recording the same songs with the same musicians in the U.S. or Britain, and in the event Simon was right: the album’s international success led to a boom of interest in Black South Africa’s culture and may have helped hasten apartheid’s end. The Graceland tribute featured South African-born Dave Matthews, Angelique Kidjo and the a cappella vocal group Take 6, who kicked off the proceedings with their own version of the song “Homeless,” performed by the Black South African group Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the original album. Afterwards Matthews and Kidjo duetted on “Under African Skies,” a fascinating song choice given that the original recording was a duet between Simon and Linda Ronstadt – and Kidjo’s grittier version was quite different and equally effective as Ronstadt’s clear country soprano. (I’ve long thought that, out of all the different incarnations of Ronstadt’s voice, she was at her best as a country singer.)

The Graceland tribute ended with Matthews leading the on-stage band in “You Can Call Me Al,” after which Paul Simon himself came onstage and continued the Graceland homage with a version of the title song. Simon announced that he was featuring South African bass player Bakithi Kumato, whom he said was the last surviving member of the original Graceland band. He also paid special tribute to the late Joseph Shabalala, leader and founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who died in 2020 at age 79. Simon’s voice is a shadow of what it once was, though it was still effective enough to put the song across. The next item in Simon’s three-song set was “American Tune,” on which he turned over the lead vocal to the great Rhiannon Giddens (one of my favorite living singers) while playing some surprisingly virtuosic guitar behind her. In line with her mixed ancestry – part African-American, part Native American and part white – Giddens changed the last chorus of “American Tune” (a really beautiful song Simon wanted as the single from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, though Columbia Records then-president Clive Davis didn’t think it was strong enough and made “Kodachrome” the single instead) from referencing having come over on the Mayflower to being brought here involuntarily on a slave ship. (Giddens did a similar transformation to the Johnny Cash-Johnny Horton song “The Vanishing Race,” adding a whole new melodic strain and lyric to assert that Native Americans are not vanishing, but are very much still a part of the American population and culture despite white Americans’ best efforts to commit genocide against them.)

For the final song, Simon did the inevitable “The Sounds of Silence,” playing an instrumental chorus before beginning the famous lyric. I was more than a bit surprised that “Scarborough Fair” was not included, and I was even more disappointed that two people who should have been there weren’t. One was Art Garfunkel – I have no idea what relations between the two of them are like now (there was bitterness over the breakup that sandbagged several later attempts at a reunion) – and the other was Simon’s son Harper, a quite capable singer-songwriter in his own right despite the long shadow of his dad. (Frank Sinatra, Jr., Julian and Sean Lennon and Jakob Dylan have had the same problem.) In fact, I remember discovering Harper Simon on a sampler CD on which I thought, “That guy sounds a lot like Paul Simon,” and I looked at the liner notes and realized it was his son. But those qualms didn’t keep me from being genuinely impressed and moved by this great music and the respectful (if at times a bit too respectful) way the various artists performed it.