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How Graceland saved Paul Simon – and offended the anti-apartheid world
Forged in South Africa, the 1986 masterpiece drew accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’, offence and theft. What were Simon’s intentions?

By Ian Winwood 10 June 2020 • 11:34am - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/concerts/graceland-saved-paul-simon-offended-anti-apartheid-world/

In the summer of 1984, Paul Simon took regular drives from his apartment overlooking Central Park to the town of Montauk, on Long Island, to oversee the construction of a bespoke beachfront property. En route, he listened to a cassette of uncredited mbaqanga street music, from the South African township of Soweto, bearing the title Accordion Jive Hits Vol. II.

“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 favourite tape. I wonder who the band is,” he said. “And that’s when things started to perk up.”

The 43-year-old songwriter had been having a turbulent time of things. His most recent album, Hearts and Bones, from 1983, had stalled at the box office, while his short-lived marriage to Carrie Fisher had fared even worse. The cassette that brightened his drives to Montauk, and which pointed to an exit from the cul-de-sac in which he found himself, had been loaned to him by the songwriter Heidi Berg. She planned to make an album in its style; not just this, she hoped that Paul Simon would produce it.

She was in for a shock. After weeks of evasion, Berg confronted Simon backstage at his concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, in New York, and learned that her grand idea had been kidnapped. Accordion Jive Hits Vol. II was now the genesis of a brand new Paul Simon LP that would utilise the talents of South African musicians. Despite an international boycott occasioned by the apartheid policy, parts of the record would be recorded there too. Aggrieved and bereft, Berg asked Simon: “What’s my end?”

As well as much else, this ungallant episode set the tone for the album that would become Graceland. Throughout a journey marbled with controversy and danger, not to mention music as magical as any from its author’s bejeweled career, Paul Simon carried himself with a ruthless certainty. He believed his decision to harvest the music of a forbidden land was honorable, so pick the bones out of that; to him, the status of the artist was sacrosanct.

“Authoritarian governments on the right, revolutionary governments on the left – they all f--- the artist,” he told Robert Christgau of The Village Voice. “What gives [them] the right to wear the cloak of morality? Their morality comes out of the barrel of a gun.”

Above all else, for Paul Simon, Graceland was a musical enterprise; politics could go hang. In 1985, the singer declined to join Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, Run-DMC, Bob Dylan, and many more, on the hit protest song Sun City, by Artists United Against Apartheid, after learning that its original lyric criticised his friend Linda Ronstadt for performing at the titular venue in the surrogate nation state of Bophuthatswana, in South Africa. Ronstadt offered an apology for her actions, but kept the $500,000 she was paid.

Sun City was written by “Little Steven” Van Zandt, the former and future guitarist with Springsteen’s E Street Band, following a visit to the black townships of Johannesburg in 1984. He later encountered Paul Simon at a party in New York, at which he was asked, “Why are you defending this [Nelson] Mandela guy? He’s obviously a communist.” Simon claimed to know this from speaking to his friend Henry Kissinger. Unimpressed, Little Steven bid the even littler Simon goodnight with the words, “You and Henry Kissinger can go f--- yourselves.”

Armed with his bulletproof political savvy, Paul Simon and engineer Roy Halee arrived in Johannesburg in February 1985 to begin the torturous process of recording Graceland. On an album that featured contributions from more than 50 musicians and singers, a core band featuring guitarist Ray Phiri, drummer Vusi Khumalo, and bassist Bakithi Kumalo assembled at Ovation Studios for 12 days of tryouts with dozens of performers. No matter the quality of the results, Halee’s tape rolled at all times.

The players were paid just under $200 an hour – compared to their usual fee of $15 a day – three times the rate in the United States. Musicians that travelled to New York City and London, for sessions at The Hit Factory and Abbey Road Studios respectively, were flown first-class and billeted in five-star hotels. Upon arriving in Manhattan, percussionist Isaac Mtshali asked Simon how he might obtain a permit to visit Central Park. “You don’t need a permit, you just go. You go anywhere you want,” he was told.

The same could be said for Paul Simon. Having ignored the advice of his friend Harry Belafonte to seek the permission of the leaders of the outlawed resistance movement, the African National Congress – “to beg for the right to passage was against his instinct,” the actor and activist recalled – the American arrived at Ovation Studios with no songs and with only the consent of the South African musicians’ union for company. Crucially, he did not have the blessing of the ANC, nor the United Nations.

By collaborating with township musicians, Simon was in contravention of the UN-approved cultural boycott, established in 1980, the wording of which was unequivocal. Resolution 35/206 stated: “The United Nations Assembly requests all states to prevent all cultural, academic, sporting and other exchanges with South Africa. Appeals to writers, artists, musicians and other personalities to boycott South Africa. Urges all academic and cultural institutions to terminate all links with South Africa.”

The problems that bedeviled Graceland followed its participants across the globe. Summoned to a pub in London, Ray Phiri met representatives of the ANC who told him that he and the other musicians must return to South Africa. Incensed, the guitarist replied, “I am the victim here. How can you victimise the victim twice?” Addressing the reliably testing issue of cultural appropriation, Phiri said that “we used Paul as much as Paul used us. There was no abuse; he came at the right time. He was what we needed to break South African music more into the mainstream market.”

But for others, the quarrel concerned matters other than melody. Stationed in England, in 1983 Dali Tambo, son of the ANC President OB Tambo, joined forces with Jerry Dammers, the keyboardist with The Specials, to found Artists Against Apartheid. In 1986, Tambo helped to organise the UK Freedom Festival, on Clapham Common, at which an audience of more than 50,000 people witnessed sets by Gil Scott-Heron, Sade, Elvis Costello, Peter Gabriel and more.

With Paul Weller and Billy Bragg among their number, in 1987 the organisation the organisation picketed six Paul Simon Concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. “It pained me to be part of that because I’m a Paul Simon fan,” Bragg told the writer and broadcaster Robin Denselow. “But he was on the wrong side of the argument despite his good intentions.”

“What Paul Simon was doing had a beauty to it,” Dali Tambo said in the documentary film Under African Skies. “He had a great idea to mix his rhythms and his music and his ingenuity with some he had found in South Africa. But at that moment in time, it was not helpful. There was this inconvenient thing called apartheid. It got in the way… and this situation was not about Paul Simon. It was about the liberation of South Africa.”

But for all the furor that accompanied Graceland and its subsequent tour – at which sniffer dogs combed each venue in Europe in search of bombs – Simon was hardly the first artist to transgress the South African boycott. Along with a list of Sun City performers that appeared to cover everyone from Frank Sinatra to Status Quo, in 1982 Malcolm McLaren recorded parts of his album Duck Rock in the shunned state. Among his collaborators were the Boyoyo Boys, one of the artists on Accordion Jive Hits Vol. II.

In a case of colonial skullduggery far more flagrant than that leveled against Paul Simon, McLaren was accused of stealing the Boyoyo Boys’ song Puleng, for use as the hit single Double Dutch. (Remunerations were agreed out of court). Conversely, four years later Simon credited the band for the adaptation of the track Gumboots that appeared on Graceland. But it was the American who found himself in the stocks, while McLaren escaped without censure.

“The intensity of the criticism really did surprise me,” he said. “And part of the criticism was, ‘Here’s this white guy from New York who came in and ripped off these poor innocent guys.’”

In point of fact, on Graceland the cries of “Stop! Thief!” came from the United States. The group Good Rockin’ Dopsie and the Twisters, from Louisiana, believed that Simon had appropriated the chord progression from their song My Baby She’s Gone for use on the album’s penultimate track, That Was Your Mother, on which they appeared. Playing the percentages, bandleader Alton Jay Rubin decided to keep his counsel and enjoy the increased exposure rather than cause a scene.

The same could not be said for Los Lobos. After spending a fruitless two days churning through music in the sound room of Amigo Studios, in the San Fernando Valley, the Los Angeles Chicano quintet began playing a well-drilled song in a style similar to Will The Wolf Survive?, from their successful second album How Will The Wolf Survive? As they did so, they were interrupted by a voice from the control room above. “Wait, what’s that? What are you playing there?” asked Paul Simon. “Let’s work on that.”

When Graceland was finally released, so certain were Los Lobos that they were the authors of the album’s sublime (if contextually misplaced) final song, All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints, that they assumed that Simon’s sole writing credit on the inner sleeve was a printing error. Not a bit of it. “Sue me,” said the New Yorker. “See what happens.”

“It was not a pleasant deal for us,” recalled Steve Berlin, the group’s saxophonist. “I mean he quite literally – and in no way do I exaggerate when I say – he stole the song from us.” To this day, the saxophonist remains unimpressed. Paul Simon, he says, is “the world’s biggest prick.”

For music so fully equipped to soothe the savage breast, Simon seemed oblivious to the fires he set while making it. His decision to recruit Linda Ronstadt to duet with him on Under African Skies – for my krugerrands, Graceland’s finest moment – seemed particularly galling. Writing in The Village Voice, Robert Christgau described the pairing as “a slap in the face to the world anti-apartheid movement. A deliberate, considered, headstrong slap in the face.”

But it simply didn’t matter to Paul Simon that she had gone and played Sun City (so to speak). Ronstadt was his friend, and, anyway, parts of the song’s lyric were inspired by stories of her infancy in Tucson, Arizona. Others were less convinced by the track’s gentle and ethereal majesty. Writing in the music trade paper Billboard, one critic likened the collaboration to “using gasoline to put out birthday candles.”

But in the face of mounting criticism, Paul Simon had music as his balm. On May 10 1986, he appeared on Saturday Night Live with the a cappella group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Earlier that week, the two parties had convened at The Hit Factory to record Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes, the final installment of the Graceland sessions, after Warner Bros. Records had delayed the album’s release to the end of the summer. Just days later, Simon stood on the stage of America’s most influential television show as behind him a nonet of South African men danced and sang their unique isicathamiya melodies.

More than anything else – more, even, than the irresistible video for Graceland’s leadoff single, You Can Call Me Al, featuring Chevy Chase – the performance introduced Paul Simon’s new music to coastal America like a crack of thunder on an African plain. “Everyone was kind of in awe,” said Lorne Michaels, the programme’s creator. “It wasn’t like anything that we’d had on the show before. You felt it in the studio; you knew that it was happening in the country. It was just – ‘Boom!’”

Exactly that. A sojourn to South Africa had harvested hours of raw music that took almost 18 months to wrestle into a collection of coherent songs. To do so had required brand-new digital technology and the mountainous skills of Roy Halee. It had required the patience of a statue. And it had required every milligram of talent from one of America’s finest writers. But as listeners from Astoria to Zaire found themselves falling, flying and tumbling in turmoil, saying “Oh, so this is what he means”, Paul Simon finally reached his Promised Land.

In its first six months of release, Graceland sold six million copies. Today, its tally is more than twice that number. Less than two years earlier Simon had told his friend Philip Glass that he was no longer interested in composing hit singles – easy to say, he hadn’t had one since 1977 – yet here he was, the mastermind of a project that featured five of them.

On February 24 1987, the album won the Grammy award for Record of the Year. Standing before an audience of the glittering and the good at the Shrine Auditorium, in Los Angeles, Paul Simon spoke of the musicians with whom he had collaborated. They lived, he said, “under one of the most repressive regimes on the planet today, and still they are able to produce music of great power and nuance and joy.

“I just find that extraordinary, and they have my great respect and love.”