from the LP Bookends, Columbia Records, 1968
Amidst the haze of drugs & hormones that was my early adolescence, within the passionate deluge of cognition & vain angst, I found myself running away quite often, before getting locked up anyways. Strange as it may seem, I always pumped myself up for these adventures by listening to particular songs that, I suppose, engaged the more romantic visions of a spontaneous existence inside my mind; this song, along with others like Jefferson Airplane’s “Wooden Ships” and Jimi Hendrix’s “If 6 Was 9” helped focus my thoughts on the sunny possibilities rather than the dire potentials. What’s interesting to me, in hindsight, is that many of them were laced with a certain melancholy or impending doom, this track in particular; I wouldn’t have been able (or willing) to put it into words back then, but I think a part of me was drawn to the danger & detachment of life on the road as much as I was repelled by my parents. It’s almost as if Paul Simon was playing with two different chronologies here: one of the couple’s fictional jaunt across country, the other carried along metaphorically by his tale but representing the passage of time from the mid – late ‘60s. Considering Simon’s long involvement in the folk scene previous to the hippie explosion, and his early interest in the Beats, one has to wonder if the last verse about, “…counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike, they’ve all gone to look for America…” was a slight jab at the fact that the once rare & new journey of self-discovery ala road tripping had become standard and near-stale; they were both known for being rather skeptical and sharp individuals. Whatever their intentions, the repeating chorus at the end of the song, when things are at their most orchestral and dramatic, “...all gone to look for America…all gone to look for A-mer-ica…” still gives me goosebumps from head to toe.
