A return to Graceland

Paul Simon's remarkable crossover album celebrates its quarter century, and the singer wants to take it on tour next year. Round up the gang, writes Andrew Donaldson

The call has come from across the Atlantic, from Paul Simon, no less. Where are the Boyoyo Boys? Find them. We can't do this without them ... This was the second time in more than a quarter of a century that Simon and his management had gone searching for the township stars. It was they who had initially put that infectious earworm in Simon's head.

A friend had given him an unmarked cassette of an SA compilation album, Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II, in mid-1984 and he would listen to it in his car, driving between Long Island and Manhattan. "It was a happy instrumental music that reminded me of 1950s rhythm and blues, which I have always loved," he told the New York Times in August 1986. "By the end of the summer I was scat-singing melodies over the tracks."

One track in particular, Gumboots, stuck fast, and Simon found himself not only humming along, but coming up with lyrics. "I thought that the group, whoever it was, would be interesting to record with. And so I went on a search to find out who they were."

Simon's record company put him in touch with SA producer Hilton Rosenthal, who not only identified the group as the Boyoyo Boys but sent Simon albums by a dozen other local acts. Impressed, he flew to Johannesburg in February 1985 with recording engineer Roy Halee. And so began the creative process that led to Graceland, the vibrant, award-winning album in which Simon seamlessly and somewhat controversially fused SA and US music styles. It was more than just a successful album that rebooted Simon's flagging career - it is now widely regarded as a pivotal moment in popular culture.

Today Graceland sounds like any other Paul Simon album, albeit one with a strong African influence. We forget, though, the force with which it blew open Western ears to music half a world away. That opening blast of accordion, bass and drums in The Boy in the Bubble and the chaotic imagery of Simon's lyrics - that stuff about lasers in the jungle and soldiers and billionaires, baboon hearts and bombs in baby carriages; who knows what it meant? But it all came together rather beautifully in the opening lines of the chorus, These are the days of miracle and wonder/This is the long-distance call.

Welcome, then, to the global village.

Graceland was a worldwide success, topping charts on both sides of the Atlantic. It won the 1986 Grammy Award for Album of the Year, while the title track picked up the 1987 Grammy Award for Record of the Year. Plans for the 25th anniversary celebrations of Graceland are now under way. A remastered version was released recently, and Simon has announced he will tour the album early next year in much the same way he did with the 1987 tour - taking as many of the SA musicians who appeared on the album as possible.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose involvement with the singer led directly to international success, spring immediately to mind. But there were others: guitarist Ray Phiri and drummer Isaac Mtshali, both from Stimela, and Tau Ea Matsekha's Bakithi Khumalo, whose fretless bass runs gave Graceland much of its heartbeat, wound up in New York as members of Simon's backing band. Before that, Simon had recorded in Johannesburg with General MD Shirinda & The Gaza Sisters, Lesotho's Tau Ea Matsekha and, of course, the Boyoyo Boys - Daniel Vilakazi, Vusi Xhosa, Petrus Maneli, Lulu Masilela and Phillip Msiza.

Just as he did in 1985, Simon flew unheralded into Johannesburg in July this year for a Graceland reunion concert featuring Hugh Masekela and Ladysmith Black Mambazo at the SABC studios in Auckland Park. He brought filmmaker Joe Berlinger who shot the gig, before an audience of about 300, for inclusion as a DVD in an anniversary edition of the album to be released by Sony Legacy next year. The Boyoyo Boys, sadly, were not present.

Last month, shortly before his 70th birthday, Simon told Billboard: "[Berlinger's] documentary took me back to the artistic aspects and the political aspects of making Graceland and the controversy that surrounded it and how it was resolved, plus what remains of it and what we learn from it."

There were those who said he shouldn't have come here in the first place, and charged that he had violated the UN cultural boycott. Simon knew the risks from the outset, and later remarked: "At first I thought: it's too bad this isn't from Zimbabwe or Zaire or Nigeria, because life would be simpler ... I later learnt that the black musicians' union took a vote as to whether they wanted me to come. They decided that my coming would benefit them, because I could help to give SA music a place in the international musical community similar to that of reggae."

At this time, black SA music was slowly chipping away at the fringes of international pop culture with releases like 1985's The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, an indispensable compilation that featured, among others, Mahlathini, Amaswazi Emvelo and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

More controversially, the British producer Malcolm McLaren had remixed and over-dubbed a Boyoyo Boys' track, Puleng, passing it off as his own work on his 1983 album, Duck Rock. Retitled Double Dutch, it was a No 1 hit in the UK. The Boyoyo Boys and their record company sued, and the case reached the high court before McLaren capitulated.

But, on the whole, the music of black South Africa - too foreign for conventional Western ears - was not leaving the townships in a hurry any time in 1985.

Simon's career, too, was in a bit of a rut. His previous 1983 album, Hearts and Bones, had not performed well. But there were benefits to the album's commercial failure. With reduced expectations from the public, he had new freedom to experiment. The Boyoyo Boys provided the catalyst for a more "improvisational" approach.

The February 1985 Johannesburg sessions were chaotic. A number of groups auditioned and, frustrated with attempts to express his ideas through translators, Simon decided to work only with musicians who could understand English.

This almost put paid to Ladysmith Black Mambazo's involvement. In a 2005 documentary, Paul Simon: Graceland, the group's leader, Joseph Shabalala, revealed how he'd struggled to create a vocal arrangement around Simon's ideas for the song Homeless. Eventually, late at night, in their hotel, he encouraged his group to just "do what we know. Just give them what we know ... then they will give us what they know". The arrangement that followed earned Simon's instant approval and was the one the world got to know.

The songs with Shabalala and his group - Homeless and Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes - were the most rewarding and successful of the Graceland collaborations. But the contributions from the other artists were no less significant - the thumping accordion jive with which Tau Ea Matsekha opened the album, General MD Shirinda & The Gaza Sisters with I Know What I Know, and the Boyoyo Boys with Gumboots.

These artists would share songwriting credits with Simon. Given that Graceland went platinum five times in the US and the UK, as well as topping charts the world over, the royalties would not have been insubstantial. Which may explain Ray Phiri's unhappiness with Simon over Graceland, particularly the title track.

Interviewed in June this year, Phiri claimed Simon came up with the lyrics, but the melody was his - or rather, his father's, who taught him the tune back in 1964. And he told this newspaper: "There's bad blood with Paul Simon. He never gave me credit on the album for the songs I wrote, and we hardly got any royalties. But maybe I wouldn't have been able to handle all that wealth. I sleep at night, I have my sanity and I enjoy living. The big rock 'n roll machine did not munch me."

Unmunched or not, the bad blood did not prevent Phiri from performing at that SABC concert. Music industry insiders will not go on the record over Phiri's complaints but they do roll their eyes and mutter on about "stuck records". To be fair to Phiri, however, Los Lobos, the Tex-Mex group who performed on one of the album's two non-African tracks, have also accused Simon of stealing their work. Simon suggested they take the matter to court. Twenty-five years later, Los Lobos still have not done so.

Such incidents serve perhaps to indicate the difficulties in projects that attempt to bridge cultures. When Graceland was released, Simon was accused of "tourism" and of exploiting township music for financial gain - a charge that seems unfair when you consider that, for the Johannesburg sessions, he paid the musicians close on $200 an hour - triple the US rate.

The commissars who enforced the cultural boycott did, in fact, briefly blacklist Simon for working in South Africa - but this was reversed after Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela rallied to Simon's defence, and the singer agreed not to perform in SA. He later donated all proceeds from the US leg of the tour to various charities and causes, including anti-apartheid organisations.

But perhaps what rankled Simon's critics the most was that Graceland was an artistic rather than a "political" triumph.

Years later, the singer would say: "What emerged from Graceland as an album and a tour was that, for the most part, it made a very powerful point - gently. It wasn't an album that said, 'There is terrible evil here.' It said, 'There is incredible beauty here.' That was a very powerful point in conjunction with the anger that the world directed towards South Africa."

The Graceland tour rolled into SA in January 1992 after the UN boycott was lifted. The first concert, at Ellis Park, drew some 40000 fans. "Most black South Africans," the New York Times noted, "could not afford to pay up to $30 for a ticket or, lacking cars, to travel from the outlying black townships." And so, most of Simon's audience was young and white.

Whether this will be the case next year, when and if Graceland returns to SA, remains to be seen. The music, though, will have lost nothing of the miracle and wonder.