There is a moment in “The Boy in the Bubble” — about forty-five seconds in — where the accordion hits and the drums kick and suddenly you are somewhere you have never been but recognize completely, and that is the trick Paul Simon pulled off in 1986 that nobody has quite managed since.
Johannesburg, February 1985
Simon flew to South Africa on a bootleg cassette and a hunch. A friend had passed him a tape of township jive — mbaqanga — and he couldn’t stop listening. He went to Johannesburg, mostly alone, and started recording with musicians he had never met. Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The Boyoyo Boys. Stimela. Ray Phiri, whose guitar playing on “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” is one of the great understated performances in American pop.
The sessions were tracked at Ovation Studios in Johannesburg and later overdubbed at various New York studios — The Hit Factory, A&R Recording — with engineer Roy Halee, who had been Simon’s recording partner since the Simon and Garfunkel days. Halee had a gift for making records sound like they were recorded in a room you wanted to be in, not a room you were paying by the hour. That quality is all over Graceland.
Simon brought in a few American players for the New York overdubs. Adrian Belew plays guitar on “I Know What I Know.” Los Lobos appear on “All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints,” though they were famously unhappy with how the collaboration was credited. The Everly Brothers show up for “Graceland,” the title track, and their harmonies land in a way that feels both out of time and exactly right.
What It Actually Sounds Like
The record is not a genre exercise. Simon wasn’t trying to make an African album. He was trying to make a Paul Simon album with a rhythm section that moved differently than anything he’d worked with before. The bass playing — particularly Bakithi Kumalo’s fretless work on “You Can Call Me Al” — is so far forward in the mix it becomes structural. That low-mid warmth is there on a decent system, but on a really good one you hear how much space Halee left around each instrument. Everything has its own air.
“Crazy Love, Vol. II” is the one that always gets me. It’s the quietest track, Phiri’s guitar wandering around a minor chord while Simon sings about facts, trains, the ordinary accumulation of a life — and it never resolves into anything tidy, which is why it’s still interesting forty years on.
The album attracted significant controversy at the time. The cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa was in full effect, and Simon had recorded there without consulting the African National Congress. Artists United Against Apartheid were vocal. Simon maintained he was paying musicians above union scale and giving them international exposure. The argument was real and not fully resolvable. Quincy Jones said he’d done the right thing. Harry Belafonte said he hadn’t. Both of them were partly correct.
The Sonic Argument for Vinyl
The CD sounds a little bright to me — something about how the cymbals sit in the high end got clipped in early mastering. The original vinyl, cut from the analog masters, is warmer and wider. The 2015 25th Anniversary remaster improved the digital version considerably, and that’s the one worth streaming if vinyl isn’t on the table tonight. But if you have the original pressing and a decent phono stage, play that. The accordion on “The Boy in the Bubble” breathes differently.
Graceland went on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1987 and sold somewhere north of sixteen million copies. None of that is why it still sounds the way it sounds on a quiet night. It sounds the way it sounds because Simon was genuinely chasing something he couldn’t name, and the musicians he found in Johannesburg were already living there.