Originally entitled “Goin’ Home,” the song’s most important
line is its first, the one about all the crap the young Elvis wannabe pictured
on the cover of its parent album learned at high school. Clearly wanting to get
back to the bumptious bonhomie of the
days with Garfunkel, Simon muses ambiguously about the value of colour versus monochrome in life; does
Kodachrome smear bullshit over inconvenient reality, or is it the indispensable
finishing touch to comprehension? One rather suspects that he loves the notion
too much to let it drop, if something like presidential politics depended on
viewing the world in black-and-white. Markedly smoother, but also more easily graceful, than anything on his
neurotically active first album, harmonies are doubled up and cushioned in
expensive production, as are Roger Hawkins’ drums, Barry Beckett’s woodpecker-nag
keyboards and Allen Toussaint’s wearied eyebrow of a horn arrangement. But then
he goes up a semitone in the chorus and turns it into a hymn, the fly bastard.
Date Record Made
Number Two: 7 July 1973
Number Of Weeks At
Number Two: 2
Record At Number One: “Will
It Go Round In Circles” by Billy Preston
UK Chart Position: B-side
to “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” (which peaked at 7); CBS in the UK correctly
assumed that the BBC wouldn’t play “Kodachrome” for advertising/brand name
reasons
Comments
Post a Comment