“I have many associations with vinyl, but the most primal one is the connection to my father. My parents owned an acoustic instrument shop in the California hills, and my dad plays banjo, guitar, and so on—Beatles, bluegrass, folk.”
“Though he played all the time when I was young, and plays constantly now in his band the Prozac Mtn Boys, there was a while where he wasn’t listening to music at all. For his birthday in 1986, my sister and I bought him the new Paul Simon LP Graceland in part, I think, to rev him up. Instead, I found myself totally fascinated by that record, slipping it out of the sleeve multiple times per day to place it on the platter and listen again and again.
I was just a boy sitting by the record player, concentrating on the words and the images and all of these sounds I’d never heard before. The album art on the cover—a small image of, what? A fresco maybe? On a large field of off white—doesn’t reveal anything about the contents. But because it’s a record, with a luxurious 12 inches of art, even that small image is enough to get lost in, to use as daydreaming fodder while listening to the album another time through.
I knew nothing about Simon and Garfunkel… but I had heard about South Africa and apartheid while watching the news with my parents. So Graceland became this strange, powerful puzzle about a huge injustice that I could only grasp in broadest outline, the same way I only had a fuzzy understanding of Elvis and his cultural importance. I certainly hadn’t heard of Clifton Chenier or zydeco yet.
The album starts with “The Boy in the Bubble,” which is full of mysterious signifiers—African rhythms, accordion, Simon’s smooth voice, lasers in the jungle, distant constellations, all underlaid with an African chant. I was transfixed, confused, and thrilled at this transmission of foreign sensations, violence and hope transmitted through the record player to my living room. The title song, up next, sounds so fundamentally American, as American as a National guitar, but the comforting textures are transformed by the loneliness of the narrator, even as he hopes for some kind of salvation from the cradle of American music culture.
I read every word of the liner notes eventually: the lyrics, the credits, the story of the album’s creation included on the back cover. I stared at the small hand-tinted photo of Paul Simon, I watched the black record spin out its stories. There was this palpable sense, borne up by the news, that this record was actually an agent of worldwide change—not just the recordings, but the record itself, the copy in my hands, changing South Africa and changing the lives of South Africans, by changing how the world understood what was happening there.
And yet there was nothing overt in the lyrics, there was no demand for change or expression of outrage; instead, it was a deeply humanizing album, braiding Paul Simon’s New York songcraft with Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s African patterns and voices, Los Lobos’ guitar and accordion, Baghiti Khumalo’s bass. It was a grand binding together of people, and a call to the moral collectivism that lay at the root of the hippie ethos—very much my parents’ ethos.
And it was beautiful. The heart of the album is “Homeless,” sung largely in Zulu, where an African choir introduces sorrow and beauty a million miles from anything I’d ever heard before. I’m pretty sure I brought the record to school and played “Homeless” for my class. I memorized every syllable, even the ones I couldn’t even approximate with my own mouth. That was the pure stuff, the feeling that couldn’t be contained, the sense that music makes the world, that the records I bought, the music I listened to mattered.
I’ve been through a few record players since then (so has my dad), but I still have his copy of Graceland, scratched up long ago by a cat named Cousin, stickered with notes from nights Sleepy Kitty has been asked to DJ. The physical album has become a talisman from that time before I played music myself, before I had a collection of my own, before I had a sense of what was cool and what wasn’t, when I was first introduced to the days of miracle and wonder and don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.”
—Evan Sult, Sleepy Kitty
Sleepy Kitty’s sophomore album, Projection Room is in stores now on the Euclid Records imprint.
Sleepy Kitty Official | Facebook | Twitter
PHOTOS: SHERVIN LAINEZ
