Review: Paul Simon Live @ Paso Robles Faire Grounds (Guest Post)

The following is a guest review written by Hillary's mom, Peggy.

The baby boomers were coming out tonight, and they were finally on screen. Their fame was not the Andy Warhol 15 minutes they had longed for, it was more like 15 seconds. They were the briefest of stars as they strolled into the arena, captured on the big screens that would soon feature their tiny icon: Paul Simon. Women—and some of the men -- wore flowers in their hair. There were vintage clothes too, Nehru shirts and Renaissance faire costumes, and of course, sandals on every pair of feet. Many of the men had long, carefully groomed gray beards, and they covered their bald heads with baseball caps. Some were 33% larger than they had been when Artie and Paul sang us through our youth. But as each well- weathered couple walked toward their seats, straining in the growing dusk to see their number, the excitement in the crowd was so strong that it could have walked on its own.

Amos Lee presented a conscientious and uplifting opening, singing a few love songs that were carefully tailored to give old ears just enough new sound. But when he stepped away from the crowd and Paul Simon’s band came out, there was not a seated boomer in the entire stadium. The applause was thunderous, even in an open arena. The woman next to me hooted in my right ear so loudly and so continuously that I wished I had the foresight to bring my earplugs for these tumultuous moments between songs.

And our Paul was exactly the same. He was still diminutive and perfect, splaying his fingers as he always did to illustrate a particular point in a song. In his 40 years of making our music, he had never gyrated, spun in circles, or jumped in the air, he had always just talked to us like a good friend would, a good friend who had the kind of wisdom we were hungry to hear. He had always just stood at the microphone and communicated—kind of singing, kind of talking, but always telling us something so insightful, yet so portable, that we could always take it with us and tell other people what he had told us.

And in his sing/talk style, he told us old and new stories; about Cecilia, how untrue she was, about Julio down in the school yard. He asked us who was going to love us when our looks were gone, a relevant question for sure. He told us about what it meant to be a parent, and how our children, much as we love them, are the burden of our generation. He told us again about the boxer and we all sang through that one, one tuneless voice outranking another. He took us back, and he took us forward. He sang some new songs but not too many. We all wanted his old songs. Shortly into the performance, the crowd response to the old songs was so shattering that he just gave up and took us on back, before the paunches, and the botox. He also tossed out a few nuggets from Graceland. When he sang about the diamonds on the soles of our shoes, one pair of boomers was so transported by the drums and the perfect syncronicity of the band that they rose to their feet, gently waltzed across the stadium and out the exit, presumably overcome by passion.

The man next to the hooting woman had come in puffing a giant cigar. He must have removed the cigar, because he became a crying child as the concert went on. Each time Paul would try to leave us, throwing kisses all around and thanking us profusely the man would cry, “Oh PLEEEEZE don’t go….PLEEEZE come back. PLEEZE. PLEEZE.” I didn’t want to embarrass his wife by looking at him too closely, but it seemed to me like he was on his knees in supplication. And for three curtain calls, Paul came back and sang to us, about the bridge over troubled water, and about how it felt to slip slide away as we got nearer and nearer our destination. And when he finally made his final exit, the man cried “THANK YOOOOOO, THANK YOOOO, THANK YOOOOO” in that same plaintive warble. I was so glad that he did the important thing. He put the baby back in the boomer. If there is one thing I know about myself and my peers, we will continue, with every fiber of our collective being, to stave off maturity in any form. I was glad that an articulate representative was there to voice my own sentiments.

“PAULLLL. THANK YOOOO!”