Paul Simon - Jonah

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Paul Simon - Jonah, taken from the 1980 movie One-Trick Pony.
Paul Simon's One-Trick Pony is a morose little art film about a minor Sixties pop star, Jonah Levin, who blows his only chance for a comeback by refusing to let a hack producer (played knowingly by Lou Reed) "commercialize" him. This moody, downbeat film is part road movie and part tribute to the Woody Allen school of Manhattan angst. Yet at its center is a question that Allen wouldn't dream of asking: Is the pop life just for kids? After Jonah's estranged wife contemptuously suggests that he's too old at thirty-four to want to be Elvis Presley, the singer meekly defends his commitment to music by retorting, "It's what I do."
One-Trick Pony's soundtrack album explains exactly what Jonah Levin-Paul Simon does, and its ten songs carefully weigh the pros and cons of taking rock & roll seriously when one's well on the way to middle age. But Simon offers no definite conclusions. At the end of the film, Jonah gives up music to become a full-time provider for his family, and we sense he's giving up the only work that will ever mean anything to him. Simon accepts his disappointment with sorrow and resignation.
The soundtrack's two major songs, "Ace in the Hole" and "Late in the Evening,". "Ace in the Hole" is a sly rock-gospel composition that combines the martial drumming of "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" with the gospel exuberance of "Gone at Last." In "Late in the Evening," Simon compiles flashbacks of the moments that made him fall in love with pop music: remembering his mother listening to the radio, his harmonizing on a street corner, and getting high in a club and blowing away the audience. One-Trick Pony's title track, a live folk-funk production like "Ace in the Hole," is almost as powerful. Here, Simon works the "one-trick pony" metaphor into a double image: the hapless performer toiling on tour and the spirit of rock & roll incarnate.
If the aforementioned compositions evoke Simon's spiritual commitment to rock, the LP's seven pop-slanted songs display a more mundane viewpoint. "Jonah," "How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns" and "Long, Long Day" are bittersweet "adult" numbers that flirt with a Middle European modality as they further refine the shimmering, angst-under-glass folk-pop of Still Crazy after All These Years. Such tunes wistfully describe the rigors of a musician's life on the road--the loneliness, the physical exhaustion, the sense of futility and fear of obsolescence -- all the reasons, in other words, for hanging up one's guitar and getting a "real" job. Simon sings these ballads, which are weary to the point of effeteness, in a soft, whimpering croon.
"That's Why God Made the Movies" and "Oh, Marion" are lighter exercises in the hip-jive style of Michael Franks. A traditional spiritual, "Nobody," and the bluesy "God Bless the Absentee" boast spare folk-pop arrangements and sophisticated wordplay. Except for the bad grammar of "How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns" (an otherwise exquisite mood piece), these seven compositions are models of contemporary songwriting craft: the pop-tune equivalents of New Yorker vignettes.
(Stephen Holden -- Rolling Stone 16 october 1980)
Band;
Paul Simon: Vocals & Guitar
Tony Levin: Bass & Vocals (Background)
Richard Tee: Piano, Keyboards, Vocals, Vocals (Background)
Eric Gale: Guitar
Lyrics:
Half and hour you change your strings and tune up
Sizing the room up
Checking the bar
Local girls unspoken conversations
Misinformation
Plays the guitar
They say Jonah was swallowed by a whale
But I say there's no truth to that tale
I know Jonah
Was swallowed by a song
No one lets their dreams be taken lightly
They hold them tightly
Warm against cold
One more year of traveling 'round this ciruit
Then you can work it into gold
Here's to all the boys who came along
Carrying soft guitars in cardboard cases
All night long
Do you wonder where those boys have gone?
Do you wonder where those boys have gone?

[@ellenripley71]

I love this song, thank you for sharing!

[@yvettesavo18]

I've never heard of or seen this movie.

[@felixhayman5934]

Such a wonderful song, all musos can relate

[@herb6677]

my favorite Paul Simon Song ever, to be followed by St. Judy's Comet, which is a similar mood and The Cool Cool River at number 3

[@garywoollard810]

Good choices Sir