The Private Canon: The Cosmic Chill of "Night Game"

This post is part of a series.

Among Paul Simon's many gifts is to make complicated music sound natural, accessible, inevitable. There is a line of criticism, which I think he has joined himself, that he can get overly fussy—I seem to remember him telling an interviewer that Hearts and Bones represented his realization, after the musically ambitious-to-a-fault One-Trick Pony, that he could write more simple harmonies and still be satisfied, an epiphany that was surely a gateway to his next breakthrough, Graceland (and then, in turn, for the even better The Rhythm of the Saints, which arguably veers back into compositional complexities and thornier textures but still goes down like a cool drink).

I share some of the misgivings voiced in this fairly harsh Paul Nelson review of Still Crazy After All These Years, the last stand in Simon's remarkably brief career as a '70s singer/songwriter, and arguably the least of his three albums from that decade (I'd rank them Paul Simon > There Goes Rhymin' Simon > Still Crazy). There's a lot of would-be Randy Newman snark here, either spoiled by slick production ("Have a Good Time") or novelty lyrics ("50 Ways"), and then, abruptly, at the end of each album side, the po-faced sincerity of "Night Game" and "Silent Eyes." But even Simon's mixed bags overflow with gems, and I'd put "Night Game" in the overlooked treasures pile.

As with all the songs I like, it's about the sound first: Simon finger-picking a lilting seven-beat pattern (3/4 alternating with 4/4) on a quiet electric guitar and whispering his lyrics in a low double-track vocal. The only other sound is a bass guitar, woven imperceptibly alongside the lead. The chords start simply, with a few subtle snags (the E7 after the G under "tied"), but it's not until the bridge that the chords get cosmic, more or less around the time the lyrics—about a pitcher who dramatically expires mid-game—zoom out, as if for an aerial view of a baseball diamond shining at the center of a surrounding void. The song is in D but the bridge starts in A-minor, then makes some heroic leaps: from B-flat-major-seventh, through a G-minor and D-minor, to B-major-seventh, then out of that through the tritone leap to E7, A7, and back to D. It's breathtaking, and I think even a musical layperson can hear it. (It starts at :52 above.)

There's been a tendency to hear this song, as Paul Nelson put it, as "unintentionally hilarious." And certainly its somber valorization of death in the line of duty may invite a smirk. But I hear it as both a deadpan provocation (the way he bluntly drops the big news in the first verse, "the pitcher died," is a dare-you-to-laugh moment) and a chilly, Olympian meditation on insignificance and transience. Again, it's all in that bridge, in which the "night turned cold"—Simon hits that "k" consonant with onomatopoeic precision—and the song's perspective pulls back to consider the age of the stadium (old), the color of the stars ("white as bones"), the fleeting "screams" of fans (an unsettling double reference which collapses cheering and grief into one). The effect is very much like that shot in Hitchcock's The Birds in which he leaves the bloody action on the ground for a placid bird's-eye view of the devastation. And it's clear that Simon is mourning something more than an unfortunate pitcher or a lost season.

Toots Thieleman's harmonica solo is garrulous where Simon's melody is taciturn—we might hear this antic noodling as illustrating the flurry of activity that would have accompanied an actual mid-game death, or as simply unleashing the roiling anxieties the rest of the song so coolly contains. Above all, though, it is the bruised, wintry sound of Thieleman's harp over the sad chords that fits the song like a—well, like a glove.