by Kevin Burton
OK, so this is what I get for digging into my favorite songs.
First, Happy birthday to singer-songwriter Art Garfunkel, born on this day in 1941. I do not have a present for him today, but I have been pondering within his great gift to us.
It was the gift of Garfunkel the singer, and the songwriter Jimmy Webb; the song “All I Know,” a tune that went to number 9 in October 1973.
I have written before about how the greatest songs leave a space for the listener, so he or she can walk in and feel welcomed and at home.
In the case of All I Know, it appears that a lot of the furnishings within are things that I dreamed up and brought with me.
What I received as deep lyrical thoughts about life and love, death, vulnerability, encouragement, friendship, disappointment, perseverance, endings and the rhythms of time, was intended by the writer as just another love song.
“Webb was smitten with the Welsh beauty Rosemarie Frankland, who was Miss World in 1961,” explains the song’s Wikipedia page. “She wasn’t interested, but Webb took his best shot, writing a song about her that he played for her in a romantic setting at the Dorchester Hotel in London. After he played the song, Frankland declared it “silly,” leaving him crestfallen.”
My first thought: any woman who would call that song silly is far too shallow to live happily ever after with a man as insightful as Jimmy Webb.
Second thought: “crestfallen” is also a good way to describe me after I heard the origins of the song.
But that latter didn’t last long for I have moved into the song and made it my own.
Consider the song’s beginning:
“I bruise you, you bruise me, we both bruise too easily, too easily to let it show. I love you and that’s all I know.”
Isn’t that the tragedy of the human condition codified succinctly and beautifully?
You hear “We go on hurting each other. Making each other cry, hurting each other, without ever knowing why” from “Hurting Each Other” by the Carpenters and you see there is a certain similarity.
But with the Webb lyric you get visual evidence of the pain. Plus, includes the human instinct to hide the hurt – “too easily to let it show.” How brilliant is that?
When I thought Garfunkel had written the song, I thought the line “all my plans have fallen through, all my plans depend on you” was a reference to Paul Simon.
That’s not true, but it was the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel that brought All I Know to his attention.
“On his flight back to the United States (from visiting with the beauty queen), Webb read the latest issue of Rolling Stone, which revealed that Simon & Garfunkel were splitting up. His spirits lifted as he realized Garfunkel would need songs for his first solo album,” according to the song’s Wikipedia page.
“Art had been acting for a while after the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel,” Webb told Mojo in an interview, quoted from Ultimate Classic Rock. “He wanted to get back into music. He was calling songwriters up to San Francisco to play songs for him.”
“All the hottest writers were there – Stephen Bishop, James Taylor, David Crosby and Graham Nash. He was discarding songs right and left. I sat at the piano and played just about everything I had. Nothing interested him,” Webb said.
“After a couple of hours, dozens of songs and a couple of Baptist hymns had played out, I remembered a song written for a girl who had broken my heart. The song had been spoiled for me as the romance soured, but in a moment of desperation I pulled it out and … Art loved it. ‘All I Know’ went on to be his first solo hit. We have been close friends and collaborators ever since.”
Think of the inevitability of death, and the seeming inevitability of certain lesser earthly deaths. Think of the mind-altering shock of sudden separation, and the gut-wrenching slog through its aftermath, and hear Webb’s:
“But the ending always comes at last. Endings always come too fast. They come too fast but they pass too slow I love you and that’s all I know.”
When you boil it all down to the essentials, it all comes down to love.
That’s just too deep a place to include Miss World.
There has been precious little written about All I Know. So I was thrilled when Garfunkel mentioned it in a two-part interview with Bob Costas on the old NBC show “Later.” But Garfunkel said, “I did a Jimmy Webb called All I know in the 70s I think that came off good,” without elaborating.
“Artie is the intellectual’s intellectual,” Webb said, and this came out in the Costas interviews, a thoughtful review of the S&G days, the complicated relationship with Simon, his perfectionism, his solo career and what it all means to him and to us, his listeners.
“We like to think we’re making a contribution to the world. And I feel like I put my sound and my very spirit into the air,” Garfunkel told Costas. “I feel wonderful about that fact.”
“I loved the 60s I thought they were colorful and full of a breakout spirit and I love that I was part of that breaking out.”
“I love that we got so crazy about being artful in our albums, like the Beatles did. We broke the rules. That’s a fabulous aspect of my history.”
“When the singer’s gone, let the song go on,” Garfunkel sang in All I Know. He’s still very much with us at 83, but his songs will live on forever.
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