The Vinyl Diaries

Graceland

I was right about Matthew, his tusk and our mutual love of Tusk. Our first night together with Fleetwood Mac and our Manhattan challenge was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

A week or so after our Tusk date we had a plan to meet at my place again.

When Matthew arrived at my house, neither of us exhibited the bashfulness on display during our first date. There was no time for drinks; no time for records; no time for small talk. We both knew sex was on the menu and we wasted no time getting to it. Matthew had barely made it in the door and we were upstairs, naked on my bed.

Post sex, it was time for a beer, and as I headed to the fridge I told him to pick out a record. He was a bit overwhelmed. The wall of records in my home can be a bit intimidating, but he took to his task as I had done to mine earlier, and dove in headfirst. When he surfaced, Matthew was holding Graceland.

Paul Simon released Graceland towards the end of the summer of 1986, when I was seventeen. It was one of only a handful of albums that were positively ubiquitous that year, and the next. No matter what generation you belonged to, you could not get away from it. In a pre-internet world there weren’t many records that got this much play and attention, and when they found a wide audience, they stuck around. For months.

Matthew would still have been a small child when Graceland was released, so I was surprised by the choice. After he dropped the needle on side one, we sat and listened to a record I hadn’t heard in years. As the album played, we shared our experiences with Graceland and his choice became more clear.

It was decidedly not cool to like Paul Simon amongst my friends at seventeen. I was mostly listening to British imports like the Smiths, Depeche Mode and the Cure, not sixties folk stars. My experience with Graceland was a solitary one, spent mostly in my room in the basement, headphones on, escaping the horrors of high school all by myself.

The album is widely considered Mr. Simon’s best, but it did not come without a bit of controversy. His solo career was at a bit of a low point and he took a big gamble by infusing his sound with a wide variety of styles and influences—and therein lies the problem. He collaborated with dozens of musicians, including many from South Africa, and while the beats and the sounds of that country are what make this album truly soar, Simon got a lot of criticism for what many perceived as breaking a cultural boycott in place at the time in protest of South Africa’s apartheid policies. Simon was not making a political statement, he was simply collaborating with artists who inspired him (not to mention paying them and giving a few songwriting credits to his co-creators). Most of the controversy flew over my head, and it sure didn’t stop the album from selling truckloads, but I’m sure it tainted the success for its creator.

Matthew’s experience with Graceland was very different. He was too young to discover the record on his own; it was his parents who introduced it to him. They loved the album and he shared warm memories of being at home and on road trips listening to it on cassette. Happy memories to a great soundtrack.

I never had these kinds of musical experiences with my parents. On car trips with them I listened to my yellow Sony Sports Walkman as loud as I could to drown out the adult-contemporary “soft sounds” radio, all the while suffocating from cigar smoke. Yes, my father smoked cigars in the car with the windows rolled up tight. Hotboxed by my dad! My parents’ record collection of jazz artists, Barbra and popular Broadway musicals mostly sat in a corner, rarely played, and I don’t remember them ever coming home with a new album to introduce me to.

It wasn’t exactly a generation gap, but it was interesting to hear how we both came to appreciate Mr. Simon’s most successful solo record. We also agreed that anyone who was married to Carrie Fisher, even briefly, had to be a bit of a badass. We both loved the original Star Wars films and had made many a bad lightsaber joke in reference to our boners over the weeks of our courtship. Sometimes boys just don’t grow up.

It was all fun and games until “Under African Skies.” “Listen, listen . . .” he told me, and as the bass drum kicked in and Linda Ronstadt started harmonizing with Simon, Matthew completely disappeared. He was gone for the entire running time of the song and his eyes teared up while he quietly sang along.

Linda’s voice is exquisite and pairs perfectly with Simon’s. It’s not just him, though, she’s one of the great vocal collaborators there is. Paul Simon, Neil Young, James Taylor and others all have songs made infinitely better by her voice. The records Linda made with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris as Trio are inspired; the three of them harmonizing together is sweet magic.

Not to mention the gazillion records she made and sold as a solo artist in the ’70s and ’80s. Linda Ronstadt is a talent for the ages.

Matthew and I were discovering that we were pretty good collaborators too. I could get really excited about a fellow who got so worked up about a deep cut on a Paul Simon album.

After that night, Matthew came back to my place again and again. More often than not we listened to Stevie Nicks or Graceland, but we played dozens more records and artists during our dates.


Another thing Matthew and I agreed on was condom use. Matthew and I had talked about how more and more guys were using PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) to protect themselves against contracting HIV, but I wasn’t convinced of its efficacy yet and would only have sex while using a condom. A few of my online conversations on the apps would end when I wouldn’t agree to bareback with the man on the other end, despite the assurances they were on PrEP. Could I trust them? Most of those men were in their early twenties and what they didn’t understand was that for this Generation Xer, I had thirty years of HIV fear to unpack and get over before I could even consider anal sex without a condom, PrEP or not.

One major problem arose after a few weeks of our ongoing dates: I liked Matthew. He was definitely worth dating, but I’d promised myself that I wasn’t going to jump into another relationship. Not any time soon, anyway. And this was way too soon. For the first time in my life I had to have the “I’m not looking for a boyfriend” talk. I wasn’t even sure how to do it, but Matthew received the news incredibly well—he was happy to stay fuck buddies and friends. Wow. Great.

Maybe there was a whole world of these lovely guys out there who just wanted to have sex and enjoy their lives as single men. To build real friendships and real intimacy but not end up dating.

The concept was something I had never really considered. I’d never been shown any kind of gay relationships growing up, let alone something like this. We were friends, and we were having sex, but we had no romantic commitment. Matthew and I were clear on that—we were not boyfriends. Maybe that’s what I had wanted all along: true connection, real friendship and a healthy dose of sex. Was that real grace? Was that me?

Gay Graceland, that’s got to be a place I can find.