One-Trick Pony [Bonus Tracks] [Digipak] [Remaster]

Performer: Original Soundtrack/Paul Simon
Artist: Patti Austin; Jon Faddis; Eric Gale; Tony Levin; Joe Beck; Richard Tee
Engineer: Phil Ramone; Jim Boyer; Phil Ramone; Jim Boyer
Producer: Phil Ramone; Paul Simon; Phil Ramone; Paul Simon
Distributor: WEA (Distributor)

Notes: Personnel: Paul Simon (vocals, guitar, electric guitar, nylon-string guitar, percussion, background vocals); Paul Simon; David Sanborn, Lourdes Delgado, Michael Brecker (saxophone); Irwin "Marky" Markowitz, Marvin Stamm, Randy Brecker (trumpet); Tony Levin (bass guitar, background vocals); Anthony Jackson (bass guitar); Richard Tee (vocals, piano, tambourine, background vocals); Patti Austin (vocals, background vocals); Hugh McCracken (acoustic guitar, slide guitar); John Tropea (acoustic guitar); Eric Gale (electric guitar, nylon-string guitar); Hiram Bullock, Jeff Mironov, Joe Beck (electric guitar); Jon Faddis (flugelhorn); Don Grolnick (synthesizer); Steve Gadd (drums, percussion); Ralph MacDonald (percussion); Lani Groves (background vocals). Audio Remasterers: Dan Hersch; Bill Inglot. Audio Remixer: Phil Ramone. Recording information: A&R Studios, New York, NY (09/1979); The Agora Club, Cleveland, OH (09/1979). Photographer: Louis Goldman. The 1980 film ONE TRICK PONY starred and featured the music of Paul Simon, who portrayed a singer-songwriter of considerably less renown than himself. Full of heart, humor and realism, it's one of the best music-oriented dramas extant, and this soundtrack album is equally substantial. ONE TRICK PONY marked an important turning point in Simon's artistic development. Though his musical sophistication had grown, previous to this album his lyrical approach was still oriented towards the linear storytelling style he began with in the '60s. Here, Simon began to develop a more poetic, imagistic approach to lyric-writing. While the salsa horn section of the hit "Late In The Evening" foreshadows Simon's later cultural experiments, it's tracks like "Jonah" and "Oh, Marion" that really tell of things to come. In the former, Simon plumbs the biblical metaphor, skillfully interspersing it with more autobiographical-sounding details. On the latter, he uses metaphysical, slightly surreal imagery to tell the story of a man at odds with his own emotions. Both tunes are representative of the great literary leap Simon's writing took with ONE TRICK PONY, an album full of inventively constructed lyrics matched with Simon's usual harmonic sophistication. Paul Simon's One-Trick Pony never sold as well as it might have, perhaps because it was associated with a film that few people enjoyed -- although, ironically enough, it wasn't a soundtrack album, and merely included some of the songs that Simon had written for the film. (In a sense, the album suffered a fate similar to Dean Koontz's novelization of The Funhouse, which turned out to be a much better book than Tobe Hooper's film was a movie, and was selling well and getting good reviews but died once the long-delayed movie got out to kill interest in it). It is a good album, if nowhere near as imposing as the four albums that preceded it, with the usual excellent playing and one unabashed jewel ("Late In The Evening"). The July 2004 reissue boosts the clarity and shapness of the sound, as well as the volume, and gives the music a fresh punch as well as adding two songs from the movie that were never on the original LP or CD -- among the latter, "Soft Parachute" rates as good as anything on the original LP and should have been there, and the slow, introspective "Spiral Highway" adds an element of quiet that was missing from the original album, and the producers have thrown on the chronologically related single "Stranded In A Limousine". ~ Bruce Eder Though it was released to coincide with the opening of the film One-Trick Pony, which Paul Simon wrote and starred in, the One-Trick Pony album is not a soundtrack, as it is sometimes categorized, at least, not exactly. If it were, it might contain the Paul Simon song "Soft Parachutes" and other non-Simon music featured in the movie. Instead, this is a studio album containing many of the movie songs, some of them in the same performances (two were cut live at the Agora Club in Cleveland). The record is not billed as a soundtrack, but a sleeve note reads, "The music on this Compact Disc was created for the Paul Simon Movie 'One-Trick Pony.'" Are we clear? Okay. Anyway, if Simon was in fact writing songs for Jonah, his movie character (as seems true of songs like "Jonah," "God Bless the Absentee," and "Long, Long Day"), he intended that character to take a somewhat less considered lyrical viewpoint than Paul Simon generally does, but to be even more enamored of light jazz fusion than Paul Simon had been on his last album, Still Crazy After All These Years. Tasty licks abound from the fretwork of Eric Gale, Hiram Bullock, and Hugh McCracken, and the rhythm section of Steve Gadd, Tony Levin, and Richard Tee is equally in the groove. This is the closest thing to a band album Simon ever made, and it contains some of his most rhythmic and energetic singing. But it is also his most uneven album, simply because the songwriting, with the exception of the title song and the ballads "How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns" and "Nobody," is not up to his usual standard. Maybe he was too busy writing his screenplay to polish these songs to the usual gloss. (It can't have been than Jonah wasn't supposed to be as talented as Paul Simon. Could it?) In any case, though the album spawned a Top Ten hit in "Late in the Evening" and may have sold more copies than the film did tickets, it remained a disappointment in both artistic and commercial terms. [In 2004, Warner Strategic Marketing reissued Simon's studio albums as remastered editions with bonus tracks, packaged in a cardboard digipack. Like the other entries in this reissue series, the remastering on One-Trick Pony is excellent. This contains four bonus tracks, all previously unreleased with the exception of "Stranded in a Limousine," which initially appeared on the 1978 compilation Greatest Hits, Etc. and has not been reissued since. The other three songs are unreleased originals -- two of which, "Soft Parachutes" and "Spiral Highway," were in the movie but not on the soundtrack, the latter, "All Because of You," merely an outtake. While none of these are major works, they are charmingly low-key tunes that fit in well with the soundtrack.] ~ William Ruhlmann

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