Gary Warren has posted tracks by The Penguins, The Moonglows, The Orioles, and The Five Satins, the four doo-wop groups name-checked in Paul Simon’s 1983 album track, Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War. You remember this track that so easily can leave footsteps in anyone’s heart?
It’s a sweet, sad and beautiful song, softly surreal in its strange waltzing images of the Belgian artist and his wife dancing naked in a New York hotel room.
Paul Simon – „Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War“
Brilliantly, Simon soundtracks the couple’s time in America with exactly the same music that romanced Simon in his teens, blurring historical fact and personal memory, and infusing the Magrittes’ post-war narrative with the lonesome romance of ’50s doo-wop.
There is no other music like ’50s doo-wop. It’s a teenage music where kids sound like ghosts. Voices are high and keening, miked from a distance with chamber reverb, while the songs inhabit an ethereal landscape of dreams and twilight, where all titles are imaginary, all kingdoms built on air, and everyone is broken-hearted and, finally, alone. This spectral, otherworldly quality is best appreciated alone, and late at night, broadcast on the AM frequency to the small speaker on an old car radio. (Andrew Male, carefully shortened and minimally extended by M.E.)