{"id":1049920,"date":"2026-06-25T21:05:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T21:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1049920\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T21:05:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T21:05:20","slug":"paul-simons-1968-song-that-perfectly-captured-the-1960s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1049920\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Simon’s 1968 song that perfectly captured the 1960s"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\u2018Mother<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ Album Cover<\/p>\n

Thu 25 June 2026 20:15, UK <\/p>\n

When I was growing up, absolutely nobody was waxing lyrical about the virtues of pasta water. But times change. Sometimes the changes are subtle, sometimes the changes are stark. In the 1960s, they were stark enough to give an idle passenger whiplash. Paul Simon<\/a> was not one of those passengers. <\/p>\n

The diminutive songwriter was transfixed by the transitioning scenery, gripped by the gravity of a new dawn as he set out on a road trip in 1964. Four years later, he captured it all in one beautiful song called \u2018America\u2019.<\/p>\n

Songs were the leading way the times were captured in the \u201860s; now we have memes and short videos, often depicting cooks ladling cloudy water into pasta sauces. In years to come, this sudden reverence of an erstwhile starchy throwaway might be seen as a desperate attempt at authenticity at a time when artificiality is everywhere.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the age of technopoly, starchy water is an inevitable attraction to the old ways from the old country. \u201cI\u2019ve gone to look for America\u201c.<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, the inverse was true. People were striving to find the \u201cnew\u201d ways in the \u201cnew\u201d country. And nothing signposted that quite like Jack Kerouac\u2019s classic 1957 novel, On the Road. Pick up any modern copy, and you\u2019ll find the following testimony from Bob Dylan inscribed on the inside sleeve: \u201cIt changed my life like it changed everyone else\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

America was evidently in a state of flux with new technologies, possibilities, drugs, and haircuts all abounding. Sitting in a pampered office peddling taut and stilted prose seemed remiss in this climate, so Kerouac went out to capture the new America on the wing. He set out on a feverish pursuit of the soul of a post-war world still in the process of inventing itself. That pursuit inspired a whole host of beats thereafter. <\/p>\n

\"Simon<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ Rob Bogaerts \/ Anefo<\/p>\n

But finding new ways is inherently \u2018a search\u2019. And amid searches, you can become lost. What happens if you don\u2019t find what you\u2019re looking for? By the end of the \u201960s, that question hung over counterculture like a cloud, and nowhere was it rendered more poignantly than in Simon\u2019s \u2018America\u2019. \u201cKathy, I\u2019m lost\u201d.<\/p>\n

Simon\u2019s song was not alone in asking that question. By the end of the decade, uncertainty itself had become a defining cultural mood. As the \u201860s hurtled to a close, Hunter S Thompson mused on the decade<\/a> as time careened around the bend, \u201cIt seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era \u2013 the kind of peak that never comes again.\u201d<\/p>\n

His chin-stroking, cigarette-toking, coke-sniffing rumination continued, \u201cSan Francisco in the middle \u201960s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run\u2026 but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thompson had mused a lot during the decade, but that closing remark \u2013 \u201cWhatever it meant\u201d \u2013 has proven to be his most prophetic, and arguably, in its inextricable mysticism, profound. Even today, endless polemics continue to try and catch the soul of the decade<\/a> like Fisher-Price nets trawling the Atlantic in search of a white whale.<\/p>\n

The dastardly \u201860s were elusive by nature, flitting between dreams and nightmares, certainty, and a deep sense of dislocation. \u201cMichigan seems like a dream to me now\u201d.<\/p>\n

There was no definitive manifesto to pin it all to. No Das Kapital at the heart of it besides \u2018Peace and love, dude\u2019, and the thousands of ways bands found to phrase that saying. Amid that waywardness, the phrase became an idiom of diminishing returns. Ultimately, the vagueness of peace and love was part of the point. Like Simon hitchhiking across the States simply because he \u201chad to see what a city named Saginaw looked like\u201c.<\/p>\n

The search itself remained far more compelling than any destination. Actual politics, policies, and answers were far too stuffy and confining, like a black and white printed recipe from an authentic Italian chef as opposed to a contextless, tasty video of pasta water\u2019s starchy deployment. That is precisely the tension that sits at the heart of \u2018America\u2019. The \u201968 masterpiece is less concerned with finding answers than documenting what it felt like to go looking for them.<\/p>\n

\"Paul<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ Harry Chase, Los Angeles Times<\/p>\n

When Simon set out on the genuine road trip behind the song in \u201864 with his girlfriend Kathy Chitty, he was only 22. He had been living in London, but Tom Wilson, who was producing Simon & Garfunkel\u2019s debut album, Wednesday Morning 3 AM, beckoned him back to America<\/a> for the record\u2019s final mix. So, Simon thought it offered a good opportunity to show Kathy the country, in every which way.<\/p>\n

Jack Kerouac would often say that On The Road took him seven years to live and three weeks to write. Well, Simon\u2019s very own musical version of the novel consisted of a five-day road trip with Kathy, a gig in Saginaw in \u201866, and a further two years to pull together, and it is only three minutes long. Alas, concision is a skill, and \u2018America\u2019 packed more of the zeitgeist into its slight runtime than perhaps any other song of the era.<\/p>\n

In truth, it is less of a song in the traditional sense and more so a short story set to music. Inspired by the track, Gerry Beckley would go on to form America the band, and he explained that Simon and Garfunkel\u2019s classic is, in fact, entirely \u201cprose. There\u2019s not one line that rhymes,\u201c he says, \u201cand I will tell some of the best songwriters you\u2019ve ever met that particular element and you can see them stop and go through it in their head.\u201d<\/p>\n

He told SongFacts, \u201cWe\u2019re oblivious to that being an ingredient because we\u2019re so involved in the story. You\u2019re not sitting there going, \u2018That didn\u2019t rhyme, wait a second.\u2019 It\u2019s not an issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

And like all great story songs, the tale far extends beyond its runtime. Each line contains something pertinent about the times. In fact, you can go through it line by line and find a corroboration.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Let us be lovers, we\u2019ll marry our fortunes together
I\u2019ve got some real estate here in my bag\u2019
(It begins with the Kerouacian dream of no possession and the open road.)
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs Wagner pies
And walked off to look for America
(Yet, American culture is still underpinned by products and brands.)
\u2018Kathy,\u2019 I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
\u2018Michigan seems like a dream to me now\u2019
(The onset of dislocation as the idealism of the trip is befallen by abstraction.)
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I\u2019ve gone to look for America
(The endeavour of the quest is what mattered in the \u201860s.)
Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
(There are times when the search feels carefree.)
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said \u2018Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera\u2019
(But there\u2019s always the creeping paranoia that the carefree utopianist will be upended by the authorities.)
\u2018Toss me a cigarette, I think there\u2019s one in my raincoat\u2019
\u2018We smoked the last one an hour ago\u2019
(The hardships are ultimately puny, but nevertheless, ordinary life and its issues always rear their head.)
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field
(The couple drift apart into separate experiences. All the while, the landscape remains beautiful, but it offers no revelation. Time goes on.)
\u2018Kathy, I\u2019m lost,\u2019 I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I\u2019m empty and aching and I don\u2019t know why
(The spiritual drift of the age and its inability to openly admit it reveals itself.)
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They\u2019ve all come to look for America
(The personal search becomes a collective one. Every passing car contains its own hopes, ambitions, and uncertainties. All of them as vague as the next.)
All come to look for America
All come to look for America\u201d<\/p>\n

The repetition of the final point is a pertinent one. Everyone was searching for answers in the \u201960s, and they remained irreconcilable. The track\u2019s musicology, darting from haunted and humble to grand and liberated embody this. But it is a simpler element of the musicality where the message truly lies. <\/p>\n

As Simon told Paul Zollo of the moment he harmonises with Garfunkel in unison, \u201cThat has a real upright, earnest quality because we both have the identical soul at that moment. We come from the identical place in our attitude, and the spine that\u2019s holding us up, we are the same person. Same college kid<\/a>, striking out.\u201d They were far from the only two.<\/p>\n

Today, people scour social media for signs of authenticity in ladles of cloudy pasta water. In the golden age of the British invasion, sitar, and LSD, it wasn\u2019t just young Americans but people all over the world who were searching for something equally difficult to define, only their gaze was fixed firmly on the horizon and something vast instead of the past and something rudimentary.<\/p>\n

Simon captured his particular era\u2019s brand of yearning better than anyone with the aptly named \u2018America\u2019, more of an idea, like the concept of starch being a conduit to flavour, than anything else. As Simon said when he introduced the song for what seemed like the final time in 2018, \u201cStrange times, huh? Don\u2019t give up.\u201d Times change. Nothing changes. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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