geoMP3 of the Week: Paul Simon’s Johnny Ace Tributes, “Pledging My Love” & “The Late, Great Johnny Ace”
Me to Paul Simon: We get it: you dig Johnny Ace.
Paul Simon: (hypothetically) Well…he’s…half a ton of pig meat…
Me: What?
Anyway, this week’s song is another well-known hit, sort of. Ostensibly the song of interest here is Paul Simon doing a medley of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love” and his own quasi-Johnny Ace tribute “The Late, Great Johnny Ace” from a show at Auditorium Theatre in Chicago on November 24, 2000. The version is poignant, I think, if for no other reason than Simon’s “Late, Great…” drips poignancy. (Possibly cheaply, though, because dead-checking John Lennon and JFK oozes poignancy on its own. Lennon’s death comes with the atmosphere of an especially sad, cold December evening, and you sort of don’t need to even mention it.) But I digress. So poignancy begets poignancy (who uses the word ‘poignancy’ this much?) when Simon puts a carefully-sung “Pledging My Love” in front of his own “Late, Great…” and gives us all some bona fide, regretful sadness about that time when people were being killed for being important.
…Not counting Ace, of course, who was killed for being, well, as dumb as a bag of jars. Ace’s original 1955 recording of this Ferdinand Washington and Don Robey 1954 composition became (posthumously) a well-known, big-time hit and is often suggested to have influenced the way Elvis Presley sang songs (good going?). Presley covered it on the last album before he died in 1977, Moody Blue. And it’s death that happens to be the real story here and it’s Ace’s death (referenced by Simon) that gets put on the map. It’s the current site of Houston’s Jesse Jones Hall and the former site of City Auditorium where, backstage on Christmas Day in 1954, Johnny Ace did what all thoughtful, tender, amorous balladeers do: he blew his brains out in a devastating loss at Russian Roullette. Simon was upset by it, apparently, so much so that despite the fact that he “really wasn’t such a Johnny Ace fan” he still sent away for an autograph. Me? Poignancy in life begets poignancy in song and Russian Roullette begets dead dudes.
Paul Simon: “Pledging My Love/The Late, Great Johnny Ace” at Auditorium Theatre, Chicago (November 2000)
Johnny Ace: “Pledging My Love” from Memorial Album, 1973
kml (network link to all geoMP3s of the week)