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Paul Simon - One-Trick Pony, taken from the 1980 movie One-Trick Pony. Recorded live at the Agora Theatre and Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio in September 1979.

Paul Simon's One-Trick Pony is a morose little art film about a minor Sixties pop star, Jonah Levin, who blows his only chance for a comeback by refusing to let a hack producer (played knowingly by Lou Reed) "commercialize" him. This moody, downbeat film is part road movie and part tribute to the Woody Allen school of Manhattan angst. Yet at its center is a question that Allen wouldn't dream of asking: Is the pop life just for kids? After Jonah's estranged wife contemptuously suggests that he's too old at thirty-four to want to be Elvis Presley, the singer meekly defends his commitment to music by retorting, "It's what I do."

One-Trick Pony's soundtrack album explains exactly what Jonah Levin-Paul Simon does, and its ten songs carefully weigh the pros and cons of taking rock & roll seriously when one's well on the way to middle age. But Simon offers no definite conclusions. At the end of the film, Jonah gives up music to become a full-time provider for his family, and we sense he's giving up the only work that will ever mean anything to him. Simon accepts his disappointment with sorrow and resignation.

The soundtrack's two major songs, "Ace in the Hole" and "Late in the Evening,". "Ace in the Hole" is a sly rock-gospel composition that combines the martial drumming of "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" with the gospel exuberance of "Gone at Last." In "Late in the Evening," Simon compiles flashbacks of the moments that made him fall in love with pop music: remembering his mother listening to the radio, his harmonizing on a street corner, and getting high in a club and blowing away the audience. One-Trick Pony's title track, a live folk-funk production like "Ace in the Hole," is almost as powerful. Here, Simon works the "one-trick pony" metaphor into a double image: the hapless performer toiling on tour and the spirit of rock & roll incarnate.

If the aforementioned compositions evoke Simon's spiritual commitment to rock, the LP's seven pop-slanted songs display a more mundane viewpoint. "Jonah," "How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns" and "Long, Long Day" are bittersweet "adult" numbers that flirt with a Middle European modality as they further refine the shimmering, angst-under-glass folk-pop of Still Crazy after All These Years. Such tunes wistfully describe the rigors of a musician's life on the road--the loneliness, the physical exhaustion, the sense of futility and fear of obsolescence -- all the reasons, in other words, for hanging up one's guitar and getting a "real" job. Simon sings these ballads, which are weary to the point of effeteness, in a soft, whimpering croon.

"That's Why God Made the Movies" and "Oh, Marion" are lighter exercises in the hip-jive style of Michael Franks. A traditional spiritual, "Nobody," and the bluesy "God Bless the Absentee" boast spare folk-pop arrangements and sophisticated wordplay. Except for the bad grammar of "How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns" (an otherwise exquisite mood piece), these seven compositions are models of contemporary songwriting craft: the pop-tune equivalents of New Yorker vignettes.

(Stephen Holden -- Rolling Stone 16 october 1980)


Band;
Paul Simon: Vocals & Guitar
Tony Levin: Bass & Vocals (Background)
Richard Tee: Piano, Keyboards, Vocals, Vocals (Background)
Eric Gale: Guitar
Steve Gadd: Drums

Lyrics:
He's a one trick pony
One trick is all that horse can do
He does one trick only
It's the principal source of his revenue
And when he steps into the spotlight
You can feel the heat of his heart
Come rising through

See how he dances
See how he loops from side to side
See how he prances
The way his hooves just seem to glide
He's just a one trick pony (that's all he is)
But he turns that trick with pride

He makes it look so easy
He looks so clean
He moves like god's
Immaculate machine
He makes me think about
All of these extra movements I make
And all of this herky-jerky motion
And the bag of tricks it takes
To get me through my working day
One-trick pony

He's a one trick pony
He either fails or he succeeds
He gives his testimony
Then he relaxes in the weeds
He's got one trick to last a lifetime
But that's all a pony needs
(that's all he needs)
He looks so easy
He looks so clean
He moves like god's
Immaculate machine
He makes me think about
All of these extra movements I make
And all of this herky-jerky motion
And the bag of tricks it takes
To get me through my working day

One-trick pony, one trick pony
One-trick pony, one trick pony
One-trick pony (take me for a ride)
One trick pony