Homeward Bound
I am currently reading Ian Clayton's Bringing it all back home which is very funny and also touching. There is an account in there of a friend of his who had a penchant for making up stories.It had me in stitches:-
'Geoff Raybould, another spinner of bizarre yarns told me he'd had a hand in writing Paul Simons song 'Homeward Bound'.Geoff loved to tell the story of when he was a young train driver in the mid-sixties.
'I was sitting in my cab at Widnes railway station and I saw this little student sitting on his own with a guitar, he looked right miserable. I asked him what he was doing. He said,'I'm just sittin' on this railway station'. So I said, 'Have you got a ticket?' He said, 'Yeh!' I asked him where he was going and he said 'Homeward bound'. I told him, 'I wish I was.''
In true Word fashion I am pretty sure we could make up some fantastic additions to songs if we put our minds to it.
- More from Steve Turner.
- Login or register to post comments
I was the inspiration behind...
...the Bacharach and David classic (They Long to Be) Close to You.
At the time I was living in New York and whenever I visited Central Park I would always stuff the pockets of my flared jeans with breadcrumbs to feed to the ducks. After a while the resident pigeons got wise to this and would descend upon me in great flocks. Sometimes there would be so many amassed around my groinal area that, to an unsuspecting passer-by, it must looked as if I was wearing a loincloth made out of birds. Unfortunately the NYPD also took this view and I was charged with gross indecency on several occasions.
It was on one such visit to the park that I met a fine gentleman by the name of Hal David. He enquired after my close kinship with birds. Not wishing to divulge my secret I replied: “I guess they just long to be close to me.” After that we became both friends and badminton partners.
In 1962 I returned from the swamps of New Jersey suffering from an extremely rare medical condition which caused my red blood cells to exert a strong gravitational pull on distant celestial bodies. The result was that stars and galaxies from as far away as 50 billion light years began to accelerate towards earth at an astonishing rate.
This was a very difficult time for me and I don’t know whether I would have got through it without the help and emotional support of Hal David. There was even talk in the U.S. senate of sending me to stand in the centre of Moscow, on the assumption that my presence there would eventually draw the sun close enough to Russia to wipe the Soviet menace from the earth once and for all. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and scientists at NASA found that they were able to counterbalance my innate gravitational pull by sprinkling lavender-scented moon dust in my hair. This proved to be very popular with the ladies. Sometimes it seemed as if all the girls in town were following me around and asking me where they could obtain some of the lavender-scented powder.
When Hal and his friend David Bacharach first played me the song I had inspired I was extremely flattered. It was me who suggested that they put ‘they long to be’ in parenthesis.