There’s a problem in Rhymin(apostrophe)’s “The Late, Great Johnny Ace.” It’s not a lack of poignancy, because “Late, Great…” oozes poignancy. It’s actually that Simon saps poignancy from the death of Ace by borrowing poignancy from the deaths of JFK and John Lennon; Lennon’s, in particular, by revisiting that “cold December evening” that makes a lot of people sad to this day.

So poignancy begets poignancy (who uses the word ‘poignancy’ this much?) when Simon medleys together “Pledging My Love” with his own “Late, Great…” and makes us all get a little rueful about people who were killed for being important.

Ooh, but wait - Ace was dumber than a bag of jars.¹ To wit:

Ace was a good singer, man. His 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 even covered it on the last album before he died in 1977, Moody Blue. But since Simon brought it up, let’s map Ace’s death - the current site of Houston’s Jesse Jones Hall and the former site of City Auditorium. There, backstage on Christmas Day 1954 (not New Year’s Eve, as Simon sings), Johnny Ace did what all thoughtful, tender, amorous balladeers do: he went ahead and put a bullet in his brain. Various accounts (Wikipedia and scholarly works alike) offer different reasons for said brains-blowing-out: Was it Russian Roullette? Was it from waving the gun around, pointing it at the ladies and bragging about knowing which chamber was golden? A deposition given by – wait, those are the two options?!! He was either playing Russian Roullette OR randomly waving a gun around pulling the trigger?!

Not that it matters at all but James Salem, writing in American Music in 1993 includes the full text of a depostion given by none other than Big Mama Thornton, who indicates that the real reason was…both! A kind of one-man Russian Roullette game, wherein Ace terrorized his entire entourage until finally the joke was on him cuzza bang-bang splat. Swell!

• int. backstage, some murmuring
• Ace, lounging near a vanity, mindlessly spins the chamber of a pistol
• someone unamused
• Johnny, Johnny. You're makin' us all nerv –
• Gun goes off. Fin.

Ok, so after removing points from Salem for shoehorning a Marshall McLuhan citation into his article, where are we? Oh, right: this Paul Simon live recording at Auditorium Theatre in Chicago in 2000, where he contrasts the beautifully dreamy “Pledging My Love” with his own dreary retelling of learning about various unnecessary murders. Unnecessary murders, we can agree? Because it seems obvious that one torpedoes the poignancy of this juxtaposition when one introduces some boozed bully who slumped to the floor from .22 calibers of stupidity.

MAPPING IT

City Auditorium has evidently been through some shit. To the point that it’s dead. ScottyMoore.net (noted historian?) and The Houston Chronicle both reference what it was and what it became. This track goes down on what’s there now - Jones Hall.

HEARING IT

This track is from a bootleg, so Spotify doesn’t have it. You’ll have to download it like we did in the old days.