‘Welcoming any positive attention — the town was long the butt of jokes because of an awful smell caused by fumes from local chemical plants — townsfolk took pride in and placed a plaque outside the train station to mark the spot where they believed Simon wrote the song.’
— From Robert Hilburn’s “Paul Simon: The Life” (Simon & Schuster, 2018, Page 79). Hilburn spent decades as a music critic and editor at The Los Angeles Times and has also written a biography of Johnny Cash.
This sentence refers to the notoriously stinky English town of Widnes, at whose train station Paul Simon is reported to have written the hit song “Homeward Bound.” The residents, tired of bad publicity and refreshed by the touch of folk-rock greatness, installed a historical marker.
But such commemorations — plaques, portraits, statues — are always complicated. When history is compressed into tiny spaces, reality gets forced out like water from a squeezed sponge. (A statue of Winston Churchill might capture the hang of his jowls, but it can never reproduce the honey-tongued bellicosity that defined much of World War II.)
The “Homeward Bound” plaque in Widnes is layered with ironies as lush and tight as any Simon and Garfunkel harmony. First of all, the song is not exactly a celebration of the town. It is a statement of complete distaste, of desperately wanting to leave. (“And each town looks the same to me, the movies and the factories.”) Also, Simon probably didn’t actually write the song in Widnes. According to this biography, he was in a hurry and nearly missed his train, which would have left no time for scribbling lyrics about the bittersweet nature of life on the road. He may have thought about the song in Widnes, but he didn’t write it there.
Still, the “Homeward Bound” plaque contains enough pop-cultural juice that it has been stolen multiple times. It is a memorial not to presence but to absence: a plaque at a railroad station, commemorating a song about a man wanting to leave that railroad station, that refuses to stay at the railroad station.