Paul Simon is pop’s most famous perfectionist, a man known for spending days on a single track and months on a single line. So of course one of his biggest solo hits was recorded almost by accident, in spare time he had not expected to have, in a small Alabama studio he had booked for an entirely different song. Kodachrome began life as a throwaway melody with a dummy lyric, acquired its famous title almost as a joke about how the title sounded, and then — in a career full of ironies — was banned by the BBC for naming a commercial product, kept off British radio altogether, and still became so beloved in America that the song eventually outlived the film stock it was named after. This is the story of the brightest accident of Simon’s solo career.
The context matters. By 1973 Simon was two albums into a solo career that the industry had not known quite what to do with. The partnership with Art Garfunkel had ended in acrimony at the very summit of their success, and Simon’s answer had been motion: he had recorded reggae in Jamaica, gospel and R&B flavours were creeping into his writing, and he was deliberately hunting for American rhythm sections who played differently from the New York studio men he knew. There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, the album Kodachrome would open, was conceived as a tour of those sounds. Which is how the most meticulous man in pop came to be standing in Sheffield, Alabama, with a band famous for working fast — and a song that did not yet have its name.
It Started as “Going Home”
When Simon began sketching the song, he sang it to a temporary phrase: “Going Home.” It was a pleasant enough idea, and that was precisely the problem. Simon later explained that the title struck him as far too conventional — the kind of title a hundred songs already had. What caught his ear was the sound of a different word, one with the same rolling rhythm but a world of colour inside it: Kodachrome, Eastman Kodak’s famous colour film, on the market since the 1930s and beloved by photographers for its rich, saturated tones.
The decision reversed his usual process. Instead of a title summarising a finished lyric, the title came first and demanded a lyric worthy of it. “Once I decided that the song was going to be called ‘Kodachrome,’” Simon recalled, “I had to think: ‘Well, what does that mean?’” What it meant, he decided, was memory itself — the way we develop our pasts in unnaturally bright colours, the greens of summers that were never quite that green. Around that idea he built one of his slyest lyrics: a shrug at formal education, a fond look back at schooldays and sweethearts, and the immortal observation that everything looks worse in black and white. Billboard, reviewing the single in May 1973, praised its “cheerfully antisocial lyrics” — a phrase that could serve as Simon’s coat of arms.
Four Days Booked, Finished by the Second Take
In 1973, Simon travelled to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama to record with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section — the celebrated house band known as the Swampers — for his album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. He had booked four days, expecting his customary slow craftsmanship to consume all of them on one song, Take Me to the Mardi Gras. The Swampers worked at a different speed. Accustomed to cutting finished tracks in a few hours, they had Take Me to the Mardi Gras in the can by the second take, leaving the astonished New Yorker with days of paid studio time and the best rhythm section in America sitting idle.
So they kept going. In those borrowed days, Simon and the Swampers recorded Kodachrome and Loves Me Like a Rock, two of the defining tracks of his solo career. The Kodachrome session is a small masterpiece of feel: Barry Beckett’s Wurlitzer electric piano bubbling under the vocal, David Hood’s bass and Roger Hawkins’ double-tracked drums pushing the groove, guitarists Pete Carr and Jimmy Johnson weaving around Simon’s acoustic. Simon, the studio obsessive, had stumbled into the loosest, sunniest record he had ever made — precisely because, for once, there had been no time to overthink it. The perfectionist’s masterpiece was a product of somebody else’s schedule.
The Word That Got It Edited, the Name That Got It Banned
Trouble arrived from two directions at once. The first was a single word. The song opens with Simon looking back on “all the crap I learned in high school” — mild enough today, but in 1973 a handful of American stations banned the record over it, and New York’s influential WABC simply edited the line out, broadcasting a version that jumped straight to “it’s a wonder I can think at all.”
The second problem was the title itself. Kodachrome was a registered trademark, and Kodak intended to protect it: the company required the album to carry a notice that Kodachrome is a trademark of Kodak, complete with the registered-trademark symbol after the song’s title. In Britain, the consequences were fatal to the record’s chances. The BBC would not broadcast songs built around branded products, so Kodachrome could not be played on British radio at all. Simon’s label quietly flipped the single in the UK, issuing Take Me to the Mardi Gras as the A-side with the banned song tucked away on the back. The Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters banned it too. A song celebrating the vividness of memory was, in two countries, officially unhearable.
Two Weeks at Number Two
None of it mattered in America. Released on May 19, 1973, as the lead single from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, Kodachrome entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 82 and climbed with a speed Simon rarely enjoyed — into the Top 10 within four weeks, then up to No. 2, where it sat behind Billy Preston’s Will It Go Round in Circles. It matched that peak on the adult contemporary chart, and the album followed it to No. 2 on the Billboard 200, held off the top only by George Harrison’s Living in the Material World. Between his old bandmate at No. 1 and Preston on the singles chart, Simon spent the summer of 1973 as pop’s most successful runner-up.
The record also announced something important about his solo identity. Simon & Garfunkel had been all harmony and hush; Kodachrome was a New York intellectual singing over an Alabama groove band, cheerfully antisocial, funny and faintly wistful at once. It proved the solo career was not an epilogue. It was a second act with its own sound. The industry agreed: There Goes Rhymin’ Simon was nominated for Album of the Year at the 1974 Grammy Awards, with Simon also nominated for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male — formal recognition that the duo’s supposed straight man had become one of the most interesting solo artists in America.
Mama, Don’t Take It Away
The song’s strangest chapter came decades later. Kodak discontinued Kodachrome film in 2009, and the last roll was processed at the end of 2010, closing a seventy-five-year chapter in photography. By then the song had long since stopped being about a product. Its famous plea — “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away” — had become a lament for everything vivid that time fades: schooldays, first loves, the saturated colours of a remembered summer. Photographers mourned the film in print; radio stations answered by playing Simon.
Kodachrome remains a fixture of his concerts and of classic-rock radio, the rare hit that was too commercial for the BBC and too cheeky for WABC, recorded in time a perfectionist never meant to use. The film is gone. The colours, thanks to four spare days in Alabama, are permanent.
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