Paul Simon’s biography gives an intimate picture of an extraordinary talent.
‘The lyrics of pop songs,” says Paul Simon, “are so banal that if you show a spark of intelligence they call you a poet. The people who call you a poet are people who never read poetry.”
It’s a disarming statement, and a surprising one. It also happens to be true. At 76, Paul Simon has proven to be a survivor of the rock world, one whose outer serenity masked internal battle. The subject of Robert Hilburn’s Paul Simon: The Life emerges as atypically clear-headed about himself and his work. Perhaps that has kept him healthier and more sane than most of his peers. Simon has sometimes been accused of being aloof, or arrogant; early in their relationship, his third wife, Edie Brickell, told him, “I heard you weren’t so nice.” But the delicate reflectiveness of his lyrics, like his attractively humble singing voice, tethers him to us, makes him unusually relatable. As an artist, he’s intimate, the opposite of aloof.
Simon doesn’t deny his lyrics are poetry out of fake modesty or in order to claim for himself some sort of shamanistic status as someone who communicates outside normal verbal channels. He says the lyrics aren’t poetry because they aren’t. His early years in the music business, when he was just a teen, were spent trying to hustle a living at the end of the doo-wop era, writing trifles like “Hey Schoolgirl.” Within just a few years, rock lyrics graduated from the hey-heys and the na-nas, took on folk stylings thanks to Bob Dylan and others, and emerged in hushed confessional mode. Rock began to turn inward, to map the heart, even to share news of what it was like to be an artist and a celebrity.
Simon was crucial to creating this template. “I was 21 years when I wrote this song / I’m 22 now but I won’t be for long,” he would sing in 1966, the same year he honored his English girlfriend Kathy Chitty in “Kathy’s Song” and evoked his rail journeys back to London, where he was then living, with crystalline beauty in “Homeward Bound.” Great songs are crafted so that the words nestle with the music, their images immediately landing, not requiring repeated close study for their power to emerge. Simon’s art is broader, more open than poetry, not poetry itself. Such lyrics have succeeded so well that they have to an extent supplanted poetry in the popular consciousness.
Simon is one of the most essential artists of the postwar era, and this volume appears to be the closest we will ever come to Simon’s memoirs. The songwriter insists he isn’t interested in writing his own story but granted Hilburn (a longtime Los Angeles Times music critic) wide-ranging interviews about all phases of his life. Hilburn did not interview Art Garfunkel, with whose slights and complaints Simon seems completely exhausted. In one recent interview, Garfunkel assented to a journalist’s framing of Simon as having a “Napoleon complex,” and habitual ingratitude to the boyhood friend whose songwriting gifts are the sole reason any one of us knows Garfunkel’s name seems to be the latter’s enduring flaw. On a couple of occasions, when Garfunkel sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water” solo on stage when the song was new, he pointedly overlooked inviting the song’s author out to take a bow, and this rankles Simon still. At the time, Simon used to hear from people that they assumed Garfunkel wrote the duo’s songs. Why? Because Garfunkel supposedly “looks like he wrote songs,” people would say.
This might have been a disguised way for people to express their commonly undisguised loathing for short men; Simon is just a squinch over five feet tall, and has never gotten over it. “No matter what happens,” Garfunkel once told Simon in one of his many venomous moments, “I’ll always be taller than you.” In Simon’s generation there are more men 5’4″ and under than 6’2″ and over, and yet the most exclusive precincts of society teem with the tall even as they ruthlessly exclude the small. Hardly any man of Simon’s stature ever makes it, or is allowed to make it, as far as he has. His talent was simply too great to ignore, though even that would never have come to public notice if it weren’t for the commensurate self-confidence Simon needed to break through in those early days, when he couldn’t get a booking in his hometown clubs in Greenwich Village and went off to England to hone his craft. Arrogant? Simon was steadfast, and we should thank him for it. Is it a coincidence that in the titles of two of his biggest hits he compares himself to a rock?
Hardly ever has Simon supplied much indication in his songwriting that he is of the Left.
Confident as he was, Simon was never sanctimonious or smug. A lesser artist’s response to President Kennedy’s assassination would have been much less oblique than what Simon wrote, which was “The Sounds of Silence.” In a funk after Richard Nixon’s reelection in 1972, Simon came up with “American Tune.” Political ups and downs are fleeting, but these lyrics are timeless, indelible. Hardly ever has Simon supplied much indication in his songwriting that he is of the Left, much less felt the need, as one or two of today’s artists do, to shout about his partisan loyalties and dissipate his creative energy on shaking his fist.
Simon is perfectly game to tell us about how his sillier songs came about, also. It was during his first marriage, to Peggy Harper, that a guest — Pierre Boulez, musical director of the New York Philharmonic — departed a party at the couple’s apartment with these words for his hosts: “Thank you, Al, and please give my best to Betty.” More than a decade later, Simon turned an in-joke he and Peggy had laughed about into “You Can Call Me Al.”
Simon suffered his share of drug problems and depression — there were times when he thought, “If I admit I’m happy, maybe I won’t be able to write” — but he remains a placid soul with an eye who savors, as he once put it in song, “the days of miracle and wonder.” “I’m not religious, but I believe in God — at least I’m getting there,” Simon told the author. Assuming God exists and created our planet, he said, “I’ve got to say an incredible ‘Thank you so much — great job. I’m really grateful to be here in this marvelous setting.’” And if there is no God, that’s okay with Simon, too. In that case, “I still feel the same way. I’m really grateful to be here. What a beautiful planet.”