Paul Simon on Almost Everything, Chapter 3 of 5: "Out Here on My Own" (1970-1984)

Two marriages, two divorces, two commercial flops, and mo' betta music

Carrie Fisher and Simon, neither of whom could live with, or without, the other

Not long after Clive Davis took over as Columbia Records’ president, he sat down with Paul Simon for what Davis thought would be an upbeat talk about Simon and Garfunkel’s future, which, with Bridge Over Troubled Waters leaping off record-store shelves, looked bright indeed. Davis’s sunny mood darkened quickly when he asked Simon when he and Art Garfunkel were planning to record their next album, and Simon answered, “We’re not.”

Davis was shocked. During the making of Bridge,” said the record man, “Paul and I went out to lunch from time to time, and he told me about the issues he was having with Art. But I had no idea he was thinking of leaving Simon and Garfunkel. And I told him frankly that I thought it was a major mistake. I told him how much I respected him as an artist, but I also pointed out how few musicians from best-selling groups were able to do even remotely as well on their own.”

“I had gone to see Clive,” Simon said, “hoping that he would understand and be supportive.” What he got was a warning from the boss that “leaving Simon and Garfunkel would be the biggest mistake of my life. But Clive was just thinking commercially. I wasn’t thinking of sales. I wanted to do what was best for my music. I was hoping for a long career and making enough good records that someday people would look back at Simon and Garfunkel and say, ‘Oh, this is what you did in the beginning.’”

“The pressure on [Paul] was enormous when he worked on his first solo album,” said Roy Halee. But Simon turned the duo’s breakup to his immense advantage, and without wasting time. “Mother and Child Reunion,” the first track on that first, 1972 solo album, bursts with the nervous energy of an artist who’d been chafing to explore new ground: in “Mother and Child”’s case, reggae, cut in Kingston with top Jamaican players. The single shot to #4 on Billboard’s Hot 100.¹

The next dozen years saw Simon release five albums—Paul Simon (1972); There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973); Still Crazy After All These Years (1975); One-Trick Pony (1980), and Hearts and Bones (1984). These were years of nonstop experimentation, of music as color-splashed as the Milton Glaser album jacket for There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.

Simon’s lyrics matured from inauthentically jaded (“I Am a Rock”) to sardonically open-eyed (“Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover"). His musicianship deepened, too. “It took me until the middle ‘70s,” he told me, “to get up a big enough interest in harmony to move away from the simple stuff,” the four chords of “The Sounds of Silence” or the slightly embellished five of “The Boxer.” As Simon recalled, “Somebody said, ‘You ought to, just for a second, take a look at something that’s interesting,’ and I said, “All right, sure—hey, that sounds awfully good!’” I remember telling some writer that stuff like ‘The Boxer’ was great, but that I was getting into stuff that was more musically challenging. Once you’ve examined the simple ideas and you find yourself coming around to them a second, and a third time, you start to say, ‘I know this could go somewhere else, but I don’t know where.’ You have the urge to travel but you don’t know where to go.”

Simon began studying harmony and music theory with the jazz bassist Chuck Israels, and before long was writing harmonically enriched songs like the title track to Still Crazy After All These Years, with its complex chords, startling key change at the bridge (1:20), borderline atonal string-and-woodwinds arrangement, and tenor saxophone solo by the jazz virtuoso Michael Brecker (who would not have come cheap).

There are two versions of Simon’s song “Silent Eyes.” One, which closes the album Still Crazy After All These Years, came with lyrics, Simon’s vocal, and the crack musicians from the album. Simon wrote the other, which features only Simon’s guitar, wordless vocal, and a cello, for the 1975 Warren Beatty movie Shampoo. Snippets of it recur throughout the movie, and the entire piece accompanies this, the movie’s long final shot. Simon wanted the song “Still Crazy” played during the end credits; “Sorry, no,” Beatty said.

Simon’s growing harmonic sophistication was not going unnoticed. Still Crazy After All These Years won the 1976 Grammy for Best Album. (Accepting his award, Simon thanked Stevie Wonder for not releasing an album that year; Wonder, who was at the peak of his career, had won Best Album in 1974 and ‘75, and would again in ‘77.)

Art Garfunkel also put out an album in 1975: Breakaway, his second. As his first had, it went Top Ten; musically, neither came anywhere near what Simon was up to. (“If Simon & Garfunkel had been the thinking man’s Everly Brothers,” writes a critic today, “Garfunkel alone turned out to be the thinking man’s Johnny Mathis.”) Praising Still Crazy After All These Years when it came out, Ken Emerson of the New York Times took the opportunity to denigrate Breakaway, writing that “Simon’s new album, quite possibly his best, is an eloquent expression of adult despair, while Garfunkel’s is an exercise in juvenile sentimentality.” Simon, with that putatively inadequate voice, won a second 1976 Grammy, Best Male Pop Vocal, for the single “Still Crazy” (the compulsive self-improver had been seeing a vocal coach). ²Commercially, Simon continued to win big: the Still Crazy single “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” went to Billboard #1, Simon’s first chart-topper since “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

He was finding plenty of ways to offset the absence of Garfunkel’s celebrated tenor. “On all or most of my albums,” he told me, “there’s a vocal group that’s only me. We used to do it in Simon and Garfunkel—on “The Only Living Boy in New York” there’s eight or ten voices that are just Artie and me.” The soaring choir on “Late in the Evening,” the backup vocalists on the first solo album’s “Peace Like a River” and on Hearts and Bones’s and Graceland’s title songs: Simon, multi-tracked. “They’re all imitations of the Crickets, Buddy Holly’s group,” said. “I’ll do anywhere from four to seven or eight voices. On [Hearts and Bones’s] ‘René and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,’ the lowest bass voice is me, and so is the highest falsetto. These are private signatures that stay, album after album.”

If One-Trick Pony was a dud of a movie, the soundtrack album was not, selling more than a half-million copies, hitting #12 on Billboard’s Top 200, and yielding a #6 single, “Late in the Evening”; album and song would probably both have gone higher if the movie hadn’t been such a flop. There’s so much going on in “Late in the Evening—Simon’s one-man choir, brass, Steve Gadd’s wonderful drum part—that one is startled to realize that the song has only three chords. Below: a vibrant live version with a big band, including Gadd, who uses four drumsticks to sound like two drummers playing at once. Hard trick to pull off, but Steve Gadd, who has played with everyone from Steely Dan to Chick Corea, is one of the, if not the, best jazz/rock drummers of his generation

With Hearts and Bones (1983), Simon left his fans behind. The album, whose title song is about Simon’s troubled relationship with his second wife, Carrie Fisher (Simon’s first marriage, to Peggy Harper, had ended in 1975) feels insular, sealed off. Its only single, “Allergies,” reached a lackluster #44, and the album itself was Simon’s first that failed to go gold, selling barely 400,000 copies. There was a second reason the album stiffed. Simon had originally intended to make Hearts and Bones a Simon & Garfunkel reunion. By the time he decided that it was too personal a statement to be sung by two voices, it had already been widely billed as an S & G album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s bitterly disappointed fans stayed away in droves.

Critics loved it. To the New York Times’s Stephen Holden, Hearts and Bones “has a visionary beauty and eloquence that go beyond anything Mr. Simon has done before.” Three of the album’s songs are on Simon’s short list of favorites: the heartbreaking title song, in which Simon has one of its two characters, who is clearly Fisher, ask her partner, “Why won’t you love me/For who I am?”; “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” which rather unconvincingly links three gunshot victims who happened to share a name: the ‘50s R & B singer Johnny Ace, who accidentally shot himself, JFK, and John Lennon; and “René and Georgette Magritte," which Simon told me “is one of the best songs I ever wrote.” It was born when Simon happened across a photograph of the great painter and his wife in old age. “It’s a surrealist song about a surrealist painter,” said Simon, juxtaposing the Magrittes’ enduring love with the innocence and tenderness that a young Simon had heard in doo-wop. In addition, “just the names of some of the doo-wop groups—the Moonglows, the Penguins, the Orioles”—Simon told me, conveyed to him, especially at age 12, the mysterious, enigmatic quality of many a Magritte canvas. Adults’ distaste for doo-wop plays into the picture, too: in Simon’s lyric, the elderly Magrittes Dance by the light of the moon/To the Penguins/The Moonglows/The Orioles/And the Five Satins/The deep, forbidden music/They’d been longing for. Simon had come a long way from “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy”.

He took the album still further outside when he invited the avant-garde composer Philip Glass to add his touch to Hearts and Bones, namely, what Glass called an “end piece”: an extended coda that departs radically from the body of the composition. “He used it beautifully to conclude ‘The Late Great Johnny Ace,’” said Simon, so beautifully that Simon appropriated it, with Glass’s blessing. “That end-piece concept,” he said, “has found its way into my arrangements for live shows.”

Glass, it turned out had been a Simon fan for years. “Paul just phoned me up one day, I think it was around 1981,” Glass told Simon’s biographer, Robert Hilburn. “I was flattered because I had known his music ever since ‘The Sound of Silence’ and ‘The Boxer,’ and I admired the way he kept growing as a writer. I understood fully when he went on his own after Simon and Garfunkel. He was like a plant who had outgrown the pot. I invited him to my place and the first thing he wanted to talk about was his musical education—or lack of it. He said he couldn’t read music, which almost made me laugh. I said, ‘Paul, you’ve written some of the greatest songs in contemporary American music. Why do you think you need to read music?’”

Hearts and Bones’s final song, “The Late Great Johnny Ace.” Philip Glass’s end-piece starts at 3:35.

They collaborated again in 1986, on Glass’s album Songs from Liquid Days, for which Glass pointedly wrote songs, ie. short pieces, not the marathons he was known for, and asked pop composers David Byrne, Suzanne Vega, Simon, and others to write lyrics to be sung by pop singers, including Linda Ronstadt and the Roches. Simon contributed a set of sardonically playful lyrics, “Changing Opinions,” in which a group of urban sophisticates try to pinpoint the source of a mysterious hum. “Gradually we became aware of a hum in the room/An electrical hum in the room.” Was it “a calm refrigerator cooling in the big night?” “The hum of our parents’ voices long ago in a soft light?” Mystery unsolved. “Changing Opinions” delighted Glass, who opened his album with it.

Simon’s fine recent work notwithstanding, he spent the first half of 1984 in a funk, ruminating over his money-loser of a movie, his worst-selling solo album, and his maddeningly inconsistent relationship with Carrie Fisher. Warner Records’ president, Mo Ostin, the rare music-biz executive who valued music as much as, or almost as much as, sales, considered Hearts and Bones “a masterpiece. Paul was so shaken when the album didn’t do better,” Ostin recalled, “especially coming after One-Trick Pony, that it made him question his ability to continue as a successful recording artist.” Simon’s alpha-male self-confidence had, for now, gone missing. Out in Montauk, he spent hours sitting numbly in his car staring out the window, one depressed multimillionaire.

I am providing three interview segments, below. Two are from my 1993 conversations with Simon. The (deceptively) short one, on top, is about how his song lyrics were, increasingly, “stream of consciousness, edited. I’m just telling people what crossed my mind, hoping it’s interesting enough that they say, ‘Yeah, that’s right, I like the way it leaps.’” Which leaves plenty of room for ambiguity, which Simon had grown to accept, even welcome.

The longer segment, in the middle, has multiple topics including Simon’s daily writing routine circa 1993, the importance to him of rhyme, his half-dozen or so favorite poets (Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney are two big ones); and why so many rock lyrics are so dumb.³ The third, final segment, is from my 1993 conversation about Simon with Philip Glass. It’s enjoyably explosive—Glass is one voluble, emphatic talker.

1. There are significant differences between Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion,” Simon’s take on reggae, and Eric Clapton’s only #1 Billboard hit, his 1974 cover of the Wailers’ “I Shot the Sheriff,” written by Bob Marley for the 1973 Wailers’ album Burnin’. In 1970, Simon had fallen in love with ska, reggae’s chief precursor, and wanted to write and record a ska-inflected song for his first solo album. “But he didn’t want to try having American musicians duplicate the sound,” said Roy Halee. “He insisted on going to Jamaica and working with actual ska musicians, as he had worked with Peruvian musicians on “El Cóndor Pasa,” and asked a Jamaican producer to round up a handful of the island’s top musicians.

When Simon arrived, he said, “Let’s play some ska.” They didn’t play ska, the musicians said; they played reggae. Simon said, “Okay, let’s play reggae,” and encouraged the musicians to contribute their own ideas and touches. “Mother and Child Reunion,” Simon’s ears-open, receptive encounter with reggae, has a deeply authentic feel. Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” recorded in Miami with American session musicians, is reggae-lite, with none of the genre’s delicious off-center push-pull or Marley’s incendiary passion. Clapton may almost as well be playing “Lay Down Sally.” “Mother and Child Reunion” is a different matter altogether, Simon approaching reggae, as he did the many indigenous musics he explored, with sincerity, taking pains, and spending a lot of money, to go straight to the source (and “Mother and Child Reunion”’s musicians were probably paid handsomely). Clapton, who, perhaps not coincidentally, has for decades been accused of making racist remarks, showed little, if any, of Simon’s sensitivity and respect.

2. What Mick Jagger once said, in a refreshingly candid moment, about his own voice applies to Simon’s: “It gets the job done.”

3. The “Derek” whom Simon mentions as one of his favorite poets was the late Derek Walcott, the Nobel-winning poet born and raised on the West Indian island of St. Lucia. Walcott was Simon’s friend for a number of years, during which they collaborated on Simon’s disaster of a 1998 musical, The Capeman.