Paul Simon Postscript: Seven Unposted Interview Chunks
As promised, I combed through the many unused audio segments of PS's and my six-hour August 1993 interview, and found a number of fascinating ones. Here they are, each with an explanatory note.
#1) In which Paul discusses his lack of anxiety over his popularity fading and the unlikelihood of his ever jumping offstage into a mosh pit.
#2) On being a) short and b) Jewish. Paul denies having any sensitivity about being short. (Simon’s height has been variously listed, usually between 5’3 and 5’5”. In my 1993 Life article, I wrote that he was 5’5.” I have no idea what his actual height is, nor do I remember how I arrived at my ‘93 estimate.) Simon had apparently forgotten a 1984 Playboy interview in which he’d said that being short had contributed to a negative self image. He replied, “I don’t feel that way at all now.” Re this issue, I’ll refer to a passage from Hilburn’s biography, pp. 191-2: “On the matter of size,” Hilburn wrote, “Simon said in 2017 that he’s been sensitive about it all the way back to the Tom & Jerry days. ‘I remember during a photo session at Big Records… Artie said, “No matter what happens, I’ll always be taller than you.” Did that hurt? I guess it hurt enough for me to remember sixty years later.
‘It came up all the time. There is a prejudice against small men, and that has been a problem at times because I happen to be a sort of alpha-male-ish-type guy. It becomes a competitive thing. There’s this attitude that “I’m taller, so I could beat you up,” or “I should be in charge.” Eventually, somewhere in my thirties or forties, probably, I told myself, “Listen, man, if you’re going to make a big issue out of what you don’t have, you’re taking your actual gifts for granted. So I said, “That’s the hand I’ve been dealt. That’s the way I’m going to play it.”’
Hilburn continues, “He even put together a humorous game to drive home the point. ‘I’d pretend God would come to me and say, “If you could be six foot two with a mop of hair [Simon and I never got into the baldness issue], would you pay a million dollars?” I said, “Absolutely.” Then God said, “Would you pay five million?” and again I said, “Absolutely.” Then the question changed: “If you could be six foot two with a mop of hair, would you give away ten of your songs?” and that’s when I said, “No.” That was too much.” In any case, whether it continued to be or not, height had been a complicated, significant issue for him in his earlier days. And perhaps later.
Re being Jewish, his answer was less complicated. Rather than take up more space, I’ll let him speak for himself. [He said it wasn’t an issue, but wasn’t entirely convincing. I’m going to quote myself from that ‘93 Life profile: “Even today, his cockiness isn’t quite convincing; it reads as self-doubt held at bay, but not vanquished, by years of achievement.”]
#3) “I am constantly looking to extend my vocabulary,” PS says, referring specifically to his musical vocabulary. Oddly, he says that this search does not apply to his language, which is patently false: Simon’s lyrics have grown more and more sophisticated over time, more pregnant with meaning. To illustrate his point, he mentions the song “Thelma,” which he recorded for The Rhythm of the Saints but left off the album. “Thelma” appears on The Paul Simon Anthology (1993), and which includes the Cameroonian guitarist Vincent Nguini, a Brazilian musician, or musicians—he doesn’t specify whom—the bluegrass dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas, based in Nashville, and the well-traveled guitarist Adrian Belew (King Crimson, Talking Heads, David Bowie, and Belew’s own solo albums.
#4) Referring to the Drew Friedman cartoon of Simon and David Byrne running into each other in the tropical bush, Simon takes the opportunity to praise Byrne’s work in raising Westerners’ awareness of Third World music. Simon mentions the Belgian/Congolese singer Marie Daulne, who performs under the name Zap Mama, the name she has also given the vocal/instrumental group she leads. David Byrne released Daulne/Zap Mama’s early album Adventures in Afropea 1 on his record label Luaka Bop.
#5) “That’s not true. That’s wrong!” Somehow Simon managed to strenuously disagree with me without sounding in the least hostile or aggressive. I had said, and repeated, that if a music’s rhythm is too powerful, too propulsive, the music runs the risk of losing sophistication, nuance, and complexity. Simon could not have agreed less, pointing the conjoined rhythm and sophistication of much of the African music he has encountered. He further surprised me by pointing to rap as an example of combined rhythmic and lyric complexity: “They have a word-and-rhythm thing that’s going very consciously,” he said of rappers; the fact that they use “an inner-city vocabulary and subject matter” doesn’t make it any less sophisticated. He mentions that he and his wife, the singer Edie Brickell, listen to music differently. “The way I listen is, for the most part, the rhythm first. If I’m attracted to the rhythm of a record, I listen. For Edie, it’s the words first.”
#6] Thinking back to his late-teenaged apprenticeship cutting demo records, learning to feel at home in a recording studio, and to his decades spent working closely with his go-to engineer/co-producer the gifted Roy Halee, Simon considered himself “as much a record-maker as a songwriter”—ie. a studio rat at heart.
#7] “You get better with practice.” In my opinion, words and rhythms were in closer synchrony on The Rhythm of the Saints than on Graceland. Thinking this over, Simon says, well, that may be the case. After all, he’d already had an album’s worth of practice—Graceland—at coordinating high-level lyrics with Third World rhythms. By way of illustrating his point, he compares the relative unsophistication of “Gumboots,” the first song he and the players cut on Graceland, to the relaxed, seamless vocal/rhythm blend of “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” the last Graceland song to be recorded, almost a year after “Gumboots.” As he put it“Your creative powers have been honed,” he , “by having done it ten, eleven times before.” I couldn’t resist pointing out that at the end of “Diamonds,” Ladysmith Black Mambazo are singing about the ace Detroit Tigers’ pitcher Frank Tanana (“Ta-na-na-na-nahh/Ta-na-na-na-nahhh…..”) No, said Simon, a big baseball fan; Tanana wasn’t with the Tigers anymore; he’d been traded to the Mets.
Voilà! Happy listening, and we hope you enjoyed this always thought-provoking, sometimes bumpy ride through the early, and then peak, years of a bonafide great artist. As Philip Glass told me in 1993, “For a quarter-century now, Paul has generated a tremendous amount of music we love.”