Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
The fighter still remains
Music critic and author talks about Paul Simon and his enduring artistry
AFTER more than three decades at the Los Angeles Times, pop music critic Robert Hilburn retired in 2006 and has turned to writing books about rock and roll and some of its biggest stars. He sat down recently to talk about his latest book, “Paul Simon: The Life,” published by Simon & Schuster this past week, just ahead of Simon’s farewell tour concert May 27 at the MGM Grand Garden.
This is Hilburn’s third book since leaving the Times and follows 2013’s “Johnny Cash: The Life.”
Times: You chose Johnny Cash as the subject of your first biography. Why Paul Simon?
Hilburn: When I first went to the L.A. Times in 1970, the question I had was “Who should I write about?” When I began to interview people from the ’60s, my first question was always “What was your favorite record?” They would always say Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and maybe somebody else.
Then when I started interviewing people from the ’70s generation and asked, “What was your first record — who influenced you?” it was always the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, maybe somebody else — and Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
So I thought, maybe that’s what you do — you don’t try to follow who’s No. 1 every week, because that’s often somebody maybe nobody cares about. So I’m going to try to think of the artists who, 10 years from now, the musicians are going to say, and the fans are going to say, “That’s the person who was important.”
Still, a number of artists could fit that description.
While I was writing the Cash book, I saw Simon at the Fonda Theatre (in Hollywood). He was doing the “So Beautiful or So What” tour (in 2011). I listened to that album and I thought, “My God, that’s a great album.” I love the song “Questions for the Angels.” I was thinking, “Who else is active today who is writing music that can stand up to their earliest, best stuff?” Paul McCartney can’t, Brian Wilson can’t, Joni Mitchell can’t. Even Dylan — I’m not sure.
So after the Cash book, I tried to think “Who’s the best songwriter I can think of that would make an interesting book, and who would tell me about the whole issue of artistry: how artistry comes about and how you have to protect it?” There’s the issue of fame: Look at Elvis — he was destroyed by fame and womanizing and drugs and stuff. All these artists have these (hurdles): marriage, divorce, changes in public taste, laziness, running out of talent.
That’s why I talked to people like Quincy Jones and Allen Toussaint, people who have worked with a lot of great talent, to see what characteristics they found (in Simon’s work). And again, I thought Paul is so articulate, this would be fabulous. He could tell me about the songs.
Simon often comes across as a sober, even somber guy, yet there is a lot of subtle humor in his songs. How did his sense of humor come out during your time with him?
He and his son are big baseball fans, and they have the All-Fish Team — all-time players with fish names (Mike Trout, Jim “Catfish” Hunter). One day he said, “Of course, one of my favorite players on our team is Minnow Minoso.” I’m thinking, “No, Paul, it’s not Minnow Minoso; it’s Minnie Minoso.”
I was shaving the next morning, and I realized, “That was a joke!” It’s subtle like that — he doesn’t set it up. I sent a note back to him and said, “That was a joke, wasn’t it?” He sent the word “smile” back.
But he does have a reputation for being aloof.
He’s had this reputation of being prickly, kind of a stuck-up guy. Even in the book, he says that when Edie (Brickell, the singersongwriter he married in 1992) meets him, she says, “I heard you weren’t a very nice guy.” He says, “No, I never meant to be a bad guy; I try to be nice.” But he’s so focused.
That’s the thing people don’t understand: If Bob Dylan is sitting here, and you sat down with him and started talking, he wouldn’t sit there and say, “Hey, how ya doin’!” He’s got his own world. And Paul, if he’s thinking about a song, he’s not going to talk to you; Neil Young, he’s not going to talk to you. Now Bruce (Springsteen), he would try to talk to you. (Laughs) Bono would try to talk to you.
But some of these guys are just so into their world. I remember I was doing an interview with Neil Young one time, driving around his big ranch up there (in Northern California), and he said, “I write a lot of songs in the car.” I said, “What if you start writing a song now?” He said, “The interview would be over.” That’s what they are. That’s their artistry. It’s the focus, the obsession they have.
Speaking of artistry, you spend as much or more time in the book examining his music as you do raking over the details of his private life. You don’t gloss over his tempestuous relationship with Art Garfunkel, or his celebrity marriages to Carrie Fisher and more recently singer-songwriter Edie Brickell.
I think of it as two train tracks going in (parallel): You’ve got to tell the personal story, because that’s what a biography is. But I think what’s important — beyond the personal story, which is essential — you’ve got to build on that and tell why he’s important. That’s the art part. And it went deeper into the art part than you almost ever see in a biography because, again, I wanted to stress the significance of it — why he’s remembered: those songs.
When you think of all these songs he wrote … it’s almost like I wanted it to be a case study in songwriting. But I didn’t want to do it to the exclusion of his private life.
One of my favorite sections is the one where he talks about writing “Darling Lorraine,” which he considers one of his best songs. It’s fascinating when the man who wrote it says he was surprised when the song about two people long into their relationship takes an unexpectedly dark plot turn.
That’s the big thing I learned: He writes in an unusual way. He doesn’t pick a theme and write about it ; he plays the guitar until something resonates. Then he tries to figure out what that feeling is and write about that, taking one line at a time, until he discovers what he’s writing about. That’s the discovery.
He said when he was writing (the song) “Graceland” — that line (emerged) that just took the breath out of me: “She said losing love is like a window in your heart / Everybody sees you’re blown apart.” Those things come out. It’s partially subconscious.
That’s why he left Simon & Garfunkel. He was probably burned out by the ’70s. He knew he had done all he could with those three (fundamental rock-pop) chords, so he set out to educate himself about other kinds of music so he could make more music: gospel music, Latin music, Cajun music, South African music — something else that would inspire him.
Did you reach a conclusion about how he has continued to make music that compares favorably to his early output?
Fame never became more important, money never became more important, nothing became more important than his music. And for much of his life he suffered because of that; his relationships suffered.
Gradually, after “Graceland,” he starts opening up his life, and with his marriage to Edie, now he’s found a balance.
Fame never became more important, money never became more important, nothing became more important than his music.