SIMON’S NOT SIMPLE AT ALL
Bio looks at complex life of music icon Paul, on verge of retiring, to find out, ‘Who am I?’
AFTER 60 YEARS in the music business, Paul Simon is ready for the sound of silence.
This September, his “Homeward Bound” tour is set to conclude with three nights in Madison Square Garden. And then, the pride of Kew Gardens Hills insists, he’s bidding the music business farewell.
Before his final bow, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer took a look back at his life and career with author Robert Hilburn for “Paul Simon: The Life.”
Music critic Hilburn says the biography, though official, is uncensored — and based on extensive interviews with Simon, exwives and lovers, family and friends.
Except for one friend. Or former friend.
It’s difficult to think of Simon without mentally adding “and Garfunkel,” a name once derided by Columbia Records executives as better for a law firm than a band.
But Art Garfunkel, Simon’s childhood friend and former collaborator, isn’t interviewed here. All of his quotes come from other people’s articles. He’s deep in the background.
As, perhaps, Simon always preferred.
Simon’s family moved to Queens from Newark when he was 2, with his father, a professional musician, commuting to a regular gig at the Roseland Ballroom in the Theater District.
A career in music held no allure for young Paul, who only wanted to play for the Yankees. Simon still keeps a framed newspaper clip in his office, commemorating the time he stole home in a high school game.
At a mere 5-feet-3, Simon knew he was too short for pro sports. And so the musician’s son started discovering music on his own, writing songs and singing harmonies with his pal Artie.
The teens landed a record contract. Billed as Tom and Jerry, they scored a modest hit, “Hey, Schoolgirl,” in 1957. But when their next few singles stiffed, Simon signed a separate deal as a solo act.
Garfunkel saw it as a betrayal. Simon saw it as business.
That disconnect — emotional for Garfunkel, practical for Simon — became the harbinger for decades of angst.
A few years later, when his solo career stalled, Simon reached out to Garfunkel. They landed another deal, this time with Columbia Records — where the suits proposed the duo perform as Catchers in the Rye.
Someone fortunately thought better, and 1964 brought Simon and Garfunkel’s first album, “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” It flopped. Simon bolted for England, playing clubs and recording a solo album. And then “The Sound of Silence,” a song from the pair’s debut, was re-released as a single after the label added electric guitars.
It was suddenly a hit. Simon rushed home. Garfunkel received a phone call. They were together, again.
The two began selling out concerts. Their contributions to the soundtrack of Mike Nichols’ 1967 smash movie, “The Graduate” — a few old songs, plus the hit single “Mrs. Robinson” — made them even bigger.
There remained critics, including the iconic Yankees star Joe DiMaggio — who didn’t get the song’s lyrics at all.
“What I don’t understand is why you ask where I’ve gone,” the Yankee Clipper told Simon. “I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial.”
Despite their success, the partnership was soon in trouble again. Garfunkel signed on to act in Nichols’ next two movies, “Catch-22” and “Carnal Knowledge.”
The acting stints delayed recording sessions. There was another complication: After the hit “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Garfunkel’s vocals were getting more attention than Simon’s songwriting. Simon decided he was done. He told the record company. It’s unclear in the book when or even if he told Garfunkel. He simply began work on a new album, bluntly titled “Paul Simon.”
It yielded an immediate hit, “Mother and Child Reunion” — named for a chicken-and-egg dish Simon had seen on a Chinatown menu.
Simon was solo once more — though he was never alone.
Simon married his manager’s ex-wife Peggy Harper in 1969. Five years later, after she kept interrupting his attempt to listen to the new Stevie Wonder album, he walked out and moved into a hotel. The divorce soon followed.
Then a relationship with the actress Shelley Duvall came and went. Simon married Carrie Fisher in 1983, but they proved “compatibly incompatible,” she said.
They broke up, got back together then divorced in 1984. She kept coming back to him until Simon finally called it quits.
He married again in 1992 to the singer Edie Brickell, 25 years his junior. Though a report of domestic violence — she slapped him, he shoved her — brought police to their New Canaan, Conn., home in 2014, the marriage has lasted.
Still, Simon — moody, self-involved and often insecure — appears difficult to get along with. His premature baldness depressed him for a long time, and while he learned to joke about his height, he remained sensitive.
Sixty years later, he could still quote an offhanded gibe of Garfunkel’s from their Tom and Jerry days: “No matter what happens, I’ll always be taller.”
“There is a prejudice against small men and that becomes a problem at times, because I happen to be an alpha-maleishtype guy,” Simon said last year. “It becomes a competitive thing.”
Even his biggest solo success, 1986’s “Graceland,” was marked by controversy. While his collaborations with black South African musicians were heralded by some as building bridges, they came in the midst of a United Nationsbacked boycott.
Simon faced withering criticism from the African National Congress and anti-apartheid activists. Steven Van Zandt, whose song “Sun City” urged performers to avoid the country, called Simon’s decision to go anyway “extraordinarily arrogant.”
Simon characteristically refused to back down. He would make music the way he wanted, with whomever he wanted. That included his old partner. Although there were years when the two didn’t speak, Simon called when he wanted everything the word “reunion” could bring.
Their famous free concert in Central Park in 1981 was initially planned as a Simon solo. But the songwriter fretted that it wouldn’t live up to Barbra Streisand’s legendary event there in 1967. He invited Garfunkel to draw a bigger crowd.
Any collaboration was always on Simon’s terms. He asked Garfunkel to join him in the studio in 1983 for a new album, “Hearts and Bones.”
Once they started working, and quarreling, Simon simply turned it into another solo project.
Although the two occasionally still toured together, the gigs ended in 2010 when Simon realized Garfunkel had been downplaying a serious vocal problem.
The remaining bookings were canceled, and that meant the duo had to cough up $2 million. A furious Simon ended the partnership for good.
“I was tired of all the drama,” he said. “I didn’t feel I could trust him anymore.”
Simon returned to focusing on his own career, though the albums didn’t garner the attention they once did.
Perhaps he was reminded of the embarrassing flop of his 1998 musical “The Capeman” when Brickell’s show, “Bright Star,” was a Broadway hit in 2016.
In any case, that was when he decided “showbiz doesn’t hold any interest for me” and announced his impending retirement. It’s a decision he calls “an act of courage.”
“I’m going to see what happens if I let go,” he said. “Then I’m going to see, who am I? Or am I just this person who was defined by what he did?
“And if that’s gone, and you have to make up yourself, who are you?”
Paul Simon is about to find out.