#268 - Paul Simon - Paul Simon (1972)
MUSIC HISTORY COMPILED BY ADAM BERNARD:
BACKGROUND – PAUL SIMON
Paul Simon is an American musician, singer, songwriter and actor whose career has spanned six decades. He is one of the most acclaimed songwriters in popular music, both as a solo artist and as half of folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel with Art Garfunkel. After Simon & Garfunkel split in 1970, Simon recorded three acclaimed albums over the following five years, all of which charted in the Top 5 on the Billboard 200 After a career slump, Simon released Graceland in 1986, an album inspired by South African township music. It sold 14 million copies worldwide, and remains his most popular and acclaimed solo work
Paul Frederic Simon was born in 1941 in Newark, NJ to Hungarian-Jewish parents. Both of his parents were teachers - his dad a college professor and his mother an elementary school teacher. His father was also a double-bass player and dance bandleader that performed under the name Lee Sims. They moved to Kew Gardens in Queens when Paul was 4 years old. Donald Fagen of Steely Dan described Simon's childhood as that of "a certain kind of New York Jew, almost a stereotype really, to whom music and baseball are very important. I think it has to do with the parents. The parents are either immigrants or first-generation Americans who felt like outsiders, and assimilation was the key thought—they gravitated to black music and baseball looking for an alternative culture." Simon, upon hearing Fagen's description, said it "isn't far from the truth".
Simon met Art Garfunkel when they were both 11. They performed in a production of Alice in Wonderland for their sixth-grade graduation, and began singing together when they were 13, occasionally performing at school dances. Shortly after, at the age of 12 or 13 Simon wrote his first song, "The Girl for Me", for him and Art Garfunkel. According to Simon, it became the "neighborhood hit". His father wrote the words and chords on paper for the boys to use. That paper became the first officially copyrighted Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel song, and is now in the Library of Congress. In 1957, in their mid-teens, they recorded the song "Hey, Schoolgirl" under the name "Tom & Jerry", a name that was given to them by their label Big Records. The single reached number 49 on the pop charts. Between 1957 and 1964, Simon wrote, recorded and released more than 30 songs, which included a period where both were attending different colleges. Most of the songs Simon recorded during that time were performed alone or with musicians other than Garfunkel. The duo occasionally reunited as Tom & Jerry for some singles, including "Our Song" and "That's My Story". They were released on minor record labels. In early 1964, Simon and Garfunkel auditioned for Columbia Records, whose executive Clive Davis signed them to produce an album. Columbia decided that the two would be called Simon & Garfunkel instead of Tom & Jerry; according to Simon, this was the first time artists' surnames had been used in pop music without their first names. They broke through in 1965 with the song "The Sound of Silence" and would become two of the biggest rock stars in the world by 1969. By the time they began working on their final album, Bridge over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel's relationship had deteriorated. "At that point, I just wanted out," Simon later said. At the urging of his wife, Peggy Harper, Simon called Davis to confirm the duo's breakup. For the next several years, they spoke only two or three times a year.
In 1971, Simon taught songwriting at NYU. He said he had wanted to teach for a while, and hoped to help people avoid some of the mistakes he had made, saying "You can teach somebody about writing songs. You can't teach someone how to write a song, I don't think ... I'd go to a course if the Beatles would talk about how they made records because I'm sure I could learn something." Among the students he taught were two of the Roche sisters, Maggie and Terre, and singer-songwriter Melissa Manchester who remembers that Simon was nervous, listened to the students' songs and offered suggestions and criticism, often dissecting the lyrics and drawing comparisons with his own work while offering insights into his own work and sources of inspiration. Simon started traveling to San Francisco around this time to record some demos and began to work with different musical styles for a proposed solo album, including Latin music, jazz, blues, and reggae. That leads us to today's album.
Simon's next project was the pop-folk album, There Goes Rhymin' Simon, released in May 1973. It contained some of his most popular and polished recordings. The lead single, "Kodachrome", was a number 2 hit in America. The album reached number 1 on the Cashbox album charts. Highly anticipated, Still Crazy After All These Years was his next album. Released in October 1975, it marked another departure. The mood of the album was darker, as he wrote and recorded it in the wake of his divorce. Simon & Garfunkel would reunite for a Central Park Concert in 1981, and Simon's musical experimentation continued on into the 1980s, including South African music on his 1986 release, Graceland (which went on to win the Grammy For Album of the Year). He put on another huge Central Park concert in 1991 featuring African and South American bands, this time with over 750,000 attending, making it one of the largest concert audiences in history. He continued to write and release music over the next 3 decades, with his most recent release being in 2018 (In The Blue Light).
Simon has won 12 Grammy Awards(one of them a Lifetime Achievement Award) and five Album of the YearGrammy nominations (the most recent for You're the Onein 2001). He is one of only six artists to have won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year more than once as the main credited artist. In 1998, he was entered in the Grammy Hall of Famefor the Simon & Garfunkel album Bridge over Troubled Water. He received an Oscarnomination for Best Original Songfor the song "Father and Daughter" in 2002. He is also a two-time inductee into the RnR HOF as half of Simon & Garfunkel in 1990 and as a solo artist in 2001.In 2006, Simon was selected by Time Magazineas one of the "100 People Who Shaped the World".Simon was the first recipient of the Library of Congress's Gershwin Prize for Popular Songin 2007.
ALBUM BACKGROUND – PAUL SIMON
Paul Simon is the first studio album released by Paul as a solo artist after his break up with long time musical partner Art Garfunkel. If any musical justification were needed for the breakup, it could be found on this striking collection, Paul Simon's post-split debut. From the opening cut, "Mother and Child Reunion" (a Top Ten hit), Simon, who had snuck several subtle musical explorations into the generally conservative S&G sound, broke free. The lead track heralded the rise of reggae with an exuberant track recorded in Jamaica for a song about death. It was miles removed from the ballad style of Bridge Over Troubled Water and signaled that Simon was a versatile songwriter as well as an expressive singer with a much broader range of musical interests than he had previously demonstrated.
Sometimes when musicians or a famous athletic duo split up, there is always debate about who is better after the split, or if the accepted better half or Batman needs his Robin to be good. This album proved Simon could flourish without his former partner.