Wendy Carlos's Twin wrote:Simon supposedly stole a lot of the music on "Graceland" from Los Lobos, and they are still furious about it. He sounds like a real douche.
Higgs wrote:Peter Ames Carlin’s Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon is one of curiously few books about the songwriter. Hundreds, probably more, have meanwhile been written about his great ’60s rival, Bob Dylan. If he gave it any thought at all, is this the kind of discrepancy that might rankle, peeve or otherwise irk Simon?
You bet.
According to Carlin, the 75-year old Simon is in many ways unchanged from the tubby Jewish kid from Queens, growing up sick with the knowledge he was never going to be elvis. In other words, he’s still a mess of anxieties, insecurities and self-doubt unrelieved by years of therapy, awards, hit records, critical acclaim and largely pampered celebrity.
In Carlin’s meticulously assembled portrait, Simon’s neediness is matched only by his self-importance, a pumped-up sense of himself and his apparently unmatchable talent, tyrannical in most respects, everyone in his orbit there only to do his bidding, lackeys attending his demanding whims. For all the expansive generosity of his music, he can also be petty, malicious, prone to spite and envy, especially of his oldest friend and musical partner, Art Garfunkel, who he seems to have equally loved and resented, mainly because of the unwanted knowledge that he would always be more popular as part of Simon & Garfunkel than he was even at his most successful as Paul Simon.
And don’t get Carlin started on Simon’s bullish intransigence, the mule-headed belief that his opinion is the only one that matters, his inability to compromise, back down or negotiate, and a stubborn unwillingness to heed wiser council.
His friend, Harry Belafonte, for instance, was still negotiating on his behalf with the African National Congress for clearance for him to record in South Africa when Simon, typically headstrong, turned up for the first sessions. With a little more patience, the whole sanctions-busting hoo-hah that subsequently pursued Graceland could have been avoided. even a belated apology for not waiting for ANC approval – which they were happy to give – would have put paid to the controversy. Simon refused to issue one and the row rumbled on.
Simon is ruthless, too, and sometimes duplicitous. When he and Garfunkel signed their first recording contract as a duo, he simultaneously negotiated a solo deal for himself without mentioning it to an eventually furious Art. Years later, aspiring songwriter Heidi Berg gave him a cassette of the African township music she wanted to incorporate into the songs she’d written for the LP Simon had promised to produce for her, which became instead the sound of his own Graceland, the record that put him back on top after a few fallow commercial years.
He has also been cavalier about songwriting credits, paying generous session rates, but retaining all publishing rights, which has incensed some collaborators, notably Los Lobos, who suggest their contribution to Graceland was based on a song they’d already written that Simon claimed as his own.
Free boops today.
