Paul simon biography book

When Paul Simon wrote — in Simon & Garfunkel’s 1965 breakthrough hit The Sound of Silence — that “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls/And tenement halls,” he made a call to our collective conscience that resonates just as powerfully today as it did during its long moment on the pop charts.

Among ‘60s folk-rock bards who matured and endure as global singer/songwriters, Simon stands in the front rank, setting as high a bar for musical quality and poetic vision as any. His ongoing success has been flecked with failure, youthful doubt and adult disappointment, and now we have a worthy portrait of the artist to put it all in perspective.

Paul Simon: The Life (Simon & Schuster, 448 pp., ★★★★ out of four) is a straight-shooting tour de force by Robert Hilburn, the former pop critic for the Los Angeles Times and author of an acclaimed 2013 Johnny Cash biography. Famously private, Simon reportedly resisted countless offers for his story until he read the Cash book, after which he gave Hilburn access and full editorial control.

It makes sense that Simon would trust Hilburn, a writer who doesn’t go for lurid detail, over-analyze or indulge in critical preening and preciosity. Like Simon, Hilburn’s passion is music, and he makes clear that Simon’s is very much a life in and of music — a drive for aesthetic achievement, deeply serious in the studio and onstage.

As Hilburn tells it, Simon inherited his rigor from his musician father, Lou, who was stingy in his praise of Paul’s early songwriting efforts, just as Paul is a candidly tough judge of the musical aspirants he encounters.

Hilburn’s nuanced attention to the dynamics and the substance of Simon’s artistry is evident throughout. We learn where memoir turns to message in his lyrics (“When you’re weary, feeling small“ is, for example, the confessional nudge that sends Simon’s great hymn, Bridge Over Troubled Water toward its affirmation) and we learn countless, often surprising details of his music-making: how he wed the melody line of a Bach chorale to the words of American Tune, or the obsessive studio wizardry that made such folk-pop anthems as The Boxer rival the ambitiousness and sweep of The Beatles.

Hilburn’s reportorial skill takes us on a complex journey, starting with Simon’s birth in 1941 and his middle-class rooting in Queens, N.Y., where he and a childhood friend, Art Garfunkel, inspired by the Everly Brothers, harmonized well enough to catch the ears of Manhattan producers. They enjoyed a modest hit record, Hey Schoolgirl, in 1957, as Tom and Jerry.

It would take another decade, though, for the multi-million-selling triumphs of Simon & Garfunkel’s heyday, followed by the Simon solo albums that yielded such hits as Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, and the pioneering, pop-expanding world music of Graceland, for which Simon journeyed to South Africa in the 1980s to collaborate with local musicians.

In doing so, he sparked controversy among anti-apartheid activists, while bringing great African musicians such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo to the wider world. Simon’s high-profile failures — from his star turn in the film One-Trick Pony to the Broadway debacle of his musical, The Capeman — are just as fully delineated.

Hilburn weaves together the turbulent decades and quiet personal drama of Simon’s story — how his self-consciousness about his short stature (he’s 5-foot-3) prompts him to tower above the pop competition, while his relationships and three marriages have often coexisted uneasily with his dedication to his art.

And though he will launch his lengthy Homeward Bound: The Farewell Tour on May 16 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, British Columbia, in part to raise money for a number of worthy, Earth-conserving causes, Hilburn makes clear there’s nothing forcing Simon, now 76, into retirement. 

Ultimately, he’s a man at peace with his complicated past, his honored present, and Hilburn does thorough justice to this American prophet and pop star.

FacebookTwitterEmail