by Robert Hilburn, 2018
Scanned this book quickly after getting through the first 100 pages but then getting bogged down. Learned enough: Born in 1941, grandparents immigrated from Lithuania and Ukraine, long before the Holocaust, which would have killed them since they were Jewish. His father was a musician, stand-up bass. He was born in New Jersey but moved to Queens as a toddler. He loved baseball and was good at it but was so short, he had to give it up (I think he topped out at 5 feet 1 inch). The first hit he wrote was “Hey, Schoolgirl.” He sang it with his friend Artie (Art Garfunkel) at age 16 in 1956 and it was on American Bandstand in 1957.
Art Garfunkel was a dick; he first took offense and never forgave Paul for recording a few songs without him in 1958. They got back together and broke up again in 1970 (Art had signed on to do a 2nd movie without consulting Paul and Art’s movie commitments were bogging down recording commitments), again in 1993 (Art accused Paul of making him look like a fool on stage because Paul made a mistake on where to come in on The Boxer) and the last time in 2010 (Art’s voice was shot from a sickness he picked up in Nicaragua and they had to cancel many concerts they had booked because Art misled Paul and said his voice had recovered when it hadn’t).
Paul first fell in love with a young English woman named Kathy Chitty. They never married but remained life-long friends. He had 3 marriages; his last to Edie Brickell and they are still together. He has 4 children. He was involved with Carrie Fisher for about a decade.
His “Yesterday” song was “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” He was inspired by a gospel album by the Swan Silvertones:
At one point, the group’s lead singer, the Reverend Claude Jeter, injected a line common in church parlance: “I’ll be a bridge over deep water, if you trust in my name.” The line doesn’t stand out in the clamor of the record. You have to be paying attention to even catch it. Simon was paying attention…
…”It was just like that,” Simon said. “The essence of the song took maybe twenty minutes; the first two verses were done in two hours. And the melody was something like fifteen notes, which is long. I thought, ‘this is better than I usually write.’ It just seemed to flow through me. In a way, you don’t feel you can really even call it your own, but then again, it’s nobody else’s. I didn’t know where it came from, but I knew it was exceptional…
from pages 142 and 143 of Paul Simon
He is a musical genius and has been writing music since he was a young teenager in Queens, New York.