The guitarist Paul Simon called extraordinarily gifted: “Incredible showmanship”
Paul Simon always approached his craft as a songwriter rather than a musician. It’s one thing to play the instrument incredibly well, but it’s impossible to reach people’s hearts if you’re playing a thousand miles an hour but not actually saying anything. But in those magical moments, some people have both of those talents down to a science, and Simon knew that he was witnessing something incredible once Jimi Hendrix started making waves on the rock scene.
When you look at Simon and Garfunkel and Hendrix together on the charts, though, it seems like it’s coming from two different worlds. For all of the fretboard fireworks that Hendrix put into every track he ever made, there were also the lighthearted sounds of the folk duo playing pertinent songs about social issues and the occasional silly track sprinkled in for good measure.
That’s not to say that Hendrix didn’t have a sense of humour, but his shows were more reserved for his larger-than-life moments. From the minute he got on stage, every audience member got a sense of how he was feeling that day, either unleashing anger on his instrument, playing with his teeth, or easing things back in the most beautiful, clean tone ever conceived by any rock musician.
Though Simon was better suited to the acoustic guitar, he still had to admit that all those accolades were earned, telling Howard Stern, “I met him at Monterey Pop. In fact, we jammed together. If you can call it [that], me trying to keep up with him. He was an extraordinarily gifted guitarist, and that’s not a new piece of news. I saw the show where he lit his guitar on fire. I thought it was an incredible act of showmanship.”
With all due respect to Simon’s technical skills as a fingerpicking god, there was probably nothing that he could have added whenever Hendrix was playing. There were certainly moments when Hendrix left space in the mix for other players, but if he was unleashing emotion whenever he played, Simon wanted to connect to the more intellectual side of the mind.
Across albums like Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon would balance out the ballads with more thoughtful songs about the state of the world or trying to establish connections with his fellow man. It’s not like Hendrix wasn’t paying attention to that kind of music, either, taking it one step further by interpolating Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ to create one of the greatest cover songs of all time.
What Simon lacked in showmanship, he made up for in his solo career by getting more people onstage and introducing Western culture to the concept of world music on projects like Graceland. Hendrix was far too out of reach for any guitarist to try to emulate, but by keeping to the folk tradition as a singer-songwriter, Simon ended up settling into a groove that no one else could touch. Instead of being about the stage presence, it was about using songs to speak to the audience directly.
