The singer Paul Simon knew became “an incredible waste”
I hope it doesn’t shock you when I say that Paul Simon was never going to be a rock and roll frontman.
It’s one thing that he didn’t really look the part of one of the greatest performers to ever walk the Earth, but when looking at his legacy, he was more focused on writing songs that could last far longer than anything else that his peers were doing. He knew that all great artists had to come through with the songs before anything else, and he could see when some performers really weren’t giving it their all.
As far as Simon could tell, the greatest performers are the ones that needed to have passion behind what they were doing, and he even knew that what he was doing as part of Simon and Garfunkel wasn’t working. He and Art Garfunkel were already having disagreements over creative direction, so it didn’t make sense for them to keep making the same kinds of tunes and hope that the audience would eat up whatever they threw at them.
That wasn’t Simon’s idea of a healthy career, and his solo years were full of tunes all about trying to make something new. Each of his albums was approached as a new creative endeavour to find a different angle, and it’s shocking how much it worked half the time. No one would have imagined him being able to work with jazzy musicians or travel to South Africa, but the entire point was about keeping things fun.
But that’s not what the labels always want to hear. The label may be an artist’s best friend when they first sign that contract, but once they taste that first tiny bit of success, all they’re going to want is for someone to make lightning strike twice every single time they make a record. That doesn’t make for the healthiest environment, but Simon knew that far too many artists turn themselves into nostalgia acts over the years.
After all, the biggest names from a generation before him had already begun doing that. Chuck Berry wasn’t going to try and convince everyone that he had something that could outdo ‘Johnny B Goode’, and even The Beach Boys had become a nostalgia act talking about fun in the sun after Brian Wilson went on sabbatical, but none of them broke Simon’s heart more than seeing Elvis Presley get more and more manufactured.
Presley’s music was what he fell in love with when he first heard rock and roll, but seeing him making movies and getting even more shallow in his Vegas period broke Simon’s heart, saying, “I liked [Elvis] up to [the year 1957]. And after that, when, you know, the material that he picked, and the movies, and everything was just, to me, an incredible waste of a great talent.” But that’s not to say that everything about that period was terrible.
Presley was getting more than a little bit shallow with the tracks that he picked and the projects that he was taking on, but he still had that phenomenal voice to anchor everything down. And when he ended up singing a ballad, you can practically feel everyone swoon from the first note that he sang, when singing tunes like ‘Love Me Tender’, the same way people swooned listening to ‘Mystery Train’.
He had played many shows that were overdone to the point of parody in Vegas, but every so often, there would be a song like ‘An American Trilogy’ that would remind everyone why he was considered ‘The King’. His final years could get bloated, tired, and more than a little bit embarrassing, but on the rare occasion, a song would come up that proved that Presley was the only one who could do that job.
