The drummer Paul Simon called the best of his generation: “Certainly one of them”
Every great rock and roll song always starts with the drums first. Although the common consensus is that no song sounds good unless it can be played on one instrument, even soft rockers like Paul Simon knew there was some magic to getting the one magic piece of percussion that tied a song together.
And despite Simon’s reputation as an acoustic guitarist, there’s a lot more rhythm that goes into his music, dating all the way back to Simon and Garfunkel.
He fingerpicked many intricate patterns during those early years, and while most of ‘Scarborough Fair’ feels like it’s floating on air half the time, what keeps everything grounded is listening to Simon’s acoustic guitar half the time, which has the exact lock-step timing to be a makeshift metronome for their voices.
For anyone even remotely interested in Simon’s talent for rhythm, though, you only need to look at nearly half the tracks on Graceland. He may have had a common knowledge of what specific tempos were supposed to be, but when working with these South African musicians on some of his ballads, he started to have a greater respect for the craft of making records. Now he could have a fragment of a song in the can and have the rest of his band interpret it differently than he could have done himself.
But that was the kind of music he had already been working towards since he started his solo career. Bridge Over Troubled Water had a lot of strange moments behind it like on ‘Cecilia’, but across his self-titled album, you could hear more jazz influences coming into view. And by the time he made Still Crazy After All These Years, he had the confidence to make music that had more interesting rhythms going on.
Even for a traditional pop song, ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’ is a bit much to take in all at once. There are many moments on the tune that would take a guitar player a little while to figure out, but outside of the strange chords he threw into the mix, Simon was most interested in the kind of drum sound he got out of drummer Steve Gadd during the recording.
Gadd had already turned in time working with other legends, but Simon was blown away seeing what he could do in only one take, saying, “The drum part, which is one of the most sampled drum parts, that’s the great drummer Steve Gadd. Maybe the most premier drummer of my generation or certainly one of them. I had my drum machine, and he said, ‘I was in the Army Corps of drummers and we would have to learn these parade drum things. What about that?’”
Although the song is still dominated by Simon’s great chorus, it’s impossible to get that groove out of your head once it ends. And compared to what Gadd would later do with Steely Dan, it felt like he was only getting the public warmed up for what he could really do on a mainstream pop record.
People already heard what he could build a laid-back groove, but the drum solo in a song like ‘Aja’ feels like watching a percussion artist slowly paint his masterpiece over the course of a minute. That may have been the proof that Gadd could play anything, but the amount of restraint that he put into this kind of performance is what made him one of the best drummers of his generation. Because if there’s one thing that any drummer should know before all else, it’s the importance of serving the song.
