The one band Paul Simon could never take seriously: “Too much about haircuts”
There was a certain standard that Paul Simon held himself to whenever he made a new record.
He wasn’t going to spend his time doing the same schtick that made Simon and Garfunkel one of the biggest duos in pop music, and the rest of his career saw him constantly restructuring the way that he sold his songs whenever he went into the studio. He wanted to expand the palette of what a rock and roll star could do, and that meant moving away from the more glamorous side of the genre most of the time.
Let’s face it: it’s not like Simon was going to be appealing to the glam rock crowd whenever he made a new record. His debut marked the first time that he started working outside of his comfort zone, but his audience was much different from the David Bowie and Marc Bolan crowd. His songs had a lot more twists and turns, and it’s hard to think of any of them that could have been perfected in any other way once they got started.
Simon was more of a craftsman by this point than a songwriter, and a lot of his contemporaries were also toying with the idea of what rock and roll could be like. Joni Mitchell didn’t want to stay a folk singer for much longer after making a record like Blue, and even the biggest singer-songwriters at the time, like Bob Dylan, were changing their sound at every corner. It may have been exciting for its time, but there’s a certain danger that came in when punk took over the charts.
In one fell swoop, all of the foundation that people like Simon had set for themselves seemed obsolete. The name of the game now was being able to have passion behind everything you played instead of knowing the basics of music theory, so it wasn’t like bands like Ramones and Sex Pistols were going to be talking about how great a song like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ sounded.
That’s the nature of the beast in popular music, but it wasn’t like everyone in punk shied away from Simon’s way of thinking. The Clash had tried to move punk rock further when they started spreading out their sound on records like Sandinista, and while a band like The Police may have fit somewhere in the cracks of punk, Sting was willing to show everyone the strange musical ideas he had, whether that was throwing in jazz chords or playing with modal interchange on tunes like ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’.
But even for someone who cared about their craft as much as Sting did, Simon remembered that he could never manage to take his band that seriously whenever they played, saying, “Until now, their albums seemed too smoothed down. There’s a little too much fashion in it for me. Too much about haircuts. It’s distracting to me. Not for what makes number one, mind you, because haircuts are fairly important for number one.”
Granted, it’s not like the fashions were the band’s idea in the beginning. They were musicians first and foremost, but once MTV managed to turn them into a teenybopper band, you could tell that they weren’t that enthused about playing that game, especially when they started hamming it up in thor videos and looking bored out of their minds trying to sell their songs on the set of ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’.
But given the kind of songwriter that Sting would ultimately become, it’s a no brainer why Simon would see some magic in him. He was never afraid to wear his influences on his sleeve, and since Simon was trying to break down the doors of what he could do on Graceland, Sting was practically following his lead when working with more jazz musicians on records like Dream of the Blue Turtles.
