The songwriters that took Paul Simon’s breath away: “They wouldn’t settle for just good”
Any artist that gets to the top of the food chain knows how to play it cool around their fellow legends.
There’s nothing that separates them from everyday people, but when anyone grows up listening to their contemporaries’ music, it’s going to be surreal trying to see them in the flesh for the first time. And while Paul Simon is far from the most animated person in the world, it took a lot for him to be rendered absolutely tongue-tied when he saw a living legend standing right in front of him.
But when Simon was cutting his teeth as a writer, there was no guarantee that he was going to be one of the greatest songwriters of his generation. Simon and Garfunkel was still a project in many respects, and even if ‘The Sound of Silence’ got the ball rolling for them in their early days, there were bound to be a few people that didn’t get their appeal when listening to their arrangements of ‘Go Tell It On the Mountain’.
Then again, their brand of folk wasn’t all that different from the rest of the music coming out of New York. Bob Dylan had just crash-landed in town and was making people think about their lives in a much different way, but whereas Simon liked the idea of using wordplay in the same way that Dylan did, he knew that he had a much different approach. He could never have that sardonic wit about him, but compared to his musical prowess, The Beatles were practically musical chameleons.
There had been plenty of fans that saw the Fab Four as four versions of Elvis Presley together in one group, but the magic always came from John Lennon and Paul McCartney working as a duo. Every member was responsible for making them Fab, but as someone who didn’t have a partner to bounce songwriting ideas off of, Simon was intrigued that two people could manage to go down so many different avenues.
And while Simon could admire the diverse material they put onto every record, he would have been lying if he said he wasn’t a little bit overwhelmed by it. Make no mistake, the ‘Nerk Twins’ were absolutely electric together, but their track record could leave anyone else downright disoriented, especially when Lennon emerged with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ only for McCartney to come back having written ‘Penny Lane’.
Simon was confident enough as a songwriter by the time he met the Beatles duo, but that competitive spirit was almost too much for him, saying, “You have no idea how competitive John Lennon was around Paul McCartney. When I first met them, I felt like someone had taken all the oxygen out of the room. I almost couldn’t breathe, they were so competitive, and that’s what made them so great. They wouldn’t settle for just good.”
That same belief is probably what made Simon and Garfunkel so tense as well. Both of them wanted to make great records no matter what the cost, but when looking at the amount they had to sacrifice to get everything made, it’s not like they were willing to let the other try to outshine them with a tune that they knew wasn’t that good.
But that’s the key to all great art. Not all of it is meant to sound pleasant all the time, and more often than not, artists can get to be a handful when they stand by their creative vision, but even if they had to test their relationships to find their place in the world, it was all worth it when they had a song or album they could be proud of.
