An Excerpt from Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. This is broken record liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Hey, y'all, it's justin Richmond today. I'm super excited to share something with you that have been working on with Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam for about the last year and a half. It's called Miracle and Wonder Conversations with Paul Simon, and it's Malcolm's new audio book called from thirty hours of conversations he and Bruce had with Paul himself. In this book, Paul breaks down his musical evolution from the doowop he loved as a kid, to the folk music of his teens and early adulthood, all the way up until the newest music that he's making today. There's tons of unheard stories in here, and lots of rotten moments with Paul remembering how he wrote some of the most famous songs in his catalog. We're sharing with you the prologue in chapter one of the book, and if you like it, go check out the other nine chapters at Miracle audiobook dot com, or you can also listen on audible. I hope you enjoyed this exclusive excerpt of Miracle and Wonder conversations with Paul Simon. You know, listen to this story. This is quite amazing. I took a trip on the Amazon and we stopped in this village. It didn't even have any roads, and there's a girl who's sitting in there and she's practicing a nylon string guitar. So I listened for a while, and then we say to her and I said, I know a South American song, and I play due Dodd Dodd, but and she says, I know an American song. I say, really, as he goes, what are the odds? What did you say to her? There was nothing to say. What am I going to say? I wrote that so in the middle of the Amazon. It's so completely out of a realm of possibility. You know. That's Paul Simon talking to me and my friend and colleague Bruce Headlam, a moment I never believed could happen. Months before, I met Paul Simon for the first time in a little Italian restaurant in Manhattan. He arrived early, no entourage, no publicist. He was roaring a Yankees cap and jeans. In person, he's unassuming, direct, funny, in a slightly rye New York kind of way youthful. It was hard to remember that he had his first hit before I was born. I'll admit I was star struck. I've been a fan of my life. The very first pop music I ever remember hearing was Simon and Garfuncle. It was nineteen seventy. I was seven. My family had just moved to Canada from England. We had a record player, but no records. My mother went to the public library and checked out two albums, a Peter Paullen Mary record that I've largely forgotten and Bridge Over Troubled Water, which I've never forgotten. And now, fifty years later, here he was having lunch with me. I asked him, what do you think of sitting down and having an extended conversation about your career? You know what, I'm gonna stand I'm gonna stand up. He liked the idea. I think this is going to be an old contest, but let's just check the two guitars acause Jo, how would you describe the difference in the sound. It's the two guitars, how would you I'm I'm not the guy to ask. I enlisted my oldest friend Bruce, had them to help with the interviewing because Bruce knows a lot more about music than I do, and because way back when I was seven and I first listened to Bridge over Troubled Water, I listened to it with Bruce. It seemed like the best of karma to invite him along. What do I think? I think? I think the first one. I think, the second one is the Martin, and the first one is your favorite guitar is a Gurian? Yeah? And who one? Did you like? One or two? I prefer too. That's interesting, it's funny. On everything you played, I preferred this until you until you did the finger picking, and then I actually preferred the Martin on the finger picking. So there were three of us, Me, Bruce, Paul. Well, you know what, who will take on one and who will take on other? Okay? We met nine times. First in Hawaii, way up in the mountains, in a tiny little studio in what used to be the fruit seller of a ramshackle house perched on the side of a mountain. Look around this whole place, you'll just everything you see is like an odd sound. Even that little box is a cohne. There was a pit bull who greeted us enthusiastically each morning. The rumor was that Mick Fleetwood had recorded there once When will I Be Loved? Can we play a little? Then cheeted. Then after a break of a few months, we met again in a cottage in Paul Simon's backyard, joined by his engineer, Andy Smith, Simon and Garfuncle kind of. We'd listen to music and Paul would play and tell stories. Each conversation lasted four, sometimes five hours. All right, this is a really good one. Shake it very gently, just to create a cloud. Simon turned out to have far more energy than either Bruce or I. I have no anxiety about running out of ideas. You don't have that at all. No, I think another idea, you want another idea? Okay, here's another. Here's another idea. You know. I'm reminded of the line from the poet Delmo Schwartz, who once drove cross country with his friend William Phillips. William drove until I was exhausted. Then I drove. I never had a problem with phrasing, because there's always like a metronome clicking in my head, and I know where it is, and my body usually moves to it. Paul talked until we were exhausted. Then we talked, isn't I feel like that's your musical sensibility? Is honesty with an undercurrent of am I being ridiculous? Or no, that's true. What follows is not a biography. It's not an a through z account of Paul Simon's life. There are at least two very good biographies of Simon out there that will do that for you. This is a musical biography, a discussion of his songwriting, his craft, and examination of the sources of his extraordinary creativity. How do you get there? How do you make yourself feel that chemical high that you feel when you make something that you like. In our time with him, Paul talked about doo wop and queens and his dad and a million other things. What he thinks of all the different cover versions of his songs, specifically Hurry the Franklin that felt to me like wasn't even my song? Like I gave it up for adoption, or something about the countless people he's collaborated with over the years, Art Garfuncle, of course, his child friend, and his recording engineer, Roy Halley, who has worked with him almost from the beginning. With Paul, it's creativity, adding colors were appropriate. I don't go crazy, but if I come up with a really nice color, he'll nine out of ten times love it. The first part of this book is an argument about what makes Paul Simon special. When we call someone like him a musical genius, what does that mean? Can we be more specific about how experience and culture and talent and family combine to make music that endures a big part of my thinking is trial and error. It's to all trial and error, and there's no reason to be upset about the errors. Then in the middle comes the story of Graceland. Maybe Simon's greatest accomplishment. Part of the reason that I was able to write songs that were not overtly political was that the sound of what was going on was joyful. Could that album be made today? I'm not sure. We prefer our artists these days to stay in their own cultural lane, but Simon didn't, which is a good part of what makes him such a fascinating figure. And look at what he produced. I knew that I had to go to South Africa to get it right. I learned early on that you can't ask musicians to write in somebody else's handwriting. The final part of the book is about later Paul Simon, the work he did in his fifties, sixties, and seventies, when most musicians of his stature have resigned themselves to leaning on their own hits. He kept going, why how there are times when you say, oh, don't change, I'm happy here, stay right here, and I'm having a good time. Let's just stay right here. But it's like I'm off. Nope, I'm gone to the next part. Throughout the book, you'll hear from other musicians who have played with Simon over the years, or just love his music. Hello him, Renee Fleming, Roseanne Cash, Herbie Hancock, sting the idea of walking off to find America. You know, that's redolent of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer or Keroax picaresque American novels. And then we have something special, a piece of music Paul was working on while we were talking to him for this book, a piece called the Seven Psalms, something as personal as anything Simon has ever made. But most of what follows it's just Paul Simon. Missus Robinson wasn't really folky either. Missus Robinson is old snatch of blues, singing, talking, arguing, teaching. That's a lick that's not too different from to the Girl with the Diamond Ring. At the end of every session, he would always ask should we meet again, and we would say yes. Over the course of these long sessions, we had the experience of sitting just a few feet from a maestro. If you've been a fan of his music as I have, I think by the end of this book you'll see him in a new light. But where you haven't given us your feelings on these two guitars with respect to this song, Well, I know that these guitars records. You know. Yeah, if you know very little about it, you're invertree slip sliding away, slip slideing away. You know, the nearest destination, the more your slip sliding away. Well, I know, man, he came from my hometown. You are is passing fuzz woman like a thorny crown. He said to Lord, I live in fear. My love for you so overpowering. I'm afraid that I won't disappear. Slip sliding away, slip sliding away. You know, the near your destination, the more your slip sliding away. And I know woman became awaye. These are the very word she uses to describe her life. She said, a good day when it ain't got no rain, She said, a bad days when I lie in the bed. Now, think all things that might have been slip sliding, slip slideing way. The nearer your destination, the more your slip sliding away. And I know, Father out a son. He longed to tell her mother reasons for the things he'd done. He comes a long way just to explain, kissed his boys, he lay sleeping, and then he turned around and he headed home again. He slips sliding, slideing away again. God only knows. God makes his planned the informations on available to the mortal man. We will God jobs, collect all pain, leave went sliding down the highway. In fact, where slips sliding away, slip sliding away, sliding always slip sliding away, sliding away. M m mmmm Hold then lolo, Hello, oh love love lo lo whoa, whoa? That's any questions. That's a pretty good life. Do you remember how the song was constructed? Can you recreate that first chapter one? The mystery? Well, first of all, it's this kind of picking, So that tells me what time It was sometime between nineteen sixty four and sixty eight. That's when I was playing this style, and afterwards I stopped using it so constantly. Our conversations with Paul Simon usually began with a song. We would suggest one, or he would. He would talk about the song, sometimes sing a little bit of it, or we would play the original recording and he would break it down as we listened, like a color commentator on a football broadcast. So how would you describe that style? I would call this Travis picking. One of the days we met, we started with the boxer from Bridge over Trouble Water. I'm starting off as a net with a narration that could be me. I'm just a poor boy, though my story seldom told. I squandered my resistance for a pocket full of mumbles such a promises. Simon's song reconstructions were always meticulous, exacting as if he had just written the song the day before, not half a century before. I could understand beginning I am just a poor boy, though my story is seldom told. It's kind of typical of the way I begin some songs, you know. I try to find a way to begin the story now when I sing it I don't sing that. I sing, I sing a poor boy. Story seldom told squanders his resistance. So now I'm talking about you know, it's in the third person, because it doesn't seem authentic to say. I can't say that I am just a poor boy. I'm not a boy, and I'm not poor. What can I say? You know? But I could tell a story about that and people would know, of course that it was once applicable to me. But that verse has two kind of outstanding lines. Stories seldom told us squandered resistance. For a pocket full of mumbles, such a promises, that's the first one. Pocket full of mumbles is a nice idea. And I think it kind of came out of pocket full of marbles. And maybe I said, well, there's no used to say marbles, so I'll say, oh mumbles. Oh that's better, you know, pocket full of mumbles. That's a nice You know, nothing such our promises all lies and jest. Still a man is what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. That's the really good line of the maybe the whole song, the quarters where the ragged people who go looking for the places they would Paul Simon is one of the two or three greatest English language songwriters of his generation, or of any generation for that matter, And typically when confronted with achievement on that scale, we shrug and say, oh, that person's a genius. But that word genius doesn't tell you anything, does it. It's a label, not a description. It doesn't help you understand the scope or the origin or the character of someone's accomplishment. To listen to Paul Simon is to be struck by the mystery of creativity. How did he do it? And what can we learn from how he did it? Of course he wasn't just going to tell us. We would have to listen. Then I go back to storytelling. When I left my home and family, H left my home and my family no more than a boy and the company of strangers in the quiet of the railway station, running scared. So I probably wrote that song in England. If I'm saying railway station, because we say railroad laying low, seeking out the poor quarters where the ragged people go. That was somewhere. Because I remember that I wrote these lyrics on the back of an envelope on a plane. You don't still have that envelope, I hope I have that envelope. Yeah, actually, it's one of the few things that I have of when I wrote. But interestingly, I never wrote stuff down on pads or paper, you know, which I started to do later. But all of those songs were just written in my head, not written down. And even that one, I guess I was thinking about it. We was sitting on a plane looking for the places only they would go. Then La la la, And this is what's interesting to me, La la la, la, la la Lia. I always intended to write lyrics for that section. I just couldn't think of what the chorus should be, so I was just singing la la la as a spaceholder. But then I never could think of any lyrics, and I kept it. And it's so fortunate that that's what I did, because when I sing that song anywhere all around the world, people sing li la Lie, which takes you back to a deep truth about songwriting, which is that we love to sing nonsensical sounds. That's just a kind of deep human pleasure to sing that. You can think of tons of songs that have that, where you're just singing tura lura lura, or if you go way back into the English folk tradition, you know, followed it all did all day, and so Lila Lie serves that purpose and people sing along and there's a communal atmosphere that it evokes when I'm singing it in front of a large crowd, and that is part of what makes it anthemic. When you get a lot of people singing together, it's a very powerful, very powerful feeling. Time and again we would land in the same place. After he had described the why and how and where of his songwriting, we would still be left with questions, do you consider that a folk song? Yeah? I would say it was folky sixties folky kind of thing. This, that kind of fingerpicking, that's that's out of the folk all of that stuff is that would be what was the acoustic folk movement in the US and in England. If I had asked you when you wrote that song whether you considered yourself a folksing of what would you have said? No, No, We're used to our creative geniuses having clear identities. Martin Scorsese is an Italian American filmmaker from New York who has made films again and again about the intersection of those two worlds. Stevie Wonder who is one of the few American musicians who can be said to be a true peer of Paul Simon's, is a Black Motown singer, child of Detroit, who works within the overlapping African American traditions of R and B funk, gospel, and jazz. In both cases, the art tells you something critical about the artist. If you listen to a Whitney Houston song or Aretha Franklin song, you can tell with absolute certainty not just the ethnicity of the singer, but maybe even the denomination of the church they attended as a child, because there is absolutely no question that they both emerged from the Black Church. Good. Simon is different. It's really hard to locate. Sometimes he writes one of the great folk songs of his generation, But when you ask him, did you consider yourself a folk singer? He says no, how bet he'd have been interesting. Yeah. This idea, this mystery of Paul Simon's origins, goes beyond the boxer and beyond whether or not Simon falls within the folk tradition. Let me give you another example, which it involves one of Simon's favorite singers, Guy, a gospel legend. What was his name named Claude Jeter. Claude Jeter, the Reverend Claude Jeter. You don't know him, so, oh my god, you have to know him. You have to know the Swan Silvertones. Maybe I have an album here, Yeah, as a matter of fact, I have one right here. Oh this is perfect. Did you ever hear Oh Mary, don't you we've heard design? I don't think i've heard this version. Well, this is where bridge over Trouble Water across from its playing? Yeah, yeah, it is plair now listening you by good Random now, I want to tell you that I shooting would not perfect group. This is not Jeter yet. This is the other lead singer. That's what the battle said. You'll hear him when he comes in. I believe the mention he said me there is that's Jeter. Wish I had somebody that have me call me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You read over deep watering and trust in my name there it is. That's a phrase that's in gospel, you know, that comes out of the Bible. Would be your bridge over deep water or if you're trusting my maid, that's Oh Mary, don't you weep? That's what started at all listening to that record with Simon was a big moment for me and Bruce. As Paul mentioned, Mary Don't You Weep provided the spark for Bridge Over Troubled Water, the gospel masterpiece. Simon wrote for Our Carfuncle, but Jeter that falsetto. He's got a great, great, unique falsetto, probably the best falsetto in gospel. And of course I was looking for any opportunity to do a duet with him. Of course he was looking for an opportunity to collaborate with Jeter, and that came up with take Me to the mardy Gras. Come on, take me dude, Take Me to the Mardi Gras, would become one of the signature songs on their was Ryman Simon, Paul's second solo album after the breakup of his partnership with Our Carfuncle. He was recorded in nineteen seventy two in a legendary R and B studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Simon wrote Marti Gras with the Reverend Jeter in mind for the falsetto part. So we got together and I showed him the part and let him sing whatever he wanted to, and then we went down to Muscle shoals together, but flying first into Huntsville, Alabama, and then there was like a two hour car ride to muscle shows, Alabama. And during that time I would ask him, you know, so, what was it like on the road with a gospel quartet in the forties into the fifties playing in the segregated South? And his stories were fantastic. You know, there should have been a biography of Reverend Jeter Paul Simon, known for chart topping folk songs in Alabama with a gospel luminary. Did you ever feel when you're sitting down with someone like Claude Jeter? How does it feel when you're investigating another musical tradition? Do you feel awkward? Do you feel I mean, what's the kind of emotion? I Am not, in my mind investigating a musical tradition. I don't think that way. In my mind, I'm talking to an artist who I really admire and respect. You have to keep in mind that I'm my father was a musician, and I was raised in a house where there was always musicians around, and there was always great respect for musicians. So I felt a kind of a comfort. Didn't really feel awkward, but a little sense of awe. Did you go to Muscles Shoals deliberately seeking to shake up your sound? Oh? I don't go to shake up. I go to where I where I'm interested in, where I want to play. I don't think that way I'm going to shake up my sound. I got to do this for a change. I'm gonna I don't. I really don't think that way. Notice how Simon corrects me there twice. He wasn't investigating another musical tradition because it didn't feel like another musical tradition to him, And he wasn't deliberately trying to shake up his sound. He was just following his ear. Simon wanted to record him Muscle Shoals because he had heard a number of songs produced there, like the Staples singer's classic I'll Take You There. Muscle Shoals studio was fantastic because it was an old warehouse for gravestones. It was like a cemetery place, some southern Gothic. It's fantastic and yeah, and the bathroom was like right in the studio, so he had to use a bathroom me and well and do it take or anything because it was like flushing and it was right there in the studio. Also, the thing that was great about them was that that was their studio, that was their sound. You'd come in, they'd flick on the switch and they were ready to go. It wasn't like we got to do an hour of getting the drum sound. They had it. They had all their sounds. You know, everything was mike properly, everything was amped and you got the muscle shoal sound. But Simon wanted more than to just replicate the muscle shoals sound. That did use a New Orleans band, Onward Brass Band, Alabama Gospel, the muscle shoals sound, and the New Orleans brass band. They came up from New Orleans. And in order to get that, we drove to Jackson, Mississippi, and went to Malaco Sound, which is like one of the really great anecdotes. Driving there, we stopped at a gas station. We say we were lost. You know, do you know where Malaco Sound is? We say to the gas station, go ahead, he says, I'll tell you what. You take up the road, go about two miles up, come to a golf field. You go past there about a mile and a half. You make a U turn. You come back and then you make a right turn. That's right there. So then we said, well, why can't we just make a left turn when we come to the golf field, said well we could do that too. I've been saying that ever since. Well you could do that too. Can you see now why Paul Simon is so hard to locate? A Jewish songwriter from New York City who at that point in the early nineteen seventies is one of the three or four most famous musicians in the world, drives from Huntsville to muscle shows Alabama with Claude Jeter and ordained minister and black gospel legend to record a song with a group of acclaimed R and B musicians and a New Orleans brass band's Ferry Beckett, And what's the song? Take me to the Mardi Gras. Come on, Dake me Dood, which by the way has a Jamaican reggae guitar group that's Jimmy Johnson, looks like Jamaican. You know, five separate traditions colliding effortless again stall Hurry day me dodo. Musicians all the time borrow from each other and from different traditions. Of course, the Rolling Stones began life as a bunch of suburban English kids imitating the American blues. Janis Jomplin was not a product of the Mississippi Delta. She was the daughter of an oil and gas engineer from Texas. But with Paul Simon, five traditions layered one on top of each other. New York City, Jewish, Jamaican reggae, New Orleans brass band, Harlem gospel, and Alabama R and B. That was the Paul Simon mystery that we started with. Here comes Jeter. You know that he's the the great falsetto singer in the gospel quartets. That's like what he always said, You know, I never pretended to be anything other than falsetto. By the standards we use today to judge authenticity in an artist, that they are true to their identity and tradition. Paul Simon is inauthentic. But how can that be? How do you become one of the most beloved and influential songwriters of your generation if you appear inauthentic. That's the question we'll get to in the next chapter. I like it's a very very sweet record with incredible talented people in their muscle shows band, a real brass band of you know. I mean those are old cats, are from the worms. They weren't kids. What do you think Cludge either thought of you. Um. I think he thought of me as a good guy. And as I said, you know, there was always this rumor that I was gonna which I didn't know of, that I was going to give him a Cadillac at this church up in Harlem. But I didn't know that I know about it. Otherwise I would have such a lost opportunity. You could have rolled up in some Oh. Absolutely, I really wish I had. I wish I could. I could go back in time and do that. If you enjoyed this excerpt, go order the book now at Miracle audiobook dot com, or it's also available on Audible.