From People Magazine, a profile of Paul Simon from November 1980, in which he reflects on One-Trick Pony (his new movie), his personal life and his apartment:

In the life cycle of a pop-rock star, 40 is not an age, it is an apocalypse. Mick Jagger once vowed that he’d never be singing Satisfaction after 40, and Elvis survived only two years past that abyss. Yet there’s at least one heavy who is still cagey after all those years. At 39, and 11 months short of his own reckoning, Paul Simon has emerged in the 1980s as a rocker for all ages, one figure from the ’60s entering midlife not as a jejune nostalgia act but thriving both financially and artistically.

Most surprisingly, perhaps, the liberating locus of Simon’s mid-career renewal is not strictly musical. Rather, it is One-Trick Pony, the new movie he wrote, scored and stars in, which represents his biggest risk-taking since the difficult split with Art Garfunkel a decade ago. Garfunkel, of course, found a home in movies like Carnal Knowledge and Catch-22 and is currently starring in Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing/A Sensual Obsession. Simon added to his musical feats (40 million LPs, 13 Grammys) but stayed clear of Hollywood until 1977, when Woody Allen talked him into a cameo in Annie Hall. The switch came, he explains, because “I’m afraid to stop growing, afraid that someday I’ll say, ‘That’s it. I’ve run out of ideas.’ Probably all artists fear that their lives will outrun their gift. And that’s a moment you don’t want to face.”

If nothing else, One-Trick Pony proves Simon’s obsession with survival. Even he recognizes it. In one fatalistic but funny scene in the film, Simon comes up with a new twist on an old trivia game. Each player tries to remember the name of a deceased rock star; failure means elimination. (“We should have two separate categories for ODs and plane crashes,” someone cracks mordantly.) Yet the more challenging contest might have been to name not the stars who have died since the early days of rock but rather those whose bodies, souls, hearts, minds—and art—have survived intact.

Simon is one of the very few. In the New Hollywood economics, for instance, a successful LP soundtrack can be the tail that wags the horse. The Pony sound track, Simon’s first album since Still Crazy after All These Years in 1975, is predictably high on the charts, as is Late in the Evening, the vibrantly percussive, Latin-tinged single from the film. It hardly matters that Simon’s most ambitious move—the film itself—has left reviewers divided. A rock critic for the Los Angeles Times cheered that Pony is “so perceptively and ruthlessly honest” that it “ranks among the year’s best.” But another critic, from the New York Daily News, groused that Simon’s onscreen persona was “so forlorn and listless it is hard to care what happens to him.” Simon tries but is unable to shrug off critics as just ordinary people. “I should do what Woody [Allen] does, ignore them. But I’m curious.” And he admits, “I don’t take it well, either for my music or for the film.”

A methodical, driven perfectionist, Simon spent four years on the $7 million project that he hopes will launch him in the ’80s as The Graduate’s soundtrack did in the ’60s. He was helped in acting by Mira Restova (a former Montgomery Clift coach suggested by close friend Charles Grodin) and spent several weeks in Chicago mastering the Middle American argot of waitresses and club owners. (The title, referring to a trained pony who can perform only one trick, comments ironically on the fading rock singer protagonist’s clinging to his music amid the shambles of his marital life.) Paul reworked some scenes over and over and learned how to cry menthol-induced tears in front of the camera. Yet though he’d like to write another film, Simon will probably cast elsewhere for the lead. “I don’t want to be a movie star, and being a celebrity undermines the seriousness of your work. I’m not an exhibitionist,” he sums up. “No, I’m not ready for summer stock companies and Streetcar Named Desire.”

Simon just concluded a 12-city U.S. tour of small halls and is now playing 13 European gigs with the touring band which stars in the film. The tour, aimed to boost the movie, stands to lose him $300,000. Shrugs Simon of the bottom-line side of the business: “Entertainers are paid disproportionately high sums of money for their contribution to society. I used to feel guilty,” he continues, “but now I accept that gratefully. When someone tells me, ‘You’ve given me a lot of pleasure in my life,’ it all seems like a gratifying, very pure way of earning money.”

Like McCartney and Dylan, Simon is among the wealthiest composers of his generation. In his five astonishingly prolific years with Garfunkel (who rarely wrote), he created a seemingly endless string of sophisticated hits like The Boxer, Sounds of Silence, Mrs. Robinson, Bridge over Troubled Water, America, Homeward Bound and Scarborough Fair. Since going solo, Paul has added Kodachrome, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, American Tune and Still Crazy. His awesome composing prowess, coupled with the fact that he retained all his publishing rights, has generated enormous income from royalties, sheet music, air play and catalogue (previously released LPs) sales. Michael Tannen, his business manager, says, “Paul has probably the most valuable self-owned publishing catalogue anywhere.” Bridge alone has been re-recorded 200 times by other artists. Says Simon: “I have enough money. If I want more money I write some songs.”

Simon’s home (his only one) is a cavernous duplex overlooking Central Park on Manhattan’s West Side. It is, like much of his music, elegant, unostentatious, with everything in its place. He likes to sit and pick out new tunes on a couch near the floor-to-ceiling windows. Simon has been living “on and off” for two years with actress Carrie (Star Wars) Fisher. Her filming of Under the Rainbow with Chevy Chase in L.A. and Paul’s touring have caused what Carrie calls “forced separations, which are rough.” Simon’s ex-wife since 1975, Peggy Harper, 41, is a non-showbiz Tennessean who lives a few blocks uptown. Their son, Harper James, 8, a third-grader in private school, divides his time between them. Simon is an animated and warmly attentive dad. “It’s a great thing in my life to be a father. I always wanted to have children and be a member of a nuclear family,” he says. He then adds, ruefully, “The molecules exploded, however, in a manner I couldn’t predict at the time of the marriage.” (He met Peggy in the ’60s when she was married to his former business manager, and they wed in 1970.) Even now he doesn’t rule out another marriage—”if it happened soon enough. But I have no specific plans.”

Simon spent several years in analysis in the early ’70s to help him through the twin turmoil of the Garfunkel split and his marital woes. “It was helpful, but it doesn’t cure you. I’m verbal, given to introspection,” he understates. “So it’s natural for me to lie down and talk about things.”

Unlike his Pony character, Simon finds, “My personal life isn’t a mess. But it could use more time,” he concedes. “I’m much less adept at working out my personal life than my career life. It’s not like I spent 15 years on my relationships. I didn’t, and you can see I didn’t. The ones that I had didn’t hold.” Lorne Michaels, ex-producer of Saturday Night Live and his down-the-hallway neighbor, thinks Simon may be a little hard on himself in that regard, noting, “Paul’s one of the people I go to for advice. He’s direct and clearheaded. He assesses your situation with kindness and compassion. He is very gentle.”

Indeed, Paul seems to cherish peacemaking with partners of the past, and says he has “no enemies.” He and Garfunkel, a buddy since they were sixth-grade classmates at P.S. 164 in Forest Hills, are still friends and see one another or talk frequently. “I root for Artie,” Paul says of his friend’s current (if controversial) role as a sexually obsessed professor in Bad Timing. “I rooted for Shelley Duvall [with whom Simon lived several years ago] in The Shining. We were together in Cannes when she got the call that Kubrick wanted her.” Carrie Fisher doesn’t need his prayers, grins Paul: “She’s really got the goods and the Force is with her. She’ll emerge as a gifted comedienne.”

Even professionally, Simon’s made amazingly few foes. CBS Records president Bruce Lundvall, who says Paul’s recent defection to Warner Brothers (for up to $5 million per LP, according to rumors) left him feeling “bitter and disappointed,” now reports that they are again on cordial terms. In fact, Paul cast him as an extra in a party scene in Pony.

Most of all, Simon roots for his ex-wife Peggy to be happy, he says. “It’s not just that we share a child. You don’t fall in love without a reason. That feeling is rare and those people who meant that to me still mean a lot.”

Simon likewise remains close to his family. His father, Louis, a former bass player who went on to teach English at City College of New York, and mother, Belle, who taught elementary school while Paul grew up, are now retired and live across the George Washington Bridge in Englewood, N.J. His younger brother, Eddie, 34, runs New York’s Guitar Study Center and lives nearby. As a kid in Forest Hills, Simon was a card-flipping baseball-crazed kid who was competitive in sports, though he topped off at 5′4″. “I must have been very angry, probably about not growing,” he observes. “I was doing well. When I was 15 Artie and I played on American Bandstand. I batted first on the baseball team. I had a school jacket with letters and everything on it. I was popular. But,” he repeats, “I was a real angry guy. I spent a lot of time by myself, playing guitar.”

Rather than go out, Simon prefers to invite close friends and family to his eight-room pad, but he mostly centers entertaining in an upstairs den that doubles as office and study. A tiled hot tub is in an adjacent bathroom. He owns a Mercedes and spends summers in rented Long Island homes. “I don’t tend to socialize with other musicians,” he says. “Lorne Michaels and his girlfriend, Susan Forristal, are my Fred and Ethel Mertz.” Socially, Lorne confirms that Paul keeps a low profile. “Flamboyant is not a word that applies here. Paul can get melancholy. But there’s a keen, tough New York edge to him.” Laughs Simon, “I’m not your basic walk-in-the-woods guy. I’m not overwhelmed by sunsets, and Peggy always used to say I never got poison ivy ’cause I never walked off the roads.”

Simon does stay tapered and well toned by jogging in Central Park and sweats through workouts in his $5,000 gym room at home. He’s on a strict diet—no dairy foods, red meat or sugar—prescribed years ago to dissolve calcium deposits in his hand which were jeopardizing his nimble folk-jazz guitar-picking style. But lately he has dropped to 117 pounds, even below soul brother Woody Allen’s weight class. “Control is one of the essences of art,” observes Paul. “There is a controlled tension in my work and it is very much like me.” Carrie, 24, agrees: “Paul is the most disciplined person I’ve ever seen. I don’t know anyone who has gone about conquering what Paul has and succeeded.”

Paul says he’d like to write a Broadway musical “in the next decade,” but one trick he hasn’t turned this year is the political benefit. “It was a mistake for politics and show business to mix,” he says, “and now it’s backfiring, because we have an actor trying to become President.” But he adds: “For all we know Willie Nelson is making decisions about Iraq. You know, ‘Hey Willie, y’think we oughta send ‘em into Iraq?’ ‘I’ll ask Waylon. Shit, yeah, Waylon’ll tell us.’ Politicians got their campaign moves real down, and they know their TV, but they don’t know how to do their job when elected.”

Instead, Simon’s causes have shifted inward with his realization of aging. “It came so powerfully,” he recalls. He particularly remembers visiting a dentist with his son and gazing at an X-ray of Harper’s teeth. “To see an X-ray of your skull is to see you dead,” he says. “There’s nothing there. So I’m looking at Harper’s skull, his baby teeth, and behind and below and on top of them I see his next age and then the space for wisdom teeth. I had his whole life right there in front of me. This is my little boy, my boy, a whole life in these X-rays of his teeth.” Then Dad stops short, pauses, struggles for words and finishes: “Yeah, it’s flyin’; time’s flyin’.”

But Simon is determined to keep pace. “I have options, I got brains, health. I’m thinking now of the best way for me to live my life.” He stops, rubs his cheeks and chin, smiles and nods slowly. “Yeah, I’m happy. I’m busy, it’s exciting now. I got a kid. I starred in a movie. I’m touring in Europe. I got friends who love me and whom I love. My parents are alive. Yeah, I’m happy,” he sums up. “It’s not gonna last forever, but this is a precious moment.”

http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20077781,00.html

Occasionally this blog will look “back through the cracks in the door,” taking a moment to revisit some overlooked aspects of Paul Simon’s career. To get things started, here’s Simon discussing two musical legends: George Gershwin and George Harrison.

The essay on Gershwin comes from the New York Times, which ran a series of articles about the prototypical New York composer on the centennial of his birth ten years ago. In it, Simon examines how Gershwin succeeded at both the high and low ends of the cultural spectrum before drawing parallels to the challenges he encountered when crossing musical boundaries: “No rock composer has crossed the lines between popular and serious music with anything near the results that Gershwin achieved… Eclecticism, however, will always have its detractors, and critics will cite a lack of purity as the weakness in cross-cultural work. At Howard University, I was told that my ”Graceland” album (which drew upon various South African musical styles) was neither Zulu, Xhosa, Shangaan or American.”

In his remembrance of George Harrison, with whom he performed stunning renditions of “Homeward Bound” and “Here Comes the Sun” on Saturday Night Live, Simon reveals that his prose is on par with his poetry, excelling at short-form literary journalism: “The three of us paused for a minute at the crest of a hill to let George catch his breath. Gazing down at the black pond, he told us that there were interconnected caves beneath the water’s surface, caves that he’d explored before his lung capacity had been diminished by his battle with cancer and a madman’s deranged obsession with celebrity. Every gardener knows nature’s random cruelty – frost, drought and predators – but most of us are shocked when jagged violence lunges from the shadows and reveals our own vulnerability.”

Highbrows and Hits: A Fertile Compound – The New York Times, August 30, 1998

”INCIDENTALLY, rumors about highbrow music ridiculous. STOP. Am out to write hits.” So George Gershwin wired his agent early in 1936. Hoping to land a contract with RKO Pictures for the new Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie ”Shall We Dance,” Gershwin was annoyed at a Hollywood studio executive’s suggestion that he might have lost some of his legendary gift for writing hits.

To put his defensiveness in a context, Gershwin had seen his folk opera ”Porgy and Bess” open to mostly poor reviews the year before and close after only 124 performances. Its entire investment of $70,000 was lost, including $10,000 that the Gershwins had put in. The composer Virgil Thomson, doyen of serious music critics, described the work as ”falsely conceived and rather clumsily executed . . . [with a] . . . libretto that should never have been accepted, on a subject that should never have been chosen, by a man who should never have attempted it.” For Gershwin, an artist who crossed musical boundaries as no other before or since, it must have been doubly frustrating to be attacked by the serious music press as inept and by the Hollywood studios as too sophisticated. His ”highbrow” music was regarded with disdain in Hollywood, while his popular melodies contaminated his concert pieces in the eyes of Eastern critics.

Hollywood, of course, needn’t have worried. In the less than two years that remained in his life (he died of a brain tumor at the age of 38), George and his brother Ira collaborated on three film scores, ”Shall We Dance,” ”Damsel in Distress” and ”Goldwyn Follies.” The songs from those films, as melodically inventive and lyrically sophisticated as anything the Gershwins had done, include ”They All Laughed,” ”Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” ”They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” ”Nice Work if You Can Get It” and ”A Foggy Day.”

In time (though not in his lifetime), ”Porgy and Bess” has come to be considered the great American opera. ”Rhapsody in Blue” is one of the most popular and frequently performed symphonic works and, despite critics who find his concert work structurally flawed and naive, Gershwin has joined the pantheon of great 20th-century composers. He stands, with Irving Berlin, at the pinnacle of American popular music. What, then, does his legacy say to those rock-and-roll songwriters who emerged in the 60’s and 70’s and who are now in their mature middle years?

There are parallels, perhaps coincidental, with Gershwin’s career and lessons to be pondered as we celebrate the centenary of his birth. The music that John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen and I grew up with was not the Broadway show tunes of Gershwin, Berlin, Porter and Kern. It was the gospel-influenced doo-wop of the Orioles, the blues and church-tinged rhythm-and-blues of Ray Charles, the rockabilly of Elvis Presley and the effortless rhymes and rhythm-guitar lines of Chuck Berry. That music, drawn from African roots and Appalachian modalities, was as far from the sophisticated harmonies of George Gershwin as Tupelo, Miss., is from Manhattan. Rock had its own sophistication, rhythmic and street-wise, but its shallower harmonic well has never provided even its best songwriters with the abundance of great melodies that Gershwin poured forth in his less than two decades of work.

Like Gershwin, the second generation rockers matured musically as they passed from their 20’s to their ”don’t trust anyone over 30.” The music expanded from one or two hit tunes on an album to the more fully realized, though sometimes pretentious, ”concept” album. The seismic cultural jolt that ”Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” delivered had its antecedent in the ecstatic response to ”Rhapsody in Blue,” written when Gershwin was only 25 years old. Lennon’s interest in Stockhausen and Cage, McCartney’s knowledge of English music hall melodies and arrangements, Harrison’s study of raga with Ravi Shankar — these are echoes, conscious or not, of Gershwin’s experimentation with cross-cultural forms. Gershwin’s incorporation of ragtime (”Swanee”) and blues (”The Man I Love,” ”Summertime”) helped reinvigorate the Broadway musical, which had been dominated by 19th-century European thinking, while the vibrancy of jazz (”Fascinating Rhythm,” ”I Got Rhythm”) also gave Gershwin’s work its distinctly American flavor and appeal.

Gershwin, who lacked formal training and felt his innate musicality was limited by his technical incapacity, studied harmony and composition with several prominent teachers of his day. He used these studies, incompletely digested though they may have been, to help compose the Concerto in F, ”An American in Paris” and ”Rhapsody in Blue.” Of course, if Gershwin had studied formally at an early age, he would never have spent those years learning popular song forms on Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, and his fusion of high and low culture wouldn’t have been realized. One enters Carnegie Hall from the street, not vice versa.

NO rock composer has crossed the lines between popular and serious music with anything near the results that Gershwin achieved. In fact, rock critics have consistently derided orchestral or symphonic fusions as pretentious and bourgeois, while exalting the nihilism of punk and alternative bands as the best way to purify and revitalize rock-and-roll. Perhaps the deeply ingrained oral tradition in rock has left an indelible mark on the psyche of its musicians: beware the written form, the manuscript paper with notes, clefs and musical direction in Italian. It’s a credo of rock that raw is true, yet in the adjacent world of jazz no such constraints hinder its composers. Similarly, in Brazil, the other great musical culture of the Western hemisphere, composers like Antonio Carlos Jobim have fashioned a rich melodic and rhythmic tradition from a European and African fusion. Gershwin did this for American music in 1925.

Eclecticism, however, will always have its detractors, and critics will cite a lack of purity as the weakness in cross-cultural work. At Howard University, I was told that my ”Graceland” album (which drew upon various South African musical styles) was neither Zulu, Xhosa, Shangaan or American. It was a dilution of cultures, and all I’d really done was a ”Gershwin goes to Africa.” This is a definition of purity that freezes a culture: no new information need apply. In truth, cultures and artistic movements influence each other by osmosis. The proximity of different cultures, magnified by the speed of technology, offers an irresistible challenge to artists to rearrange and reinvent languages, musically, visually and verbally. Cross-cultural dialogue is inevitable as generations, philosophies and artistic movements bang against each other, intermingle, intermarry and interface. There are many versions of the same truth.

As for Gershwin’s greatest triumph and most disheartening failure, ”Porgy and Bess,” he attempted to depict black culture in a way that was as truthful to blacks as whites and to shape from diversity an esthetic unity. His genius, like all genius, was unique, but his all-embracing artistic vision still resonates powerfully today in a world where music is sometimes the only benign avenue of communication between antagonists.

Paul Simon Remembers George – Rolling Stone, January 17, 2002

The rain had lifted and the October sun was warm enough for us to pull on pairs of galoshes and stroll across the meadow at Friar Park. An afternoon with George Harrison and his wife, Olivia, was a treat Jeff Kramer (our mutual friend and manager) and I had promised ourselves to relieve the monotony of airplanes, hotel rooms and sound checks; the everyday humdrum of musicians on the road.

I hadn’t seen George for several years and was anxious to know, in person, how he was faring after the harrowing attack he’d endured just ten months earlier, on New Year’s Eve 1999. “I’m really happy to see you,” he said as we shook hands and embraced, “and these days, when I say I’m really happy to see someone, I mean I’m really happy.”

He looked healthy and his mood was up as we approached a wooden bridge over a pond of waterlilies. I’d never been to Friar Park before, but the rhythm of the wind in the leaves and the cluster chords of autumn’s orange, gold and evergreen made it easy to understand why he’d chosen to spend the last thirty years gradually planting, pruning, editing and reshaping the land while at the time recasting himself from pop-culture icon to master gardener.

The three of us paused for a minute at the crest of a hill to let George catch his breath. Gazing down at the black pond, he told us that there were interconnected caves beneath the water’s surface, caves that he’d explored before his lung capacity had been diminished by his battle with cancer and a madman’s deranged obsession with celebrity. Every gardener knows nature’s random cruelty – frost, drought and predators – but most of us are shocked when jagged violence lunges from the shadows and reveals our own vulnerability.

We walked toward the sun and slipped through a copse of weeping willow. There in the middle of a field of wildflowers were two huge boulders weighing several tons and standing one atop the other like a pair of giant granite acrobats. “Are those the work of a sculptor?” I asked. “No,” he said, “they came from opposite ends of the property, but we moved them here and stacked them in this field. Everyone wants to know about them. In fact, when Ringo came round for a visit last summer, he asked about them as well. I told him that Paul’s record company had sent them as a promo for his new album, Standing Stone. Ringo was really miffed that he hadn’t gotten his standing stones, but I said they’d probably only posted them to A-list people.” Liverpool accents always sound to me like a joke is coming, but Harrison’s wit was deadpan and dead-on.

The roots of my friendship with George Harrison go back to 1976, when we performed together on Saturday Night Live. Sitting on stools side by side with acoustic guitars, we sang “Here Comes the Sun” and “Homeward Bound.” Though we’re in the same generation and weaned on Buddy Holly, Elvis and the Everly Brothers, it must have seemed as strange to him to be harmonizing with someone other than Lennon or McCartney as it was for me to blend with someone other than Art Garfunkel. Nevertheless, it was an effortless collaboration. The mesh of his guitar and voice with my playing and singing gave our duet an ease and musicality that made me realize how intrinsic and subtle his contribution was to the Beatles’ brilliant creative weave. He made musicians sound good without calling attention to himself.

His songwriting, too, which I always thought to be stylistically close to mine, was gentle and sad with country and skiffle influences rippling beneath his often sardonic lyrics. It all seemed deceptively simple until masterpieces like “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something” made people realize that the Beatles had three major writers competing for the limited space of the vinyl LP. They called him “the quiet Beatle,” but he wasn’t particularly quiet; he simply didn’t demand to be heard. He knew who he was, where he’d come from, what he’d accomplished. He wasn’t humble, but he projected a humility that implied a vision of his fame seen in a larger context. God gives us color and fragrance, the gardener waters and weeds.

At Friar Park, the rain was threatening an encore, and the English sun sets early at that time of year, so we headed back to the house and the warmth of a fire. Nature’s vibrant fall colors are misleading. They imply life and vitality, but they camouflage the muted browns and grays of winter. Soon the leaves will float to the ground and turn to dust, a blanket for a long winter’s sleep.

Sitting by the fire, we drank tea and ate chocolate biscuits while George, to my astonishment, played a miniconcert of Hawaiian music on several ukuleles he’d collected on trips to the islands. His playing was clean and bouncy, his voice sounding like an exact duplicate of George Harrison. I could envision him sitting on a stool side by side with Don Ho, making us wonder how we’d missed the whole Don Ho experience that first time around.

Before we left, George showed us a copy of the new Beatles Anthology book and wrote an inscription to Jeff, deftly adding three perfect forgeries of the other Beatles’ signatures.

“Why don’t you come down and see the show tonight?” We invited him, knowing there was little chance he’d stir from his chair by the fire. “Maybe we will,” he said. “If not, thanks for coming by. I’ll see you soon, I hope.”

On the drive back to London, Kramer told me that George had felt awkward about not offering a copy of the book to me, but he was afraid I might not have great interest in owning one. I said I’d never asked for anyone’s autograph, but I was actually a little disappointed that he hadn’t made the offer. Two months later, the tour ended, I came home to find a copy of The Beatles Anthology sitting on my desk. “To Paul and Edie,” the inscription read, “with lots of love from your pal, George Harrison.”