Paul Simon by Cornel Bonca

Author:Cornel Bonca
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-04-30T04:30:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Mistakes on Top of Mistakes on Top of Mistakes

1978–1983

It was a difficult time for me. . . . What was I thinking? . . . All kinds of mistakes on top of mistakes on top of mistakes. So now I had a personal blow, a career setback, and the combination of the two put me in a tailspin.[1]

After the major success of Still Crazy after All These Years—an album that spun off three hit singles, amassed platinum sales, and earned two Grammys, including Album of the Year—Paul Simon had, again, hit the pinnacle of the pop music world, only now he’d done it as a solo artist. He had walked away from being part of the most successful rock duo in history—walked away from the riches, fame, and security it provided—taken up the challenge of a solo career, and floated to the top of the singer-songwriter pantheon in less than five years. Not only had he already written a flurry of pop standards, but he had helped expand the palette of modern pop music, incorporating more diverse styles (and with more professional panache) onto his records than any other songwriter of his time (his only rival here was Paul McCartney). Finally, and most importantly from an artistic point of view, he had shed his early influences and, in songs like “Mrs. Robinson,” “The Boxer,” “Peace Like a River,” “American Tune,” and “Still Crazy after All These Years,” had found his own voice—discerning, wry, rueful, melancholy, vulnerable.

But by 1975, Paul Simon was also alone, his marriage to Peggy having disintegrated as the count of his career successes mounted. He had moved out of one apartment and into another, still on New York’s fashionable Upper East Side and—fortuitously, it turned out—close to those of two new friends, Lorne Michaels and Chevy Chase. These two were the producer and star, respectively, of a new late-night television show called Saturday Night Live that, with its super-hip satire, theatrical experimentation (including its willingness to break the fourth wall), and its ability to express the comic sensibility of the Boomer generation that had survived the 1960s Counterculture, was beginning to transform broadcast television. Michaels made Simon one of the show’s first musical guests; he sang “My Little Town” with guest Art Garfunkel and other songs from Still Crazy—including the title track, which he performed in a chicken suit, Simon’s attempt to shed the ultra-serious artist image that had dogged him long after he had ceased cultivating it. That chicken suit was indicative of Simon’s attempt to loosen up generally: newly single, he had begun carousing around Manhattan with his new TV buddies, dating Hollywood starlets like Shelley Duvall and eventually Carrie Fisher, even dancing at New York’s Studio 54. In a way, he might have been trying to de-ironize “Have a Good Time”—that is, really trying to put his conscience, his work, and his penchant for brooding aside for once in his life in favor of a lighthearted pleasure principle. By 1977, in fact, he

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