Paul Simon Was No "One-Trick Pony"

He Also Wasn't Elvis, So He Needed His Own Strategy: From a 1980 Interview

Three movie critics were standing in the lobby of a screening room after seeing One-Trick Pony, which stars Paul Simon as Jonah Levin, a once famous folk singer who sang a generational anthem from the 1960s. One hit: A One-trick pony. A dozen years later, Levin is playing smaller and smaller clubs. Driving in a van with his band through the decaying industrial midwest of the late 1970s, the culture he once represented has moved on, made him a curio.

I thought it odd that these professional movie critics could not tell the difference between a movie and reality. They wondered if Simon's solo career in the 1970s had been such a bust (it was anything but), why was he so unhappy. I wanted to grab them by the lapels and remind them: It's only a movie!

[Simon also wrote the screenplay and of course, wrote and performed the soundtrack music. The album is excellent, and opens with the hit "Late in the Evening."]

Simon smiled when I told him this in an office in midtown Manhattan in 1980, and said he had heard similar feedback. "It's not me on the screen. My career in the '70s was great . . . I had No. 1 records, I won Grammys [album of the year, best pop vocal performance for 1975's Still Crazy After All These Years]. In the movie, I was talking about what it's like not to be in that situation, to not have the luxury of being a success for a really long time. To not have the buffer of celebrity to keep you from the blows of the world, to whatever degree it protects you."

Yet there are scenes that ring true to Simon's adolescence. At one point, his frustrated screen wife played by Blair Brown shouts at Jonah, "You've wanted to be Elvis Presley since you were 13 years old, and it's a goal you're not likely to achieve in your lifetime." Both points in Simon's life are true, but he was clever enough to use the tools he had that would bring him stardom. (Even Elvis Presley sang Simon's songs, including "Bridge Over Troubled Water.")

"The first time I heard Elvis Presley, I was driving in my parents' car, it was in the back of a Waldbaum's supermarket in Queens," Simon told me. "A guy on the radio said, 'Here's a guy by the name of Elvis Presley, and they say wherever he sings in the South, there are riots going on. And then he played 'That's Alright Mama,' and I said to myself, 'Elvis Presley. That's the weirdest name I ever heard.

"It didn't have much effect on me. But 'Heartbreak Hotel' killed me. I saw a picture of him on an album in a record store and I was immediately taken by him. Then I saw him on television, and that was it, it was over for me. I wanted to be Elvis Presley very much. I let my hair grow real long, pulled it down, got into fights with my parents over it."

But Simon had an honest moment with his adolescent self. It took a few years and a look in the mirror, but he realized: "Uh, I'm never gonna be Elvis Presley. I'm never gonna look like that, I'm never gonna sound like that. He's singing really hard, so I'm gonna sing real soft. I never trained my voice to go and blast, because of Elvis Presley."

Under the spell of both Elvis and the hit doo-wop group the Cleftones from neighboring Jamaica, Queens, Simon and his schoolmate from P.S. 164, Art Garfunkel, recording as Tom & Jerry, had a minor hit in 1957 called "Hey Schoolgirl." It peaked at No. 49 on the national pop charts. In 1964, the teamed up again as Simon & Garfunkel, and the folk duo made their debut with "Wednesday Morning 3 A.M." A song from the album, "The Sounds of Silence," got some east coast airplay. Garfunkel was at Columbia University studying literature; Simon was in London busking and playing clubs. In mid-1965, producer Tom Wilson had electric guitar, drums, and other instruments overdubbed on the acoustic version of "The Sounds of Silence" and it hit number one at the end of December, 1965. Although the cover of the album named Sounds of Silence has a picture of Garfunkel and Simon looking back, they never looked back until they broke up after "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

Where Paul Simon meets Jonah Levin is the intriguing "what if?" What if "The Sounds of Silence" was Simon & Garfunkel's only hit? What if Art had gone back to grad school and become an Ivy League literature professor, which he said had been his likely career path when I interviewed him for Rolling Stone in 1975. What if Simon never had a solo career, but just the idealism to hang on to a song like "Soft Parachutes," (his one trick in One-Trick Pony), Jonah Levin's antiwar hit in the movie, once the sound of a generation that grows up, and moves on, and he can't, or won't? 

"He was typical of a certain kind of musician of that generation," Simon said of Jonah Levin. "A guy who lived in a time of idealism and romanticism, who was inspired to write an anti-war anthem and had a hit with it. And 10 years later this evidence of his idealism and romanticism is so obviously dated that it's embarrassing to sing anymore. I think many, many people had this feeling of something special in the '60s.

"People today [1980] don't think anything particularly special is happening. We were blessed living in a very exciting age, even though at the time it seemed lousy. It seemed like it was really tense, and there were hard times. In retrospect, they were romantic. How passionate! How much richer it was to have been passionate, rather than dispassionate and indifferent."

At a show at the Palladium [a one-time concert hall on East 14th St. in Manhattan] he introduced "Kodachrome," a hit from his 1973 solo album There Goes Rhymin' Simon with a moving defense of his home borough of Queens, NY, and places like it: staunchly middle class, small houses filled with family generation gaps, exaggerated yet typified by the late Norman Lear's character Archie Bunker in TV’s breakthrough topical sitcom All in the Family, which debuted in 1971.

"It wasn't until the 1960s, when everybody became 'exotic', you couldn't come from anything that was middle class or lower middle class," Simon said. "That's when the middle-class really got into its self-loathing, you know? Everybody wanted to come from Katmandu. 'Hey, I was born in Katmandu and just came down from Berkeley, so I really know what's happening'. And then Queens became the butt of jokes because it was typically middle class.

"But why should the middle class feel ashamed of themselves? I don't feel ashamed of anything that I was. I played ball in the schoolyards, went to Parsons Junior High and Forest Hills High School, played ball for Forest Hills High, and sang on street corners. It was good times, it seemed like a good place to be."

"I don't even feel ashamed of the bad songs I wrote," Simon continued.  "Or that I was pretentious, or that I was young. I mean, that's what I was! Was I sophomoric? Yes! Yes, especially when I was a sophomore. It just happened my pretensions became very popular, and people bought them."

Still, once you get a persona, it's hard to break, and the Paul Simon of the 1960s, and Simon & Garfunkel hits like "Hazy Shade of Winter," "Homeward Bound," and "I Am a Rock," typecast him as an alientated sad sack. 

"Once you get tagged with an image, it just stays with you, because nobody wants to readjust," he said. "Nobody wants to pay attention to whether you're growing, or thinking. So for years people were asking me, was I sad all the time? Was I alienated all the time? I couldn't refute the thing until I got into a turkey costume hosting 'Saturday Night Live' a few years ago. Finally, here was a chance for me to come out and say, 'Hey, I'm aware of everything people say about me. I'm not a cliché, I'm not alienated, I'm not sad. I'm just movin' along, you know, and I'm trying to grow."

The movie was a flop, not even earning $1 million of its $8 million budget at the box office, according to IMDB. It is a very sad movie. Watching it again last night--it can be rented from Apple TV+ or Amazon Prime video for around $3--I was disappointed at how much is spent on the character's separation and divorce from his wife, played by a teary Blair Brown, and scenes of single-parenthood with Levin and his eight-year-old son Matty (Michael Pearlman). There are also some fine performance scenes with Levin's outstanding band: if his career is bottoming out (we see him at the Agora ballroom in Cleveland, opening for the B-52s playing "Rock Lobster"), how could he afford the second billing, the cancelled gigs, with the best session players in New York? Steve Gadd (drums), Eric Gale (guitar), Richard Tee (keyboards), who in real life played with the go-to Upper West Side club band of its time, known as Stuff; and Tony Levin, the bassist for King Crimson and Peter Gabriel, among many others. (They do break up in the movie.) There are some neat sarcastic swipes at the corrupt, corrupting record business Levin resists as a co-plot. Allen Garfield is particularly good as pompous AM radio hitmaker Cal van Damp (think of the once influential king of a radio tip-sheets, Kal Rudman), and a laid-back performance by Lou Reed as a chill Phil Spector-type who adds strings, horns, and background singers to make a more "commercial" album for Jonah Levin. Rip Torn played Rip Torn (didn't he always?), in this case distractable record company executive Walter Fox. (Possibly a name inspired by CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff, who was sometimes referred to by his Yiddish name, Velvel, meaning wolf.) One-Trick Pony was Simon's first album for Warner Bros., having been with Columbia Records from the beginning. What did Warner's have that Columbia didn't? A movie studio, for one thing. Warner's executive Joe Smith was the MC in the movie at the now-defunct trade magazine Radio & Records 1980 convention, at which a depressed Jonah gets paid good money to perform "Soft Parachutes" at the back-to-the 1960s-themed show. The reunited Lovin' Spoonful perform at the show. A cringing Jonah shares a backstage space with Tiny Tim. Little known fact: I was Radio & Records nominal copy editor after it was bought by Billboard in the 2000s, and was my last salaried job when the parent company shut down R&R in 2009. –– WR