THERE ARE THREE Paul Simons, give or take. The first is the songwriting half of Simon and Garfunkel, an astoundingly accessible folk-pop duo that recorded some truly wonderful music during the second half of the 1960s, and who were responsible for, at one point, the best-selling album of all time (1970's Bridge Over Troubled Water). The second is the butter-smooth, butterfly-collared balladeer behind such slinky, mom-friendly '70s jams as "Still Crazy After All These Years" and "Slip Slidin' Away." And the third is the world music ambassador who brought South African sounds to the masses with 1986's Graceland and continues to mine various folk and regional musics for sonic twists on his cerebral pop songwriting.
Like the rest of you, I hold the most affection for that first Paul Simon. Simon and Garfunkel'sGreatest Hits was one of the few non-classical-music CDs in my house growing up, and naturally, I was put off at first by the profoundly dorky photograph on its cover. There's Simon, with disastrous Woody Allen-circa-Sleeper hair, a furry caterpillar of a mustache, and a taxi-hack flat cap, clutching what looks like a pantyhose egg (it is, I think, actually part of an iron fence). And behind him is Garfunkel, whose wispy angelic hair is the color of freshly budded dandelions, to match the wispy angelic dandelion hue of his high-tenor harmonies. These were not two men you wanted to get in a van with. To make matters worse, the album's title was emblazoned in an off-putting baby-pink.
But once I heard the actual music, I was thoroughly hooked. "The Sound of Silence,""I Am a Rock," and "Cecilia" are filled with melodic turns of phrase that remain irresistible at any age, and the cannonball echo on the drums of "The Boxer" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" suggested a widescreen scope to pop music I'd never before encountered. As I later learned from friends who'd similarly listened to Simon and Garfunkel during childhood, the collegiate, urbane cool of Simon's songs proved irresistible to a certain type of bookish, moony, rainy-day-weather child. And the ostensibly highbrow literary bent to his Simon's lyrics was appealingly aspirational to an impressionable mind—he'd use words like "diffused" and "crinoline"; he'd sing about grown-up things like "the whores on Seventh Avenue"; he'd use non-rhyming couplets in a song like "America" to replicate the vividness of a short story.