YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Simon

lines on the record: 73
first: 2016-07-28
most recent: 2016-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think it's after the last week in Cleveland with all the rage and negative... Negativity, I think it's good to have a song that has some comfort and empathy in it because”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true. That's true. But he's from a different part of Queensland. Know anyway, it's well, you know. I could go on and on like everybody can. But I thought it was important to. To make a contribution. In this particular political climate and these arguments, because I think he's wrong and dangerous. And I think It's very important that the Democrats prevail. And I have no, I have, I don't have any doubt that Hillary Clinton is a very bright woman and well-prepared to do it. So, I don't feel. I don't have any unease about singing the song. And the song that I'm going to sing is Bridge Over Trouble Water, which”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Clinton people are reached out. I think it's very important that the Democrats That this, I think it's very important that Trump be defeated”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On voters. And now it came out. So as these subjects, and maybe this election is going to be... The first time that we're actually going to see Really raw. Feelings about stuff that hasn't been talked about in the recent past or even in the past. Well, there's certainly a lot of rocks.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He asked for permission and I gave it to him. For several reasons. You know one he's like he's a guy from Brooklyn, you know I grew up in Queens. We're almost the same age he's and so here he is running and he believes in things that I believe in he voted against the war he well you know all the things you know everything and I believe in it I believe his description of what was going on was also the case. And I thought He wanted Citizens United to be overturned. And I think that's I think that should happen, and so I said, Yeah, I use my song if you want hats off to you. You know, good for you. I hope that you get your ideas into the debates and that those ideas become. Discussed. I mean, if you think about the two Obama elections, they almost never discuss the NRA. Never nobody would touch it because it's such a negative impact on”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, there would be verses here and there or references here and there American tune was written in the 70s. And that's very political. But I don't think of myself. I'm not a political writer and I don't like songs that I think of them as songs that are, and my point is, I find that kind of irritating to have to be, I don't want to be lectured to in a song, so I don't want to be that I don't think it's entertaining. But some people are great at it. If that's what you do and you're great, if you're Woody Guthrie or Phil Oaks or... Or Bob Dylan, then that's another story if you can make an art for him.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wrote about it. Yeah. I've always thought that I wasn't particularly Good at writing songs that had a point, a political point. All my songs had, not all of them, but many, many had political references. Even Mrs. Robinson is going to the candidates' debate. Laugh about it any way you look at it, you lose.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh big, as I say, you know, it's just a kid. I couldn't believe that. It was hard to grasp that somebody. Was in class with was murdered.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were you friends? Yeah. Well, I wouldn't say we were friends. I'd say we were people who knew each other from being in the same class. That was a shock. That's the first person I knew who died.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we made our one and only TV special Instead of doing like a variety show, we did it sort of as an interview, and it was against the war and it created a fur. We were being sponsored by AT&T, which was establishment as you possibly could. They said, if you don't change this, we're withdrawing our sponsorship. And we said, well, like, what? We had one scene. It was the first time that Bridge Over Trouble Water was ever played. and it was played behind footage of The funeral processions JFK and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and they said like that, for example, you have to change that. And we said, Why? And they said, Well, it's not fair and we said, what's not fair? And they said, well, they're all Democrats. And we said, really, we think of them as all assassinated people. But yeah, it was very political.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. That's my theory. Well, there's going to be a lot of pressure for me to express whatever is building up in me. But if I don't let that pressure express itself in this habitual form of music and song, what will happen? That's really all I was saying.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said that doesn't mean I'm a good artist. It's just a kind of personality. It's just a personality type, you know? I make up things. That's what goes on. That's who I am. That's the description. So if that's the way my mind works, and I'm privileged enough because of my success to continue to let it work that way, I would You know why stop now? I think it will be uncomfortable to stop.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is different It is different. I'm not really all I'm saying is that If you're, you know, it took me a long time before I would ever describe myself as being an artist. I was always uncomfortable if people said I was an artist. But somewhere in my late 40s, I said, oh, I am an artist.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a hit album. But again, I'll tell you how I think. If I say I can't stop because people, they like it so much, well, then I'm working for That's making my decision. And my career hasn't been based on I'm going to follow what people want me to do. You know, if I have a hit, I'll make another one like that. If I have a flop. I'll move in another direction. Just gone, as I said, sort of passively from one place of interest to another, so if I think I can't stop now because people really”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly And so that's what I said, yeah, I'm thinking of stopping, but I wasn't like, I'm thinking of stopping because I'm played out. I was thinking of stopping because I had this other thought. But he wrote it as he's going to quit.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it actually, in a way, it's all it took. But the truth is that I didn't say. I was going to stop, I said, I think it would be interesting to stop for a period of time and see if my creative impulse, if I denied the normal You know, course of my creative impulses if I denied them their destination in the form of a song or a music. I thought this could be interesting to see what will I think of. What could I do?”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people wrote to me, I got a lot of letters. But then Chuck Close called me up. Chuck close the great portrait painter. He called me and he said, you can't You can't retire all the good ideas come from work, and I said okay, you taught me into it”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I follow him. And the more you do that, the more you start to see that there are connections between sounds or you can try to make connections between sounds.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's reggae? So that's how I fell into it. When I was living in England, I got booked on a show in Paris and I heard a group called Losin play a song called El Condor Pasa. And it was so beautiful, you know, and they gave me their record. I loved it. And I never thought there was any big distinction to be made from One culture to another if I liked it to me was all popular music. It was fine. It was just a stranger kind of, you know, more unusual. My ear takes me to the places that I like. And I'm sort of passive really as a musician and it's kind of as a personality. So it's not like I go searching for anything. I don't. It's things, I hear things. If I were driving on the street and I heard something in the car next to me, I would roll down the window and listen. I'm just curious. I'm curious about sounds that I like.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a further leap, you know, because there wasn't that much just percussion in my early life. Although if you grew up in New York, you are going to hear percussion because you're going to hear bongos and cungas and hear a little bit of Latin. So the sound is there. But by the time I would move from one thing to another, or like reggae, like mother and child reunion, when I lived in England, Ska, which was a precursor to reggae, was very popular, and I liked it. And so when I went to Jamaica to record Mother and Child Reunion, I came down there and I said I want to do, you know, here's a song I wrote and I want to do a Ska record. And they said, oh, we don't play Ska anymore. We play reggae, so I said, oh, well, cool.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not even, I was not even looking, I was following a sound, the sounds that I liked. You know, I liked all of those sounds. So I mean, this is jumping way ahead, but when I hear Lady Smith Black Mombaso, it sounds like the best Duop group that I'd ever heard. But it was that kind of thing. When I heard South African music, it sounded like something like early rock and roll guitar music. Not exactly, but not so far away that I thought of it as foreign. I didn't, you know. Rhythm of the saints gets more”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not a reinvention. What it is is Well, first of all If you go back to the early stages of rock and roll, what I described a few minutes ago, hearing music from Hearing fat stomino from Louisiana and hearing Frankie Lyman from the streets in the New York and then hearing Johnny Cash, or from Arkansas or Presley from Mississippi. All of this music all coming from or the Everies, you know, whose music really comes from Appalachian harmonies, hearing along with that is really world music. Of course, the term didn't exist, and we didn't think of it as anything other than rock and roll. But really all those different sounds are sounds from different parts of the world, Louisiana, that syncopation and that rhythm. That's coming out of African, West African drumming, the Everlees in those harmonies. That's coming from.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had to go the other way and make it small and rhythmic because bridge was just too big an album. To say, I'm going to do that again, but even bigger and better. I wouldn't have. I would have naturally gone, even if it was the duo, to where I went, which was down to make it small and rhythmic. And I liked singing rhythm. And Artie really didn't like singing rhythm that much.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely Absolutely I mean, there were things that I wanted to do that That Artie wouldn't have wanted to have done. I'm sure when you take my first solo album, that would have been the next Simon and Garfunkel album. He wouldn't have wanted to go to Jamaica to record, you know, a reggae tune, and there was no big ballad in there. I mean, he was already his mother and children. He was a great great. What mother and child reunion is a reggae, too? had a great voice for ballads and big ballads That meant I'd have to that I would have to try and write big ballots. Which don't come that easily. Certainly not at the level of Like a bridge over trouble water. So, I mean, even trying to attempt to come and top that. That couldn't have been done anyway for the next album.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're making the biggest mistake of your life. And I said, well, who knows? Maybe by the end of my career, I'll say. People will say, well, you know, and in the beginning of his career, he sang as a duo”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, music, musical arguments. And then he took a second movie, carnal knowledge. And he didn't tell me about it. And somebody, a mutual friend said, oh, so Arty's going to do carnal knowledge. And I said, I didn't know about that. And I said to Arty, are you going to do another movie? And he said, yeah, I'm going to do this. And I said, why didn't you tell me? And he said, Well, I was afraid that you would stop working on this if I told you. So that really pissed me off. And I just decided. That's the end of that. I don't want to do this anymore. So I went to Columbia records Clive Davis was the head of the Libel, and I said I'm leaving. I like to do a solo record. And he said, that's the biggest mistake of your life. Simon a garfunkel is like a household”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then quite. And we were arguing. Used to argue like all the time, even when we were kids, but then we would fix it very rapidly. We could say, let's just drop this right now Forget about the whole thing. We say, okay, good. But in the recording of Bridge Over Trouble Water, there were arguments. It wasn't that pleasant. And then he took a second movie.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right so Art went down to for long periods of time to Mexico to shoot this. And he wanted to be in the movies. As well as do this. So He said, Well, okay, the way I see it is like I'll do movies for six months and you'll write songs and then I'll come back and then I'll sing. You know, sing for six months. I thought, yeah, the hell with that, man. That's not going to happen, you know.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, the duos You know, they all break up, really. Martin and Lewis, the Everly Brothers It's just almost impossible. Why? You get on each other's nerves people have to go in one direction somebody wants to go in another direction. In our case, what we had was a real unbalance in that I wrote all the songs. And played guitar and played. And then we sang, so we Yeah, we weren't balanced, you know. When we were asked to do the graduate, Mike Nichols was the director or the graduate. He said, I'd like you both to be in my next movie. It's going to be Catch 22. And so, I mean, we were thrilled because the idea of being in a movie was Over the moon. But then that summer, he called me and he said, you know, the script is so long that we're going to have to take your character out.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we had a period from 1968 to 1970, like from the graduate to bridge over trouble water. We probably were as big as the Beatles”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm sure he was utterly amazed, you know, I'm sure he was proud and amazed and But also in its own way it threw the family dynamic into a An odd shape for somebody like, I guess I was about 24 years old then, to suddenly be suddenly have this Fame and money and then. I used to think when Carol King was writing all her hits, I used to really wonder why I was frustrated that I couldn't write a hit. But I used to think if I ever do have a hit, I'll know how to write. The next one. I don't know how to make the first one, but I'll know how to make the second one. And that's exactly what happened with Sound of Silence. Was a hit then I had already written homeward bound and I am a rock and so Simon Agarfle just Took off with all these songs that I wrote when I was in England.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the first year, I think I made about $300,000. Which was wow is exactly right because here's my father still working as a musician and doing this and this is like ten times.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I left England. I said, I said to my girlfriend, You know, I wouldn't be surprised if I make fifty thousand dollars from this year. So I'll just do that and then I'll come back this world live, you know, I'll live here off that, you know. So Anyway, it was just the record was just a giant smash.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“had now become a genre. And so they overdubbed drums and an electric twelve string guitar, and the song came. Became a number one record. Oh, I say it's low.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a year later they overdubbed electric instruments on top of our acoustic version. Well, I was living in England. I wasn't even in the studio when they did it. And let's see why they did that. Oh, they did it because a station in Boston was playing the acoustic version. Anastation in Jacksonville, Florida was also playing it, and they were starting to get requests for this song, and so they decided to make it folk rock, which had, you know, was now D.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, everything seems like, well, that's just the way it is. I used to go back and forth to England because I had made it, you know, one summer I went to the first time I went to Europe, I met some English kids and they say, oh, come and stay with us. And so I'd go over and I had a girlfriend in England and I'd go and I'd sing in these clubs, these little folk clubs in England. Anyway, we made our record, the sound of silence was on this album Wednesday morning three AM and Record came out and it was a flop, and a year later the guy who was our producer, his name is Tom Wilson. After the success of Mr Tambourine, the birds. Is my My ring tone, it's Ali Farquature from Mali. Anyway.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know that's the first time that that ever happened. And I noticed it, but I didn't think anything of it because you don't think anything of anything when you're...”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really almost out of nowhere I wrote the sound of silence, and that was like a big jump over like the three or four or five songs that I'd written that were like that. That was that style. And I mean, I still find it really quite extraordinary that I wrote this song when I was 22 years old. And I thought at the time, the song is much better than what I'd written. And I think it's like this has happened to me several times in my career that I can remember where you feel like Where you feel like you're just a conduit and a song comes through you. And it's quite an extraordinary feeling. It's like, I'm sure you've heard it described many times and probably know the feeling where something just sort of writes itself and it's there. Well, that was the first one that happened like that.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How did it happen? Oh, so as the 50s got towards the late 50s, it got more commercialized and became much, much less interesting. And I mean, also you had American bandstand, and so it became a more corporate And they start to package kids who were good looking and sell records that way. It wasn't the way it was sort of naturally, which was almost like an American kind of folk music. So I lost my interest In rock and roll as he became stupider, and I became interested in, you know, folk music, the weavers and Joan Baez and then Bob Dylan Kim. And I switched playing electric guitar and got an acoustic guit And so I started to In that style. Now I'd be in my early 20s, so somewhere around the age of twenty two, I think.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sound of silence. What happened was Artie and I went through our phase where we imitated the Everly brothers had this little hit, hey schoolgirl broke up, went away to college I lost interest in rock and roll, you know, in the middle fifties. There was something fascinating about it to me, and actually it still is. My favorite period of popular music is 1954 to 56. And then as the music became much more mainstream, as it went from being, they used to call it race records or country in Western, hillbilly, you know, I mean, once that all came together. With the DUP groups on the corners and Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley all these disparate voices from the different elements of American culture and you put it all together and you called it rock and roll Well that was I don't know. I forgot what I was talking about.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you say that, sort of the last 60 years, well, okay, so let's say it was 50 years instead of 60. That's a big period of time. 50 years. And yet, you know. It goes fast.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And where that little record company that I was on big records, where that they were in that and then there was this other building sixteen fifty Broadway that had Newer publishers and kind of the Brill building, you know, that was Hill and Range, which was country music and Johnny Marks. He wrote Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer. He was in that building. But, anyways, she and Jerry got signed to this company that had A lot of young talent Nil Sakak Cynthia man, man and wild and Anyway, they were in that world, but I wasn't. I was still. Did you know?”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they were there was a company called Alden Music and there were two big buildings in the York that had record companies and publishers. One was the Brill Building, which is sort of famous. Right.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of his luck. You know, I was thinking about music, and then I met Carol King. And her story was very similar to mine. But she'd learned the same thing in the studios, and then we started to do demos together. And we would do, like Carol would play. Drums and piano and sing, and I would play guitar and bass. So we could make a whole record between the two of us just overdubbing. And then she And then she met Jerry Goffin, who was also at Queen's College and was a Quit and they got married The rest, as they say, it's history. You see that show?”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you could buy gas for your car and you could go out and you could buy your clothes and it was pretty good. But also I was recording all the time. So I learned about recording techniques. How to use a mic, how to overdub and sing in harmony with yourself, how to play and make tracks. And basically that was my training in being a recording artist.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While he started out studying architecture and then he switched to math. And I studied, as I said, I studied English literature. But I mean, doing this on our like, Or three times a week. I mean, first of all, it was like, I think it paid like $50 to do a demo. So if you did three demos a week, it was pretty good. $150.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing the song. I'm doing it. So we would do the demo and I would play the guitar And they usually had professional musicians, and I'd learn the song, and that's sort of how I made money when I was in college. But of course I was also, Artie wasn't doing that.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Or else the, you know, I used to, what happened after is that when I was in college, I used to do demos. That's how I met Carol King. Demos meaning that songwriters would write a song for a specific artist and they would book me and I would sing the song that they wrote for that artist, you know, kind of in a voice that was aimed at whoever it was. We want Frankie Avalon to record this.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we had one hit, then we put out a second record, it wasn't a hit. I think they might even put out a third record. And then we graduated. And we went off to college.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like, you know, the difference between that they were paying a $600 for the week and this guy was going to pay us $20 was like, it was might as well have been a babysitting job.”
2016-07-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 70 - Paul Simon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source