As a struggling young singer-songwriter in 1960s Queens, New York, Paul Simon would often retreat to his parents’ bathroom. There, with the tiling giv
As a struggling young singer-songwriter in 1960s Queens, New York, Paul Simon would often retreat to his parents’ bathroom. There, with the tiling giving the room an echo and the sound of running taps generating white noise, he’d sit strumming his guitar in the dark. This experience inspired The Sound of Silence – Simon and Garfunkel’s first US No 1 – and one of pop’s most memorable opening couplets: “Hello darkness my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.”
The Sound of Silence was the first song I wrote which seemed to come from some place that I didn’t inhabit
Such classic songs flow through In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, Alex Gibney’s three and a half hour documentary film, which explores the singer-songwriter’s long career and the making of his latest album, last year’s Seven Psalms. Simon says he approached the 70-year-old fellow New Yorker and gave him full editorial control. “I admire his work. I thought he would give a pretty accurate description of me from his perspective – but I didn’t think his perspective would be askew.”
Gibney has made award-winning documentaries on subjects such as Scientology and Enron corruption as well as Frank Sinatra, James Brown and Fela Kuti, but relished the opportunity to work closely with the artist his film calls “the greatest songwriter in the history of American popular music”.
On 15 January 2019, a voice in the dream told him: “You are working on a piece called Seven Psalms.” Over subsequent weeks and months, and as Covid closed the world down, he found himself waking in the early hours with lyrics that had come to him in dreams. As the album came together in Simon’s wooden cabin studio in Texas, Gibney was allowed unprecedented access, and filmed everything.
Simon, who was an English literature major and quit law school after one semester, had wanted to be a singer-songwriter since he was 13. He experienced the big bang of rock’n’roll in the 1950s, when teenagers suddenly had their own culture. “It’s impossible to convey how exhilarating it was,” he says, his voice quickening with glee. “Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, doo-wop groups from New York, Philly, Chicago, New Orleans. An enormous amount of musical information that came in a very few years exactly at the age when you are really open to it, absorbing and falling in love with it.”
In Restless Dreams tracks Simon’s beginnings from meeting Art Garfunkel in Parsons Junior High, harmonising together over Everly Brothers songs, having a minor 1957 hit as Tom & Jerry with Hey, Schoolgirl (which Simon wrote when he was 15), to his early 60s songwriting apprenticeship in New York’s Brill Building, working alongside Carole King. Gibney sees this period of “elbow grease, discipline and developing the craft” as crucial to Simon’s subsequent ability to translate the more mystical elements of his creativity into something catchy, tangible and universal.
Gibney says Simon talked affectionately about the periods he spent playing English folk clubs in 1964 and 1965, which he found most welcoming after struggling for bookings back home. The singer refers to those travels in Seven Psalms’ Trail of Volcanoes, written six decades later. “The two years I lived in England were amongst the happiest times of my life,” Simon says. “I wrote a couple of songs that became hits with Simon and Garfunkel [including Homeward Bound, believed to be inspired by Widnes station]. I learned how to do a set, perform, talk to an audience. I was 23, 24 and was living away from a home in a country that seemed magical to me. It was an extraordinary time – Carnaby Street, the Beatles and the Stones, the Who, mods and rockers and then the folk movement. Martin Carthy, Davey Graham, the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. Then contemporaries like Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and later Sandy Denny and Jackson Frank. I met Kathy [Chitty, his first love, who inspired Kathy’s Song and many others]. It really was a beautiful time.”
Ears were pricking up, although Simon was still often performing in pub backrooms where, he has said, promoters would tell audiences: “Shut up! You’ve ’ad yer bingo! Now give the turn a go.” Meanwhile, in New York, producer Tom Wilson was overdubbing the electric guitars and drums that in January 1966 would take the retitled The Sound of Silence to the top of the US charts, a place they soon knew well.
In Restless Dreams includes Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s incredible footage, much of it unseen, of a 1987 concert in Harare, Zimbabwe. Exiled South Africans Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba are in Simon’s all-African band and a racially integrated audience of Zimbabweans and visiting South Africans are filmed dancing joyously together, which would have been illegal across the border.
Which hasn’t stopped yet. The hearing loss precludes playing with a full band, but he is finding ways to perform acoustically. Two weeks ago, he played seven songs with two guitarists at a fundraiser for the Stanford Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss, his longest performance in five years. “I’m hoping to eventually be able to do a full-length concert,” he says. “I’m optimistic. Six months ago I was pessimistic.”
He’s also written two new songs. “One of them, a duet with Edie, is different from anything I’ve written. I might just put it out into the ether, see where it goes.” He says he has no interest in developing the “extraordinary stadium spectaculars” of some of his contemporaries. “I’m interested in relearning how to write songs, like I did in England, and developing new acoustic sounds.
Maybe I’m something of a lone wolf in that respect,” he chuckles. “But I’m kinda interested in the conclusion of where my thinking in music finally ends up.”
Conclusion:
In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon is a fascinating and deeply personal exploration of the singer-songwriter’s life and career. From his early days as a struggling artist to his later years as a Grammy-winning legend, Simon’s story is one of creative passion, innovative experimentation, and a refusal to be bound by conventional expectations. With its intimate access to Simon and its thoughtful consideration of his work, In Restless Dreams is a must-see for fans of Paul Simon and anyone interested in the art of songwriting.
FAQs:
* Who is the director of the documentary?
Alex Gibney
* What is the title of Paul Simon’s latest album?
Seven Psalms
* How long is the documentary film?
Three and a half hours
* What is the subject of the documentary film?
The life and career of Paul Simon
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