Paul Simon & Hank Shocklee (1990 interview)
johmbolaya
4,472 Posts
I posted this over at OKP and decided to post it here.I'm clearing out a lot of my magazines from storage, and I want to save certain items of interest. I don't know if these are archived anywhere so if they are, then they are.I have some others on the way but they will be posted on my new blog:http://jbookmusic.blogspot.comAnyway, here we go:==begin swipe==(from Spin Magazine, January 1991 issue)EBONY & IVORY---One is the quintessential white, easy-listening artist from a middle-class Jewish background, the other a street wise black who's best known for producing Public Enemy, the quintessential rap group that, some argue, attacks white, middle-class values. SCOTT COHEN arranged a meeting of two very different minds - Paul Simon's and. Hank Shocklee's -at Simon's office in the Brill Building in New York, where the following conversation took place.======PAUL SIMON: This was a very famous building. All the early rock'n'roll record companies were located in this area and this was the class building. When we were 14,Artie and I used to come into the city with my guitar and knock on the doors and sing. Then, when we were 15, we made our first record.HANK SHOCKLEE: When I came into the city I would knock on people's doors and get them slammed in my face. I was a DJ in a few record pools, so I had a feel for the companies and knew who was putting out the hit records and who needed help. I stopped going around when I couldn't get anyone to listen to my demos and ended up making records live on the radio, because there wasn't enough rap records being supplied by the companies.SPIN: Was this when you were 14?SHOCKLEE: This was '84, '85. I wasn't looking for a record deal when I was 14,no way.I was still on the streets, playing football, baseball, and basketball. SIMON: So was I. People during my time were making records at that age, though. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers really were teenagers.SHOCKLEE: We got kind of dogged in the disco crunch. After '79, '80, companies weren't signing anybody. To make a record was like the most incredible thing in life. The only people we really had on wax were Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown, and Earth, Wind and Fire. These were major groups. Cutting an independent record was, likeno way.SIMON: When I was a kid all there was was independent record companies, Majors didn't recordrock'n'roll. Record companies were just tiny little cubicles.SHOCKLEE: I think the same thing happened for us in rap. There were no majors. Tommy Boy, Profilethose were the major rap labels. Kurtis Blow was actually the first rapper signed to a major, and that was Mercury. Other than that, most of these records were distributed out of the backs of cars: Enjoy Records, Sugar Hill Records, the Sound of New York. And if you made a 12-inch, it was considered, like, wow. But if you made an album-now, that was inconceivable. I mean, rappers never got to do an album.SIMON: When I was a kid, they didn't have albums. But radio used to be so good. You could hear really different stuff. I was thinking there might be a correlation between format radio and the polarization of the society. When you start to divide everything up into categories, you never get to hear the interesting stuff from the other groups.SHOCKLEE: When I grew up, in order for us to hear a Supremes record or Sly Stone, you had to suffer through Blood, Sweat and Tears. That's why I have such a wide musical interest. Back then you had to battle against the best rock'n'roll record, the best blues, the best jazz. Music should be competitive all the way around.SIMON: This is another example of corporate damage. Because sponsors can hit their demographics perfectly this way,they have a radio format that appeals exclusively to the audience that'll buy their product.SHOCKLEE: Most people who appreciate music listen to a lot of different music.SIMON: What did your family listen to?SHOCKLEE: My father was a strict jazz buff-Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Smith, Thelonious Monk, Cannonball Adderley. I hated it. I'd sneak in my mother's room and there'd be a Nancy Wilson or an Aretha Franklin. Some people have a gift. You put them in a setting and you see the magic. Then there's others who got to work and work at it. Aretha Franklin had the magic. My example would be Chuck D versus a Flavor craft.SPIN: Have you done many songs in one take?SIMON: No, I tend to be in the other category. I began The Rhythm of the Saints in March of '88. SPIN: Do you wish you were a one-take guy?SIMON: I think everybody wishes they had that instant, effortless gift. On the other hand, people who can have the persistence to stay with it, that's a gift as well. Basically, you're working with what you have. You're still trying to get to some kind of truth about what's in your mind or in your heart. Some people seem to be able to do that effortlessly, but for all we know, they're doing a lot of thinking, too. They're making split decisions at an amazing rate, and they're going through the same editing process, but it's incredibly fast.SHOCKLEE: A lot of it is on impulse and feel. If someone took your sight away, you're going to use a lot of impulse and feel really quick, or you're going to fall down a flight of stairs. But there are drawbacks. Usually artists like that don't last as long as those who work hard. One might pick up a drinking or a drug habit because it goes with the normal flow of their existence. SIMON: One of the worst aspects of this culture is that we romanticize that early burnout, self-destructive, die-young attitude. For some people, that's their destiny, but then they become cultural icons, and you got a whole people out there dying young for no reason.SHOCKLEE: Right now, there's a different pattern, and it's not to be an icon. It's a love ofmoney and fame. Once you add the two together, it's like bleach and ammonia. They're perfectly harmless when separated, but put them together and they create a lethal gas. That's what this society is producing. It's no longer producing a craft. Forget about music. If you find a plumber these days, he's into it for the money, and he wants to get famous.That's all he cares about. He doesn't care that he's coming into your place and destroying your plumbing.SIMON: They said Madonna, Milli Vanilli, and Janet Jackson were lip-synching. Madonna, who's as shrewd an entertainer as there is, comes up with a logical answer: Hey man, it's a performance. What's the difference if I'm lip-synching or not? So I didn't sing. I'm dancing. It's another thing. The answer to that is a great concert performance that'sspontaneous and live - so the audience is moved in some way-that can't possibly happen in the lipsynched way.SHOCKLEE: You get a person who says, "I don't have time to study an instrument." Rappers sample. There's a difference between plagiarizing and sampling. You take a horn hit here and insert it somewhere where it has a different application than it had in its original context-that's creative sampling. You got people who are forgetting about the horn hit; they're taking half of the song or the intro to the song. And now that we like that intro somuch, we'll take the chorus. You got that mentality happening.SIMON: Yes, you do. You're saying the guy who takes half the song is not someone you admire as much as the guy who takes the right horn hit and puts it in the usual spot. My question is, How are you going to make your case for the skillful plumber, the skillful sampler, the skillful performer, those people who have the potential to do better?SHOCKLEE: You're talking about art versus commercialism. At this point, it's very difficult to be both. Five years ago in the record industry you had a little time to develop yourart. Now these record companies don't
want to hear about art. You're selling only a hundredthousand records, you're out of here. We plant a seed today, and if it ain't a tree tomorrow, throwaway the roots, pot, dirt, and everything.SIMON: It was the same thing with rock'n'roll. They said, This is dumb music for 5-year olds, with stupid lyrics that don't mean anything. Then that generation grows up, starts to be creative, and expresses itself on a mature level. SHOCKLEE: When I first heard the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, it was probably the most incredible performance I had ever seen on television. Every adult must have said it was sheer garbage, it was noise, it was nonsense. Only now are they saying the Beatles are the greatest.SIMON: When I grew up there was only one station that played rock'n'roll in New York, WINS, and it only came on at a certain hour of the night. It wasn't on seven days a week. On Sundays, when it wasn't on, I'm turning the dial looking for interesting music - which is how I first heard gospel-but as I'm spinning the dial I also heard Latin music, countrymusic. I didn't like it, but I heard it. Now, when I think back on it, there are certain things about it that I like. The fact that somebody may have heard my music doesn't mean that I was their favorite artist, but the sound was there. Like Wynton Marsalis said, "A musician has to accumulate so many different styles of music to really understand where hismusic is coming from." His point was that people weren't doing that; they were ignoring the past and their history. SHOCKLEE: Rock'n'roll back in the late '60s, early '70s had a lot of different music in it. You listen to the classic rockers, it was influenced by a lot of different music. Deep Purple had a jazz situation happening; Grand Funk had funk mixed in with its stuff; theStax sound incorporated classical strings behind soulful, funky riffs, which gave it a whole other texture. These guys pushed music. Nowadays you hear the bands regurgitating something that's been regurgitated. The kids don't get a chance to experience any other particular music inside the music. SIMON: But you've got to absolve them from blame. Take Motown; take Berry Gordy and the music he created. He's remembering the music he heard when he was a kid. Now you're talking about culture that was not totally homogenized by the media. There were different pockets in the country where different music existed that was real. Now, with the way television covers everything, it's actually hard to find that.SHOCKLEE: Now it's more like, Let's copy what already hit. That's a whole different mentality.SIMON: Not only that, you start to get penalized when you make something different. Look what happened to me with Graceland. The song "Graceland" won a Grammy for record of the year. That song was on the charts for three weeks and never got higher than 81. Radio didn't play that record. It didn't fit into anybody's format.SHOCKLEE: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was No.1 on the black charts for two weeks, made Top 20 pop, but was never played on the radio. The difference is, you made a different record for an audience that is not as active as the audience that I made a record for. My audience is very active right now and represents the majority of record buyers. They're very vocal, they're very visual, they're going to go out and tell the next person. People who are going to appreciate Paul Simon's music are not going to run around on the streets and blast it in their Jeeps.SIMON: And I felt when Iwas making that record that if I don't make this record really interesting nobody in my generation is going to pay attention, because they don't listen to music for information anymore. They don't expect to learn anything about the world from this because they're already shut out. They've already been eclipsed by a generation that plays another kind of music -SHOCKLEE: - people who don't really care.SIMON: My generation is a total music generation as much as the generation today. But people get older, they have families, other concerns. Also, the music got boring and the generation got boring. So how does an artist talk to people if they're no longer listening?SHOCKLEE: We had the same concerns with our audience. We knew they weren't going to play it on the radio, but one, we had this message behind the music, and two, it's very abrasive, so we got to do something to wake these people up to check out this particular record.SIMON: Why do you think the life span of rappers seems to be so short?SHOCKLEE: Because rap is the last available music. Hap is the scavenger of the music business: Hey, prey on every piece of music that's out there; after people get over your voice, the particular style that you kick your rhymes in, and your subject matter, there's really nothing else you can do. It's not like you can make a ten-minute instrumental and dazzle people with your musicianship. It always has to be a vocal situation. You have to focus on the word and the subject, and when that wears thin, it's like, next. SIMON: That's why you hear rap being combined with more music, right? It's got to go there. It's got nowhere else to go but the music.SHOCKLEE: I envision in about four, five years, there's going to be no live shows. Live shows are only going to be for the super-superstars that MTV got in crazy heavy rotation. They'll be the only ones able to afford to go into an arena.SIMON: I disagree. If you project the trend at the moment, that will be so. But I don't think it wiII happen, because there's always going to be somebody with that kind of gift that people wiII flock to see, as they always have throughout history.SHOCKLEE: You're basing everything on talent, and I'm telling you there's going to be people that are going to look at talent totally different from you or I. SIMON: You're saying the entire course of the human race is going to be radically different. that people will no longer love to hear the sound of the human voice? It just isn't so, it's always been that way and it will always be that way.SHOCKLEE: You got kids growing up not knowing what a live drummer is.SIMON: Well, they will, because there are plenty of live drummers. You're telling me about what's happening in a certain section of the world. That's not what's happening in South America. That's not what's happening in Africa.SHOCKLEE: I'm speaking for here in the States. You're one of the fortunate ones that can go to South America. You got people who can't leave their own particular cities. There's such propaganda being put out there by this culture about being rich and famous that these other cultures think that whatever's in the States is what's supposed to be.SIMON: Well, if you go back into the terrible, distant past, you'll find periods of time when popular culture was pretty thin in terms of musical quality. Then, from someplace you never expected, comes something that turns everybody's head around. Believe me, the last thing anybody would have expected in 1964, when music was packaged on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, was that people from Liverpool were going to come up with music and turn the world around. Couldn't be predicted, and I think it'll happen again.SHOCKLEE: For anything like that to happen, there's got to be a climate. It might not be playing instruments; it might be breaking instruments.SIMON: People have played instruments throughout the history of the species. It's never ever been other than that.SHOCKLEE: I think it's been more about a sound that turned people on, and it just so happened that it was made by an instrument.SIMON: The sound you're talking about is taken from preexisting sounds, like the drum machine, and sooner or later, that well is going to run dry. Unless you get new drummers, you don't have new sounds.SHOCKLEE: Well, if we'd be quiet for a minute ... I hear a lot of sounds. I hear a bus going by, a car
horn, somebody closing a door.SIMON: It's a hard case to make that those sounds will fulfill - as the main part of the meal - what actual instruments have always done. We've broadened our idea of what sound is and how it can be used in terms of music, but we haven't eliminated the heart. I don't believe you'll be as satisfied hearing a series of buses and doors as you will hearing areal instrument. SHOCKLEE: If you took people and played them nothing but simulated sounds, they'd start to develop a universe within, playing sounds from an artificial instrument.SIMON: But I think somebody's going to appear with a wooden flute, and people are going to go, Wow, what is that sound? I love it, because they've been loving that sound for ten-thousand years. I'm not saying people's vocabulary of sounds will ever eliminate the sound of the bus passing or the door closing; once your ear opened to the thing, it's in there. I am saying that these essential ingredients are so deeply a part of the human species that they could never go away. Melody has gone so far away that people don't think it will ever come back, but I don't believe it. You know why? Because at some point in time, everybody stands up and tears fall out of their eyes when the appropriate moment comes to sing "Amazing Grace." Because there's a certain moment when only "Amazing Grace" will do. ===end swipe===
want to hear about art. You're selling only a hundredthousand records, you're out of here. We plant a seed today, and if it ain't a tree tomorrow, throwaway the roots, pot, dirt, and everything.SIMON: It was the same thing with rock'n'roll. They said, This is dumb music for 5-year olds, with stupid lyrics that don't mean anything. Then that generation grows up, starts to be creative, and expresses itself on a mature level. SHOCKLEE: When I first heard the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, it was probably the most incredible performance I had ever seen on television. Every adult must have said it was sheer garbage, it was noise, it was nonsense. Only now are they saying the Beatles are the greatest.SIMON: When I grew up there was only one station that played rock'n'roll in New York, WINS, and it only came on at a certain hour of the night. It wasn't on seven days a week. On Sundays, when it wasn't on, I'm turning the dial looking for interesting music - which is how I first heard gospel-but as I'm spinning the dial I also heard Latin music, countrymusic. I didn't like it, but I heard it. Now, when I think back on it, there are certain things about it that I like. The fact that somebody may have heard my music doesn't mean that I was their favorite artist, but the sound was there. Like Wynton Marsalis said, "A musician has to accumulate so many different styles of music to really understand where hismusic is coming from." His point was that people weren't doing that; they were ignoring the past and their history. SHOCKLEE: Rock'n'roll back in the late '60s, early '70s had a lot of different music in it. You listen to the classic rockers, it was influenced by a lot of different music. Deep Purple had a jazz situation happening; Grand Funk had funk mixed in with its stuff; theStax sound incorporated classical strings behind soulful, funky riffs, which gave it a whole other texture. These guys pushed music. Nowadays you hear the bands regurgitating something that's been regurgitated. The kids don't get a chance to experience any other particular music inside the music. SIMON: But you've got to absolve them from blame. Take Motown; take Berry Gordy and the music he created. He's remembering the music he heard when he was a kid. Now you're talking about culture that was not totally homogenized by the media. There were different pockets in the country where different music existed that was real. Now, with the way television covers everything, it's actually hard to find that.SHOCKLEE: Now it's more like, Let's copy what already hit. That's a whole different mentality.SIMON: Not only that, you start to get penalized when you make something different. Look what happened to me with Graceland. The song "Graceland" won a Grammy for record of the year. That song was on the charts for three weeks and never got higher than 81. Radio didn't play that record. It didn't fit into anybody's format.SHOCKLEE: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was No.1 on the black charts for two weeks, made Top 20 pop, but was never played on the radio. The difference is, you made a different record for an audience that is not as active as the audience that I made a record for. My audience is very active right now and represents the majority of record buyers. They're very vocal, they're very visual, they're going to go out and tell the next person. People who are going to appreciate Paul Simon's music are not going to run around on the streets and blast it in their Jeeps.SIMON: And I felt when Iwas making that record that if I don't make this record really interesting nobody in my generation is going to pay attention, because they don't listen to music for information anymore. They don't expect to learn anything about the world from this because they're already shut out. They've already been eclipsed by a generation that plays another kind of music -SHOCKLEE: - people who don't really care.SIMON: My generation is a total music generation as much as the generation today. But people get older, they have families, other concerns. Also, the music got boring and the generation got boring. So how does an artist talk to people if they're no longer listening?SHOCKLEE: We had the same concerns with our audience. We knew they weren't going to play it on the radio, but one, we had this message behind the music, and two, it's very abrasive, so we got to do something to wake these people up to check out this particular record.SIMON: Why do you think the life span of rappers seems to be so short?SHOCKLEE: Because rap is the last available music. Hap is the scavenger of the music business: Hey, prey on every piece of music that's out there; after people get over your voice, the particular style that you kick your rhymes in, and your subject matter, there's really nothing else you can do. It's not like you can make a ten-minute instrumental and dazzle people with your musicianship. It always has to be a vocal situation. You have to focus on the word and the subject, and when that wears thin, it's like, next. SIMON: That's why you hear rap being combined with more music, right? It's got to go there. It's got nowhere else to go but the music.SHOCKLEE: I envision in about four, five years, there's going to be no live shows. Live shows are only going to be for the super-superstars that MTV got in crazy heavy rotation. They'll be the only ones able to afford to go into an arena.SIMON: I disagree. If you project the trend at the moment, that will be so. But I don't think it wiII happen, because there's always going to be somebody with that kind of gift that people wiII flock to see, as they always have throughout history.SHOCKLEE: You're basing everything on talent, and I'm telling you there's going to be people that are going to look at talent totally different from you or I. SIMON: You're saying the entire course of the human race is going to be radically different. that people will no longer love to hear the sound of the human voice? It just isn't so, it's always been that way and it will always be that way.SHOCKLEE: You got kids growing up not knowing what a live drummer is.SIMON: Well, they will, because there are plenty of live drummers. You're telling me about what's happening in a certain section of the world. That's not what's happening in South America. That's not what's happening in Africa.SHOCKLEE: I'm speaking for here in the States. You're one of the fortunate ones that can go to South America. You got people who can't leave their own particular cities. There's such propaganda being put out there by this culture about being rich and famous that these other cultures think that whatever's in the States is what's supposed to be.SIMON: Well, if you go back into the terrible, distant past, you'll find periods of time when popular culture was pretty thin in terms of musical quality. Then, from someplace you never expected, comes something that turns everybody's head around. Believe me, the last thing anybody would have expected in 1964, when music was packaged on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, was that people from Liverpool were going to come up with music and turn the world around. Couldn't be predicted, and I think it'll happen again.SHOCKLEE: For anything like that to happen, there's got to be a climate. It might not be playing instruments; it might be breaking instruments.SIMON: People have played instruments throughout the history of the species. It's never ever been other than that.SHOCKLEE: I think it's been more about a sound that turned people on, and it just so happened that it was made by an instrument.SIMON: The sound you're talking about is taken from preexisting sounds, like the drum machine, and sooner or later, that well is going to run dry. Unless you get new drummers, you don't have new sounds.SHOCKLEE: Well, if we'd be quiet for a minute ... I hear a lot of sounds. I hear a bus going by, a car
horn, somebody closing a door.SIMON: It's a hard case to make that those sounds will fulfill - as the main part of the meal - what actual instruments have always done. We've broadened our idea of what sound is and how it can be used in terms of music, but we haven't eliminated the heart. I don't believe you'll be as satisfied hearing a series of buses and doors as you will hearing areal instrument. SHOCKLEE: If you took people and played them nothing but simulated sounds, they'd start to develop a universe within, playing sounds from an artificial instrument.SIMON: But I think somebody's going to appear with a wooden flute, and people are going to go, Wow, what is that sound? I love it, because they've been loving that sound for ten-thousand years. I'm not saying people's vocabulary of sounds will ever eliminate the sound of the bus passing or the door closing; once your ear opened to the thing, it's in there. I am saying that these essential ingredients are so deeply a part of the human species that they could never go away. Melody has gone so far away that people don't think it will ever come back, but I don't believe it. You know why? Because at some point in time, everybody stands up and tears fall out of their eyes when the appropriate moment comes to sing "Amazing Grace." Because there's a certain moment when only "Amazing Grace" will do. ===end swipe===
Comments
About the same time. I remember seeing Paul Simon getting shouted down by black folks for stealing from Africa for Graceland. I think he started crying at one point.
Yes, and I just formatted and corrected a few things.
On point.
NPR is out of touch with the streetz.
Not sure about Sting, but, for example, Paul Simon helped Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Peter Gabriel Helped Youssou N'Dour garner some major success with Western markets.
"So" is an alright record. But I think the 3rd one is his best.
I could never get into "Graceland" but I liked "Rhythm of the Saints." Paul Simons work is spotty for me, but I respect his as an artist. I proabably like "Bookends" the best.