David Byrne Does Paul Simon ("The World's Biggest Prick" According To Some Dude In Los Lobos)
Yeah, and if there's even a shred of truth to this Simon story the Lobos is telling about the Graceland sessions, then Paul really is the world's greatest dong. But first, the happy good times: David Byrne joined Paul Simon for one night of his month-long BAM residency last week. The video has surfaced, and as promised, we are sharing. So without further ado, here's David (although you can call him Al, RIMSHOT):
Next up is "I Know What I Know" which clearly Byrne was born to perform.
Sounds so good, it's almost like David wrote it! Which is an even less funny joke than it first appeared to be when you hear Los Lobos lay bare the sordid details of their days in the studio with Paul during the Graceland sessions. That Paul stole from many of the African musicians who worked on the album -- and later gave them songwriting credits -- is well known; that he stole "Myth Of The Fingerprints" from Los Lobos, not so much. Here LL's Steve Berlin shares his side of the story with Jambase:
JAMBASE: Speaking of doing a lot of different records and working with a lot of amazing songwriters, I own a ton of the records that you've done over the years. One, in particular, I'd like to ask you about is Paul Simon's Graceland. I obsessed over that thing when I was young. Do you have any recollections of working on it?
STEVE BERLIN: Oh, I have plenty of recollections of working on that one. I don't know if you heard the stories, but it was not a pleasant deal for us. I mean he [Simon] quite literally -- and in no way do I exaggerate when I say -- he stole the songs from us....
And you know, going into it, I had an enormous amount of respect for the guy. The early records were amazing, I loved his solo records, and I truly thought he was one of the greatest gifts to American music that there was.
At the time, we were high on the musical food chain. Paul had just come off One Trick Pony and was kind of floundering. People forget, before Graceland, he was viewed as a colossal failure. He was low. So when we were approached to do it, I was a way bigger fan than anybody else in the band. We got approached by Lenny Waronker and Mo Ostin who ran our record company [Warner Bros.], and this is the way these guys would talk -- "It would mean a lot to the family if you guys would do this for us." And we thought, "Ok well, it's for the family, so we'll do it." It sounds so unbelievably naïve and ridiculous that that would be enough of a reason to go to the studio with him.
We go into the studio, and he had quite literally nothing. I mean, he had no ideas, no concepts, and said, "Well, let's just jam." We said, "We don't really do that." ... Not by accident, not even at soundcheck. We would always just play a song.
... Paul was a very strange guy. Paul's engineer was even stranger than Paul, and he just seemed to have no clue -- no focus, no design, no real nothing. He had just done a few of the African songs that hadn't become songs yet. Those were literally jams. Or what the world came to know and I don't think really got exposed enough, is that those are actually songs by a lot of those artists that he just approved of. So that's kind of what he was doing. It was very patrician, material sort of viewpoint. Like, because I'm gonna put my stamp on it, they're now my songs. But that's literally how he approached this stuff.
I remember he played me the one he did by John Hart, and I know John Hart, the last song on the record. He goes, "Yeah, I did this in Louisiana with this zy decko guy." And he kept saying it over and over. And I remember having to tell him, "Paul, it's pronounced zydeco. It's not zy decko, it's zydeco." I mean that's how incredibly dilettante he was about this stuff. The guy was clueless.
It was ridiculous. I think David starts playing "The Myth of the Fingerprints," or whatever he ended up calling it. That was one of our songs. That year, that was a song we started working on By Light of The Moon. So that was like an existing Lobos sketch of an idea that we had already started doing. I don't think there were any recordings of it, but we had messed around with it. We knew we were gonna do it. It was gonna turn into a song. Paul goes, "Hey, what's that?" We start playing what we have of it, and it is exactly what you hear on the record. So we're like, "Oh, ok. We'll share this song."
JAMBASE: Good way to get out of the studio, though...
STEVE BERLIN: Yeah. But it was very clear to us, at the moment, we're thinking he's doing one of our songs. It would be like if he did "Will the Wolf Survive?" Literally. A few months later, the record comes out and says "Words and Music by Paul Simon." We were like, "What the fuck is this?"
We tried calling him, and we can't find him. Weeks go by and our managers can't find him. We finally track him down and ask him about our song, and he goes, "Sue me. See what happens."
JAMBASE: What?! Come on...
STEVE BERLIN: That's what he said. He said, "You don't like it? Sue me. You'll see what happens." We were floored. We had no idea. The record comes out, and he's a big hit. Retroactively, he had to give songwriting credit to all the African guys he stole from that were working on it and everyone seemed to forget. But that's the kind of person he is. He's the world's biggest prick, basically.
So we go back to Lenny and say, "Hey listen, you stuck us in the studio with this fucking idiot for two days. We tried to get out of it, you made us stay in there, and then he steals our song?! What the hell?!" And Lenny's always a politician. He made us forget about it long enough that it went away. But to this day, I do not believe we have gotten paid for it. We certainly didn't get songwriting credit for it. And it remains an enormous bone that sticks in our craw. Had he even given us a millionth of what the song and the record became, I think we would have been - if nothing else - much richer, but much happier about the whole thing.
JAMBASE: Have you guys seen him since then?
STEVE BERLIN: No. Never run into him. I'll tell you, if the guys ever did run into him, I wouldn't want to be him, that's for sure.
He goes on to talk some more fightin' words and then adds, among other things, "That's our version of it. I'd love to hear Paul's version of it." Yeah, we'd love to hear Paul's version of it, too. Paul?
Posted at 11:12 AM in Video
Tags: David Byrne | Los Lobos | Paul Simon | Talking Heads
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gotta go with the Los Lobos version. ask anyone (besides Lorne Michaels) who has ever dealt with Simon: he IS a notorious prick
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wow...as a huge fan of Lobos and a friend of the band, Steve is not one to make stories up, or fictionalize the truth. Steve speaks his mind and is a brilliant musician, along with the rest of the guys...why has this story just come out? Check out our exclusive interview, www.indieoma.com, we did with Steve last year...Lobos por vida...
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"...and if there's even a shred of truth to this Simon story the Lobos is telling about the Graceland session..."
Do your research, Stereogum. This is a very well covered story. How can you not have heard about this before? The stories surrounding the making of Graceland (and subsequent release) are appalling.
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i didn't know about that los lobos thing, and i'm a graceland junkie. i think the african musicians thing is well known, as the piece mentions, but the lobos portion is actually news. well, news to me and so i'm guessing most that aren't as big of freaks as me. and it hurts me, because i just want to love graceland. dammit.
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You can still love Graceland, buddy. You don't have to like the person or even the process. But rip-off artists are artists, too. It's about the product. Paul Simon could be a Nazi or a Lakers fan or a guy who plagarized a band that had a decent run of albums for ten years, but "Graceland" is transcendental, baby, and rightfully is held in higher esteem than anything Los Lobos have been able to put their name on.
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The response, from an interview Simon did (http://thedreamerofmusic.com/EXPLAINS/EXPLAINS.htm):
“This Los Lobos thing has come up before, so I wanted to talk to you direct. They said all this stuff to Songtalk magazine in the States, and I've replied to it all in an interview that hasn't run yet, but its all there. There was a bad atmosphere at those sessions (with Los Lobos on Graceland) from the start; I don't know what it is with them. The whole deal for them working on Graceland was all worked out beforehand between Los Lobos and Lenny Warnoker (Managing Director at Warners USA) and there were no complaints at the time. It was made clear from the outset that we didn't have a song. There was no song. It was being written from scratch. I was - and still am - a fan of the band. What I really love is the accordion sound. So we started jamming in the rehearsal room and nothing was really coming together, and so I said do you have any ideas we can work on. What I wanted for the Graceland track was like a generic Los Lobos dikka-de-dikka guitar sound. And so we came up with something around a riff. They never once said that this guitar line is one of ours and we don't want you to have it. So we worked on recording this track for about three days, which is a long time to work on one track. I had to teach David Hildegger how to sing this song! And then David Hildegger came up to me and said "we're not happy with this track. We wanna do a ballard". But I couldn't have that. At that time it was the last track of the whole album - eventually we did one more - and I just said at this stage I don't care whether the album comes out without Los Lobos on it. I was getting really tired of it - I don't want to get into a public slanging match over this, but this thing keeps coming up.
"So we finished the recordings. And three months passed, and there was no mention of "joint writing". The album came out and we heard nothing. Then six months passed and Graceland had become a hit and the first thing I heard about the problem was when my manager got a lawyer's letter. I was shocked. They sent this thing to my manager, not me. If there was a problem they could have contacted me direct, they've got my home number, we talked a lot. If you ask me it was a lawyer's idea. You know, "the records a hit, and there's $100,000 in it". They had nine months from the recordings to talk to me about all this, but I heard nothing. And its still not sorted out because they still keep bringing it up - I heard they'd done this interview for you. I don't want to get into a public slanging match with them, because I really like their music."
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Thanks BG. It's good to hear Paul's side. I know it's all sort of old (the Jambase interview is a few years old), but still ... 20 years later and Los Lobos sure hold a grudge. I'm a big fan of Graceland and hope to see Paul at BAM next week, but the more I read about the making of the album the more it seems like credit wasn't given where it was due? ("Crazy Love Vol. II" was obviously stolen from Vampire Weekend.)
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Steve Berlin here -Wow- thats the first time I've seen Pauls response and theres so much there that is not at all what happened. First off- I didn't bring any of this up recently- it came out of an interview I did for the release of our last record about 2 years ago, so I'm hardly stirring things up- it just seems like a lot of people have spread it around recently, and I'm happy gets a proper airing. His story really breaks down when he whines about Davids singing- remember they were instrumental jams so nobody was singing anything, nor were we expected to. What happened is exactly as I told it- Paul had nothing idea-wise, and after 2 miserable days of truly pointless jamming we started playing a Lobos track we had rehearsed briefly and had intended to prepare for our next record. Paul said :What's that? excitedly and we replied it was a track we had begun to put together- he says great lets do that, and it comes together in about 90 minutes. We thought we were clear as can be that it was one of our songs that we were playing- god knows it wasnt one of Pauls BECAUSE HE DIDNT HAVE ANY, EVER during the 48 hours we spent with him. As far as getting Dave to sing - that is a complete hallucination. Were were just making music- Paul told us he likes to take the tracks to his place in the Hamptons and throw a tennis ball at the wall while he comes up with rhymes- it was on 60 Minutes back then and I believe it shows him working on our song. We never thought that we were going to sing on it- we were just happy to be away from him and Roy the engineer. Then as far as the aftermath of the release- we thought it was an honest mistake and went in search of him or his representatives to square things. Months go by, the world is totally enraptured by the concept and the sound and our piddly comlaints are off the radar. We tried for months to find someone to get to Paul and register our complaint and the next thing we hear back which I have always thought came directly from Paul to Linda Clark, our manager at that time is this sentence-:You wanna sue me? Just try it ,, see what happens to you." We didnt know what to do but we didnt want to slug it out in court, and Lenny said if we stopped whining about it he would make it all better. Basically we then got strung along till we went in to make La Bamba and then it fell off our active radar as all his other stuff began happening, I also wryly note Pauls line about hearing nothing for months after it came out- we were calling everyone we knew trying to get it worked out before more copies got sold, and then we heard he had to re do the cover to give the African players their proper credit, so that made us even more furious. And this day I dont think we ever got a penny for the 2 days work, so the moral here is always have a legal agreement before you start collaborating, especially with known assholes.
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@BG - Eh, "David Hildegger"? Not sure how reputable your source is dude. That's David Hidalgo.
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yeah BG, I higly doubt anyone has to teach David how to sing or play...Jez...
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If Paul Simon actually said all that, then he is an even bigger jackass than Berlin says he is. Even if what Simon says is true, he still should have given Los Lobos joint credit. He didn't need their permission.
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Paul's version sounds sketchy. Either way he should've given them the courtesy of a credit if he admittedly stole a song from them. Whether they were going to use it in the future or not isn't the point, it was still a song they were working on that he co-opted.
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My gosh, Byrne sounds amazing with those songs. That's seriously what I want playing in heaven.
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I agree with you , wilceaux and Stephen B. Even if it happened exactly as Paul says, he's totally abnormal for acting like it wasn't a collaboration at all. I mean, obviously, it was. Normal people realize this instantly. Guess he really is a prick.
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David Hidalgo's name isn't the only one spelled wrong in that excerpt - so is Lenny Waronker's, the head of WB. If you go to that link, the introductory paragraph is written in somewhat broken english. To give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Simon's comments were from an audio interview and they transcribed parts incorrectly? Or you can go with the cyncical view and say it's made up. The quotes don't appear anywhere else on the internet.
I'm a fan of Los Lobos and of Paul Simon and I find the story depressing, to say the least. It reminds me of another issue I haven't heard too many people talking about - Bob Dylan's Modern Times CD where he takes sole writing credit for a number of blues songs that he merely added a new lyric or two to. I think they're both similar situations.
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