Paul Simon The life

some readers sniff that only those with especially eventful lives should have the temerity to publish memoirs. Even such readers will be fine with the record executive Seymour Stein having written SIREN SONG: My Life in Music (St. Martin's, $28.99). After all, Stein was in the hospital awaiting possible heart surgery when a then-unknown Madonna visited his bedside seeking a record deal and playfully said, "Take me, I'm yours!" That event and its aftermath, which might warrant a full memoir from someone else, is but a passing episode for the ever-hustling Stein, who has to leave space for his time working with the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Pretenders, the Smiths, the Cure, Ice-T and many others. Stein has led the kind of life that makes this sentence sound utterly routine: "On Thanksgiving 1974, we had Elton John and his band over for turkey and pumpkin pie." (John Lennon showed up for dessert.) "My ears grew up faster than the rest of me," Stein writes of his childhood enthusiasm for records by James Brown, Sam Cooke and others, but it seems that his entire spirit was plenty precocious. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1942, he flew to Cincinnati when he was 15 for a summer internship at King Records under the tutelage of Syd Nathan, a seasoned executive who showed him the ropes and insisted the teenager change his last name from Steinbigle. Stein founded Sire Productions (soon renamed Sire Records) with the musician, songwriter and producer Richard Gottehrer in 1966. The company's most paradigmshifting successes grew from the downtown petri dish CBGB, where Stein found and signed the Ramones and Talking Heads. "I have no easily definable skills or talents," Stein writes. "What I really am is an extremist." Reading about Depeche Mode in a British music magazine late one night while home in New York, Stein made a phone call to a London friend inquiring about the availability of the band's American rights. When his friend said the band was playing that night in Essex, Stein booked a flight on the next Concorde. What he found was "four teenagers poking synths in a dump in the English suburbs." He loved it. From the sound of it, Stein has spent long stretches ignoring his personal life, but he pays attention to it in "Siren Song," candidly (and not always flatteringly) recalling his doomed marriage to Linda Stein (the victim of a brutal murder in 2007) and his role as a father to their two children. Stein was a "tragically clumsy" kid who realized he was gay when he saw Ricky Nelson performing Fats Domino's "I'm Walking" on television. "I truly believed that if I ignored it long enough," he writes of his sexual orientation, "it might go away, like the hiccups or a door-to-door salesman." Though a co-author, Gareth Murphy, helped write "Siren Song," Stein's pithy, brash voice is believably his own throughout. On his relationship with Linda: "Most divorcees fight over children; we shared custody of the Ramones." On the business: "The thing about pop music is that no matter how hard you work the land, you'll always be at the mercy of the weather." Now 76, Stein still works the land, though the bands he lists as his highlights from this century are more of a "who's that" than a who's who. It hardly diminishes the scope and impact of his career to say it had long since peaked by the time the Scottish band Belle and Sebastian released a song named after him in 1998, with lyrics that conclude: "Seymour Stein, sorry I missed you / Have a nice flight home / It's a good day for flying." Stein says songwriters have told him that it takes crafting about 40 songs before you get your first great one. In PAUL SIMON: The Life (Simon & Schuster, $30), the longtime music critic and journalist Robert Hilburn writes that Simon "wasn't a born songwriter" and "spent six years writing one mediocre song after another" ("Get Up & Do the Wobble," to take one example, managed to not spark a dance craze of the same name) until he hit upon "The Sound of Silence." Like Stein, Simon was a Jewish New Yorker (born in New Jersey in 1941, he grew up in Queens) who fell in love with doo-wop. As a teenager, Simon needed someone with whom to harmonize. Art Garfunkel lived two blocks away. When Simon and Garfunkel were 16 (recording under the name Tom and Jerry, after the cartoon), they had a modest hit with "Hey, Schoolgirl," which garnered them comparisons to the Everly Brothers. Hilburn itemizes the reasons the pair eventually split - Garfunkel's acting ambitions among them - but smartly concludes that the break came down to the scope of Simon's talent and ambition, which would only ever really leave room for one. Hilburn's book arrives less than two years after Peter Ames Carlin's "Homeward Bound," another soup-to-nuts biography of Simon. Unlike Carlin, Hilburn had Simon's cooperation, for better or worse. His book is sturdy and hardly hagiographical, but it's also muted when it criticizes and is short on titillating material. Then again, as you might guess from his gentle and introspective oeuvre, Simon is not exactly an avatar for rock's more Dionysian pleasures. Bobby Susser, a childhood friend, describes him this way: "He'd go, 'Our record is Number 1, so I should be happy, but what if it wasn't Number 1? Should I be unhappy? What does it mean? It's the same record. I'm the same guy.'" Hilburn handles Simon's personal life, including his marriages to Carrie Fisher and Edie Brickell, with discretion. On the subject of "Graceland," the heavily Africaninfluenced apartheid-era masterpiece that created a loud debate about cultural appropriation before Twitter was even around to amplify it, Hilburn can be tough (he calls Simon naive for thinking the controversy had passed at one point), but he lands on uplift: "The general perception," he writes in conclusion, was that Simon "came away from 'Graceland' a warmer, more generous person." Like many long careers in popular music, Simon's has waned over time. But Hilburn, in this chronological account, stubbornly treats every phase as equally worthy of sustained attention. He offers a substantial (and familiar) analysis of the failings of Simon's 1998 Broadway-musical flop, "The Capeman." He gives the same kind of space to the lyrics of "Darling Lorraine," from the 2000 album "You're the One," as he does to those of "The Boxer." Another native New Yorker from the boroughs outside Manhattan, Lamont Jody Hawkins couldn't have grown up more differently than Stein or Simon. Now known as UGod from the hip-hop collective the Wu-Tang Clan, he relates In his memoir, RAW: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang (Picador, $27), how he somewhat miraculously survived the streets of Staten Island, along with the group's other founding members, to achieve stardom. ("People think Staten Island is a joke," he writes. "Staten Island is no joke." U-God, I believe you.) The first half of the memoir is a visceral retelling of the rapper's childhood, with nary a paragraph that would escape a parental advisory sticker. He writes about being the product of rape ("The way I see it, you've got to be a compassionate individual to love a child conceived the way I was"), and about having a knife put to his neck by the father of his half brother. There's a fascinating and almost dizzying alternation at times between U-God's gentler side, which he credits to his mother, and an almost reflexive, blustering belief in the edification of violence. ("Not enough people living in New York today have been punched in the face.") He describes the ravages of the crack epidemic on his neighborhood, but also writes with pride about his work ethic in capitalizing on that epidemic. "Drug dealers are not lazy," he writes, with convincing detail to back it up. "Let me tell you straight up - it's not easy." Unlikely as it is with so much competition, the book does have a most horrific moment: U-God's son Dontae was nearly killed when he was 2 years old, used as a "human shield" during a neighborhood shootout. He lived, but required multiple surgeries over many years as part of his recovery effort. In the aftermath of that shooting, U-God writes, "I didn't get any support from these dudes who I thought were my brothers," meaning the Wu-Tang Clan (with the exception of Method Man). U-God is frank about the conflicts that can arise in such a large group ("Nine MCs going at each other, battling for who gets on the song can lead to some hard feelings"), but the book actually slows down when the Wu-Tang Clan's fame speeds up. The quick impressions of tour stops and recounted episodes of bad behavior lack the immersive and granular feel of the portrait of his youth. "I wanna give you the epic journey," U-God says of his lyrics. "Make you feel what I went through." "Raw" certainly does that. Patsy Cline's journey is the bass note running through John Lingan's homeplace: a Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27, to be published in July), a book about the singer but even more about the history and current day of her hometown, Winchester, Va. "This little town of 25,000 is in fact a brutal microcosm for the entire country," Lingan writes, "a place where the deepest history and most pressing contemporary concerns are in constant collision." Don't let that thesis statement of sorts scare you off. Lingan's book is not a polemic and it's not a gimmick. He often conjures the place and its people with novelistic detail, saying a lot with a lyrical little. Residents of the town fill prescriptions at "a pharmacy whose perfume shelves were misted over with ancient dust." A man performing karaoke sings a "tuneless and heaving" version of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," sitting "motionless on the chair, staring deadpan into the monitor, delivering his lines like a police chief naming casualties at a press conference." Lingan writes sensitively about Cline, "the patron saint of people who feel kicked to the curb." Her association with Winchester was long uncomfortable for the town's more patrician residents, who viewed her "simply as a loudmouth and unregenerate flirt." Lingan also writes engaging portraits of several other figures (politicians and preservationists among them) to put the puzzle of the town together. Primarily, there is Jim McCoy, in his mid-80s, whose Troubadour is the honky-tonk of the book's subtitle. McCoy met Cline in 1948. He was 19, moonlighting as a radio D. J., when the 16-year-old Cline visited the station and sang "San Antonio Rose" for him in a hallway. He quickly put her on the radio to perform it live. This moment became part of Cline's "creation myth," and her friendship with McCoy lasted until she died in a plane crash at 30. You end "Homeplace" thinking that every American town could use a book like this one written about it; every town could afford to be this lovingly but critically seen. Like many of the best country songs, the book is sentimental in a way that makes you wonder why sentiment is such a dirty word. Where "Homeplace" is serious-minded but essentially affectionate, the most blisteringly impassioned music book of the season is Saul Austerlitz's just A shot away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont (Thomas Dunne, $26.99, to be published in July), a vivid retelling of that claustrophobic disaster of a music festival. The 1969 event, at which a young black man named Meredith Hunter was killed by Hells Angels ostensibly there to keep fans safe, has long served as a clichéd time-of-death for the free-loving '60s as a whole, but Austerlitz's autopsy manages to feel revelatory. The primary reason is his dogged focus on Hunter. The book begins with Austerlitz in the Oakland home of Hunter's sister Dixie Ward, who confesses that she rarely can bring herself to visit her brother's grave just a few miles away. Hunter's identity is well known, but his story, Austerlitz believes, has never been properly told, and his life never properly mourned. The murdered teenager went unnamed in the documentary "Gimme Shelter," the most familiar account of the day. Austerlitz fixes our gaze on Hunter and situates him (if sometimes too neatly) as one chapter in a story that has recently grown to include Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and others. "A black man had gone somewhere white men did not want him to be, and had never come home." If Austerlitz is here to honor the memory of Hunter, he has also come to bury the Grateful Dead. The band was a major reason the festival happened, and their association with the Hells Angels, a group whose "most fundamental belief was in the righteousness of violence as an act of manhood," helped ensure the bikers would vastly outnumber the police in the security department. After watching the day's mayhem (which included the Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin being knocked out cold by an Angel), Jerry Garcia and his bandmates chose not to take the stage as scheduled, claiming that it would be better to skip straight to the headlining Stones. Austerlitz paints that decision as understandable but cowardly, and writes that it began a "process of erasure," in which the Dead's "footprints were being deliberately scrubbed, leaving the Rolling Stones as the sole owner-operators of the debacle called Altamont." Austerlitz also recounts how the documentary makers made something lasting out of footage that was chaotic and non-narrative. The day was druggy, hazy, surreal, ultraviolent; "Yellow Submarine" as a Quentin Tarantino movie. This book relentlessly places you in its scrum. Even days after finishing "Just a Shot Away," you may feel as if you're still in that crowd, trying to find an inch in which to back up and escape what's coming. The same year as Altamont, Larry Norman released his first solo album, "Upon This Rock." The Gospel Music Hall of Fame describes Norman, inducted in 2001, as the person "who first combined rock 'n' roll with Christian lyrics." Whether you celebrate or blame Norman for this breakthrough, his career is worth remembering for the way it illuminated the intersection of commerce, popular art and religion. At his most famous in the 1970s, Norman toured the world and performed at the White House for Jimmy Carter. Gregory Alan Thornbury is out to resurrect Norman with WHY SHOULD THE DEVIL HAVE ALL THE GOOD MUSIC? Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock (Convergent, $26). The "perils," in brief, are what you might imagine: Christians find you too edgy; rockers find you too, well, Christian. Norman wasn't threatening to churchgoers just because they were afraid of electric guitars. "His Moby Dick was institutional Christianity itself," Thornbury writes. He wanted apologies for "the church's racism, ready acceptance of aggression, violence and war, and for an unwillingness to listen to the concerns of a generation." Like a good rock 'n' roller, Norman wanted to make trouble, even if that trouble was part of an effort to promote good behavior. He claimed that any straightforward promotion of Christianity was propaganda, not art. (Perhaps not propaganda, the lyrics he sang nonetheless often fell short of his aspirations to complexity: "Take a look at yourself / And you can look at others differently / Put your hand in the hand of the man / From Galilee.") Thornbury, chancellor at The King's College in New York City (and formerly president there), is attuned to Christian culture and history. Whether he's a rock critic is a very open question. In his view, "Larry Norman Presents : Appalachian Melody" is "one of the great albums of the late 1970s." He finds it "hard to think of a better guitar album from the era" than "Something New Under the Son." Some of the book's minutiae, about record company disputes and other matters, are less than enthralling. But Norman's role - and struggles - in the cultural landscape of the time is worth remembering. "God gave me a gift," Norman once said, in a line that any rocker might adopt, "not to be popular, but to be invasive." JOHN williams is the daily books editor and a staff writer at The Times.

Simon discovered rock and roll when he heard DJ Alan Freed on WINS, the radio station which broadcast his beloved Yankees. After teaming with Art Garfunkel in school, Simon sold his baseball cards to purchase a tape recorder to capture their harmonies. They scored a minor hit while still in high school, but it was years before they prospered as a duo. Based on extensive interviews with Simon and many others, Hilburn (Johnny Cash, 2013) has assembled a thorough and engrossing account of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, who broke up a successful partnership and triumphed as a solo act. Hilburn delves into Simon's youth in Queens, his many loves (including Carrie Fisher and Edie Brickell), and philanthropy. He also closely examines Simon's approach to making music including his revisions, experiments in the studio, and worldwide search for interesting sounds. Simon is revealed as sensitive yet tough, spontaneous yet controlled, as well as reflective, perceptive, and empathetic, but also judgmental, insecure, and extremely competitive. As a songwriter, he has earned a spot in the canon alongside Gershwin, Lennon-McCartney, and Dylan.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2018 Booklist

Music critic Hilburn (Johnny Cash: The Life) delivers an energetic and elegant biography of American singer-songwriter Paul Simon. Drawing on interviews with Simon and his family and friends-including ex-wives Carrie Fisher and Peggy Harper-Hilburn exhaustively narrates Simon's life, from his discovery of pop music in the 1950s via disc jockey Alan Freed to Simon and Art Garfunkel's success and contentious relationship ("Artie knew Paul wrote the songs and thus controlled the future of the pair," according to manager Mort Lewis) and Simon's successful solo career. Hilburn describes Simon's artistry: his "songwriting would begin with the music... then he'd try to figure out how to express what he was feeling in words." Though Simon often came across as controlling in the studio, according to Hilburn, he was very respectful of other musicians and their time and work, and was generous toward other musicians (he wrote a check to Claude Jeter in gratitude for Jeter's gospel singing, which inspired "Bridge over Troubled Water"). Hilburn's brilliant and entertaining portrait of Simon will likely be the definitive biography. Agent: Luke Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Paul Simon PROLOGUE Ever since his debut on Saturday Night Live in 1975, Paul Simon looked forward to walking the narrow hallway to the stage at NBC Studios in Midtown Manhattan. Whether alone, or with Art Garfunkel, or with the high-stepping, show-stopping South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, he enjoyed the well-wishes of the cast and crew as he made the walk--their smiles, shouts of encouragement, and even pats on the back. This time--the night of September 29, 2001--it was different. As soon as Simon stepped into the hallway, he saw a row of New York City firefighters and police officers, their heads bowed, still mourning the deaths of more than four hundred of their comrades in the World Trade Center terrorist assault eighteen days before. It made Simon wonder whether this tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks--some nine thousand killed or wounded--wasn't premature. Many in the SNL cast of comedians asked themselves the same question. Would people really be ready for jokes? Simon had already joined nearly two dozen musicians--including Bruce Springsteen and U2--in performing on a September 21 telethon that was broadcast around the world and raised more than $200 million for families of the victims. In one of the show's emotional highlights, he sang his most famous composition, the gospel-edged "Bridge Over Troubled Water." But that night wasn't quite the same. The telethon was designed as a worldwide expression of solidarity and support. Artists performed on candlelit stages with no studio audiences, giving the event an intimacy that was somber and inspiring. For SNL, Lorne Michaels, the creator of the culture-defining series, wanted to aim directly and unmistakably at the residents of New York City--opening with Mayor Rudy Giuliani standing with some thirty fire and police personnel who had just come off duty at ground zero, the dust of the site still visible on their uniforms. The plan was for the mayor to say a few words about the glory and resilience of New York and then have Simon sing a song, which would serve as a crucial step in Michaels's goal of lifting the city's spirits. Michaels believed Simon was the perfect choice--the only choice. He was one of the all-time great American songwriters, inducted into both the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (twice) and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the only artist to receive Album of the Year Grammy Awards for records made in three separate decades. His tunes had been recorded by a treasure chest of vocalists, from Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra to Barbra Streisand and Ray Charles. Simon was also a New Yorker whose career reflected the triumphs and struggles of the city itself. He had come out of the borough of Queens with his schoolboy chum Art Garfunkel to enjoy superstar status around the world, and then exhibited the guts to walk away from the duo at the height of its popularity in 1970 to follow his own musical dreams. The first solo decade proved to be an even more creative period for him than the 1960s, thanks to his wider musical range, and the 1980s were equally commanding, including his masterpiece, Graceland. At the same time, Simon had felt the sting of defeat. He'd never been forgiven by a lot of Simon and Garfunkel fans for breaking up the partnership. He had also gone through two divorces and had failed in his ventures into movies (One-Trick Pony) and Broadway (The Capeman). To Michaels, Simon had one other vital link to this special evening: he had been in the city on 9/11, and he knew the fear that gripped it. On that morning, he had walked two of his children--Adrian, eight, and Lulu, six--to school, about fifteen minutes along Central Park West. It was a lovely day with just a trace of prefall chill in the air. By the time he returned to his apartment just after nine o'clock, his wife, Edie Brickell, was at the door with the news that an American Airlines plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. As Simon stared at the television screen, his first thought was that it was a tragic accident--only to watch in horror as a second plane, this one from United Airlines, smashed into the South Tower. There was now no question that the city was under attack. In panic, he raced back to the school to bring home Adrian, Lulu, and the children of some of his friends. To keep the kids calm, Paul and Edie turned off the television so they could play without hearing the frightful details of what was happening downtown, just a few subway stops away. President George W. Bush soon confirmed the attack, and city officials closed the bridges and tunnels leading into and out of the city. Within minutes, a plane attacked the western façade of the Pentagon, and yet another crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. By the end of the day, there was a strange smell in the air in New York--not a normal smoke smell but all the chemicals from the crashes. "It was like we were all trapped, all helpless," Simon said. "You wanted to help, but what could you do?" Days later, he got his answer with requests to perform on the two broadcasts. Even with his concern about the timing of Saturday Night Live, there was no way Simon would turn down Michaels, who was one of his closest friends and whose judgment he trusted implicitly. Plus, Simon had been around the SNL set so much that he was like an honorary member of the cast. Still, it was daunting. As soon as he stepped into the hallway, he began to worry about maintaining his composure. Simon had sung at funerals and memorial services for friends and musicians, and he knew how difficult it was to look at grieving faces. Giuliani, as solemn as the fire department and law enforcement officers at his side, opened the show with a statement about the city's resolve: "Our hearts are broken, but they are beating, and they are beating stronger than ever. New Yorkers are unified. We will not yield to terrorism. We will not let our decisions be made out of fear. We choose to live our lives in freedom." As he finished, the TV audience heard a few gentle guitar notes, and the camera slowly panned from the mayor to Simon. Dressed in black and wearing an FDNY cap, Simon stood in front of a huge American flag as he began singing the song Michaels had chosen for him: not "Bridge Over Troubled Water" but "The Boxer," a story of Simon's own struggle and resilience, complete with New York City references. Though recorded more than thirty years earlier when Simon was just twenty-seven, "The Boxer" was a song of remarkable craft and depth, its early verses written in the first person, but its final verse shifting dramatically to the third person to add a compelling ring of universality. That final verse: In the clearing stands a boxer And a fighter by his trade And he carries the reminders Of every glove that laid him down And cut him till he cried out In his anger and his shame "I am leaving, I am leaving" But the fighter still remains Lie-la-lie . . . The audience remained silent during the first two choruses, giving the moment an added poignancy. As Simon ended that final verse, however, scattered members of the audience whispered the "Lie-la-lie" chorus with him, adding to the emotion in the studio. Fifteen years later, Lorne Michaels called Simon's performance the most moving musical moment in the history of Saturday Night Live. "I was so proud of Paul and the show and the city," he said, acknowledging his own tears that night. "The strength he showed with that song--standing in front of those firefighters and law enforcement officers and knowing what they had gone through, what the city had gone through--was just incredible. Even after all this time, I think he's the only one who could have done it. He is as much a symbol of the show and of New York as there is." It was a defining moment for Simon because it underscored what had long been one of his quintessential qualities as a songwriter. Like "The Boxer," so many of his songs moved past any inherent darkness to express consolation, optimism, and even faith. In a rock 'n' roll world forged by rebellion, his music--from "America" and "Mrs. Robinson" to "American Tune" and "The Boy in the Bubble"--was founded on empathy. Despite melancholy and self-doubt at points in his personal life, he avoided despair or hostility in his songs. "If all I have to say is how disappointed I am about whatever there is in life, then I don't see what the contribution is," Simon said. "There's already plenty of that out there. I really don't believe philosophically that's my job. But I'm not lying when I go the other way. Love is amazing, and like I say on the You're the One album, it's something you want so desperately that it can make you laugh out loud when you get it. It's like medicine for us." Indeed, Simon's first great song was born during a period of trauma when he was in need of comfort himself. After years of toiling at the lower levels of the music business trying to write teen pop hits largely by copying what was on the radio, he felt in the fall of 1963 that he was at a dead end. Inspired by the emergence of the folk movement in New York's Greenwich Village, he vowed to reach inside to find out if he truly had anything of his own to say in a song. If he was going to be a failure as a songwriter, he told himself, he was going to be a proud failure. As he often did, Simon took his acoustic guitar into the family bathroom, where the tile made the sound all the more alluring, and he turned off the lights so that he could relax and feel totally at one with the music. "Ever since I was thirteen or fourteen, songwriting has always been a great place of security and comfort," he said. "Songwriting never turned around and stabbed me in the back. I remember times when I was really sad, and I'd sit and play an E chord for a half hour. I wasn't writing a song. I was just comforting myself with this instrument I loved." Night after night in November, he sat in the bathroom with his guitar, alone with his music and his future. Then his world changed with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Simon, who'd just turned twenty-two, was on his lunch break from his job at a publishing company in Manhattan when he heard the news. His mother, Belle, remembered that he spent hours despondent in his bedroom. Not long after the tragedy, Simon returned to the bathroom, switched off the lights per his custom, and started softly fingerpicking on the guitar. It was around then that he hit some warmly evocative notes that he played over and over again. Slowly, he began reflecting on thoughts that had been nagging at him for months: the way people ignored the words of those, from musicians to religious leaders, who preached against injustice and excess materialism. As he sat alone, these words eventually burst forth: "Hello darkness, my old friend." For the next five-plus decades, Simon wrote with such ambition and craft that it looked easy from a distance. He'd deliver a prized album, tour, and then largely disappear for the three or four years it took to write and record another collection. Through it all, he rarely shared his personal story in interviews or engaged in the tabloid-ish episodes that contribute to many artists' personas, which rival their music in the public eye. Yet Simon, too, had to deal with the struggles and challenges of a life in the pop world. He wasn't a born songwriter. He spent six years writing one mediocre song after another until, through a series of pinpointable events, he finally became the artist who wrote "The Sound of Silence." This evolution makes Simon an ideal case study of pop music excellence and longevity--how true artistry is achieved and how you then need to protect it against distractions such as fame, wealth, drugs, marriage, divorce, ego, rejection, changes in public taste, and fear of failure. Simon wasn't immune to any of them. Excerpted from Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.