(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Wed 5 November 2025 19:45, UK
The idea of becoming a rock and roll star didn’t really fit with what Paul Simon wanted to do.
He grew up on rock and roll, but he wasn’t exactly the same kind of artist that could hold a room together the same way that Elvis Presley or Little Richard could whenever he played. He was more interested in being a storyteller, and that tradition went back to a time well before rock and roll was even born.
Hell, as far back as music goes, there have been people willing to share their stories in song. Even if you listen to the greatest classical musicians who ever walked the Earth, they were always looking to profess their love, pain, and any other emotion they were working through in their music, but when it comes to rock, the clearest originator of the genre always comes back to the blues.
That doesn’t mean you have to be a bluesman to understand rock and roll, but if you look at what the genre’s roots are, you’re going to be drawing from people like Muddy Waters, whether you know it or not. A lot of the greatest blues players approached their stories of anguish as if they were second-nature, but something got lost in translation when transferring over to rock. If Robert Johnson showed everyone blues could be painful, Chuck Berry showed his generation rock could be fun.
Because if there’s one thing that Berry was good at, it was taking people on a journey with his lyrics. There’s already a common joke that every one of his tunes sounded the same, but it was never about trying to master every song he played. It was about hearing what he had to say, whether that was talking about going through the nostalgia trip of ‘School Days’ or the borderline-political commentary of a song like ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’.
At that point, Simon was still working on singing doo-wop songs, but in Berry, he found someone that he could relate to a little more, saying, “Chuck Berry, I would say he was probably the first really major influence. But I didn’t really know that until later. The reason that I single out Chuck Berry is because that was the first time that I heard words flowing in an absolutely effortless way. That were not just cliché words. He had very powerful imagery at his disposal in a lot of songs.”
Not everyone was going to be shouting the praises of tunes like ‘My Ding-A-Ling’ or anything like that, but a lot of the conversational quality of Berry’s tunes does turn up in a lot of Simon songs. There are the classics like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, of course, but when looking at Simon’s solo career, hearing him playing with language on tunes like ‘50 Ways To Leave Your Lover’ are a great way of breaking up the usual formula of rock songs that every other singer-songwriter was doing.
But Simon’s trick always involved getting more eclectic instruments behind him. The kind of traveling beat that kicks off a tune like ‘Graceland’ could have easily have been a Chuck Berry-style song if it had been in lesser hands, but by bringing in South African musicians, the whole thing feels like a journey through different corners of the world rather than going to Elvis Presley’s estate.
A lot of the most iconic Berry moments range from ‘Johnny B Goode’ to the single greatest guitar moment in film history in Back to the Future, but Simon knew it was about more than showmanship. Whenever someone sits down to write a song, they’ve got something to get off their chest, and both he and Berry could make that work every single time they picked up a guitar and a pen.
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