Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live, knows them as “the two Pauls”—a couple of old friends, both 83, that he regularly invites to dinner at swanky New York restaurants. For the rest of Earth’s population, though, they are singular entities in the pantheon of great pop songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney and Rhymin’ Paul Simon.
By most accounts, Simon and McCartney have always admired one another’s work (with some exceptions). Considering the parallel paths their careers have followed over the course of 60 years, however, it’s a bit surprising how rarely those dinners with Michaels have turned into actual creative collaborations between the two Pauls. Aside from teaming up to perform one verse from McCartney’s ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ at SNL’s 40th anniversary show in 2015, the two prideful Hall-of-Famers have seemed content not to step on each other’s legendary toes, for fear of either icon getting even slightly overshadowed.
The stakes were perhaps slightly lower back in 1973, when both McCartney and Simon were just beginning to spread their wings—pun intended—after breaking away from their longtime musical partnerships, in the forms of John Lennon and Art Garfunkel, respectively. That year, Simon published a book of lyrics from throughout his career, titled The Songs of Paul Simon. In response, somebody at Punch magazine got the clever idea to ask Paul McCartney to write a review of the book. It’s not every day you get one of the world’s most revered songwriters assessing the work of another artist in that same category, and indeed, McCartney accepted the assignment with enthusiasm, calling it an “honour”.
Much like Punch itself, McCartney seemed to see the idea of a published Paul Simon songbook as something of an old-school novelty, and perhaps more cynically, a cash grab on behalf of its subject.
“Music publishers from the old days don’t’ like song lyrics to appear on a record cover because it harms sheet music sales,” McCartney wrote, “And this type of book is the epitome of what they’re talking about, being, for someone like Paul [Simon] who is smart enough to own his own publishing rights—or so the story goes—jolly lucrative. And jolly good luck to him, because really, some of his things have been very good.”
“…Remember ‘America’ from Bookends?” McCartney adds, as if that five-year-old Simon and Garfunkel hit were an obscure deep cut. “‘His bow tie really is a camera’— classic line.”
These slightly condescending compliments, while appropriate for a satirical rag like Punch, also strike a very familiar tone among men of mighty egos throughout the ages. McCartney is happy to describe The Songs of Paul Simon as “a fine book for people who like Paul Simon’s music”, and he does note the inclusion of some amusing photos and insightful scrap paper notes revealing Simon’s songwriting process. Overall, though, McCartney knows that Simon’s greatness speaks for itself, and rather than daring to directly state his admiration for his friendly rival, Sir Paul prefers to take the piss.
“Splitting hairs,” he wrote, “I would say that the book is slightly too heavy for reading on the toilet, although on the whole it makes it. Of course, I happen to know that, as a songwriter, the real reason for these books is so that the writer himself can have a fat volume of his work to leave out on the coffee table and impress his friends.”
On a related note, you can buy the heavy 2021 volume, Paul McCartney: The Lyrics, at your local bookstore.
