John Simon is a multiple-threat artist -- a music producer (and occasional composer) in pop, rock, television, movies, and on Broadway, his name attached to notable projects in most of those fields. He was one of the top record producers in the United States during the late '60s and the 1970s, responsible for pulling together more than a dozen albums that are considered classics and all of which continue to sell well more than 30 years later, including
the Band's
Music from Big Pink,
The Band, and
The Last Waltz,
Cheap Thrills by
Big Brother & the Holding Company,
Bookends by
Simon & Garfunkel, and
The Child Is Father to the Man by
Blood, Sweat & Tears.
Simon was born in Norwalk, CT, in 1941, the son of a doctor who played the violin in his spare time. He began learning the violin and the piano while still a child, and was writing songs before he was ten years old. In his teens he was leading and composing for bands in his high school and authored a pair of musicals, and later wrote music for stage productions at Princeton University. His early musical influences included both popular music and jazz, which broadened to encompass rock & roll and other musical genres. In his early twenties, he joined Columbia Records as a junior producer, and was assigned to assist on various mixed-media projects, involving talk and music, including cast recordings, novelty records, and audio documentary albums -- among the latter was Point of Order, an LP depicting the notorious hearings conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Among his other early credits were
Of Course, of Course by
the Charles Lloyd Quartet, the Sunjet Serenaders' Steelband Spectacular, and Movie Time Polkas by
Frankie Yankovic. He enjoyed his first popular success in 1966 with the single "Red Rubber Ball" by
the Cyrkle, which reached number two on the charts;
Simon subsequently produced the follow-up LP of the same name, as well as the
Neon album that followed their debut LP. He also produced any number of hybrid and novelty recordings, including
The Medium Is the Massage by
Marshall McLuhan.
Although he had been hired during the final days of Columbia's prior administration,
Simon ended up -- albeit for only a short time -- as an integral part of the company's invigorated activities under the leadership of
Clive Davis, who, from 1966 onward, moved the staid label (which hadn't even signed a rock & roll act until 1964) to the cutting edge of popular music.
Simon was one of the Columbia employees present at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and chanced to cross paths there with
Peter Yarrow, with whom he ended up co-producing one of the more notorious projects of the era, the counterculture/music documentary and accompanying soundtrack You Are What You Eat (1968). His work on that project, however, was to have a profound impact on the course of
Simon's career and the direction of rock music.
One of those working on the movie was Howard Alk, a former club owner from Chicago and a friend of
Bob Dylan (and
Peter, Paul & Mary) manager
Albert Grossman, who had been an assistant to D.A. Pennebaker on the
Bob Dylan documentary Eat the Document. He had since been hired by
Dylan when he took the documentary away from Pennebaker, and was up in Woodstock with
Dylan in 1967 when he got involved with
Yarrow and
Simon in assembling and editing You Are What You Eat. According to
Band biographer Barney Hoskyns in Across the Great Divide, it was Alk, while working with
Yarrow and
Simon on the movie, who helped introduce
Simon to
the Band (who had not yet settled on that name for themselves), when the latter turned up serenading Alk on his birthday.
Simon was so taken with their unusual sound that he decided to help them out. Initially this was limited to one of his novelty projects, involving
Herbert Kauhry (aka
Tiny Tim), serving as backing band to the falsetto male singer. On a more important and serious note, however,
Simon also helped the group assemble the demo tape that was sent to Capitol Records and (with
Albert Grossman's negotiating skills thrown into the mix) got them their recording contract.
Simon's credits in 1968 included shepherding
Bookends,
Cheap Thrills,
Child Is Father to the Man, and
Songs of Leonard Cohen through the studio for Columbia, in addition to producing
Mama Cass'
Dream a Little Dream of Me and
Gordon Lightfoot's
Did She Mention My Name on behalf of other labels, as well as playing on the
Late Again album by
Peter, Paul & Mary. It was while
Simon was working on
Child Is Father to the Man that
Blood, Sweat & Tears founder/leader
Al Kooper advised him that he would do better working freelance as a producer, an idea that was reinforced by
Grossman. In the end, amid all of the possibilities that lay before him and the exceptional projects in which he had a hand, the most important album that
Simon produced that year was
the Band's
Music from Big Pink, one of the most influential and acclaimed albums of its era.
He entered 1969 with an already full tray, which included producing
the Band's self-titled second album (a record every bit as fine as its predecessor) and
the Electric Flag's self-titled 1969 album, as well as the soundtrack to the movie Last Summer, and writing ballet scores for Twyla Tharp. It was around that time that
Simon found a new temptation dangled in his direction, as a recording artist in his own right. Taking heed of a suggestion made by
Paul Simon and with
Grossman representing him,
Simon was signed to Warner Bros. as a recording artist. He cut his debut LP, titled (rather unimaginatively)
John Simon's Album (sometimes referred to simply as
John Simon), in 1970 -- he'd actually started some of the tracks as far back as 1968, and allowed them to develop over time as he added more musicians to his circle of friends, including members of
the Band and such luminaries as
Harvey Brooks and
Leon Russell, plus such stars-to-be as
Carl Radle and
Jim Gordon. The album was also as difficult to categorize as
the Band's first two albums, drawing on influences from psychedelia to Tin Pan Alley, though it also had a strange pop music aura about it as well, like some strange East Coast answer to one of
Randy Newman's early records. The only other record he produced that year was
Down Home by
Seals & Crofts. The following year saw
Simon appear as a session musician on albums by
Taj Mahal,
Eric Clapton,
Jesse Ed Davis,
Dave Mason, and
Howlin' Wolf. During the 1970s, he worked with such diverse acts as
John Martyn,
Gil Evans,
David Sanborn,
Martin Mull,
John Hartford,
Michael Franks,
Steve Forbert,
Cyrus Faryar,
Al Kooper, and his old friends
the Band (on
Islands and
The Last Waltz).
In the midst of all of that activity, he also generated a second solo album, the jazz-flavored
Journey (1972), though his own recordings never achieved more than cult status. That cult following has been sufficient to get them reissued in Japan in the late '90s and early 2000s, but it is as a producer that
Simon remains best known. He was less impressed with the technical advances -- especially in the areas of multi-tracking and digital recording and editing -- than a lot of producers during the 1980s and 1990s; he remained busy, however, with artists such as
Winter Hours,
Bireli Lagrene,
Emmylou Harris,
Christine Lavin,
the Kips Bay Ceili Band,
Pierce Turner, and
John Sebastian, as well as working on soundtracks such as Robocop: The Series. He also kept his hand in cast album work with
The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas (1978), and was involved in the abortive rock & roll revue Rock & Roll! The First 5,000 Years in the 1980s. Also in a somewhat historical vein (but with rather more successful results),
Simon was one of the participants in
Al Kooper's
Blues Project/
Blood, Sweat & Tears retrospective concert project, Soul of a Man.
Simon has continued to write songs and to record on his own, as well as leading
the John Simon Trio. He remains an active musician and producer in the 21st century, although, as is often the case with successful veterans in any creative field, he is sometimes in competition with his younger self -- his work with
the Band continues to get upgraded and reissued, and resold every few years (and, in fact, as of 2004, has never sounded better), as has the music he produced for
Leonard Cohen,
Janis Joplin,
Simon & Garfunkel,
Blood, Sweat & Tears et al., 35 years previously. Indeed, thanks to the efforts of Sundazed Records, even the albums he did with
the Cyrkle have shown lingering commercial life, coming up on 40 years later. ~ Bruce Eder