Paul Simon admired Bob Dylan as a musician, but he didn’t like it when people drew comparisons between himself and the “Like a Rolling Stone” singer. He believes Dylan is a talented songwriter, ranking him even above himself. Still, Simon wouldn’t want to be like Dylan because he believes he takes cheap shots at others. Simon said he thought that this was an easy and unadmirable thing to do.
Bob Dylan once offended Paul Simon during his concert
Simon admired Dylan as a musician, but he didn’t like the way he conducted himself at one of his shows. While Simon & Garfunkel were performing at a venue in Greenwich Village, Dylan came in with writer Robert Shelton. They sat at the bar laughing during the performance.
“At the bar, Bob and I had been doing quite a bit of drinking and we had an advanced case of giggles over nothing,” Shelton wrote in his book No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. “We weren’t laughing at the performance, though Simon perhaps thought we were.”
Simon was frustrated and disappointed by Dylan’s behavior.
“I wasn’t furious,” he said, per the book Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn. “But I was hurt. Here was someone laughing during my performance — especially someone I admired.”
Paul Simon said it was easy to put people down like Bob Dylan did
Simon said that he typically likes to avoid comparisons to Dylan because he is a competitive person.
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“I usually come in second to (to Dylan), and I don’t like coming in second,” he told Rolling Stone (via The Guardian). “In the beginning, when we were first signed to Columbia, I really admired Dylan’s work. The Sound of Silence wouldn’t have been written if it weren’t for Dylan. But I left that feeling around The Graduate and ‘Mrs. Robinson.’ They weren’t folky anymore.”
He also didn’t appreciate the way Dylan seemed to put others down in his songwriting. He believed that because of this, they were different on a philosophical level.
“Unfortunately, I’m always being compared to Bob Dylan,” he said, per the book Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon by Peter Ames Carlin. “Our philosophies are different. He is always dumping [on] people more than I do. It’s really easy to put somebody down. The biggest thing Dylan has going for him is his mystique.”
He appreciates one quality the ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ singer has
Despite this, Simon appreciated the way that Dylan was able to imbue his singing with double meaning.
“One of my deficiencies is my voice sounds sincere. I’ve tried to sound ironic. I don’t. I can’t,” he said. “Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. He’s telling you the truth and making fun of you at the same time. I sound sincere every time.”
