didn’t know what to think. When they got the first few tracks Paul sent to them in 1985, Waronker, Titelman, and the other top executives ran to the nearest sound system, slammed the door, and hit the Play button. And there it was: the herky-jump beat, the bleating bass, the choral chants, weird-strung guitars, and everything else. Then they smiled and nodded and agreed that, yeah, this was pretty fuckin’ cool, Paul was really into something here, it really was like nothing they’d ever heard before, and wow, wow, wow. But then they tried to imagine how they could get it into the marketplace. Whose radio station was going to play Paul Simon’s version of South African dance music? Where would the record stores display it? After all, it wasn’t rock ’n’ roll, it wasn’t folk, and Paul Simon wasn’t a world beat artist. Small questions in the grand scheme of art, but Paul knew as well as anyone that commerce mattered, too. The more they heard over the next few months, the more they realized they had only two courses of action.
