Jambase via Stereogum ran an interview with Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, recounting his band's horrible experience with Paul Simon on the Graceland album. Seems Simon basically stole one of their songs, and took the credit. When they called him on it, he responded by saying "Sue me. You'll see what happens".
snip... "We go into the studio, and he had quite literally nothing. I mean, he had no ideas, no concepts, and said, "Well, let's just jam." We said, "We don't really do that." ... Not by accident, not even at soundcheck. We would always just play a song.
... Paul was a very strange guy. Paul's engineer was even stranger than Paul, and he just seemed to have no clue -- no focus, no design, no real nothing. He had just done a few of the African songs that hadn't become songs yet. Those were literally jams. Or what the world came to know and I don't think really got exposed enough, is that those are actually songs by a lot of those artists that he just approved of. So that's kind of what he was doing. It was very patrician, material sort of viewpoint. Like, because I'm gonna put my stamp on it, they're now my songs. But that's literally how he approached this stuff."
Dude couldn't even pronounce Zydeco properly, after recording with some zydeco musicians. Kept calling it zy decko. Read the whole piece, especially for the labels' motivations to persuade Los Lobos to do it - "It's for the family..." Hat tip to WFMU's Beware of the Blog.
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