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Paul Simon, 82, is a music legend. 60 years ago, he wrote the song that would ‘irrevocably change’ his life

He’s established a catalogue as original and varied as any in the history of popular music. That achievement is fully explored in Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams.”

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Paul-Simon-1965

Paul Simon at the Jacquard Club in August 1965, as seen in the documentary “In Restless Dreams.” 


One evening in 1963, a 22-year-old Paul Simon took his guitar into the bathroom at his parents’ house and turned off the lights. Accompanied only by a running faucet and the gentle sound of his instrument echoing from the tiled walls, the young songwriter began plucking an evocative sequence of four notes and began to play it again and again.

Transfixed by the pattern, he seems to have slipped into a kind of miraculous communion with his surroundings, arriving at a lyrical flourish that was addressed to the gloom itself: “Hello darkness, my old friend …”

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