John Simon Has … Stories

Producer/musician John Simon announced that he will appear with Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian on July 13, 2025, at Woodstock’s Bearsville Theater in a show called Stories We Could Tell – Sittin’ Around Talkin’ About The 60’s—Music, Magic and Mayhem.  In Simon’s case, tales from his storied career would make for one long evening; highlights would include producing Janis Joplin (Cheap Thrills), the debut albums of Leonard Cohen, Blood, Sweat and Tears, three albums for the Band and playing synthesizer on Simon and Garfunkel’s “Save the Life of my Child.”

Hopefully, the show will start with Simon recalling his first professional gig.  In a 2021 interview with John Broughton, the Princeton graduate recalled the first time he got paid for playing the piano. “My first job at fourteen was backing a stripper, and I realized at that point that life as a professional musician might offer more than my piano teacher had led me to. I didn’t have faith in my career as a musician. At one point, I thought I’d be a music lawyer. I’m glad that notion passed pretty quickly.  I got a job as an intern at Columbia Records. And then a guy walked in and introduced himself as Brian Epstein’s associate [Nat Weiss] and played a demo of this band from his fraternity. And it was the first time I originated a project. It became a hit, and they gave me an office with a window and a plant after that.”

The band was the Cyrkle, a name John Lennon sarcastically bestowed upon them because he thought they were “square.”  Simon gave the band “Red Rubber Ball,” a tune co-written by Paul Simon.  Thanks to John’s production, the song soared to the #2 spot on the Billboard charts on July 9^th, 1966. The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” blocked it from the #1 spot.

But it wasn’t Simon’s success with Cyrkle that impressed another group.  The Band loved an album John produced called The Medium Is the Massage, a surreal slice of the ’60s that sounded as if Frank Zappa had joined the Firesign Theater.

Simon happened to be in Woodstock to work with film editor and original Second City comedy troupe co-founder Howard Alk on Peter Yarrow’s ( Peter, Paul and Mary) semi-documentary You Are What You Eat. It featured cameo appearances by Yarrow, Zappa, Tiny Tim, and hordes of hippies.  And even though it’s incomprehensible, some parts of the soundtrack are weirdly entertaining. Prime examples of this include four of the Band members backing Tiny Tim and Eleanor Baruchian on “I Got You Babe” and Simon’s whimsical composition “My Name Is Jack.”

Manfred Mann took notice of Simon’s song about a boy named Jack who lives in the “Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls” (a nickname for the Kirkland Hotel in San Francisco) and took it to #8 in the UK in 1968.

Today, the yawn-inducing film is deservedly forgotten.  But John remembers that his participation in the project and the McLuhan album started a beautiful friendship with the Band.

“Because it was Howard’s birthday, four of them, Levon [Helm] hadn’t showed up, showed up with weird instruments to serenade him in the middle of the night outside of his window and Howard knew they were looking for a producer and the only thing Howard heard of them was a goofy tape called, Even if it’s a Pig, Part 2. I think Garth [Hudson] even sang on it and the only thing they heard me do was the McLuhan album, which was a goof too, so Howard thought we’d be great together.”

And great they were, as John played on and/or produced the Band’s Music from Big Pink, The Band, and Jericho. Within Simon’s autobiography, Truth, Lies & Hearsay: A Memoir of a Musical Life In and Out of Rock And Roll, Robbie Robertson noted: “When John Simon joined the Band’s brotherhood, he fit like a glove.”

Unfortunately, while producing Big Brother and the Holding Company’s second album, Cheap Thrills, Janis Joplin and John fought like cats and dogs.  John stated, “Janis was coated on the outside with patchouli oil but on the inside with Southern Comfort, and both of them are highly explosive.  She was a warm, sweet person, but she could be tough.  I can’t say everything was smooth as silk in the studio.  We had our bumps, but she also was having bumps between herself and the band because it became apparent in the studio they weren’t quite able to do what we wanted them to do, so she was on their case.”

In a 2015 interview with the Library of Congress, John said of his time working on the album, “Progress didn’t always go in a straight line because of her wild-card drinking. I remember her trying out different screams on us, saying, ‘This is the way Tina Turner would scream.’ Or ‘I could do it like Big Mama Thornton.’  I came from a jazz background and appreciated spontaneity and improvisation.  I didn’t think that planning spontaneous screams was sincere.  But, in retrospect, I realize she was just trying to do the best she could.  Smart, loud, mercurial, she had the vision. Cheap Thrills is the album it is because of Janis, because of her raw emotion, her energy. She gave it her all.”

Simon lived to tell this tale and scores of others, including his work composing two ballet scores for choreographer Twyla Tharp.

Here’s hoping that after John Sebastian regales Bearsville Theater’s audience about Woodstock (he once noted, “I went to Woodstock as a member of the audience. I did not show up there with a road manager and a couple of guitars. I showed up with a change of clothes and a toothbrush”), John Simon will talk about fending off Polka groupies once they discovered he produced two albums for accordionist Frankie Yankovic.

-Mark Daponte

Photo: The Band (Getty Images)