Snapshot: George Harrison and Paul Simon

The photograph of George Harrison and Paul Simon together is one of those images that rewards looking at for reasons that aren't immediately obvious. Neither man is particularly known for socializing publicly with peers. Both were famous for careers defined by creative independence and a certain deliberate distance from the more gregarious dimensions of rock celebrity.

Seeing them in the same frame produces the particular pleasure of watching two distinct aesthetic systems standing next to each other.

Two approaches to the same era

George Harrison and Paul Simon both made their reputations in the 1960s within group contexts — Harrison in the Beatles, Simon in Simon and Garfunkel — and both built defining solo careers in the 1970s that involved significant departures from the sounds that made them famous.

Harrison's All Things Must Pass (1970) was the record he had been building toward, the overflow of compositions that hadn't fit inside the Beatles' recording schedule for years. It drew on country influences, on gospel, on the slide guitar work he'd been developing. It was, in retrospect, one of the clearest statements of what the country-rock and Americana-adjacent sensibility meant to a generation of musicians on both sides of the Atlantic.

Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon (1973) and Still Crazy After All These Years (1975) drew on gospel and soul sources. The approaches were different but the fundamental ambition was similar: to make American and American-influenced music that was rooted in its source material while pushing in new directions.

What the photograph carries

Snapshot entries at this site use photographs as entry points. The Harrison and Simon photograph is an entry into the community that formed around serious popular music in the early and mid-1970s — a community that was smaller and more interconnected than the scale of celebrity involved would suggest.

Both men were enormous figures. Both were also, in their personal lives, relatively quiet. The photograph of them together catches something of the world they both inhabited: the world where the people who were making the records that would define the era also occasionally just stood in the same room together.

See more at the Snapshots archive.