John Simon: The Band, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and the Songs He Wrote for Himself

John Simon is one of the most important and least celebrated figures in rock and roll history. As a producer, arranger and musician he was in the room for some of the most legendary recordings ever made. Music From Big Pink and the self-titled second album by The Band, Cheap Thrills with Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen's debut, and Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends sessions. All of it in a handful of extraordinary years in the late 1960s.But there's another side to John Simon that most people don't know. He's a songwriter. A serious one. In this conversation we start with his own music, his first two solo albums John Simon's Album and Journey, recorded live with no overdubs, no click tracks, just great musicians in a room. We work our way through what it means to write a song, how to produce one honestly, and what it felt like to be at the center of one of the most creative moments in American music history.We talk about The Band, Music From Big Pink, recording at Sammy Davis Jr.'s pool house, Musical Directing The Last Waltz, and what Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel were really like in the studio.John Simon is 84 years old, still playing piano weekly, still writing, and still thinking harder about music than most people half his age.