1977 · Behind the Songs
Written for Still Crazy After All These Years but held back for being too bouncy, it became a top-five single all its own.
In October 1977, Paul Simon was between albums. Two years had passed since Still Crazy After All These Years, and with no new studio LP ready, his label assembled Greatest Hits, Etc., his compilation. To give the package a pulse, Simon reached back to the Still Crazy sessions and retrieved a song he had written then but held over: “Slip Slidin’ Away.” His reason was musical, not commercial — he had wanted, in his words, a “more bouncy, upbeat arrangement” than would have fit the jazzy sound of that album. Freed from the LP it didn’t suit, the song became a hit on its own terms, climbing to number five on the Billboard Hot 100.
The song itself is Simon at his most gently devastating. Over a loping, sunlit groove, he sketches small portraits of people watching their plans come apart — a phrase here, a vignette there — and ties them together with a shrug of a chorus about slipping and sliding away. Billboard, reviewing the single on release, called the melody “catchy” and the lyrics “sensitive, thoughtful, melancholic and evocative.” Cash Box praised the “emotionally complex lyric,” and Record World heard in it proof that Simon’s “perception of adult problems and relationships” remained undimmed. Robert Hilburn, in his biography of Simon, described it as “an especially appealing work about the uncertainty of relationships.” Nobody mistook it for a novelty; this was a grown-up’s record about the way life refuses to follow the script.
Greatest Hits, Etc. was an odd package by design: a look back that smuggled in two new songs. Alongside “Slip Slidin’ Away” came “Stranded in a Limousine,” a wry rocker that Simon released as the follow-up single in 1978. The pairing tells you something about where his head was — one song wistful and lilting, the other wry and road-worn, both circling the same theme of plans gone sideways. Neither appeared on a proper studio album at the time, which only added to their mystique; for years, the compilation was the only place to find them.
The recording is a small marvel of ensemble playing. Simon sings and plays acoustic guitar, Richard Tee colors the track on Fender Rhodes, Anthony Jackson holds down the bass, Steve Gadd drives it on drums, and Ralph MacDonald adds temple blocks, triangle, tambourine, and shakers — the percussion equivalent of a spice rack. The secret ingredient is the backing vocals, supplied by the Oak Ridge Boys, whose gospel-trained harmonies give the chorus its lift. Simon co-produced with Phil Ramone, and the whole thing runs four minutes and forty-three seconds without wasting one.
To understand why Simon shelved it, picture the album he was making. Still Crazy After All These Years was a late-night record — jazzy, reflective, steeped in the sound of a man taking stock. Its grooves breathed; its horns sighed. “Slip Slidin’ Away,” with its bounce and forward motion, would have stuck out like a tourist in a jazz club. Simon’s instinct was right, and his solution was elegant: rather than force the song into a shape it didn’t want, he let it wait two years and gave it a showcase of its own.
Released in October 1977 with “Something So Right” on the flip side, “Slip Slidin’ Away” moved fast. It peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and number four on the Easy Listening chart, reached number three in Canada, and made the Top 40 in Britain, Australia, France, and Israel. It finished 1978 as the year’s 48th-biggest Hot 100 hit and eventually earned a Gold certification from the RIAA. For a song its author had once deemed unfit for his album, that is a remarkable second act — proof that Simon’s castoffs were better than most writers’ keepers.
The one that got away — and kept coming back
The song refused to stay in 1977. It turned up on 1988’s Negotiations and Love Songs, the compilation on which Simon gathered his most durable work, and a demo version surfaced on the 2004 reissue of Still Crazy After All These Years — a fascinating what-if, the song as it might have sounded had it made the album. On stage, it became a permanent resident: Simon sang it regularly at his solo concerts, and it held its place in Simon and Garfunkel reunion set lists too, one of the few solo-era songs the duo claimed as shared property.
What to listen for: the groove’s quiet confidence. Gadd’s drums never push, Tee’s Rhodes never crowds, and Simon’s guitar sits right in the pocket — a masterclass in playing less. Then the Oak Ridge Boys enter, and the whole record opens up like a window. Listen to how Simon phrases the title: not as a complaint but as a shrug, the sound of a man who has stopped pretending he controls the outcomes. And notice the percussion — MacDonald’s temple blocks and shakers ticking away like a clock the song is gently racing.
The title itself became part of the language. “Slip slidin’ away” — the dropped g, the doubled verb — is pure Simon, a colloquial shrug elevated into poetry. It belongs to a lineage of his great resigned choruses, the kind that sound simple until you try to write one. And it sits at a hinge in his catalog: the last single of the Still Crazy era’s long afterglow, released just as the seventies were tipping into their final act, carrying the easy confidence of a writer at the height of his powers.
There is a particular courage in releasing the song you almost threw away and watching it outrun the album it was meant for. “Slip Slidin’ Away” is Paul Simon’s reminder that tidiness is overrated — that the bouncy, upbeat thing that doesn’t fit the plan is sometimes the truest thing you have. It slipped off the Still Crazy sessions, slid onto a compilation, and slid right into the permanent repertoire. Nearly fifty years on, it still sounds like exactly what it is: a happy accident, polished to a shine.