TV Reviews : Disney Channel ‘Simon’ a Skilled Profile of Singer

Paul Simon may be the first person to say the word “laid” on the Disney Channel and not be talking about an egg. The hour-long special, “Paul Simon: Solo,” premiering Sunday night at 9, covers other unusual territory as well, not just for Disney but for cable: It’s the rare musician profile that first focuses in on music itself and then makes an interesting case for it.

For that we can thank the British, for the show has proper, unsensationalist BBC origins. Interviewer Mark Steyn peers into Simon’s handwritten songwriting notebook and gets a look at how the lyric for “Hearts and Bones” developed from an altogether different idea, thanks to a borrowed line from Yeats. He asks Simon how “Mother and Child Reunion” would have sounded had it been recorded as first intended, in a ska instead of a reggae style (the islanders informed Simon in the early ‘70s that ska was already “out”), and Simon picks up the guitar and demonstrates.

Simon even picks apart one of his favorite and least successful songs, “Rene and George Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” and wryly notes, “To be realistic about it, the people that have heard of Magritte haven’t heard of the Penguins and the Four Satins and the Moonglows (and vice versa) . . . so it’s a very small audience that I’m addressing.”

The same might be true for the show itself; most of the wide family demographic Disney aims at should be zoning out about this point. But anyone with an interest in the development of pop should have a keen interest in the breezy, informed special. The show does a remarkable job of covering the breadth of Simon’s career--from his seminal attempts at “teen-king music” through his time with Art Garfunkel through a wide-ranging 20-year solo career--in a short time, with economical use of vintage clips. As slow and carefully as Simon speaks, you feel like you’ve gotten two hours’ worth of information in half the time.

Repeat air dates include June 15, 21 and 27.