It's the Late Show Pot Show with Stephen Colbert. -♪ Welcome back to the Late Show. I'm here. You know who this man is. This is Paul Simon, ladies and gentlemen. Cheers and applause Paul, I love... I saw you in concert recently. I love the album, Seven Psalms. You're on tour right now. But even though I've had the honor of talking to you quite a few times over the years in this show and the old show, and obviously I do a lot of sound engineering for you on tour. Everybody knows that. I don't always... I don't always have the time. I have to talk to you about that one. Talk to my union rep, okay? That's how it works. I don't always get to talk to you about, like, the deepest thoughts, the deepest ideas, okay? And so what we've done here at the show, we've created something called the Colbert Questionnaire. And the Colbert Questionnaire... Cheers and applause These have all been tested to space-age tolerances in order to penetrate straight into the soul of someone so they can be revealed to the world. Do you have the courage, Paul Simon, to answer the questionnaire and to be fully known? What choice have I... First question, Paul Simon. Paul Simon, what is the best sandwich? Chicken salad and bacon. Cheers! We're talking rye, toasted. What are we talking here? Toast. Toast. Okay. What was your first concert that you attended? I went to our Alan Freed rock and roll show at the Brooklyn Paramount. I saw Chuck Berry and Frankie Lyman and a whole bunch of other acts and the whole band, you know? Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Wow. Did you save that ticket? What I... Did you save the ticket? No, I didn't have that foresight. No. I didn't save the ticket. What is the scariest animal? For me? I'm not comfortable with snakes. Apples or oranges? Depends on the orange. Depends on the apple, too. Sure. Are we talking Valencia, Naval, Tangello? Whatever is sweetest. Okay. And apple, same thing? Yeah. Are you a Fuji man? Honey crisp? No, I'm not into that. You're not into that scene? No, not the theme. Those two fruits. They're not my fruit. Gala? Gala apple? Yeah. Gala apple? Cosmic crisp? Well, this is it. Yeah? Red Delicious? Macintosh? Stop me when I... I've got a lot of apples here. If you say Granny Smith, I walk. Well, what's your favorite? I don't answer the Colbert Questionnaire questions, sir. Senator, I'll be asking the questions here today. Have you ever asked someone for their autograph? Yes. I asked, uh... Tim, forget it. I'm blocking out his name. Sports? No, I never asked anybody in sports for their autograph. No, it was, you know, the actor who played Harry Potter. Daniel Radcliffe? You asked Daniel Radcliffe for his autograph? For my kids. Oh, that's nice. Did he give it to you? That's great. That's nice. But never for yourself. You never asked anybody for yourself. No. No, okay. What do you think happens when we die? I'm not sure. What do I think happens? Well... There are several different possibilities, but my father, towards the end of his life, he had kidney problems, and he had to go and have dialysis done weekly in a hospital over in New Jersey in Englewood. And he told me on one of the times when he was having dialysis, he must have had some kind of, heart episode where his heart stopped. But he was connected to all these machines, and so all the nurses came over and then I guess they gave him adrenaline, and he woke up and he said, I woke up and there were all these people looking, you know, looking at me, and he said, I have no memory of anything. He said, I have no fear anymore about this. He said, it's just... It was just going to sleep. And that is how he passed. On the other hand, or on the other many hands, there's... My friend who's also passed now, Gayle Rampushe who is Tibetan, he said, you know, a lot of people are very afraid, they think it's going to be dark and lonely forever, he said, but I come from a culture that believes that that period of the dark aloneness is about three weeks, and then you're reincarnated into your next place. The thing that I... I don't know how you feel about this, but the thing that I have trouble with is the idea of heaven, because I think... So heaven is real. Yes. Well, where exactly is it? You know? I mean, it's obviously not in our galaxy or any place nearer, so it's really far away. So how do you get there? And when you get there, I mean, there are all these people that you hoped you'd never see. APPLAUSE Maybe they're in the other place, Paul. No, I wouldn't... I don't believe in that, either. I think that that... I think, actually, both of them, heaven and hell, are what is here, it's what we're living. Yeah. APPLAUSE We get... We get blissed out at great events or whatever. And we also can go through so much misery that you think it's just hell. So I say that's what it is. I don't need any further stories about fire and burns, fire that burns forever. And I think even that, after a while, you'd say, I'm so tired of burning everything. OK. Forever, you know. What else you got? Yeah. Yeah. OK. APPLAUSE Move on. Next one. APPLAUSE You're good? You're good? APPLAUSE Paul Simon, what is your favorite action movie? APPLAUSE Oh. I don't know what we would include in action movies. We can ask the judges. Uh... I don't know. You know... Nothing... Great Escape? No. Dirty Dozen? APPLAUSE Magnificent Seven? Yeah. Yeah, it could be that. The... Seven Samurai? That was good. Yeah. Think of that as an action movie. Well, Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai are basically... Yeah, that's right. You accepted Magnificent Seven without blinking, and now you're attacking me for the Seven Samurai. No, just... You're just attacking me. You saw. We'll roll the tape back right now, mother-... You attacked me. Oh, I deepest apologies. I was sorry. Made the pain go away, Paul. LAUGHTER You can steal that lyric if you want. OK. Window or aisle? aisle. May I ask why? Um... I don't want to cross over in front of somebody while I'm... going to the... The bathroom. Yeah. Totally agree. Totally agree. Yeah. Because they're going to tell a story later, and they're like, Paul Simon kept getting up. Yeah. They're going to tell that story. I don't want that story out there. None of that damn business. Yeah. Favorite smell? Favorite smell? Oh. Uh... Well, certain flowers that I like. Peonies, roses, of course. Uh... I also like this, uh... this oil that you can get from trees called ood. That has a very woody... nature... aroma to it. That's... Ood. Yeah. Well, that's like in the natural world. Ood, same word as like the instrument, the ood? Yeah. It's the same spelling. I mean, but then, of course, you know, if you... if you ever pass a... a pizza place, that's really good. Not 11 o'clock at night, even now. Even better. Woo! I'll have... I'll have a slice with extra ood. Yeah. Least favorite smell? Uh... Uh... Bad breath? Yeah. I'm so glad that we've had this chance to... get into this. Exactly. The deep stuff. Yeah. I have a memory of... I have a memory of being in my crib. But I don't remember much else. Just looking through the bars? But I... No, I think I was standing. Yeah. But who knows if that was accurate? I don't know. But who knows if that was accurate? One of... One of my early memories that's... I think I was like... maybe four or three or four. And... my parents had... made a birthday party for all the kids in the neighborhood. And I was having a great time. And they said... My mother came down and said, come... come upstairs. Grandma bought you a present. She bought... you a barn. And I said, whoa. This is a... I can't wait to see it. So I come up and I look, you know, I don't see any barn. And they give me this piece of paper. It's a bond. I don't know where the bond is. You know. A four. You know. LAUGHTER Cats or dogs? Dogs. Do you have dogs present? We've had... Yeah, we've had several dogs. Now they're all... they're all gone and... we miss it, but... we're not... You're not diving back in right away? No. You only get to listen to one song for the rest of your life. That doesn't mean you have to listen to it continually, but you have to choose one song that when you go to listen to music, you have to choose one choice you make. Oh, it's not Feelin' Groovy. LAUGHTER It's not that. I don't know. There's so many beautiful... beautiful melodies. Uh... Four Ely's... Uh... Sure. Silent Night, I love. I still love Silent Night. You know. Um... You know, I also... I love... songs from when I was... 13, 14. You know. I could hear them periodically. Do-op? Do-op or pre-do-op, even. Just, you know, I've started to be interested in... the period that came right before I was interested. To see where it came from. It's just great stuff. You know, for me, it's very... Like Sinatra era? Or like post-Sinatra, pre-rock? Well, it would have been... it would have been Sinatra at his prime, but it's... it's not... You know, there was this... I was never a big fan of Frank Sinatra. I didn't like that kind of music. Well, that's the music that my father played. He was in a band. He was basist. And the day after I played with Artie in Central Park, I went to see Frank Sinatra at Carnegie Hall. And it was like... it was like... I couldn't believe how good it was. I just couldn't believe that anybody could do... do this, you know? So... But I don't know that they're... Well, I do, you know. And the like music channels that I have programmed in my car, Sinatra is one of them, yeah. It's like ink spots? That kind of era? Well, that would be great. Mills Brothers ink spots because they... they come... they influence gospel quartets who influence R&B to do WAP, you know? So you can hear it. And you can also hear how sophisticated that music was and how as the music... as the years went by from the... early to middle fifties to the late fifties, the music just gets worse and worse and worse. As they lost that... they just lost the musicality because it was all kids. You know, we just stood on the street corner. I remember when Artie and I discovered how you make a chord. You know, you sing this, you sing this, and you sing this, okay? Ready? Oh! A chord. But I don't know, that's uninteresting. I'm interested, I'm interested. What number am I thinking of? Three. Interesting. Describe the rest of your life in five words. Not that much longer. Yeah, I couldn't even get to the fifth. Paul Simon, everybody, congratulations, Paul. You're known. It's a homicide. Absolutely. I would... don't see how anyone can look at this story and think. They were happy.
