Simon Eddie: Everything to Know About His Life and Career

Quick Bio

Detail	Information
Full Name	Edward “Eddie” Simon
Born	Approximately 1945, Queens, New York, USA
Nationality	American
Occupation	Guitarist, music educator, songwriter, producer, radio station owner, artist manager
Known For	Younger brother and sometime manager of Paul Simon; founder of the Guitar Study Center, New York
Parents	Louis Simon (1916–1995), professor and bassist; Belle Simon, elementary school teacher
Sibling	Paul Simon (born October 13, 1941)
Groups	Guild Light Cage; Crib and Ben
Key Contribution	Co-founded the Guitar Study Center with Paul Simon; executive produced Simon & Garfunkel compilation albums; worked behind the scenes on Paul Simon’s tours
Notable Connection	The Guitar Study Center eventually became part of The New School in Manhattan

The Man Behind the Curtain

Here’s a question most music fans couldn’t answer on a bet: did Paul Simon have a sibling? The answer is yes — a younger brother named Eddie, who by some accounts was actually the more naturally gifted musician of the two. But while Paul Simon became one of the most celebrated songwriters in American history, Eddie took a quieter road. He became a teacher. A behind-the-scenes presence. A man who built something durable and meaningful in New York’s music world — and then mostly let it speak for itself.

That’s a rarer story than it sounds. In most families where one sibling rockets to international fame, the other either chases the same spotlight or retreats entirely from the world their famous relative inhabits. Eddie did neither. He stayed in music, stayed connected to his brother’s orbit, and built a genuine career on his own terms. He just didn’t make much noise about it.

Understanding Eddie Simon means understanding something about what it means to love music for its own sake, rather than for what it might make you. That’s worth sitting with for a moment.

See also “Hope Willard: A Life of Quiet Grace“

Growing Up Simon: A Household Wired for Sound

To understand Eddie, you first have to know a little about where both Simon brothers came from — because the house they grew up in was itself a kind of musical education.

Their father, Louis Simon, was no ordinary dad. He was a college professor of education, but music was his real blood. He performed as a dance bandleader and double bass player under the stage name “Lee Sims,” and he occasionally played gigs that his sons would sometimes attend. Music in the Simon household wasn’t a hobby or a school program. It was furniture — always present, always part of the air.

Their mother, Belle, taught at a Queens elementary school until the boys came along, after which she stepped back to raise the family. She brought her own quiet intellect to the household, and between her and Louis, the Simon home in Kew Gardens Hills — a close-knit, largely Jewish neighborhood in the borough of Queens — was one where books, ideas, baseball, and music overlapped constantly.

Paul Simon, the elder of the two boys, was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1941, and the family relocated to Queens when he was just four. Eddie arrived when Paul was roughly four years old, placing Eddie’s birth around 1945. The two brothers grew up in the same attached brick row house on 70th Road, sharing bedrooms, sharing music, and reportedly reenacting baseball games together with elaborate sound effects and running commentary — two Queens kids in a world where DiMaggio was practically a deity and the Yankees were a religion.

That baseball-and-music combination wasn’t accidental. As the musician Donald Fagen once observed about the particular cultural texture of that neighborhood, the children of immigrant Jewish families in postwar Queens often gravitated simultaneously toward America’s two great passions — Black music and baseball — as twin forms of assimilation. The Simon brothers absorbed both.

The Younger One Picks Up the Guitar First

Here’s the detail that makes Eddie Simon’s story genuinely interesting: by most accounts, he was a natural on the guitar before Paul was. While Paul Simon was still trying to figure out which instrument suited him, Eddie had already taken up the guitar and was developing what observers would later describe as classical technique alongside his ear for pop and folk.

That’s a notable reversal. The conventional story of great musicians discovering their instrument — a lightning-bolt moment, an instrument pressed into reluctant hands — tends to happen to the person who then becomes famous. With Eddie and Paul, it happened the other way. The younger brother got there first.

Eddie reportedly showed musical ability early enough that he had begun formal classical guitar study while Paul was still searching. His technical approach was considered, by people who heard both brothers play, to be arguably cleaner and more instinctive. He had the kind of facility on the instrument that comes from an ease with it rather than from effort alone.

Growing up in that Queens neighborhood, in a house full of music, with a father who performed professionally — the soil was rich for anyone who wanted to plant themselves in it. Both boys did. They just grew differently.

Early Career: Getting Serious About Music

The mid-to-late 1960s were the years when Eddie Simon first began to carve out a public identity in music, even if that identity was never aggressively public. Around 1967, he was briefly involved in early discussions around a folk-rock project called Wings — though that particular venture didn’t ultimately coalesce around him. The music world of that era was full of such provisional formations, bands that formed and reformed like molecules, and Eddie moved through that space with the ease of someone who was genuinely in the scene rather than just trying to find his way into it.

The project that actually made it to vinyl came in 1968. Eddie joined a small group called the Guild Light Cage — a two-boy, two-girl ensemble that released at least one single during their brief run together. The A-side was a track called “The 14th Annual Fun and Pleasure Fair.” The B-side was a cover of “Cloudy,” a song that his brother Paul had written. It was a small release, the kind of record that turned up in crates rather than on charts. But it existed. It was real. And it placed Eddie Simon on record, in his own right, as a working musician.

Meanwhile, something more significant was happening in parallel: his connection to Simon & Garfunkel’s world. By the time that duo had reached their commercial peak in the late 1960s — with The Sound of Silence, Mrs. Robinson, Bridge Over Troubled Water — Eddie had slipped into a backstage role during their later touring life. He was there, working, supporting, learning the machinery of how a major concert operation actually functioned from the inside. It wasn’t glamorous work. It didn’t get him on magazine covers. But it gave him a ground-level education in the music industry that money couldn’t buy.

Building the Guitar Study Center: The Work That Endured

If there’s one thing Eddie Simon built that genuinely outlasted everything else, it’s the Guitar Study Center in Manhattan.

Sometime before 1973 — most sources suggest it emerged in the early 1970s — Eddie and Paul Simon co-founded the Guitar Study Center, located at 55 West 13th Street in New York City. The center was aimed at serious students of the guitar, offering instruction across styles and levels. It was, from the beginning, a real institution rather than a casual venture.

The center quickly developed a reputation. Eddie ran the day-to-day operations and taught there himself, and he attracted other serious instructors — among them Arlon Roth, a guitarist who later went on to tour with In the early 1980s, Art Garfunkel collaborated and taught alongside Paul Simon. Roth has noted specifically that he taught at Eddie Simon’s Guitar Study Center, and that it was Eddie who recommended him to Art Garfunkel when Garfunkel needed a guitarist for his 1978 solo tour.

In a moment that says everything about the center’s standing in the New York music world, Art Garfunkel himself came to the Guitar Study Center at Eddie’s invitation and led a three-hour harmony session for students. That’s not a casual favor between acquaintances. That’s a testament to the seriousness with which the center was regarded, and to the trust and warmth that existed between Eddie and the people orbiting Paul Simon’s career.

Eventually, the Guitar Study Center was absorbed into The New School — the celebrated progressive university in Manhattan — where it continued to operate as part of that institution’s arts curriculum. That transformation from independent school to university department is the kind of institutional recognition that doesn’t happen unless something is genuinely worthwhile.

The Radio Chapter and the Manager’s Role

Beyond teaching and performing, Eddie Simon reportedly had a hand in the radio business during the 1970s and later years, though the specific details of his radio work remain documented only in general terms — he has been described variously as involved in radio and as an owner of a radio station, though the particulars of which station or stations, and for how long, haven’t been widely recorded in public sources.

What is more specifically documented is his role in his brother’s professional world as a manager and executive producer. Following the dissolution of Simon & Garfunkel, Paul Simon’s career required constant management, creative supervision, and the kind of subtle organizational acumen that sustains a significant touring and recording business. Eddie had a role in some of Paul’s tours as a behind-the-scenes helper and, at certain points, as a manager.

Additionally, he served as executive producer on at least a few Simon & Garfunkel compilation albums, a position that entails significant responsibilities. A compilation isn’t just a list of songs in a new order; it involves decisions about sequencing, licensing, liner notes, presentation, and the overall statement a retrospective makes about an artist’s legacy. The fact that Eddie served in that capacity speaks to the trust Paul placed in his brother’s judgment, and to Eddie’s own deep familiarity with that catalog.

There’s also the image of the two brothers, captured in a rare live television performance, playing together — working through Davey Graham’s instrumental piece “Anji,” a guitar piece beloved in the British folk scene that Paul Simon had incorporated into his own early repertoire. Watching the two of them play together, viewers noted how physically alike they were, and how closely matched they were as musicians in that context. Eddie reportedly looked so much like Paul that fans had occasionally mistaken him for his famous brother and mobbed him for photographs on the street.

Personal Life: What We Know, and What He Kept to Himself

Here’s where Eddie Simon’s story gets genuinely thin in terms of documented detail — and honestly, that’s part of the story too.

Eddie Simon is not a person who has given interviews cataloguing his private life. He hasn’t published a memoir. He doesn’t maintain a public social media presence of note. What we know about his personal circumstances comes almost entirely from references in documents about Paul Simon, or from brief mentions in music journalism that spent a paragraph or two on the Simon family before moving back to the famous brother.

What’s clear is that Eddie and Paul remained close throughout their adult lives. The co-founding of the Guitar Study Center wasn’t a business arrangement between near-strangers — it reflected genuine partnership. Eddie’s involvement in Paul’s tours and projects across decades suggests a relationship of real trust. The two brothers grew up in the same bedroom in Queens, played pretend baseball together, absorbed their father’s music together, and then went out into a world where one of them became globally celebrated and the other found his footing in education, management, and behind-the-scenes work.

There is something quietly admirable about the equanimity that requires.

The Difficulty of Living Beside a Giant

Let’s be honest about something: being the sibling of someone as famous as Paul Simon is not uncomplicated. Paul Simon is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most significant songwriters of the twentieth century. “The Sound of Silence,” “Mrs. Songs like “Graceland,” “Still Crazy After All These Years,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and “Robinson” helped to define certain eras. He has received two inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He has won Grammy Awards across multiple decades.

Eddie grew up in the same house, played the guitar before his brother did, and by various accounts was the more naturally gifted player when both were young. And yet the world knew Paul’s name and not his.

That could easily have been a source of bitterness, resentment, or the kind of corrosive comparison that eats through family relationships over time. The evidence suggests it wasn’t — or at least, that Eddie found a way to navigate it with grace. He built real things. The Guitar Study Center mattered. His teaching mattered to students like Arlon Roth, who went on to work with the biggest names in the very world Eddie had watched his brother conquer. Being recognized in that world by your peers, even if not by the public, is its own form of success.

The music industry is full of people whose gifts were real but whose timing, temperament, or choices kept them just off the main stage. Most of them struggle with that positioning. Eddie Simon seems to have found a way to make peace with it — and to turn his position into something productive.

Net Worth and Financial Life: The Honest Picture

Eddie Simon’s personal net worth is not a matter of public record. He has never been the subject of the kind of financial reporting that celebrity journalism generates, and no reliable estimate exists in any public source.

What we can reasonably infer is this: a music educator who ran a successful guitar school in Manhattan for decades, served in a managerial capacity for one of the world’s best-selling recording artists, worked in radio, and contributed to the creation of compilation albums from a repertoire as successful commercially as Simon & Garfunkel’s—that person created a cozy, working-class-to-professional income over a long career. None of those activities individually generates great wealth. Together, over many decades, they represent a solid professional life in the music industry.

His brother Paul Simon, by contrast, has a net worth estimated at over $200 million, built from decades of record sales, touring, and songwriting royalties for some of the most-played songs of the past sixty years. The gap between the two brothers’ financial circumstances is presumably significant. That’s simply the reality of one sibling becoming one of the most successful musicians in history and the other choosing, or landing in, a parallel but far less lucrative path.

What Eddie Simon Represents Today

Eddie Simon’s legacy, such as it is, lives in three places.

The first is the Guitar Study Center — now embedded in The New School — which has trained generations of guitar students in New York City. Every working musician who came through those doors carries something of what was built there.

The second is the broader world of Paul Simon’s recorded legacy, to which Eddie contributed in quiet but real ways — as a backstage presence, a tour manager, a compilation producer, and the kind of trusted family member whose judgment shapes decisions that eventually reach millions of listeners.

The third is harder to quantify. It’s the evidence that a life in music doesn’t have to look like stardom to be meaningful. Eddie Simon picked up a guitar before his famous brother did. He learned it properly, loved it genuinely, and spent his adult life passing that love on to other people while also serving the career of someone he cared about. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s a complete life.

Final Words

The story of Eddie Simon is, in a way, the story of everyone who loves something deeply and finds a way to live close to it — not always at the center, but never far from the warmth. He grew up in a musical household, picked up the guitar with natural ease, played alongside and behind his more famous sibling, and built a real institution in the heart of New York City that outlasted whatever fleeting attention he might have gotten from the pop world in 1968.

What makes him distinctive isn’t fame, or wealth, or even a single transformative achievement. It’s consistency. He stayed in the music. He taught it. He helped other musicians reach their potential. He supported his brother without being consumed by the proximity to that fame. And he seems, from everything that can be gathered about him, to have done all of this without visible bitterness or regret.

In a world that celebrates only the names at the top of the marquee, Eddie Simon is a quiet argument for the value of everything that happens just below it.

See also “Hope Willard: A Life of Quiet Grace“

FAQs

1. Who is Eddie Simon?

Eddie Simon, born around 1945 in Queens, New York, is the younger brother of the singer-songwriter Paul Simon. He is a guitarist, music educator, songwriter, producer, and sometime manager who spent his career working both in his own right and in a behind-the-scenes capacity supporting Paul Simon’s career and legacy.

2. Is Eddie Simon younger or older than Paul Simon?

He is younger. On October 13, 1941, Paul Simon was born. Eddie arrived approximately four years later, around 1945. Paul later described himself as the elder of two boys.

3. Who were Eddie Simon’s parents?

His father was Louis Simon (1916–1995), a professor of education and a professional double bass player and dance bandleader who performed under the name “Lee Sims.” His mother, Belle Simon, was an elementary school teacher who stepped back from teaching to raise the two boys. Both parents were of Hungarian Jewish heritage and had a deep connection to music and education.

4. Was Eddie Simon really a better guitarist than Paul Simon when they were young?

Multiple sources describe Eddie as the more naturally gifted guitarist of the two in their early years. He reportedly picked up the guitar and began developing classical technique while Paul was still searching for his instrument. Paul Simon later became an extraordinary guitarist by any measure, but the head start belonged to his younger brother.

5. What band was Eddie Simon in?

In 1968, Eddie was part of a group called the Guild Light Cage, described as a two-boy, two-girl ensemble. The group released at least one single — “The 14th Annual Fun and Pleasure Fair” backed with “Cloudy,” a Paul Simon composition. He was also briefly involved with another project called Crib and Ben. Earlier, around 1967, he was connected to preliminary work on a folk-rock group called Wings, though that didn’t come together around him specifically.

6. What is the Guitar Study Center?

The Guitar Study Center was a music education institution in Manhattan, co-founded by Eddie and Paul Simon sometime before 1973, located at 55 West 13th Street. It offered serious guitar instruction and attracted notable instructors including Arlon Roth, who later worked with Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon. The center eventually became part of The New School in New York City, where it continued as part of that university’s arts curriculum.

7. Did Art Garfunkel ever work with Eddie Simon?

Yes, in a notable way. Art Garfunkel came to the Guitar Study Center at Eddie’s invitation and led a three-hour harmony session for students — a remarkable gesture that reflected the genuine respect and warmth between the Garfunkel and Simon families. Separately, Arlon Roth, who taught at the Guitar Study Center, was recommended by Eddie to Garfunkel for the latter’s 1978 solo tour.

8. What role did Eddie play in Paul Simon’s career?

He played several behind-the-scenes roles over the years. He worked backstage during Simon & Garfunkel’s later tours. He oversaw part of Paul’s touring after Simon & Garfunkel. He was executive producer on certain Simon & Garfunkel compilation albums. He was also reportedly involved in the radio industry, though the specifics of that work are not thoroughly documented in public sources.

9. Did Paul and Eddie Simon ever perform together publicly?

Yes. In a rare recorded live performance, the two brothers played together on television, performing Davey Graham’s guitar instrumental “Anji” — a piece that Paul Simon had incorporated into his own early concert repertoire. Viewers noted how closely they resembled each other physically, and the easy musical chemistry between them was evident.

10. Did people ever mistake Eddie Simon for Paul Simon?

According to multiple sources, yes — and apparently more than once. The brothers were described as near-identical in appearance, enough that Eddie was reportedly occasionally mobbed by fans who thought they were approaching his famous sibling. He and Paul also shared similar singing voices, making the resemblance extend beyond the physical.

11. What is Eddie Simon’s net worth?

No reliable public estimate exists. His career as a music educator, sometime manager, radio figure, and behind-the-scenes contributor to Paul Simon’s legacy would suggest a comfortable professional income over many decades, but nothing in the public record establishes a specific figure. His brother Paul Simon, by contrast, has a net worth estimated in excess of $200 million.

12. Is Eddie Simon still active?

Public documentation of Eddie’s current activities is limited. He has not maintained a high public profile at any point in his career, and recent information about his day-to-day life is not readily available. His legacy through the Guitar Study Center — now part of The New School — continues to have an impact on New York’s music education world. Anyone seeking current information about him would likely need to reach out through the New School or through Paul Simon’s official channels.