Never Say No To A Rock Star

by Berger, Glenn

  I began to wonder. What was it in Phoebe that engendered such fierce loyalty among her adoring fans? Of course she was a natural singer. She had a voice like no other, and when she opened her mouth, a sound came out that was joy burnished with pain. She was all contradiction: a jazzy, folky, bluesy, rockin’, funky Jewish chick from Jersey. But it was more than that. Phoebe was an oddball.

  I understand this misfit thing. I’ve always been drawn to these types. I guess I’m one myself. That’s why I was into music, and that’s why I’m now a psychotherapist.

  There’s something about the ugly ones, the weirdos, the freaks, the queers, the geeks, the musicians, the addicts, the losers, the left-handers, the nuts, the lonely and unlucky ones.

  I think those among us who are different have a little less of a psychic immune system than everyone else. They are a little closer to the source. They don’t quite make it in this world, and they feel the pain a little more acutely than the rest. But they bring us a gift we all need to know and feel.

  I can imagine chubby Phoebe Laub, with her kinky hair and moles, sitting in her bedroom in Teaneck, playing her guitar and singing to the ceiling, while the cute girls were flirting with the jocks. She was sitting alone in that car the last time I saw her because, I bet, she was alone much of the time.

  Phoebe touched this sensitive, longing part of us. There are plenty of misfits in the world. Maybe there is a misfit residing in each of our secret hearts. I can picture all the lonely freaks out there, sitting alone in their bedrooms in 1974, listening to “Poetry Man,” and feeling some solace because they knew that she knew.

  When we listen to Phoebe sing now, we can hear through and beyond that obnoxious girl I met the first time she came into the studio. We hear the contours of the essence. We hear the cry in the darkness of the West Village, that late night sound of vinyl, the echo of Zoot and Teddy Wilson, that distant reverberation receding into the dark, that voice, strong, loving, and speaking for us.

  That’s what the artist does — sees for us — suffers for us, because we’d rather not go there ourselves.

  I call the Phoebes of the world angels. They have been given wings — an incredible voice, or some other gift — in exchange for some deep vulnerability. That’s why so many artists die young. Phoebe was so powerful in her unique voice and profound love. However, all this was in contrast to her body, which was all too often a source of suffering for her.

  As an eighteen year-old, I couldn’t see past her appearance. Today, with nothing left of Phoebe but her music, I realize she was that radiant creature I imagined before I met her. Despite how she looked or acted on the outside, inside she was made of the rarest alloy. She was the essence of beauty.

  Phoebe cared for her daughter every day of her life, until Valerie Rose died at the age of 31 in 2007.

  In honor of the dearly departed Phoebe Snow, I invite you to look for the strange ones out there, or the oddball in you, and be a little kinder and a little more understanding, because you never know — you might be in the presence of an angel. And the next time you are in a quiet room, turn on that digital recorder in your smartphone, and wait. When you play it back, and listen real close, you might hear Phoebe singing in her supernatural voice.

  I strut and fret my hour upon the stage

  The hour is up, I have to run and hide my rage

  I’m lost again, I think I’m really scared

  I won’t be back at all this time

  And have my deepest secrets shared

  I’d like to be a willow, a lover

  A mountain, or a soft refrain

  But I’d hate to be a grown-up

  And have to try and bear my life in pain.

  — “Harpo’s Blues”

  TRACK NINE

  The Freaks, the Pricks, and the Gems

  Soon after completing Live Rhymin’, Paul Simon returned to A&R to begin recording his new studio album.

  The first song we tracked was “Still Crazy After All These Years,” the one we cut a demo for on my first day working with Paul, and what turned out to be the title number.

  To cut the basic track, Paul collaborated with Barry Beckett, a large, gentle man with a blond moustache, a bulbous nose, and an ample gut. Barry was the keyboard player from the famed Muscle Shoals rhythm section that hailed from Sheffield, Alabama.

  Beckett sat for hours behind a Fender Rhodes electric piano with Paul standing at his side, as they meticulously worked out every note of the keyboard part that formed the backbone of the arrangement. Barry was a consummate cat. Despite the painstaking work, he never flagged, never got frustrated, never allowed his ego to get in the way. He smiled throughout the process, as he accompanied Paul on his meandering journey in search of the lost chord.

  Paul was experiencing a time of growth and learning. He was studying music with the jazz composer and bassist Chuck Israels and was taking singing lessons, too. In his restless pursuit of innovation, his compositional style moved toward ever greater harmonic and melodic sophistication. His goal was to use all twelve notes of the scale in a song; in rock and roll, the usual maximum was seven.

  In his recent biography of Paul, author Marc Eliot asserted that it was Ramone who created the musical arrangements for the Still Crazy album and, taking an influence from his work with Billy Joel, was responsible for its mellower, keyboard-inflected sound. Eliot got this dead wrong. Ramone had nothing to do with any of the music on Simon’s album. Ramone never arranged anything in his life. That wasn’t his bag. Simon was in control of the content, as evidenced by this day with Beckett. This meant that he determined every single note played by anyone.

  Eliot was also wrong in suggesting it was Ramone’s work with Billy that influenced this album’s sound. Phil didn’t start working with Joel until long after Still Crazy had won its Grammy awards. And besides, Paul didn’t necessarily like his record label rival. Joel eventually crushed Simon as the top seller on the Columbia Records roster.

  Ramone’s real contribution was in introducing Simon to the most prominent New York studio musicians of that time, cats like Eric Gale, Richard Tee, Steve Gadd, and Tony Levin, who came from a jazz/funk/gospel/R&B background, and had the tight, hard-hitting sound that New York was renowned for. Simon used these guys for years, some even now.

  Ramone, who moved gracefully toward a greater production role with Paul, was patient in bringing his influence to bear on his strong-willed client. On this first track, Simon had yet to meet Phil’s New York cats, so he worked with Beckett, the guy who had helped make his number-two record “Kodachrome” a hit.

  Beckett did a spectacular job on “Still Crazy.” His keyboard part on that track is iconic.

  Though Simon was influenced by the people Ramone knew and suggested, his arrangements grew organically out of the songs themselves. Never satisfied with the conventional or tried-and-true, he was always chasing down the unique setting for each composition.

  I got to witness Simon’s process in the creation of the singular interpretation of a song through his tracking of the next tune we worked on, “Gone at Last.” He went through several iterations of this arrangement before he found the one he liked.

  His first attempt at creating a musical foundation for this song resembled what he had done on his Simon and Garfunkel hit, “Cecilia.” The secret sauce for this recipe was the participation of cosmic percussionist Ralph MacDonald, who had not only turned Phoebe Snow’s, “Poetry Man,” into a hit, but had also written huge hits himself like “Where Is the Love?”

  Along with Ralph, Simon also invited a group of friends into the studio. Ralph and Paul created a basic rhythmic pattern, and everyone else played a supporting rhythm on some found object, whether it was a Styrofoam cup, a cardboard box, or any other thing that could be tapped, hit, or banged with a pencil, stick, or hand.

  During this time, Bette Midler had arrived on the A&R scene. Bette was hot, in more ways than one. Having found her audience in the nascent days of gay liberation at that
place called The Continental Baths, her debut album, titled The Divine Miss M, had sold over a million copies and landed her the best new artist Grammy award in 1973. She was more chanteuse and comedienne than rocker, and in the looks department more Fanny Brice than Angelina Jolie, but she had a personality, a set of pipes, and a pair of boobs that cut through all categories in those ambisexual days of the mid-’70s. This made her a rising superstar.

  She had worked with producer/arranger Arif Mardin on her hit second album. Having produced Judith with us, Arif was now a part of the A&R family. Bette was starting to work on her third record, and Arif brought her into our studio to cut some lead vocals.

  I engineered a few of the tracks that Bette was fooling around with. She was all over the place. No two vocal performances were even close, and Arif couldn’t move her in a certain, progressive musical direction. The work went nowhere, and all the work we did was eventually thrown out.

  Hanging out in the halls of A&R, Bette met Paul, who was romantically flailing after his break up with his wife Peggy, and Bette was free. The two cute, Jewish New York stars began a fling.

  This romance blossomed right before Paul began working on “Gone at Last.” He had envisioned this song as a duet with a woman. Maybe he even wrote it with Bette in mind. She agreed to sing the female part. When we cut that basic rhythm track, Bette was in the studio, too, singing a rough guide of her vocal.

  Paul fussed with this version for quite some time, as it never sat quite right with him. He tried adding a bass part played by David Hood, another mellow dude from the Muscle Shoals band. That didn’t quite do it. Next he tried adding the gospel group, The Jessy Dixon Singers, with whom he had toured recently, and who had appeared on Live Rhymin’. The ladies in that group were the sweetest. They were really, really big. They’d enter the studio and give me a hug that felt like I was falling into the ultimate queen-sized mattress of love.

  I got to see Paul fall into a swoon of inspiration during our recording with them. His eyes fluttered as he had me play one verse of the tune over and over again. On the spot, he invented a tasty vocal counterpoint part. With Paul being flush, and the music scene being what it was at the time, he could afford to write in the studio, no matter how much time that ate up on the clock. This was impressive, considering he was paying $200 an hour for studio time alone, and that was in 1975. Even though I liked the part he created, this also didn’t satisfy him, and he abandoned this too in the end.

  Paul and Bette soon fell out with each other. I can’t be sure what really happened, but I bet that as a rising diva she didn’t have an extra minute for his egotude. She was too sassy for that. I think she dumped him, and in his fashion, not really cottoning to rejection, he closed the iron door on her. The story was they couldn’t work things out contractually, which I think is a nice way of saying she wouldn’t screw him anymore.

  Paul ultimately threw out this entire version of the song, but not because of Bette; he was far more cunning than that. If he thought this arrangement was a hit he would have figured out any way to use it, Bette be damned. He would have recut the whole thing if he had to in order to eliminate her vocal. When, in the end, he couldn’t make it work musically to his standards, he chucked it. That was a stunning lesson in the pursuit of the superb.

  Paul’s self-scrutiny was relentless. He didn’t always feel good about these decisions down the line. Later, there were times when he’d listen to early demos and realize that he’d lost something in the long, arduous production process that he grinded all his songs through. In this case though, listening to the original, he made the right call. (You can hear a rough mix that I had done of the Paul/Bette version as a bonus track on the re-released Still Crazy album.)

  Towards the very end of making the album, he re-recorded the song as a gospel rave-up. It was during this session that he got turned on to the piano playing of the big-handed gospel master Richard Tee. Paul loved this guy, and worked with him till Tee’s untimely death in the ‘90s. Instead of Midler, Paul had Phoebe Snow sing on the track. She was the far better choice. Midler couldn’t really blast this kind of gospel tune, and Snow sang her ass off on what turned out to be a top-25 single.

  During the recording of this album, I had the incredibly good fortune to sit in a room with a man who had accomplished about as much as anyone could in a short lifetime. He was a poet, a tunesmith, a unique guitarist, a visionary, a producer, an artist, a famous celebrity. He was one of the creators of the culture of the 1960s, and he was the writer of some of the most successful and important songs in the history of the entire pop music era. He captured the mood and feeling of his generation. There wasn’t a person in the world who didn’t know “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” or the guy who wrote it, Paul Simon.

  Everyone wants to know what the famous are really like. Hell, that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this book. The problem is that with a guy like Simon, no one really wants to know the answer. We want to see our heroes in a golden glow. You see, the truth of the matter is, back in the day, there were people who thought Simon was — well there’s no other way to say it —a prick. Now don’t get mad at me. I’m not the one who said it. Steve Berlin, of the band Los Lobos, called him “the world’s biggest prick.” Walter Yetnikoff, the head of Columbia Records, Paul’s label for many years, hated his guts and had him banned from the company’s corporate headquarters. Heavens, Paul even said it himself in his unfortunate movie One Trick Pony. (Character in film, saying to girlfriend, about the character that Paul Simon played, “He’s a real little prick, isn’t he?”) Biggest or smallest, the synecdoche appeared to fit.

  What do I mean? Paul just didn’t seem to care much about other human beings. It didn’t matter to him if his words or actions hurt. I’ve got lots of stories about Paul being a little shit, and some so bad I can’t even tell them here. But here’s one example.

  By the late ‘70s, a few years after we’d recorded Still Crazy, I had graduated to senior mixer, and Ramone was a full-fledged producer. He hired me to engineer some sessions for Karen Carpenter’s one and only solo record. I was curious about why she and her brother were not recording together. When I asked her, she said to me that he was at home, in the garage, working on his cars. It turns out he was nursing a Quaalude habit.

  Karen, at this point, was extremely anorexic. She must have weighed about 90 pounds. One of the young women on our staff would pick Karen up from her hotel and try to get a banana or apple down her before getting her to the studio.

  It wasn’t only her eating disorder that made Karen a bit of a freak. She was obsessed with Disney, not unlike another oddball singer who within a few years would become the King of Pop, and would also die an untimely death. Her Mickey Mouse tee-shirt hung limply on her skeletal frame. Her Goofy watch banged against the bones of her forearm.

  She may have been so frail as to be on the verge of falling to bits, but when she went out to the studio to sing, her voice had the clarion ring of pure crystal. Her vocal quality was supernatural, uncanny, numinous.

  She spoke obsessively about finding a husband. Already the nascent therapist, I asked her, “So, Karen, what are you looking for in a husband?” Did I ask because I wondered if I might be a suitable candidate? I don’t think so. She was awfully straight and clearly in a lot of trouble. Well, maybe a little.

  She answered, “I want someone rich.”

  I said, “But Karen, you have all the money you could want. What about love?”

  She didn’t answer that, only to say, “He needs to have at least five cars.” That eliminated me.

  Ramone had decided to take Karen, musically, in a late-disco direction. To arrange the songs he brought in the Quincy Jones team that would eventually go on to make Michael Jackson a mega-star, including the guy who wrote “Thriller,” Rod Temperton. We cut a bunch of tracks. Karen seemed increasingly emotionally and physically fragile with every passing day. Her vocal chops were amazing, but her body was becoming ethereal. She was literally di
sappearing.

  One day, Simon was passing through the studio and popped in for a visit. I’m not sure how well he knew Karen. I’m guessing they didn’t have the closest of relationships. He asked to listen to some of the tracks we were cutting. I played him some songs.

  Ramone stood anxiously behind Karen, who sat at the producer’s desk, while Paul listened. I sat next to them at the recording console, fiddling with the knobs, and scrutinizing Paul’s face for a reaction.

  When they were done, Simon turned to Karen. He paused. Then, in a voice that combined derision, snobbishness, concern, and alarm, he said, “Karen. What are you doing? This stuff is awful!”

  Ramone blanched. Karen stopped breathing. Remember, this was her first foray into recording solo, alone, without her brother, working with a whole new production team, in a city far from home, and clearly in profound psychological and physical distress, suffering as she was with acute anorexia.

  The air was sucked out of the room. Simon didn’t pick up on the vibe however. He just plowed on. “Karen, this isn’t what your fans want from you! They want Karen to be Karen Carpenter. They want what they have always gotten from you. This is all wrong.”

  With every word Ramone was shrinking smaller and smaller, until one could barely see him behind the producer’s desk, having been reduced to the size of a hedgehog. I sat behind the controls, trying to keep my jaw attached to my head, astounded at what I was hearing.

  Paul may have been technically, musically, and from a marketing perspective, right. But from a human perspective, he was all wrong. His insensitivity was stunning. He seemed to have a complete lack of care or understanding of the emotional toll that such a declaration could take. Couldn’t he see Karen’s condition? He was a smart guy — wasn’t he capable of coming up with a more tactful, humane way of protecting her, if that was, in fact, his intention? The truth was, from my perspective, that this was just one graphic example of how Paul was completely insensitive to other people’s feelings.