by David Browne
Simon and Garfunkel were another matter, and Davis knew it. By the time he became head of Columbia, they were already stars unafraid to demonstrate their clout—by, among other things, negotiating a higher royalty rate (an inordinately high fifty cents an album and two cents per side on singles) and demanding an extension of their contract. He also realized they were complicated men: When Davis wanted to price Bookends higher than their previous albums, they resisted, not wanting to gouge fans.
Yet Davis knew how to work with and flatter his acts. He knew that bohemians like Janis Joplin would claim not to care about sales figures, then call him after-hours to ask how their records were doing. Simon initially nixed the idea of using their music on a soundtrack album for The Graduate, thinking it would be asking fans too much to buy a collection recycling older material—until Davis went to a screening of the film, heard the judicious use of their music in it, and called Simon directly. He told Simon he’d make their name smaller on the cover to avoid any whiff of exploitation, and Simon eventually agreed
Davis’ power of persuasion came in handy when he arrived at the studio, where Simon and Garfunkel had been joined by members of their families. When the album playback finished, Davis announced that he loved what he’d heard, and the duo asked him to pick the album’s all-important first single. They were expecting him to say “Cecilia,” but instead he told them it had to be “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Simon and Garfunkel balked—a nearly five-minute ballad wouldn’t have a chance on the radio, they argued. Yet Davis pressed his case: “You can’t play everything according to the book,” he told them. The fans who’d heard a preview of it onstage during their fall tour—and often gave it a standing ovation—were also a reliable gauge. After much discussion, they agreed.
Davis’ populist instincts—his love for the big ballad aimed at the heart of middle America—were again proven right. When “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was released in late January, Billboard was nothing less than ecstatic: “They are going straight to the top with this beautiful, almost religious-oriented ballad,” wrote their unnamed reviewer. “Performance and arrangement are perfect.” Almost as soon as their version was out, the Ray Conniff Singers, the Beatles of elevator music, covered it. “Not just a number one record, but an instant classic,” read Columbia’s trade ads for “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” True to the hype, the song became the best-selling single in the States within weeks. Without meaning to, Simon had finally managed to do something he’d never done before: write a song, like “Yesterday,” that wasn’t merely a hit but a standard.
“Bridge Over Troubled Water” sounded like nothing he and Garfunkel had done before. Knechtel’s comforting opening chords—as florid as a Vegas lounge player yet grounded in the gospel feel Simon required—set the tone, followed by Garfunkel’s muted vocal entrance and lyrics about a devout friendship that built on Simon’s original opening lines. The arrangement was mathematically precise; strings and other instruments arrived gradually, in calm waves. As the last verse built to a crescendo, Blaine’s drums crashed in the distance and the orchestra surged to match Garfunkel’s shiver-inducing climactic high note. Given that the musicians on it had once worked with Phil Spector, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” felt like a distant cousin of one of Spector’s Wall of Sound productions.
In this case, though, the song was nothing less than a Wall of Balm. The two years leading up to its release had been brutalizing ones: a succession of Vietnam bombings and casualties, urban riots, and assassinations of beloved political figures like King and both Kennedys. Had it been released earlier, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” might not have had the same impact. But arriving after a numbing period in the country’s history, it became a much-needed respite from one piece of bad news after another. It was a perfectly written and produced song that had arrived at exactly the right time.
The song became the leadoff track on the most eclectic and expansive album of their career. The most immediately striking aspect of Bridge Over Troubled Water was its sonic warmth and richness. Although Simon and Garfunkel records had always had their share of aural beauty, the album took that aspect to often breathtaking new levels. The haunting Andean quena flutes that engulfed “El Condor Pasa” were the genuine article: Rather than copy the original Los Incas arrangement, Simon chose to license the group’s original recording, over which he and Garfunkel added new vocals. “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” couched one of Garfunkel’s sweetest performances in crisp bossa nova guitar and congas. With its honking saxophones and layers of street-corner harmonies, “Baby Driver” evoked the hamburger stands of post-Elvis America. For all the hard labor that went into its creation, “The Boxer” flowed like the gentlest winding river. The sonorous, strummed guitar chords that opened “The Only Living Boy in New York” were merely the start of one of their most magnificent creations. The music—a sustained, hushed murmur, with Knechtel’s organ and Osborn’s bass adding the occasional splash of color—evoked send-offs and loneliness, as did Simon’s unusually melancholy solo vocal. When he and Garfunkel’s voices converged in the song’s coda—with the help of an echo chamber at Columbia’s studio—the melancholy burned away, as if the sun had finally, gloriously, risen over the city.
Beneath its crisp surface, the album told two separate, if converging, stories. The first was the tale of one person, Simon, following his newfound world-music muse, whether to South America or Jamaica (a gawky crack at reggae, “Why Don’t You Write Me”). Its stately title ballad aside, Bridge Over Troubled Water was looser and more playful than anything the two had done since their Tom and Jerry days. Whether “Cecilia” was about a particular girl or possibly Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music from ancient Rome, the frisky sexuality of its lyrics and rhythms was hard to deny or resist. Even as a teenager, Simon hadn’t written a line as bluntly sexy as “making love in the afternoon,” and the song’s thwacking, thumping battery of percussion felt like an ad-hoc group of street-musician drummers pounding away in Central Park. The pageantry blare of horns that concluded “Keep the Customer Satisfied,” Simon’s intentionally overstated lament about the rigors of the road, was also rare for a Simon and Garfunkel album.
In terms both personal and veiled, the album also laid out another story, nothing less than the rise and fall of a friendship. The two men’s shared mutual love of the Everly Brothers emerged in a version of “Bye Bye Love.” (In another sign of the way Simon was toying with record-making rules, they turned the ebullient clapping of an audience at one of their 1969 shows into a rhythm track, which was tacked onto a studiosung cover of the oldie.) “The Only Living Boy in New York” described Simon’s ambivalent feelings about Garfunkel leaving for Mexico to film Catch-22. (Calling Garfunkel “Tom” was a furtive nod to their Tom and Jerry days, but few made the connection, since the duo excluded any references to those days and records from press releases.) “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” referred to another of Garfunkel’s outside-music passions, architecture. In a telling moment, Simon and Halee were heard shouting “So long, Artie!” during the song’s fade-out.
Throughout the album, the two were heard together as often as not. “Baby Driver” was all Simon, as was almost all of “The Only Living Boy in New York.” When the two men performed “Song for the Asking” during their fall 1969 tour, Garfunkel harmonized along with Simon’s lead vocal. But on the record, the song—an exquisite lullaby that found Simon at his most vulnerable and conciliatory—was sung by Simon alone.
On March 7, Bridge Over Troubled Water became the best-selling album in America, overtaking the Beatles’ Abbey Road. It was the number one seller from the student record store at UCLA to a Sam Goody in Stony Brook, New York. Although it was impossible to verify, Columbia claimed it had moved 1.7 million copies of the album in its first three weeks. The fact that as much as a third of it didn’t feature the voices of Simon and Garfunkel in tandem was barely noticed by anyone other than Simon, Garfunkel, and Halee.
On a chilly la
te-winter afternoon, Maggie Roche clutched her guitar and watched nervously as one stranger after another strode in and out of the NYU arts building. Finally, after three hours, the person she’d been patiently scoping for—Paul Simon—walked in.
An eighteen-year-old Bard College student, Roche was already an accomplished songwriter and guitarist. On weekends, her father would drive her and her younger sister Terre, who was still in high school, from their home in Park Ridge, New Jersey, into Manhattan. Working the Village folk clubs, they’d met local legend Dave Van Ronk and his thenwife Terry Thal, who mentioned that Simon, one of Roche’s songwriting heroes, would be teaching a songwriting class nearby. Although she was small and shy, Roche was confident in her abilities and determined to join Simon’s class.
To her surprise, Simon was alone—no entourage, no handlers—and even more surprisingly, he didn’t brush her off when she approached him. She told him she and her sister were singers and songwriters, and he replied by saying she should come back a week later—which she did, this time with Terre, the most conventionally pretty of the Roche sisters. Simon led them into an empty classroom upstairs. “Go ahead—play something,” he said.
The two started on Maggie’s “War Song”: “Set your eyes upon the greatest soldier in the war/His battlefield is strewn with corpses of his dreams,” went part of it, complete with counterpart harmonies. Halfway through the first verse, Simon stopped them. “Okay, play something else,” he said.
The two were jarred by his response: Did that mean he liked it or not? Although momentarily discombobulated, they sang another of Maggie’s songs, and Simon again halted them midway through and asked them to move on. Finally, several half-sung songs later, he said, “Okay, you can come to the class.” They wouldn’t even have to pay.
The two sisters followed him upstairs to another classroom, where they saw for themselves what a Paul Simon songwriting course looked like. Desks were askew, papers piled high in one corner, a large, eraser-faded blackboard on the wall. Astounded that they were actually in the room with their hero, along with a dozen or so other students, the Roche sisters were in such a daze that the night was a blur. The evening grew even more surreal when class broke and Simon asked if the two needed a ride home. When they said they had to get to the George Washington Bridge to catch a bus to New Jersey, Simon offered them a ride, and all three piled into his blue sports car parked outside: Maggie upfront with Simon, Terre scrunched into the small backseat with her guitar case.
As Garfunkel had learned many years before, his partner was a particularly exacting taskmaster. Tonight it would be the Roche sisters’ turn. As Simon navigated the Manhattan streets uptown, the sisters thought his generous offer to join the class, for free, was a sign: Maybe he was so impressed with them that he was about to offer to help them land a record deal or produce their music. At one point, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” came on the radio, but Simon paid it little mind. Instead, he took them to task: They had a gift, maybe enough to win local talent shows in their hometown, he told them, but they weren’t ready for a professional career.
“Do you think you’re as good a songwriter as Paul McCartney?” he asked Maggie. Confident in her abilities, she replied yes; Simon was silent.
After he’d deposited them at their stop, Simon told them he’d see them again next week. Awaiting their bus home, the sisters tried to make sense of the encounter. Simon had clearly been generous in offering them a free slot in an NYU class, alongside students who seemed more technically advanced than they were. Yet his blunt assessment shocked them. “It was such a powerful experience, that ride,” Terre Roche recalled. “On one hand, we’d be coming back next week. But on the other hand, we’d been dealt with rather harshly. He was very critical. He was like a surgeon.”
Returning the following Tuesday, the Roche sisters took their seats. A fellow student announced he’d just seen an impressive new singer and songwriter at a Village club. He asked Simon if he’d heard of him—someone named James Taylor. Simon replied no, he hadn’t.
CHAPTER 2
By the early afternoon of December 8, 1969, James Taylor’s limbs had finally healed. Three months earlier, he’d stumbled across a stolen motorcycle held in storage by the police department on Martha’s Vineyard, where his family had been spending summers the previous sixteen years. Jumping on the bike, Taylor ripped through the backwoods and promptly smashed into a tree so hard he broke both his hands and feet. When his friend and fellow guitar player Danny Kortchmar heard about it, he groaned and thought, “What a fucking asshole,” but part of him wasn’t surprised. Taylor had had a less traumatic motorcycle accident not long before, and Kortchmar—Kootch to his friends—heard Taylor had almost cut his hands off with a chainsaw and wood chipper. Taylor always seemed to be living a bit on the edge. “If he hadn’t done that, he would have jumped off a cliff,” Kortchmar recalled. “He was always trying to kill himself.”
When he first heard about the accident, Peter Asher wasn’t merely concerned; he was terrified. Although Asher knew his way around showbiz, first as part of the British Invasion duo Peter and Gordon and then as a talent scout at the Beatles’ Apple label, Taylor was Asher’s first client as a manager—and was proving to be more of a handful than first imagined. In some regards, Taylor, whose maternal grandfather was a boat builder, was a strong sort—six feet three and projecting a brawny but cerebral new style of American masculinity. Yet his physique masked an inner fragility. At the very least, the accident meant the recording of Taylor’s second album would be delayed, not the best of news for Warner Brothers Records. Later, Taylor would show his manager the chunk of tree that had been taken out by one of his clenched fists.
By the first week of December, Taylor was over three thousand miles away from the Vineyard at Sunset Sound, a studio on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The casts were off his feet and hands, and he was eager to put his new batch of songs to tape. Joining him were Kortchmar—who, at twenty-three, was two years older than his friend—and, on piano, a twenty-seven-year-old Brooklyn-raised songwriter named Carole King Goffin. Each was experienced at making music, from the string of Brill Building hits King had cowritten to Kortchmar’s tenure in underground bands in New York as well as one with King in L.A. The drummer was Russell Kunkel, a lanky kid from Pittsburgh only three years out of high school. Between two and six P.M. on December 8, the three of them—augmented by Randy Meisner, a bass player who’d briefly been a member of Poco, the country-leaning offshoot of Buffalo Springfield—efficiently cut three songs: “Blossom,” “Country Road,” and “Lo and Behold.” When the work was done, Taylor was paid $170, with $13.60 deducted for his musicians’ union pension.
As both Asher and the musicians discovered, reading Taylor wasn’t always easy. Asher had to look for the smallest signs of any dissatisfaction, like the way Taylor might look grumpy at the end of a take but never articulate what he didn’t like. “It would take a little digging to find out what should or could be changed,” Asher recalled. “You had to extract information from him.” Asher found Taylor a jumble of contradictions: quick-witted and intelligent, yet so gawky and nervous he didn’t always look people in the eye when he spoke to them. At least Taylor wasn’t spending prolonged, unexplained periods of time in the bathroom, as he had during the making of his first album. Given what Taylor had been through already, that alone felt like a significant victory to Asher.
Anyone who knew James Taylor knew he was a product, in equal doses, of music and isolation. When Taylor was three, in 1951, his family—led by his father, Isaac, a doctor educated in Boston, and his mother, Trudy—had returned to the state where Isaac was born, North Carolina. Isaac had accepted a job as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
On the surface, their new home in Chapel Hill was idyllic: eight rooms, twenty-five acres, a hammock in the backyard. Music was everywhere. An upright piano took up residence in the living room; in the kitchen, the Taylor kids—oldest brot
her Alex, followed by James, Livingston, Hugh, and Kate—would pull out cans from the cupboards and break spontaneously into the jingles for each product. The children would sing sea shanties, Woody Guthrie songs, and sing-along favorites like “On Top of Old Smoky.” Thanks to Trudy, who’d studied voice at the New York Conservatory and had once trained with Aaron Copland at Harvard, the concept of a professional career in music wasn’t unthinkable. James himself—born in Boston in 1948—took cello lessons, briefly played in Chapel Hill’s first Young People’s Orchestra, and performed once with the North Carolina Symphony, playing the ballad “Blue Bells of Scotland.” Alex brought home Ray Charles and Bobby Blue Band records and joined a local bar band, the Corsairs.
The family summered on Martha’s Vineyard in Gay Head and Chilmark, where James befriended Kortchmar. Hailing from Larchmont in Westchester County, just north of New York City, Kortchmar couldn’t have been more different from Taylor: He was shorter, more extroverted, and gregarious, a born rock and roller even in his youth. During their first summer hanging out on the Vineyard, they realized they shared a mutual love of soul, R&B, and blues records. “That was so heavy to find someone else who was into that kind of music,” Kortchmar recalled. Kortchmar also learned his friend could sing when Taylor broke into a Ray Charles song while they were hitchhiking. Before long, the two were playing at hootenannies on the Vineyard.
The tranquil settings masked a sense of unease and anxiety. Isaac had a drinking problem and was prone to go off on extended work trips, like the voyage to Antarctica that took him away from the family for nearly two years in the mid ’50s. Trudy Taylor had to fend for herself, with sometimes unpleasant results (once she was stung by a swarm of bees while protecting her family). Isaac’s isolation impacted on the family in deeper ways. Although Kate remained bubbly, Alex grew into the family rebel, the one always fighting with his parents. James was, according to his younger brother Livingston, “observant and fairly quiet, always held his cards close.” He could often be seen taking walks alone in the nearby woods. The sense that they were in the South but “of the North,” as James recalled, led him to feel isolated early; summers in Massachusetts only intensified those feelings. Even a hundred years after the Civil War, Taylor felt in his bones the difference between Southerners and, he recalled, “Yankees and outsiders,” and he was caught between them.