Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  Just when McCartney thought he was done with the Beatles, he wasn’t. In early April, he received an advance acetate of the Let It Be album from Spector. Only then did he learn that, on April 1, Spector had overdubbed a string section, choir, harp player, and additional drums (by Starr) onto “The Long and Winding Road,” his once fairly naked ballad. An accompanying letter from Spector, addressed to all the Beatles, noted that if they had any concerns, they could contact him at his room at the Inn at the Park. (In an aside, Spector also said he thought the album should be titled The Long and Winding Road, not Let It Be.) “If there’s anything you’d like done to the album,” he wrote, “let me know, and I’ll be glad to help.” He added, though, that major changes could be a problem given the album’s imminent release.

  Spector had long been known for his gloriously over-the-top production style, the way he built dense, almost orchestral tracks by using multiple musicians. But even knowing what he did about Spector’s approach, McCartney was livid. On April 14, he phoned the Apple office and dictated a letter to Klein by way of Apple employee Bill Oakes. In the letter, McCartney admitted he’d once considered orchestrating “The Long and Winding Road” but had “decided against it.” Then he let loose: “In the future, no one will be allowed to add to or subtract from a recording of one of my songs without my permission,” he decreed. His list of demands included reducing the volume of the strings, horns, and voices and mixing the Beatles’ own playing higher; “harp to be removed completely at the end” and “original piano notes to be substituted.” As his fourth and last condition, he spat over the phone, “Don’t ever do it again,” which Oakes also added into the letter.

  Ultimately, McCartney’s suggestions were ignored; it was either too late or no one wanted to bother to make him happy. (He later claimed he left a message for Spector at his hotel but received no response.) The backlash to McCartney’s surprise announcement to the world was making itself known, especially to McCartney himself.

  Two days later, Thursday, April 16, he tracked down Connolly at his home in Kensington. McCartney needed to talk, on the record, and told Connolly to meet him for lunch at Wheeler’s, a fish restaurant in Soho. Given the time of day and the restaurant’s busy lunchtime crowd, Connolly thought it an odd location. As expected, Wheeler’s was crowded, and he, McCartney, and Linda settled into a table—of all places, right in the middle of the restaurant. As Linda ordered vegetarian meals for them all, McCartney talked about how shocked he was that his press release had been interpreted the way it had. “I didn’t leave the Beatles,” he told Connolly. “The Beatles have left the Beatles. But no one wanted to be the one to say the party’s over.” McCartney felt he’d been made the heavy in the situation, and being disliked clearly rattled him. In a stinging irony, Lennon, who was always giving him a hard time about the future of the band, was now seen as a victim.

  Over the clatter of conversations at nearby, close-quarter tables, McCartney gave Connolly the first blow-by-blow of events of the previous six months. Lennon, he said, had dismissed McCartney’s idea of live performances the previous fall. McCartney admitted Ono’s constant presence was a factor in the breakup and that he had had to throw Starr out of his house the month before. He talked about the letter he’d sent to Klein about “The Long and Winding Road” and how he hadn’t yet received a response. Even to an insider like Connolly, all of it was startling—as it was no doubt to the lunching businessmen around them, who craned their necks to hear what was being said. In that regard, the setting was McCartney’s clear-cut attempt at public damage control.

  At the luncheon’s end, McCartney made one unexpected request: He wanted to read the article before it was published. Normally, Connolly would never allow his subjects to approve his text, but knowing the importance of the interview, he acquiesced.

  After Derek Taylor sent him a copy of the lengthy piece, McCartney called Connolly yet again. The article was fine, he said, except for one comment he’d made about Starr. “He’s not the best drummer in the world,” McCartney said.

  Connolly pointed out that, in the quote, McCartney had said Starr was “the best drummer in the world for the Beatles.”

  “Oh,” McCartney said, “okay, right.” Connolly could leave that part in the story.

  As they spoke, Capitol, the Beatles’ U.S. label, was preparing to release a 45 of “The Long and Winding Road,” complete with the choir and orchestral overdubs McCartney hated so much. (When he read Connolly’s interview, which included McCartney’s digs at the female choir tacked onto his song, Lennon cracked, “Is that what this is all about—those bloody girls?”) The following Sunday, April 19, McCartney finally returned to The Ed Sullivan Show, but this time alone, by way of the promo video for “Maybe I’m Amazed.” The circle was complete.

  James Taylor couldn’t yet afford a band, so Russ Kunkel, who’d drummed on Sweet Baby James, went where he could for work. On May 1, Kunkel found himself in New York, doing a session for another one of

  Peter Asher’s clients. In his room at his hotel on Central Park South, he was preparing to return to Los Angeles when Asher called. Had Kunkel packed away his drums yet? No, Kunkel replied; they were in storage. Good, Asher said: George Harrison and Bob Dylan need a drummer, immediately. Kunkel reclaimed his drums, threw them into the back of a taxi, and headed to a Columbia Records studio.

  No sooner had Kunkel arrived and begun setting up his kit when, sure enough, Dylan and his producer, Bob Johnston, strolled in; Harrison, dressed head to toe in denim, his hair and beard long, followed behind. The bass player was a hulking but affable Nashville session man named Charlie Daniels, who’d already worked with Dylan. Along with Boyd and Derek Taylor, Harrison had flown into Manhattan on April 28 to meet with Allen Klein. One night, the three of them visited Dylan at his new home in the Village, on MacDougal Street, and Dylan invited Harrison to the studio the following day.

  Beyond its financial rewards, Harrison hadn’t seemed to enjoy being a Beatle during the last few years. The day Lauren Bacall visited Apple, DiLello watched in horror as Harrison recoiled and bolted up the stairs as if being stalked. Yet around other musicians, particularly those who weren’t the Beatles, Harrison’s demeanor noticeably lightened. Such was the case as the musicians settled in with their instruments and began playing whatever came to mind. With Dylan cradling an acoustic guitar and Harrison an electric, they ambled through songs from their childhood (Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” and a wobbly take on the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream”), rockabilly standards (Carl Perkins’ “Matchbox” and “Your True Love”), and a cowpoke classic (“Ghost Riders in the Sky”).

  Neither Kunkel nor Daniels was ever told the goal of the sessions—an album or not?—but it was clear Dylan and Harrison had the shared, unspoken rapport of those who’d seen it all, as well as a mutual respect Harrison found refreshing. The afternoon was the polar opposite of the stressful Get Back sessions. “George would say, ‘Let’s do “Rainy Day Women,”’” recalled Kunkel. “Usually when someone asks Bob to do a request, he’s caustic to them. That wasn’t the case there. They were very courteous to each other.” Harrison even gamely played along when Dylan began crooning “Yesterday,” McCartney’s song. (As if he’d always wanted to, Harrison played a solo on it.)

  No one asked Harrison how he felt about McCartney’s press statement nearly three weeks before. The only time it remotely came up was when he turned to Daniels, who was playing bass, and cracked, “You want to be a Beatle?” It was just a joke, but everyone knew the context.

  CHAPTER 7

  Eighty miles north of Paul McCartney’s farm in Argyllshire, Scotland, Art Garfunkel was anxious, and at least part of it had to do with McCartney. As soon as Bridge Over Troubled Water was out of their hands and in stores, Garfunkel, like Simon, was gone. Simon ventured into teaching, and Garfunkel acted as if he were a student on summer break. After taking a freighter to Tangier, he made his way to Gibraltar, then hitchhiked to London. From there, he
traveled with his girlfriend, Linda Grossman, to Scotland, renting a hundred-year-old estate outside Oban, a resort town in Argyllshire in the country’s northwest—far from the music business, even farther from his partner. “American Star’s Argyll Holiday,” announced a headline in the Oban Times, complete with a photo of Garfunkel and Grossman posing with sheep.

  As always, he walked. Whether on vacation or on tour with Simon, Garfunkel was known for taking long, meandering hikes by himself that allowed him to think up a new harmony part for a song or stop into gas stations and start up conversations with strangers. Given his curious, knowledge-hungry brain, the walks were relaxing—if not always for those who worked for him. Just before a Simon and Garfunkel concert in Boston in 1968, he decided to hitchhike rather than fly. Worried that Garfunkel might miss the show, their manager, Mort Lewis, attempted to talk him out of it. Garfunkel held firm and was eventually picked up by a couple who told the frizzy-haired guy in the backseat that he looked just like that singer Art Garfunkel—and then wouldn’t believe him when he said he was (not even when he pulled out a driver’s license to prove it).

  Another time, Simon and Lewis, in a limo on the way to a show, passed Garfunkel on a highway, and Lewis stuck his thumb on his nose and twirled his fingers, the silly “screw you” gesture common to anyone who’d grown up with the Little Rascals; Simon could only laugh along.

  Walking also afforded Garfunkel the time to mull things over, and few mulled the way Garfunkel did. In Scotland, strolling past homes encased by stone walls and surrounded by velvet-green hills, he’d much to ponder. After the nonstop work of the previous year, he needed a break from show business and his partner. He’d also heard the new Beatles song, “Let It Be.” With its piano-centered arrangement and reassuringhug quality, it was reminiscent of the other kindly ballad dominating the charts, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Garfunkel was concerned that the Beatles’ new release would deflect attention from his own signature song. Back in the States, Simon himself noticed the similarities. “The first time I heard ‘Let It Be,’ I couldn’t believe that he [McCartney] did that,” he told Rolling Stone that spring. “They are very similar songs, certainly in instrumentation.... They’re sort of both hopeful songs and resting peaceful songs.” Simon heard that McCartney had first offered “Let It Be” to Aretha Franklin—a plan Simon also had in mind for “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

  As many had already observed, Garfunkel’s walks were merely one indication of how offbeat Simon’s collaborator could be. As a child, he’d been methodical, thoughtful, and logical. Simon would always recall the time he encountered his friend at a Queens candy store, rattling different boxes of candy to determine which had the most pieces inside (the louder the rattle, the fewer the goodies). “Reading and teaching are Art’s twin avocations,” read an early Columbia press bio of Simon and Garfunkel, as if singing weren’t his principal passion in life. In the Songs of America television special, he’d taken that comment one step further: “I can’t see myself doing this five years from now ... this entertaining, there’s nothing new about it.” In conversation, he would laugh at things others wouldn’t think were funny. He loved making lists of things to do. He would stop into record stores and, posing as a customer, ask if a new Simon and Garfunkel album had arrived, even when one was still in the works.

  The previous March 1969, he and Lewis were standing on the corner of Madison Avenue and 55th Street when an attractive brunette walked by. The girl—Grossman, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a Nashville doctor and a recent graduate of architecture school—recognized Garfunkel immediately; a Simon and Garfunkel fan, she’d attended one of their concerts. As she walked by, she heard Garfunkel remark, “Will you marry me?”

  Unnerved and unsure how to respond, Grossman crossed the street and went into a deli. To her surprise, Garfunkel followed her inside and apologized for his comment. To make amends, he invited her to a recording studio that evening. Taking him up on his offer, she soon found herself in a Columbia studio watching the duo work on material for their new album. Simon didn’t know what to make of her unexpected presence, but he was friendly and accommodating.

  During the filming of Catch-22, Mike Nichols noticed how peculiar Garfunkel could be. A scene in a mess hall, featuring a visit by a clueless general played by Orson Welles, called for Garfunkel and his costars, including Alan Arkin and Bob Balaban, to leer and laugh as a female aide accidentally flashed a thigh. In take after take, each of the actors dredged up the required guffaws—except Garfunkel, who remained unresponsive. “He just couldn’t get cheerful,” Nichols would later recall.

  In the end, Garfunkel’s concerns about “Let It Be” overtaking “Bridge Over Troubled Water” were for naught. In the U.K., “Let It Be” only reached number 2, held back from reaching the top slot by the Simon and Garfunkel single. Even against the greatest culture force of the past decade, Simon and Garfunkel’s place was secure.

  When Garfunkel heard about Simon’s new girlfriend, he was far from pleased. “Are you crazy?” he was overheard telling his partner. “Stay away from that Peggy Lewis.” But by the spring, it was too late: Simon was already building a new and separate life of his own, and with a new companion.

  Although Garfunkel tended to hole up in hotels when in New York, Simon was now living on the Upper East Side at 200 East End Avenue, across the street from the Gracie Mansion estate where New York’s mayors, like the then-current one, John Lindsay, lived. Simon was a wealthy man—he paid $350,000 in income tax in 1968—and had the posh uptown home to prove it: a duplex apartment in a postwar building with views of the East River and his native Queens.

  Four years earlier, when they were considering hiring Lewis as their manager, Simon and Garfunkel had met Lewis at his apartment for a meeting. There, Lewis introduced them to his wife, a pale, delicate-looking, blue-eyed beauty from Nashville fifteen years Lewis’ junior. For Simon, it was hard to know what was more shocking: Peggy Ann Harper’s relative youth or the fact that she was still in curlers and a robe. Born in Newport, a small town in Tennessee hill country, Harper was a child of divorce; her father, a housepainter, broke up with his wife when Peggy (born Margaret) was twelve. Since the family had to live on welfare, Harper was able to enroll in Berea College, a tuition-free school for poor students from the area.

  Leaving school before graduation and unsure of a direction, Harper wound up waitressing in New York, then Atlantic City. There, she met Lewis, who was managing the Brothers Four, a commercial folk group that tapped into the Kingston Trio-fueled boom of the early ’60s. Harper was dating one of its members, but soon, she and Lewis hooked up, marrying in 1965. Harper tended to keep to herself, which conflicted with Lewis’ need to schmooze music business types; more often than not, she’d opt out of nights out with people in her husband’s line of work. Around the time she first met Simon and Garfunkel, she and Lewis had had a trial separation, then divorced soon after. When Harper moved by herself to the Upper East Side, Lewis didn’t understand why she’d chosen to live in such a faraway part of the city—until he realized his ex-wife was now living close to Simon.

  Lewis had no idea Simon was even interested in Peggy, but he didn’t know the whole story. After her divorce, Harper spent time in London; by coincidence, Simon, who had a girlfriend there, was also in town and wound up spending intimate time with his manager’s estranged wife. Soon enough, Harper, two years older than Simon, was sharing his East End Avenue home with him. In Songs of America, she made a rare public appearance, walking through a field with both men. But even then, her need for privacy came through: She was seen from the back, and only fleetingly.

  Garfunkel’s apprehension about Harper and Simon hooking up was largely for business reasons: He was rightly concerned they’d lose their manager in the process. As it turned out, Lewis wasn’t terribly troubled by the relationship. The one person who truly had a right to be concerned was Garfunkel, especially when Simon and Harper announced they were planning to mar
ry. Simon was so devoted to his art—continually obsessing over song lyrics and chord changes—that chances were he only had room in his life for one full-time partner. The remarkable coincidence that both New Yorkers were in relationships with women from Tennessee was small comfort.

  In September 1969, Simon purchased another home, a Dutch farmhouse outside New Hope, Pennsylvania, for $200,000. The seven-room, three-floor house, nestled inside seventy acres of Bucks County real estate, felt several worlds removed from the claustrophobic intensity of Manhattan. He and Harper began spending weekends there, Harper starting a vegetable garden for their new health-food regime.

  As Harper had already learned, Simon could be difficult to read. It was hard to know how he felt at any given time, and he could be moody. Whether in conversation or in interviews, he would quietly chew over a question for many minutes before delivering a carefully thought-out, precisely articulated response. (In a sign of how many qualities they shared, Garfunkel could be the same way.) He knew all too well he was beginning to lose his hair and was pained by it; Garfunkel told one friend that Simon was so sensitive that touching his head was out of the question.