Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Paul loved the typical frat boy antics, but once he soaked up the high-democratic atmosphere of the school, he made a point of introducing a more enlightened attitude to the fraternity. Appointed rush chair during his sophomore year, he persuaded his brothers to eliminate the physical abuses of hazing in favor of a Dostoyevskian panel of inquisitors who grilled the pledges on their beliefs, ethics, morals, and their philosophies on the meaning of life. He orchestrated campaigns to tap pledges from tougher, poorer, or culturally diverse backgrounds. Given the force field of his charisma, Paul’s frat brothers fell easily under his influence, developing new interests in philosophy and, not surprisingly, the internal dynamics of the songs on the radio. Paul could talk you through the whole Top 40 with astonishing detail, describing why this one song was a stiff and why this other one was so fucking brilliant. In his car with a few brothers one night, he turned the radio to one of the obscure stations only he knew about and suddenly ordered everyone to stop talking: “You gotta hear this!” It was a hypnotic groove by Olatunji from his album Drums of Passion. It was so mesmerizing that the car went perfectly silent, and Paul pulled over so they could all absorb the African rhythm together.

  Paul’s influence over AEPi was most apparent when the frat set out to create its entry for the college’s annual Follies stage spectacular. Held in late December, the shows were a significant event on campus, a high-profile fund-raiser for local charities and also the year’s most hotly contested battle for supremacy among the school’s fraternities, sororities, and the groups of independents who signed up to compete. The challenge was for each group to perform ten- or fifteen-minute skits for the college crowd and for the panel of experts who would judge each entry’s entertainment value and then pick a champion. AEPi had never been a serious player in the Follies—not until Paul got involved.

  Paul took control of AEPi’s entire production. He wrote or edited the script and wrote the words and music to all the songs, and directed, too. Any frat brother who signed up thinking the sketch would be another fun fraternity goof learned otherwise the moment Paul walked into the first rehearsal. He was all business. “We’re gonna get this right, okay?” The roles were demanding. Performers had to recite lines, emote, sing, and even dance without screwing up a word or motion, lest Paul stop everything in its tracks. “That’s not it!” he’d bark, causing all eyes to swing to the now-mortified offender. Then came the sharply worded correction, often paired with a needling observation about the offender’s commitment and brainpower. You didn’t want to be the offender.

  Year in and out, Paul’s productions for AEPi were always the most complex of the night, usually multilevel satires that combined fairy tales, movies, or plain old absurdities with commentary on campus characters or the administration and the latest outrage it was attempting to perpetrate. One year, the show had a Robin Hood theme, with college president Harold Stoke transformed into “Huge Harold,” a hostess in the school cafeteria. The climactic song went, in part, like this:

  Huge Harold, a hostess,

  Long live Robin Hood!

  Huge Harold, a hostess

  He got what he should.

  Tyranny never pays (please return your trays!)

  Your virtue was a fable (don’t sit on the table!)

  Any on-campus demonstration of academic pomposity could get a professor parodied in an AEPi sketch, as hidebound conservative political science teacher Mary Dunn, who taught her classes clad in an academic gown, learned the year Paul transformed her into “Sahara Mary”:

  Sahara Mary teaches poli sci

  Nobody ever figured out why

  In class she wears her robes so silky

  Talking about her hero, Wendell Willkie

  Just that quickly, AEPi was unbeatable in the Follies. At the same time, Paul’s campus reputation gained a kind of gravitas. He had proven himself to be a trenchant, witty commentator on the state of the Queens College campus. What the activists were saying through walk-outs, marches, and protest speeches, Paul could put into a single verse of a satirical song performed by a character dressed as a medieval woodsman. The audience marveled at the ingenuity. They had their own Mort Sahl, a sleek-but-toothy comedian whose insights resonated far beyond the spectacle onstage. His peers got the sense that Paul could get somewhere in life.

  Yet where was he going after the day’s classes ended? He never mentioned it, not even to his close pals in AEPi. He didn’t let anyone know that when he wasn’t playing his guitar on campus, he was strumming it in a recording studio in Manhattan, working on songs they might be hearing on their radios by the end of the semester. And he certainly didn’t tell anyone that the Paul Simon who jogged down the subway stairs in Queens emerged in Manhattan with another man’s name and bright prospects, as 16 Magazine’s young editor Gloria Stavers proclaimed in the January 1960 debut of her column on up-and-coming artists: Jerry Landis is going places!

  * * *

  When Paul Simon started classes as a freshman in the fall of 1958, Jerry Landis wasn’t going anywhere. Less than a year since “Hey, Schoolgirl” launched him into Billboard’s Hot 100, the young pop star/musician/songwriter had been put on ice. Paul had no plans to kill off his alter ego; just as there was no Jerry without Paul, the reverse was also true. The problem was that each of his personae had such different visions for their joint future.

  Even as he threw himself into his classes and wove himself into the social fabric of the Queens College campus, Paul had kept right on writing pop songs. Someone else’s tune would come on the radio, and his ears would lock into what he was hearing, decoding the parts and reconfiguring them into his own songs about dream girls, true love, and the heartbreak of being so shy and so very lonely. All were composed with both ears turned to the teenage market, all set in the familiar milieu of classrooms, homework, Saturday night dances, and the lush daydreams of first-time lovers. He’d head over to the Merensteins’ place and spend another few hours with Charlie, playing songs and breaking down the new hits. If Paul brought his guitar, they might start writing a new song. When it was finished, they’d share the credit fifty-fifty and publish it through Charlie’s R&S Publishing. During those years, the two finished at least half a dozen Landis-Merenstein (or Merenstein-Landis, depending on who did the most work) songs, including the jilted lover’s weeper “Please Don’t Tell Her/Him,” which was recorded by three different artists in the space of a few months. None charted as hits, but having three covers of one song was encouraging, to say the least.

  Once Paul felt comfortable enough in college to think about resurrecting Jerry Landis, he had some new publicity pictures taken, listed Merenstein as his manager, and headed back to Midtown to push his songs, and himself, through the office doors of labels, producers, and scouts until one of them figured out that Jerry Landis had the stuff to make another hit or three. In the meantime, the steadiest work for a guy with Jerry Landis’s skills came from song publishers needing a skilled newcomer to transform their contracted writers’ music into lightly arranged, pleasant recordings showcasing the tunes’ charms. It was tradesman’s work, a flat twenty-five dollars a pop for quickie recordings. Most of the songs ranked somewhere between mediocre and daffy—what could one expect from songs called “Fortune Teller Cookies,” “Up and Down the Stairs,” and “I Want You in My Stocking”?—but Paul didn’t care. More than money, the job gave him nearly unlimited access to the recording studio and all its electronic and instrumental gear. He learned quickly, and it wasn’t long before he located new ways to elaborate on the basics: recording tongue clacks and finger snaps so they had the resonance of real percussion instruments; overloading reverb on a guitar until a simple riff wailed extraterrestrially; pairing a three-chord rocker with Latin percussion.

  He did the same thing with the songs he recorded for the do-it-yourself companies (best known as song sharks) that offered amateur lyricists a chance to turn their verse into finished recordings produced by professional-grade composers and performers. I
t was a weird gig, but it allowed Paul to hole up in the recording studio, which had become his favorite place to be. He’d take a sheaf of lyrics to the Variety Arts Studios at 225 West Forty-Sixth Street and spend an entire day writing and recording songs, challenging himself to add an original twist to each tune: a jazzy chord change here, an unexpected burst of congas there. He could have cranked them out in a fraction of the time; no one would hear the song beyond the customer/lyricist and whomever he was romancing. Yet Paul was too absorbed in the recording process to care about the time.

  It was the storied era of pop songwriting, the time of Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, Leiber and Stoller, Shuman and Pomus, Sedaka and Greenfield, Barry and Greenwich—all of them dishing up hit songs as if they were the day’s social studies homework, lyrics and chords scribbled on notepaper, on the back of a shopping list, on a torn-out page from a teenager’s diary. Hit after hit after hit until the pickles-and-cigar aura of Tin Pan Alley turned neon with Bylcreem and Tabu, grass-kissed sweatshirts and hairspray. People still talked about the art deco Brill Building as the Alley’s main address, but the more that rock ’n’ roll took its grip, the less this was true. A few younger writers may have worked the pianos in the Brill’s cubicles, but the real action was a few blocks north, behind the Euro-sleek facade of 1650 Broadway, where baby impresarios Don Kirshner and Don Nevins had stationed the headquarters of Aldon Music, the umbrella name for the various enterprises that were fast becoming an industry behemoth. Once Aldon set up at 1650, a legion of others followed them there, or else set up shop across the street at 1697 Broadway, where CBS’s ground-floor studio lay beneath thirteen floors of rehearsal rooms, studios, and music offices in which some of the biggest artists, bands, writers, publishers, and record companies went about their daily business.

  Pop music was all around Paul, and not just in Midtown Manhattan. When he called Queens College’s student tutor offices looking for help in his mathematics class during his freshman year, the service sent over a sophomore named Carol Klein, a Brooklyn girl who spent most of her off-campus hours in the Brill Building as Carole King, one-half of a rising pop songwriting team she’d made with her new husband, a fellow Queens College student named Gerry Goffin. The pair had started working together, and then fallen in love, during their first year on campus. Paul told Carole that he was also a songwriter with Hot 100 experience, and they hit it off so well that they formed the Cosines, a two-person demo recording team producing first-rate demos. Paul played guitar and bass, Carole piano and drums, and both sang lead and background parts. Paul and Carole didn’t write songs together—she had her husband for that—but they were working in the music business, and as far as they were concerned it was the greatest thing in the world.

  * * *

  In the late spring of his sophomore year, Paul finally landed a recording contract for Jerry Landis. The deal wasn’t with a record company, though; he signed with Wemar Music, a publishing company that had a side business making and selling master recordings of its writers’ songs to record companies willing to pay a premium for finished material. The Wemar executives figured Paul’s “Anna Belle” for a moneymaker and sent him into the studio to cut the track, along with another original, “Loneliness,” for the flip side. An A&R man at MGM Records liked what he heard, and in late July the first real Jerry Landis record slipped into the stores. Publicity was minimal, and when Billboard mentioned “Anna Belle” in its New Records column, the writer judged its sales potential as only “moderate.” Even that prediction turned out to be ambitious. When the MGM accountants tallied the song’s numbers at the end of the season, its national sales added up to something fewer than one hundred copies.

  Try and try again. Ten months later Paul got another Jerry Landis record into the record stores, thanks to the help of Charlie Merenstein, who convinced his pal Morty Craft to give the kid another shot on his new Warwick label. Craft signed Paul to record four sides, adding up to two 45s, front and back. Still working with the strategy of knocking off last month’s hits, Paul staked his first release to his chime-adorned ballad “Just a Boy,” the whispered confession of a kittenish fellow who is “unwise and full of fears,” until his precious love gives him “the wisdom of many years.” It was better than the B-side, “Shy,” a tangle of goops and sighs and “doodle-ee-doo-doos.” The 45 came out in May 1960 and fell flat. That didn’t stop Craft from trying again in the fall, this time with “Just a Boy” as a B-side to a cover of “(I’d Like to Be) The Lipstick on Your Lips,” which turned out to be every bit as appealing as its title. Still, the Billboard review was upbeat, judging “Lipstick” a “real cutie” enhanced by Paul’s “delicate performance.” “Just a Boy” won the most praise from Billboard’s critic, who heard a distinctly folk influence that disc jockeys would find “out of the common groove.”

  Paul was doing just fine in his literature and history classes at Queens College that term, but he still had a lot to learn when it came to producing recording sessions, which became painfully evident to the storied jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli when he was booked to play a session for Paul at Astoria Studios. Louis, who had been booked as the bassist and bandleader, had written a bare-bones lead sheet for the song, but Paul kept stopping the takes, looking for a rock ’n’ roll feel he could hear in his head but was unable to put into words. Even Louis had no idea what Paul was trying to say. Pizzarelli figured out later that the kid was after eighth notes rather than fours, but Paul could only flail during the session, and eventually he sent his expensive session players home so he could start fresh with musicians who had enough of a feel for rock ’n’ roll to intuit what he was after.*

  Being in the studio was magic to Paul: the microphones, the knobs and sliders on the recording console, the in-the-moment arranging, the creation and manipulation of sound. Then he could walk down the hall to the front offices and be as engaged by what he found there. As he’d come to learn from Louis and from Charlie Merenstein, the guys who ran the business could be just as wild and electric as the artists they propped up in the spotlight. Most of them were earthy guys, barrel-chested and bellowing, arguing and laughing, sloshing whiskey and peppering their conversations with equal measures of Yiddish and profanity. Most shared the same rough-hewn spirit of the Lower East Side operators who had bare-knuckled their way into the game back when ragtime was still king and there was big money in sheet music. The business had grown a lot since then, and some of the swifter boys had built themselves empires and fortunes. That hadn’t changed the game, though, especially not for the guys who knew the value of the veiled threat and the very public display of power. Ike Berman, Charlie Merenstein’s brother-in-law, had cousins who were so connected that Ronnie Merenstein could resolve any problem in New York, and later in Las Vegas, by mentioning his grandfather’s name.† Like Charlie, most of the record men weren’t mobsters but the same essential ethic, the impatience with etiquette and the disinterest in politesse, still applied. Business was business, sentiment was a luxury, and if an advantage presented itself to you, you didn’t hesitate. And if someone complained about getting the short end of a deal, maybe he should be more careful next time. Everyone knew that all the money in the music business traveled through the front offices before it got anywhere else. The business guys structured the deals, they counted the profits, they took what they thought they deserved, and they gave everyone else whatever was left.

  Over at 1697 Broadway you could wander up to Jim Gribble’s office and settle into his waiting room alongside a dozen or more other hustling music people. Gribble was a southerner of the classic variety (tall, broad-shouldered, loud, forever cocooned in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke), a native of small West Tennessee town called, yes, Gribble. More important, he was a talent scout/manager/packager of rock and rhythm and blues acts, so it made sense for him to keep track of who was around, what they did, and how good they were. If he had a job for a guitarist, he’d get a couple of guys to open their cases and audition on the spot. Back
ground singers? Let’s see if that doo-wop group can really sing. Paul was a regular, so when one of Gribble’s hit doo-wop groups needed to replace its lead singer in short order, the manager stepped into his outer chamber and pointed to Paul.

  “Landis! Git in here!”

  The Mystics was a five-man doo-wop group from Brooklyn best known for “Hushabye,” a Pomus-Shuman song they had taken into the Top 30 in 1959. The band made a couple of ripples when their next single, “Don’t Take the Stars,” reached the lower rungs of the Top 100, but by the winter of 1960 they had lost their lead singer, and with its record company demanding new material pronto, Gribble offered the job to Paul. Was he interested? Sure! Probably! What would it pay? Gribble mentioned a number, Paul thought that sounded fine, and after a quick check-in between the manager and the executives at Laurie Records he was in. The group’s members all got together to teach Paul the songs and determine who would sing what, and it didn’t take much time for the others to figure out that this college boy from Queens was actually a great guy. He laughed when they teased him for being short, and he laughed again when they made fun of his high-pitched voice. Then he busted them right back, which made the Brooklyn boys laugh even harder. Gribble and the A&R guy at Laurie Records had already chosen the tunes. “All Through the Night,” essentially a faster version of “Hushabye,” featured a group vocal; Paul sang lead on “Let Me Steal Your Heart Away,” but is inaudible on “(I Begin) To Think Again of You.” The sessions went smoothly, and everyone had a fine time, but Paul had no interest in performing at any of the sock hops Gribble set up for the group, and when its original lead singer decided to come back, Paul stepped aside cheerfully. He had Jerry Landis’s career to focus on.