Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  From late 1960 throughout 1961, Paul wrote songs and found labels willing to bankroll recording sessions and release and then promote Jerry Landis’s singles. The titles make Landis seem like a sulk: “I Wish I Weren’t in Love,” “Play Me a Sad Song.” And sulk he does: “I’ve got no one to hold me tight.” And complain: “I can’t do my homework … the way she treats me just isn’t right.” And kvetch: “Everywhere I look kids are having fun, / But I might as well go read a book.” And ponder the abyss: “My nights are spent in misery / Without your love I can’t endure.” In a lighter mood, he moans softly to himself: “I’m lonely.” It would seem that something is desperately wrong with Jerry Landis—except that none of it rings true; he mouths clichés that condescend to heartbreak. The music is just as void, always the standard doo-wop ballad progression, the same oohs and ahhs and doodle-doos from the chorus; the same gulping, cooing vocal style. By contrast, you can put on a Chuck Berry record and feel the hum of a well-oiled Cadillac purring down the macadam, and “Great Balls of Fire” leaves no doubt that Jerry Lee Lewis was as crazy as a goose and as mean as a snake. Even “Hey, Schoolgirl (in the Second Row)” has that cooped-up, about-to-bust feeling of those slow-ticking afternoon classes. Yet to listen to the Landis songs, particularly in light of everything that would happen in the near future, you guess that Jerry Landis had no idea who he was, either.

  * * *

  Over at Queens College, Paul Simon rose through the ranks at AEPi and was eventually elected president of the chapter. Unchallenged authority agreed with him. He was focused, cheerful, and generous with his fraternity brothers, and kept an eye out for the stragglers and outsiders. When a thuggish-looking kid found his way to a pledge party in a wise guy’s shiny shoes, tight slacks, and shiny open-neck shirt, Paul’s first reaction—his mouth fell open and a hand flew up to cover his astonished smile—made the streetwise recruit, the son of a troubled Brooklyn family named Brian Schwartz, suspect the worst. Instead, Paul beelined over and greeted him like a friend. After talking for a while and learning something of Schwartz’s past, Paul took him around to meet the fraternity’s other key members, and as the weeks went by he shepherded him through the pledge process. When Schwartz got tapped to join, he was certain Paul’s efforts had had everything to do with it.

  Paul’s star continued to rise among the college’s most influential students, his renown stemming from his reputation as a campus performer, as the impresario behind AEPi’s golden Follies entries, and increasingly as the guy most likely to whip out his guitar and hold forth for anyone and everyone within earshot. Given free time between classes, he would find some stairs where he could sit and strum his guitar for a while. Every so often he’d get up in the cafeteria and sing a few pop songs, often with frat brothers Schwartz, Ronnie Pollack, and Elliott Naishtat hauled in to sing the Belmonts’ parts while Paul put on his best Dion for “The Wanderer.” They harmonized on Kingston Trio hits, and Paul was particularly expert at the group’s “Scotch and Soda,” always a crowd favorite. Assigned to make a presentation about his hopes for the future in a speech class, Paul delivered a paper that cast his Tom and Jerry experience as the first step in a life he was determined to build around music. Richard Milner, a classmate Paul had gotten to know over a few terms, came away from the recitation feeling both impressed and inspired. He’d never met someone his age with such a clear and confident vision of what, and who, he wanted to be.

  One day between classes, Paul took Milner to an empty hallway to sing a few songs he had just written. Who knew that these songs would soon be released as singles on MGM Records? Milner certainly didn’t. Neither did Joan Tauber, one of Paul’s college friends. Ron Pollack, an AEPi brother who worked closely with Paul on multiple Follies productions, had no idea that his friend had recorded anything between his high school hit and the mid-1960s. “I wasn’t aware of Jerry Landis,” Pollack said to me after a puzzled silence. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

  Another time, Paul took Milner by the arm during a class break to tell him about an extraordinary thing that had happened to him the day before. Paul’s subway train had been held at an uptown Manhattan station. When he heard singing coming from the platform, he hopped off to investigate. He followed his ears down a stairway and, at the landing, found a five-man clutch of doo-wop singers, all black, all his age, all locked in harmony. Paul listened for a while, and when they got to a tune he knew, he started singing along. He sang tentatively at first, but when one of the singers picked up on what he was doing, he moved aside and gestured for Paul to join them. Paul stepped in eagerly and was immediately one of them. Heads bobbing together, fingers popping to the same beat—the moment of harmony triggered something in Paul he couldn’t put into words. He just shook his head in wonder. “The niggas let me sing,” Milner recalled him finally saying. He uttered the word with a tentative hush, trying it out on his tongue like Cinderella slipping the crystal shoe over her callused heel, wondering if the previous day’s magic could possibly have been real. The niggas let me sing!

  CHAPTER 6

  THE FREEDOM CRIERS

  One night in the late spring of 1961, Paul went to a talent show at Forest Hills Jewish Center. He was in Jerry Landis mode, a persona now looking to become a pop mastermind. Sitting among the parents, neighbors, and friends, Paul looked for glimmers of real talent, measuring the singers’ sound and presence, imagining them on a bigger, shinier stage and himself in the wings, tapping his foot to the clang of the cash drawer. He watched act after act, some of them decent but still so young, so hesitant, so not ready. Then came four kids from Parsons Junior High, of all places, three boys and a girl (shades of the Peptones!) singing doo-wop with real flair—rich voices, strong harmonies, a gleam in their eyes. After the show, Paul introduced himself. They knew they were really good, right? Did they ever think about making records? Well, he knew exactly how they felt because he’d come out of Parsons just a few years back, already knowing he had what it took, but with no idea how to show it to the right people. But he worked at it and then—do you guys remember Tom and Jerry, “Hey, Schoolgirl”? Yeah, that was me. So how would they like to do the same thing, only without the years of frustration he’d endured? He could guide them, step by step. All they had to do was everything he told them to.

  Some of them weren’t even in high school yet; they were just a bunch of kids having fun. Lead singer Marty Cooper and his garrulous pal Mickey Borack were just finishing up at Parsons. Falsetto whooper Howie Klein and Gail Lynn were in high school. Cooper had the richest voice; he could sing sweet on the love songs and then summon Dion’s streetwise edge for the foot stompers. But they all had strong voices, and with Borack’s big personality leading the show they had a spark.

  To make sure they could gather and hold a crowd, Paul trailed them to a street corner singing session. Then he sat them down to explain how it was going to work. He’d write the songs, produce the records, and manage every aspect of the group’s career, working in tandem with his new business partner, Bobby Susser, a super-enthusiastic kid he’d met while visiting his college friend Judith Tauber in the Jackson Heights section of Queens. Susser took care of the business, and Paul took care of the music, scheduling regular rehearsals in his parents’ basement. In search of a group name that would stand out among the Fleetwoods, the Impalas, and the Coasters, Paul combined his favorite record label (Tico) with a flashy sports car (Triumph) and, ta-dah! Tico and the Triumphs. Cooper, as lead singer, would be Tico, but they were all in this together, Paul told them when they were together. Don’t worry about it. Yet when they weren’t together, Paul would tell Cooper a strikingly different story.

  Paul opened the first rehearsal by handing out lyrics for a song he had just written called “Motorcycle.” A fast-paced rocker built to showcase the group’s harmonies with engine-evoking chants of Brrrrr-mmmm-boppa-boppa-a-boppa-bop-bop. The tune was the hardest, and best, song he had written since “Hey, Schoolgirl,” and he wanted it sung just so.
When Gail got through a few rehearsals and realized she wasn’t all that interested in the showbiz life, Paul stepped in to round out the vocal parts and, now that he thought of it, take over the lead on “Motorcycle,” which he performed with a raw-throated fierceness he’d never achieved on record. Even the B-side ballad, “I Don’t Believe Them,” was several notches above the typical weepy Landis fare, thanks to a soaring chorus and a soul-stirring vocal from Cooper. After a few weeks of practice, Paul was satisfied enough to go to Charlie Merenstein for the cash he’d need to finance a proper recording session (something like a thousand dollars, according to Cooper), then shopped the finished master around Midtown until he found a buyer in Larry Uttal, whose Madison Records released the 45 in October 1961.

  Kicked off with the throaty blast of a revving engine (Paul’s car, not an actual motorcycle), “Motorcycle” got to a quick start in New York, where it made the playlist of WINS-AM and nearly stole Murray the K’s Record of the Week contest from Boris Pickett’s novelty hit “Monster Mash.” Sales leaped across the Northeast, but just as the sparks started to fly, the record disappeared from the shops. Already short on cash, Uttal couldn’t scrape together the money to keep the printing plants stamping out the vinyl 45s. When the label declared bankruptcy, Paul snatched back the master and ran it over to Amy Records, where Charlie’s friend Arthur Yale took it straight to his printers and had them stamp out thousands of new copies. By the time the new discs found their way to stores in November, the momentum for “Motorcycle” had faded. It had a brief run on a few regional Top 20s, even topping the charts in Baltimore and, a few months later, in Puerto Rico. But those wavelets of interest weren’t enough. Tico and the Triumphs’ debut only just managed to crack Billboard’s Hot 100, spending a week in the No. 99 slot.

  Feeling they’d come agonizingly close with “Motorcycle,” Paul traded the car engine sounds for the thump of a steam engine and switched the revved-up Brrrrr-mmmm-boppa-boppa-a-boppa-bop-bop for the Wooo-wooo of the rails to come up with “Express Train,” which rocked just as hard as its predecessor, but with a more complex rhythmic texture and more inventive chord changes. Released by Amy Records in April 1962, Tico and the Triumphs’ second single once again fell short. In fact, so few copies of “Express Train” were sold that its B-side, a deliberately exotic number called “Wild Flower,” went all but unheard. But listen to it now, knowing where Paul’s long journey through the musical cultures of the world would take him, and you get a very clear preview of the revolutionary work he’d do decades hence.

  The seed of “Wild Flower” arrived in “The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh).” At the time that Paul composed “Wild Flower,” the Tokens, another New York doo-wop group, had been riding high on the Billboard pop charts for months with a lyrically enhanced, retitled cover of “Wimoweh,” a nearly wordless South African song that Pete Seeger’s folk quartet the Weavers had launched into the pop charts in 1949. The song, based on a Zulu chant that had been a big hit in Africa in 1939, had gained English lyrics after that, but it was the odd cadences and harmonies of the tribal original that ignited Paul’s imagination.

  Thus came “Wild Flower,” the story of a free-wandering girl set to a grab bag of Bo Diddley beats, acoustic guitars, a pair of soprano saxes making like snake charmers, and a faux-Hawaiian tribal chant (“Manga-wey-ah-poola-wey / Hada-ma-la-hada-ma-ley / Hey!”) that Paul and the group constructed from random syllables. The production doesn’t quite make it—the Diddley beat is too familiar to power a journey to distant lands—but you can hear what Paul is after: the allure of the world beyond, the threads linking there to here; everyone moving to the same lub-dub; the fear and the ease of love; a world filled with beasts and friends, risk and revelation; the lion in the jungle; the myths and miracles; the radio signal; the long distance call.

  When the record fell flat, so did Paul’s interest in the group. The other members of Tico and the Triumphs were fine singers and good guys, but the more Paul worked with them, the more he realized that most of the talent in the band resided in its lead singer, Mickey Cooper. Paul had gotten to like him. He could hear the power in Cooper’s vocals and see the hunger in his eyes, and he concluded that Cooper didn’t really need those other guys. In fact, they were in his way. If Cooper really wanted to make it, Paul said, he should be a solo singer. Cooper wasn’t so sure. Mickey Borack was his best friend; they’d been like brothers for years. How could he toss him to the side now? Paul shrugged and found subtler ways to make his point. Tico and the Triumphs became Tico with the Triumphs. Then became, simply, Tico. Cooper wasn’t proud of himself; he knew he was double-crossing his pals. But he was the son of a cabdriver; nothing had come easily in his family. And here was Paul taking Cooper out to buy him a sporty new jacket, tight pants, and bright, silky shirts, and then accompanying him to the Bruno’s of Hollywood photography studio to make publicity pictures. How many people got that kind of treatment? And once it was offered, who in their right mind would turn it down?

  Paul set up recording sessions and didn’t invite the others. Cooper sang the leads, Paul sang the background parts, and by the time Borack and Beck heard the title of Tico’s next single it was already finished. When the rest of the group figured out what was happening, the eruption was as ghastly as it was inevitable: Borack stopped speaking to Cooper. In any case, Paul’s new songs for Tico—a dance tune called “Get Up and Do the Wobble,” “Cry Little Boy, Cry,” “Cards of Love,” and “Noise”—all flopped. Cooper, in whom Paul had invested so much time, energy, and money, didn’t become the pop star Paul envisioned.

  Paul moved on. By the end of 1962 his entire look had changed. He draped a scarf around his neck and took to wearing it nearly everywhere, one end hanging down his chest and the other strung loosely around his throat. Life on campus, and especially the many hours he’d spent with James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and all the other great authors he’d studied, had combined with his growing interest in folk culture and music to end his appetite for schlocky pop music. Not the good stuff, though—he still couldn’t get enough of Dion, the Everlys, Elvis, the real masters of the form. Still, by the early 1960s, the Top 40 had turned to cardboard, the charts dominated by the Frankies and Annettes and the other Hollywood phonies. All the interesting people Paul knew in college were stuck on folk music, and not because they were trying to escape to some far-off land of maidens and soldiers and corn-cracking farmers. No, the folk that mattered was about real people and real life, as much about tomorrow morning as about yesteryear. And it wasn’t just a college fad, either: the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, and the Chad Everett Trio were all over the charts. You could still make a few bucks in pop music, sure—Paul had another song or two brewing for the teeny-bopper market—but whenever a new song grabbed him these days, it almost always came in a cloud of dust, sweat, and purpose.

  When he cut things off with Cooper, Paul also told Bobby Susser that he was done trying to be a showbiz magnate and would be shutting down their jointly held management and publishing companies, effective immediately. Nothing they’d tried had worked, and now things had changed and he didn’t need a partner anymore. Susser was dismayed, but Paul said they should still be friends, and so they were. The next time Cooper saw Susser, he was also sporting a loosely draped scarf and urging the singer to follow Paul’s example. “You’ve gotta start singing folk songs! That’s what Paul’s doing now.”

  * * *

  At Queens College the folk musicians gathered on the upper floor of an old cafeteria that had been replaced with a modern facility a few years earlier. The upstairs of the Old Caf, as they called it, was snug and smoky, just the out-of-the-way place to haul out your guitar or banjo or washboard and raise a voice to the slaves and the workers, to the great protests and to Woody Guthrie’s ramblings across the parched fields of the Great Depression. And none of it felt old because the pursuit of justice never ends, and you didn’t have to look any farther than this very campus to see it for yourself.

&nb
sp; Given the school’s antielitist philosophy and the progressive tilt of so many New Yorkers, politics electrified the Queens College campus. The dialogue on campus was like a nonstop debate about the entire contents of the day’s New York Times. College politics, particularly when it came to the school’s administration, ran even hotter. The first major controversy at the college broke out in the early fall of 1958, just days after Paul sat for his first class. Noting the near-complete absence of minority faces among their ranks, faculty members accused college administrators of mounting an organized effort to keep black and minority academics out of the school’s faculty. The administration tried to fend off the charges, but students rallied with their professors, organizing a successful college-wide walkout. After a solid year of criticism, newly arrived president Howard Stoke moved to shut down the student newspaper, the Rampart, to punish its staff for covering the controversy with such vehemence for so long. Stoke did the same to the school’s even more antagonistic newspaper, the Crown, declaring that both would be replaced in the fall with a new and, presumably, less radical campus newspaper. But as Stoke somehow failed to anticipate, the new publication, the Phoenix, was staffed almost entirely by ex-Rampart staffers, who displayed their anger by covering the top of the premiere issue’s front page with the text of the censure the National Student Editorial Affairs Conference had slapped on the Queens College administration for its attempt to silence the students’ collective voice.

  There was so much more to resist. Queens College became the focal point for a student protest against New York City rules banning Communists from speaking on public school campuses, including at the city colleges. Female students, still forbidden from wearing pants on campus, protested the school’s treatment of women. Students organized by the nation’s most powerful civil rights activists made Queens College a hub for recruiting and training students to be Freedom Riders, busing down to the Jim Crow South to help the black communities build the schools, libraries, and voter rolls they needed to exercise the basic rights they hadn’t gained after the Civil War.