Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  He sounded talented, thrilled, and a little bit terrified. Could he really remake himself into a folk performer? Each night marked another step in his transformation, a herky-jerky combination of showbiz gags, folk traditionals, satirical bits about existentialism and psychology, kids’ songs—“A Dog Named Blue” and “Bingo” were favorites—deliberately bad poetry, and then, like a gem tumbling from the sky, one of his own songs. Maybe a brief introduction, a spare guitar figure, a series of chords, then melody flowing across perfectly measured lines about isolation, love, or mortality. When it was over, the applause came with new intensity. Other guitarists and songwriters caught each other’s eyes and shook their heads. The fucking guy knows what he’s doing! Always neatly trimmed in his black corduroys and black sweaters, with that fast-talking, blurt-it-all-out manner of speaking, Paul had a way of filling up every room he entered, despite his size. The poetry-reading urban rustics around London took notice. They mentioned his name, wondered if you’d heard him, suggested that you make a point of doing so, because he could really play guitar and had these songs that were nothing like Dylan’s, but still so stunning. He had his own thing, did Paul Simon. He was worth knowing.

  Paul made friends with other folk musicians and became particularly chummy with Martin Carthy, the influential guitarist who had urged McCausland to hire him. Paul got a few bookings, five-pound-a-nighters that kept him busy and spread his name that much farther. And then there was Kathy. He’d spotted her the moment he walked into the Railway Tavern and made for the stairs to the club room. She was new in the area, a friend of a friend of McCausland and Rugg’s who had volunteered to help out at the Brentwood. Kathy Chitty came from a small village in Wales, and though she’d had courage enough to leave her family home and travel alone to London when she was barely twenty, she was also shy, with a soft pair of eyes behind dark brunette bangs. When McCausland brought Paul to the club, he said hello to her and smiled. She smiled back, and it didn’t take much time for Paul to ask her out and then fall in love.

  They struck some as a curious pair, given Paul’s bluff American charisma and the Welsh girl’s near-invisible public demeanor. Many of the friends who grew used to seeing her with Paul rack their brains to recall if they ever heard her utter a word in their presence. But Kathy’s timorous facade hid a rugged soul. The Welsh winters were raw and long; the mountainous terrain there offered little but physical labor, much of it in the calamitous mines crawling into the earth’s crust. Death was not a stranger in Wales. But there were also the lush green hills and jagged mountains, the rock-strewn coastline and the bittersweet, poetic hearts all that roughness nurtured. If Paul could be tough and gloomy, if he could rage at the world and at himself, if he could reach out and all but consume her with his need, Kathy understood. She could gird his spirit in the morning and draw him back to earth in the evening. A mother, a confessor, a lover, a mirror, a muse—Kathy was everything Paul could possibly need. He could look her in the eye—she was close to him in size—and when he spoke to her, his entire being seemed to soften. “I stand alone without beliefs,” he would soon sing of her. “The only truth I know is you.”

  * * *

  Then Paul’s time ran out, and he had to go back to New York, back to everything he had been so happy to escape just a few weeks earlier. So much had happened since then. He’d glimpsed a life that had nearly nothing to do with everything he’d known growing up in New York, an existence free of expectation. But once he stepped through his parents’ door, once he found himself not quite fighting off sleep in those downtown Brooklyn classrooms, England might as well have been a dream. He was back in his childhood bedroom, walking the same old streets, trudging back into those soporific law books, and then to the dusty old Edward B. Marks offices to bear the aggravation of selling other people’s songs. Still, at least that job came with a few advantages—particularly now that he had a new crop of songs and a renewed partnership with Artie.

  They were getting serious about their music again, continuing their Washington Square Park busking and open mic rounds, and also knuckling the Midtown office doors in search of a recording contract. But that process had become no easier than it had been nearly a decade earlier. An unknown pair of folksingers would never get through the doors Paul had come to know so well as an emissary for the Marks corporation. It was hard to resist the temptation to pitch one of his own songs along with the others, but Marks had so many songwriters on its staff that it had had to construct a strict intra-office law to make sure that kind of thing didn’t happen. One slip, and you were finished. Then again, this was showbiz, and as Paul had been taught so many years ago, if you had an advantage to work you used it.

  It didn’t take long: a couple of weeks, maybe a month. Holding a sheaf of songs for Columbia Records, Paul was ushered into the office of A&R executive/producer Tom Wilson, a statuesque black man with stylish clothes and an air of sophistication that drew as much from the jazz-and-poetry underground as from the lecture halls of Harvard, from which he had graduated with honors in 1954. When Columbia’s preeminent talent scout John Hammond needed a staff producer who could understand and nurture his latest discovery, he had paired Wilson with Bob Dylan, with terrific results. Just a few albums later, the impact of their collaboration had altered the course of folk music and was still radiating outward. Now seen as a kingmaker among folk producers, Wilson set out to create the Pilgrims, a pop-folk vocal trio that could serve as an African American answer to Peter, Paul, and Mary.* By early 1964 he had found his three singers, recorded a handful of songs, and was looking for the right song to make the group’s debut single when Paul came knocking with the entries from Edward B. Marks. Wilson passed on all of them and was about to dismiss him when Paul offered something else. He was a songwriter, too, he said, and had just written a song that might be a better fit. Did the producer have time to hear it? Wilson shrugged. Sure, why not.

  When Paul got a verse or two into “The Sound of Silence” Wilson started nodding his head. When it was done, he positively beamed. Yes, that did sound like the right kind of song. Why didn’t Paul go make a demo recording and bring it back so Wilson could play it for the others? Paul hopped the D train for Greenwich Village and tracked down his new friend Jim McGuinn (who later changed his first name to Roger), a guitarist and singer who was one of the more experienced young musicians on the scene, to help oversee the recording session. When it was done, he brought the disc back to Wilson, who once again declared himself impressed. In fact, “The Sound of Silence” would be the perfect single for the Pilgrims. Once again, though, Paul had another idea. He’d formed a singing duo with a friend from Columbia University, and they’d worked out a great duo arrangement for the song. Could they at least sing it for him together before Wilson gave it to the other band? Wilson said sure, and when Paul came back with Artie a day or two later, Wilson had to hear them sing it together only once. He booked time in the Columbia Records studio, asked a young staff engineer named Roy Halee to roll the tape, and watched from the control room while Paul and Artie harmonized their way through “The Sound of Silence,” “He Was My Brother,” “Bleecker Street,” and one or two others. Not long after that they were offered a recording contract with Columbia Records.

  That was the end of law school. Studying music industry law, as it turned out, had not only failed to deepen Paul’s interest in the legal world, but crystallized exactly why he didn’t want to be there in the first place. “I thought, this is completely backwards,” he said. “I want to be a musician who hires these lawyers. So I’m quitting.” The elders at Edward B. Marks didn’t give him the opportunity to quit. Once they learned that their song plugger Jerry Landis had pitched and sold his own tune during a work trip to Columbia Records, they fired him on the spot.

  And with that, Jerry Landis, the walking vision of Paul’s pop music fantasies, breathed his last. Or so Paul thought.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE VOICE OF THE NOW

  Now Columbia Re
cords recording artists, Paul and Artie made their presence known in Greenwich Village. Hanging in the clubs, taking measure of the other musicians and songwriters, mentioning their new deal, and shaking hands all around. When they saw expert banjo player and multi-instrumentalist Barry Kornfeld play a set at the Gaslight Club one night, Paul had a flash: he’d seen that goatee and those horn-rimmed specs before. During his freshman year at Queens College, when Kornfeld was finishing his degree at the school, Paul saw him with a guitar case on the subway platform near campus and struck up a conversation. The train arrived in short order, and they’d never spoken again, but when Kornfeld finished playing that night in early 1964, Paul reminded him of their earlier meeting and this time they had a much longer talk.

  Kornfeld was only four years older than Paul and Artie, but he had been playing folk music in Greenwich Village for more than ten years, all the way back to the early 1950s, when the entire scene amounted to Sunday afternoon jam sessions in a corner of Washington Square Park and smaller gatherings at the one or two Village lofts whose musician residents invited friends over to sing and play. Kornfeld was then best known for his work with Rev. Gary Davis, accompanying the great bluesman on banjo and guitar while also serving as a conduit between the older blind musician and his growing fan base among young folkies. Along with playing solo shows and in various folk groups, Kornfeld also did session work, so he was all ears when Paul told him about the album he and Artie were about to start recording. Both Paul and Artie had been impressed by his show, Paul said. Would Kornfeld like to do some playing at their sessions in the Columbia Studios? Kornfeld was happy to do it. He didn’t care if the duo’s scrabble was hard enough for Village idealogues, for one thing, and he had a union card, and enough experience to know that Columbia Records would pay its session musicians union scale. So just say where and when.

  Paul started bringing his guitar to Kornfeld’s apartment at 190 Waverly Place to rehearse, and they soon became friends. There was so much music to talk about, and Kornfeld couldn’t help but be impressed by his new chum, not just by the quality of Paul’s songs and his guitar playing, but also by his gleeful tales of the many hours he’d spent learning the tricks of the recording studio. They’d talk for hours, passing a joint and digging deep into music and literature, politics and the folk music history. And Paul was funny—not just witty but deeply and endearingly silly, quick to crack a joke, quicker to burst out laughing. Kornfeld’s building was a hub for Village musicians and writers—his neighbors included Dave Van Ronk, the soft-spoken army veteran Tom Paxton, and the Irish Native American singer-songwriter Pat Sky, and most of them would stop by and end up hanging out to jam with Kornfeld and his friend.

  Still seeing the world at least partly through Jerry Landis’s eyes, one day Paul came to Kornfeld with a proposition. The Village was overstuffed with songwriters, but hardly any of them knew how to publish their songs. At the same time, the cigar smokers in Midtown were eager to find folklike songs to appeal to the new market. He and Kornfeld should launch their own folk-centric publishing company. They’d be equal partners, with Paul providing the business expertise and Kornfeld bringing in the songwriters and matching the company’s songs, including Paul’s of course, to other performers in Greenwich Village and beyond. Kornfeld saw the logic of it immediately. They called the company Eclectic Music, and registered its address as Kornfeld’s apartment on Waverly Place. The first song on their roster was the still-unrecorded “Sound of Silence.”

  The recording sessions began at the Columbia Records studio on March 10, with Paul on guitar, Kornfeld on guitar and banjo, and jazz bassist Bill Lee, a favorite for many folk musicians, on an acoustic stand-up. Given the simplicity of the arrangements and the extent of Paul and Artie’s preparation, the work went quickly. “Bleecker Street,” “The Sound of Silence,” and a cover of Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” were finished by the end of the first day. The group reconvened a week later to nail down “He Was My Brother,” “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” and covers of Ed McCurdy’s “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” and the British songwriter Ian Campbell’s “The Sun Is Burning.” Gathering for a final time on March 31, they finished the album with versions of “Sparrow” and “Benedictus,” and covers of Bob Camp and Bob Gibson’s gospel thumper “You Can Tell the World”; the standard “Go Tell It on the Mountain”; and the tragic British love ballad “Peggy-O.”

  Released more than six months later, the album, which they titled Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, was both prim and impassioned, a product of its fading era and a signpost to the one about to start. The album’s cover illustrates the moment vividly: Paul and Artie together on an empty subway platform considering the lens as a silver train bullets past. The station is gritty,* redolent with the exhaustion of the endless night. Still, the duo look daisy fresh, their charcoal suits pressed and ties knotted tight. Both lean against a black girder, but Artie stands taller, his face open and confident. Paul keeps his back against the steel, a guitar around his neck, gloom tugging at his boyish features. The songs inside project the same contradictions. Opening with the exuberant neo-gospel “You Can Tell the World,” they make like glimmer-eyed Christians (“He brought joy, joy, joy into my heart!”), but snap the mood immediately with the faux-naïveté of “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” and its fantasy world in which war has been outlawed. The instrumentation stays constant: Lee’s stand-up bass holds down the rhythm while Paul’s and Kornfeld’s guitars twinkle and strum with tasteful reserve. If the duo’s cover of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is fairly rote, the five Simon originals and the Simon-Garfunkel arrangement of “Benedictus” veer into far more distinctive terrain.

  “Bleecker Street” sounds just as tidy as the other tunes, but the lyric tells a more complex story. Fog hanging over the streets becomes a shroud dividing a shepherd from his sheep. The people are shadows, their verse crooked and their love furtive. Apartments rent for thirty dollars a month, pace the thirty pieces of silver Judas earned by betraying Jesus. Once a paradise of art and ideals, Greenwich Village has become a moral desert. It’s a dire portrait but, strikingly, no villains emerge. The blight is existential, a function of humanity’s innate flaws. Church bells signal hope, but the ringing is faint, righteousness still on the far side of the desert.

  The bleakness continues on “Sparrow,” the wintry parable about a bird dying from the forces of greed, vanity, and indifference, then takes a turn for the self-pitying on the title track, whose narrator must abandon his lover due to an impulsive decision to rob a liquor store. “My life seems unreal, my crime an illusion / A scene badly written in which I must play,” he observes, in the style of a poet who needs to learn a bit more about the psychology of crime.

  The heart of the album, and the best indicator of all that would follow, starts with “The Sound of Silence” at the end of the first side and continues through “He Was My Brother,” which leads the flip side. At twenty-two, Paul had discovered the essence of his mature voice. Both songs are free of artifice. Rather than hiding behind the new idiom, he absorbs it deeply enough to use it as an expression of his troubled soul, his own experience, the fragile balance of perception, passion, dread, and joy that would fill his art and consciousness for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  The night before the final recording session, Paul and Artie played at Gerde’s Folk City, sharing a three-way bill with Chicago blueswoman Tracy Nelson and the Even Dozen Jug Band. It was their first major appearance since they started recording for Columbia, and to stir up excitement, Tom Wilson rallied some of his hipper friends and colleagues to the show. The producer was there, of course, as were Kornfeld and some of his living room regulars. Yet the real prize was Bob Dylan himself. He came a little late, perching at the bar next to the New York Times music critic Robert Shelton. They’d had a few drinks; maybe they’d blown a little grass. Whatever, Dylan was laughing, hand in front of his mouth, head down, shoulders heaving—“Haw-haw-ha
w, oh my god”—and you could hear it. Paul and Artie played in a hush: one guitar, two voices, and delicate strands of melody and harmony. The power was as much between the notes as in the notes themselves, and it begged close listening. And everyone knew that beaky high plains honk.

  “Haw-haw!”

  In a career whose every twitch and twang has been anatomized for personal, literary, political, and biblical magnitude, the meaning of that Dylan guffaw remains unfathomed. Shelton went to his grave insisting that the laughter—he was giggling, too, only more quietly—had nothing to do with what was happening onstage, that whatever had spurred the laugh riot was completely detached from Paul and Artie’s performance. It was just bad timing that whatever he and Dylan were talking about that evening—and Shelton never identified what it was—had popped their corks just then.

  There was more to Shelton’s story, though. Dylan and Paul had met for the first time only days earlier, and the encounter had gone badly. Despite having so much in common, including extended visits with the same folk musicians in London, the two couldn’t find anything to say to each other. So they traded the smallest of small talk. Neither pretended to be delighted, or even all that interested, in meeting the other.