Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  That was business as usual around Soho in the mid-1960s, where mobsters retailed somebody’s goods from the backs of their trucks; where the elderly street performer known as Meg the Busker was always welcome to belt out a tune no matter who was performing onstage; where Curly Goss, a cheerfully incompetent crook and part-time porn movie actor (or so he claimed) put on unlicensed folk shows in an ever-changing series of abandoned basements, the addresses of which were so secret that even the musicians wouldn’t know where they were playing until Goss took them there. It was all a revelation to Paul, who planned to stay through the end of the summer, when he’d fly back to New York to reteam with Artie and gear up for the release of Wednesday Morning, 3 AM in October.

  * * *

  Artie spent much of the summer scootering around France, and on August 28 he took the ferry across the Channel to visit Paul and get a look at his life in London. Paul had shows set up for the next few evenings, and incorporated Artie into the act, adding his harmonies to the Wednesday Morning songs he’d been performing solo and working out parts for one or two of his newly composed works. Paul’s last show for the summer was set for September 1, at the Troubadour Club. He sang a new civil rights song called “A Church Is Burning,” a meditation on aging called “Leaves That Are Green,” and “The Sound of Silence” before calling for his friend to join him on their arrangement of “Benedictus.” When it was over, a motherly forty-year-old woman approached Paul and with a plummy, if vaguely exotic, trill thanked him for his music. “I think you’re a very great artist,” she said. Paul smiled and shrugged. Oh well thanks a lot, and all that, it’s lovely to meet you. And you are…?

  The real answer to that question was a whole other adventure, so Judith Piepe kept it simple. She was a social worker at St. Anne’s Church, the particularly liberal outpost of the Anglican Church in Soho. A German refugee after the war, Piepe had spent quite a bit of time in the district’s nightclubs, particularly the ones that specialized in folk and other socially conscious forms of music, and her constant presence in the scene, along with her network of friends in and around the music community, gave her an air of influence. Piepe’s feelings for Paul ran even deeper than she had been able to tell him that first night. “I knew this was a true prophet,” she said. “This was the bloke nobody had ever heard of. And I knew this is the voice of the now.”

  CHAPTER 9

  HE WAS MY BROTHER

  The news about Andy Goodman reached the Queens College campus the same day it hit the national news, on June 24, 1964. Less than a week earlier, Paul’s younger schoolmate had boarded a bus with several dozen other Bus Project volunteers going south to register black voters in rural Mississippi. They reached their home base in Meridian, a small town on the east side of the state, their destination on the morning of June 21, the same day Goodman sent a postcard home to his family. “This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine,” he wrote. “The people in this city are wonderful, and our reception was very good.”

  The same couldn’t be said about the village of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where a few days earlier a Meridian-based CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) worker named Michael Schwerner, a recent graduate of Cornell and a member of its AEPi chapter, had led a voter registration meeting at the black Mount Zion United Methodist Church. Ku Klux Klan members rallied to burn Mount Zion to the ground the day after the meeting, and Schwerner, along with an African American CORE staffer named James Chaney, planned to return to Philadelphia to check in with the minister and his flock. Goodman arrived in Meridian just as the other two were about to leave, so they gave him enough time to stow his bags and stretch his legs, then they all piled into a station wagon and started the hour-long journey northwest to Philadelphia. When they got there, the police were waiting. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price arrested Chaney on a speeding charge, and hauled all three to the Neshoba County Jail. Released at about 10:30 that night, the three CORE staffers were escorted out of the county by Sheriff Price. Rather than taking them to safety, though, Price delivered them to two carloads of Klan members waiting just a few miles down the road. Chaney’s burned-out car was discovered three days later, with no trace of its occupants. The Neshoba County sheriff refused to investigate, and the disappearances blew into a national controversy. When the FBI stepped in, it took forty-four days for the federal investigators to find Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner’s bullet-torn bodies buried in a swamp.

  The tragedy shook Queens College and Paul’s circle of friends, but Paul hadn’t known Goodman very well. Still, Paul and Andy were similar in many ways. Both were New Yorkers from Jewish families, both dark-eyed and left-handed. Both were lifelong baseball fans who developed into solid hitters. Both were drawn to music, though Goodman ultimately pursued acting. Both studied at Queens College; both felt passionate enough about the civil rights movement to put their thoughts into verse. If Goodman’s poems were less accomplished, they overflow with the same moral fervor. “We close our eyes and choke our sighs, / And look into the dreadful skies,” he wrote in “Corollary to a Poem by AE Housman,” citing a poet whose work would inspire Paul’s writing in the coming years. But while Goodman’s beliefs set him on a collision course with violence, Paul glorified the righteous in song, including in “He Was My Brother,” the 1963 song he’d written about a civil rights martyr. When Goodman disappeared under such grim circumstances, Paul’s performance of “Brother” and his other civil rights songs gained a new fervency.

  In September 1964, Paul sat down to record an audio letter for his British girlfriend, a forty-five-minute tape of news, guitar pieces, complaints, and familiar songs performed alone and as a duo with Artie. “And also two new songs,” Paul promises at the start of the tape. “One of them is the song I wrote you about. The other is about two days old.” He sounds sweet and vulnerable on the tape, and exceptionally needy. Kathy’s most recent letter, he complains, “ruined my day” because it wasn’t as long as he’d hoped. Paul was just as hurt that David McCausland hadn’t responded to his most recent letter, and he asks his girlfriend to confront their friend about this neglect. (“Don’t ask Margaret. Ask David.”) Paul’s mood lightens when he starts singing. A delicate version of “Leaves That Are Green” leads off, followed by a bluesy take on “Patterns.” He shows off polished covers of “Anji” and two or three other instrumental pieces by British guitarist Davy Graham, whose records served as master classes for the United Kingdom’s most accomplished guitar players. Then Artie shows up, and they take a run through “Benedictus” and “The Sound of Silence.” When Artie takes a telephone call, Paul starts playing the opening chords to one of his newer works, a fast-moving civil rights tune in which hooded racists burn a black church to the ground. A close relative to “He Was My Brother,” “A Church Is Burning” makes the same lyrical feint in its final verse, in which the horrific image of smoke and flames rising from the sanctuary becomes a symbol of redemption—two hands held together in prayer. Like its predecessor, “A Church Is Burning” is designed to be a rouser, a jolt of righteousness to bring a crowd to its feet.

  When Artie returns asking what they’re doing next, Paul strums the chords again. “I’ve already done the whole introduction,” he says, pausing for the punch line. “I don’t know if you ever heard this introduction about Andy Goodman.” Oh, Artie had heard it before, many times. They both crack up, then move into the first verse. They sing together, Artie’s harmony shadowing Paul’s voice exactly, until just before the line about freedom being a dark road, when Paul’s voice flutters, he stifles a laugh, and then, as Artie loses it, too, collapses entirely, rendering the next line—“the future is now, it’s time to take a stand”—nearly incomprehensible. When they get to the final chorus, Paul shifts to “America the Beautiful,” which they both laugh through before turning back to belt the final verse of “Church” with the outsize gusto of chorus boys in a Broadway showstopper. “Thrilling!” Paul declares when it’s over. “A thrilling work!”

  It had been le
ss than a month since Goodman’s decomposing body was discovered alongside those of Schwerner and Chaney. The murders shook the nation and then catalyzed the civil rights movement, becoming one of the signal moments in America’s bitter history of racism. And it was only the start of Paul’s complicated relationship with the memory of Andy Goodman.

  * * *

  Columbia Records released Wednesday Morning, 3 AM on October 18, 1964, to lukewarm reviews. Billboard noted only “moderate” sales potential, and that proved to be an understatement. Of the one thousand copies sold during the album’s first eight months, the vast majority sold in New York City. “So that was a bomb of great magnitude,” Tom Wilson said years later. “Mega-tonnage, as far as Columbia was concerned.”

  Neither Simon nor Garfunkel had the time to fret. Artie was already in his third year of graduate-level mathematics at Columbia, earning extra money by tutoring high schoolers. Paul still felt the buzz from his successful spring and summer in England, and passed the fall writing songs and setting up club dates, concerts, and a new place to stay for his return to London on January 15. Considering his prospects for the future, he had bought a one-way ticket. Given the number of friends he had in England, his passion for Kathy, and his growing reputation in the folk music world, it was hard to imagine what could compel him to return home.

  Back in London in January 1965, Paul launched into a schedule of dates he’d arranged that fall with a great deal of help from the friends and contacts he made during the previous year. The biggest leap in his British career had been engineered by Judith Piepe, the church social worker who had approached him at his final show in September. Piepe’s prominence at St. Ann’s and the Soho district in general had earned her a show on BBC Radio, Five to Ten, a lightly religious thought-of-the-day type of broadcast heard each day at 9:55 a.m., right between Housewives’ Choice and Music While You Work, two of the network’s most popular programs. After meeting Paul, Piepe had gone to work on her bosses at the BBC, insisting that this young man’s songs examined the same social and moral issues her program always pursued. She won them over, and less than a week after his return Piepe ushered Paul into the BBC studios to record songs she would play on a week’s worth of Five to Ten episodes.

  In an hour or two they had taped a handful of songs for the BBC’s consideration: “The Sound of Silence” along with “Bleecker Street,” “April Come She Will,” “Kathy’s Song,” “I Am a Rock,” a new song about drug addiction called “Bad News Feeling,” and “A Most Peculiar Man,” which Paul had written after reading a four-line obituary of a suicide victim. Paul voiced introductions for the songs, describing how he’d been inspired to write them, as a commentary on current events and the widespread social issues troubling the world at large. Not all aired, but the ones that did, just a week or two later, made an immediate impact. “Coming between Housewives Choice and this general light music thing [Five to Ten] was the spot where people go to put the kettle on for a cup of tea,” Piepe said. “One had the feeling of thousands of people standing in the doorway, kettle in hand, listening almost reluctantly. And we got snowed under with letters from people who wanted to know who was Paul Simon and where could his songs be bought on record.”

  When an A&R man at the British division of CBS Records asked the same question, he was surprised to discover that the path led back to his own company. Columbia Records in the United States was owned by the CBS corporation, so the British CBS label already had the right to release Simon and Garfunkel’s Wednesday Morning, 3 AM in the United Kingdom. Not certain if the interest kicked up by Five to Ten was strong enough to rate an entire album release, the CBS-UK executives cherry-picked four of the songs Paul played by himself on the Five to Ten performances and released them as an EP (an extended-play single, which was very common in England in those days). The company also contracted Paul to record a solo album for release that summer. Paul got a British publishing deal with Lorna Music (the company responsible for getting “Carlos Dominguez” to Val Doonican), and soon other artists started recording his songs. Guitarist John Renbourn covered “Leaves That Are Green” with American folk singer Dorris Henderson, singer-songwriter Harvey Andrews recorded “A Most Peculiar Man,” and the Irish pop group the Bachelors would soon take their melodramatic arrangement of “The Sound of Silence” to the UK Top 3. Paul also signed up with a young talent manager named Graham Wood, whose connections at the London music newspapers, in British television, and at clubs and concert halls around the Isles started paying off almost instantly.

  Yet Paul owed his greatest debt to Judith Piepe, who soon gave him an open-ended invitation to move into her East London flat. Rent was not a problem. The multibedroom apartment was subsidized by her employers at St. Ann’s Parish, provided she could take in some of the young drifters who turned up at St. Ann’s in search of lodging. The standard-issue drifters generally wound up on the living room floor; Piepe reserved the spare rooms for needy musicians who had impressed her with their talents. And Piepe had good ears. She had supported Cat Stevens during his struggling days, and when Paul moved in, he joined a fair-haired nineteen-year-old songwriter named Al Stewart and future Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny, who was dating the heavily scarred, hard-drinking American singer-songwriter Jackson C. Frank, who also had a room.

  A lot of talented people ended up crashing in Piepe’s flat during the 1960s, but once Paul came through the door in 1965, it didn’t take long for them all to realize who was their den mother’s favorite. The day Paul told Piepe he’d be delighted to move in, she knocked on Al Stewart’s door and told him he had to move into the smaller, darker room on the same hallway: Paul preferred a room with good light. Piepe’s guests made a habit of playing different games in the evening, but when it turned out that Paul liked to play Monopoly, all the other games went back up on the shelf. And if there were enough folks around to make a communal dinner, they didn’t settle on a menu until someone asked Paul what he felt like eating. Even Piepe’s eleven-year-old daughter, Ariel, who lived with her father in Southsea, could tell that Paul outranked her in her mother’s eyes. “He was the favored child, he got all the love and attention,” she says. Tempted to hate the interloper for taking her place, the girl decided instead to follow her mother under Paul’s spell. “In a completely Oedipal sense, if I wasn’t going to kill him, I had to love him,” she says. “If I was going to square up in my own life with her, somehow he had to be worth it.”

  What Ariel didn’t understand was how much her mother had in common with the American visitor. Born in 1920 to a well-to-do German couple named Fritz and Eugenia Sternberg, Judith had spent most of her life avoiding, and then revising, the facts of her past—and no wonder. Her mother committed suicide when Judith was three. Her father, a political economist and theorist who was still in his midtwenties when his wife died, was too busy building his career to tend to his daughter, so he left her in the care of her mother’s parents. Fritz’s leftist writings, along with his Jewish heritage, made him a natural target for the Nazis, and he soon fled to the United States, leaving his then-teenage daughter to make her own escape. Judith married young, divorced quickly, got a job teaching at a girls’ school, danced ballet, had an affair with the London Telegraph’s dance critic, and birthed and then lost his child. When that relationship ended, she married Tony Piepe, a much younger man with whom she had Ariel, in 1951. A distracted and unhappy mother with no community to rely upon, Judith converted to the Anglican Church and found a spiritual home at Soho’s socially progressive St. Ann’s Church.

  Along the way, she had traded her German accent for the delicate elocution of the educated British middle class, though she never quite got the weight of the Fatherland out of her vowels. Piepe didn’t mind exotic. Despite her stern mothering of Ariel and her old-school policies about keeping the unmarried couples apart at night, Judith smoked hashish with cheerful abandon and preferred the company of eccentrics. When someone asked about her childhood, she would speak at lengt
h about her past, describing her time in a Nazi concentration camp in the 1930s and then her daring escape to the Swiss border, which nearly came to a tragic end when she was captured by German police officers, who concluded, after a brief interview, that she would be executed in the ditch where she stood. Instead, she explained, a mysterious last-minute deal allowed her to cross to safety. Piepe had a whole other set of stories about her perilous days of driving battlefield ambulances during the Spanish Civil War, and they were every bit as thrilling—and, like her stories about Germany, complete fiction.

  * * *

  In June, Paul reported to Levy’s recording studio on Bond Street, where CBS staff producers Reginald Warburton and Stanley West oversaw the recording of his first solo album. The sessions couldn’t have been simpler: Paul played guitar and sang, and if it seemed necessary he’d tap his foot for percussion. On the EP, only “The Sound of Silence” and “He Was My Brother” repeat from Wednesday Morning, 3 AM. The rest of the songs had emerged during his months in England. And if the bare-bones production seems flat compared to the rerecordings that would come, it’s fascinating to realize that beyond the pair of civil rights tunes and the unfunny takedown of Bob Dylan that Paul called “A Simple Desultory Philippic,” all Songbook’s narrators and characters either confront or symbolize the meaninglessness of individual existence.

  The suicide at the center of “A Most Peculiar Man” makes such little impression on the world that his neighbors have next to no idea he was even alive. The heartbroken narrator of “I Am a Rock” has chosen to be just as isolated, and the narrator of “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall” not only can’t tell the difference between truth and illusion, but can’t recognize his own image in the mirror. “Patterns” compares the singer’s life to a rat stuck in a maze: “And the pattern never alters / Until the rat dies.” The antiwar song “The Side of a Hill” describes the accidental killing of a child in a bullet-pocked land, while “April Come She Will” and “Leaves That Are Green” portray the crumbling of love and life as being as inescapable as the changing of the seasons. Still, none is quite as cutting as “Kathy’s Song,” the most obviously autobiographical song on the album. Here Paul speaks directly to Kathy Chitty, the sole source of truth in his life. Without her presence, his intelligence, his talent as a musician and songwriter, his knowledge, his thoughts, and his beliefs fall to nothing. Alone, he peers into the void of a rainy night, notices the water dripping across the windowpane, and sees himself. “I know that I am like the rain,” he sings. “There but for the grace of you go I.”