Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  They also shared a taste for ridicule, particularly of people who invaded their need for autonomy and creative sanctuary. When The Graduate soundtrack exploded and Paul and Artie still hadn’t finished the new record they had titled Bookends, Clive Davis began talking about putting out a full greatest hits album to give fans, new and old alike, something to buy for the summer of 1968. Both aggravated by Davis’s penchant for squeezing money from their work, they asked for a meeting with the label president, and smuggled in a tape recorder they had used to capture the executive’s attempts to convince his treasured artists to help him satisfy his board of directors’ financial expectations. They took the secret recording to their next studio session and played it for everyone in the room. This led to derisive shrieks just like they had made on that high school afternoon when Paul jumped up to congratulate the unsuspecting winner of their Fattest Girl in the School contest.

  * * *

  In the recording studio, Paul’s and Artie’s roles meshed with the same trusting intimacy. Paul did the songwriting, and usually came into the studio with strong ideas about how the tunes should feel and sound. More often than not, though, he played his new songs to Artie before they went to recording sessions, and took his partner’s thoughts and suggestions seriously. Artie might tinker with the words or suggest a revision to the melody or the meter of a line, his ear tuned to making the lines more singable or open to different harmonic possibilities. Paul didn’t always take Artie’s suggestions, but he always listened, and usually came up with a way to resolve Artie’s concerns. While Paul played guitar or sang his parts, Artie would oversee his work from the control booth, guiding his partner with a stream of advice, coaching, and, when needed, criticism. To Eddie Simon, a regular observer of his brother’s recording sessions, Paul and Artie worked together like a great pitcher and catcher. Paul had the magical arm, but he still depended on Artie to call for the right pitches and haul in his wayward throws.

  At one 1967 session for “Punky’s Dilemma,”* the duo started by laying down Paul’s guitar part, and when that sounded okay Paul went back to the studio to work on his lead vocal. Somewhere between jazzy, jokey, laid-back, and bemused, the tune called for a warm but gently teasing tone, a voice balanced somewhere between graceful and conversational. It was more a mood than something you could put into words, and, as Paul sang, Artie monitored him through the glass, responding to his partner’s attempts with advice on the nuances of tone and giving specific notes on his rhythm and intonation. Frustration mounting—“It’s no good, I’m not into it”—Paul took off his headphones and suggested they work on some of the quirky sounds (“personality fills,” Paul called them) they wanted to scatter across the track. When Paul went out for a cigarette, Artie pressed John Simon† to make certain the finger snaps he’d asked for were recorded as if they were sonically translucent. Make it light, he instructed. “Almost as if it’s not there.”

  Once Paul and Artie had gained enough authority to take creative control over their records, they formed a production trio with engineer Roy Halee, whose mastery of sound and technology was matched by his eagerness to push the outer limits of recording techniques. They had come up with some distinctive techniques on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, but the Bookends sessions flew far beyond all their earlier recordings. Even after Paul had completed the bulk of the songs, he and Artie made a point of taking their time on every session, devoting hours to experiments that often led nowhere, then making it up to the studio musicians by taking them out for long, chatty meals with the union clock still running. When bassist Bill Crow—a contemporary of Lou Simon, whom Paul had hired for a few sessions—apologized for how little they had achieved that night, Paul just laughed. Columbia was paying for the sessions, and he was happy to stick it to the company given how little time it had allowed for them to record their first two albums.

  Both Paul and Artie went into the studio determined to give each song some new wrinkle in sound that would make their listeners shake their heads in wonder. This was increasingly de rigueur in that paisley year of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, but Paul had been experimenting with sound textures since the late 1950s and was no stranger to the workings of the control board. If it took time to figure out whether coat hangers on vibes, brushes across a tambourine, or maybe just a nice little trombone part would be a better fit for this bit of “Punky’s Dilemma,” they were not going to give a thought to how long it would take or how much it might cost.*

  Looking for a mod new sound for “Save the Life of My Child,” they got in touch with Robert Moog, an audio scientist who had created a computerized synthesizer that could make a wide array of unearthly shrieks and whines and burps you could play through a keyboard set to the twelve-note scale. Moog had never recorded with the thing before; he might not even have taken it out of his laboratory. And no wonder—the thing was huge, a miniature cityscape of switches, wires, and black boxes, all of which had to be connected just so before the speakers would emit the first yelp. It took hours to set up, with a good deal of connecting, disconnecting, reconnecting somewhere else, and on and on. But once Moog had it prepared, he could crank out astonishing new sounds: a kind of deep fuzz, an even deeper synthesized bass part that was halfway between an organ bass and an earthquake, a cell door–like crash, a kind of descending whistle, and more. And when they added Paul’s acoustic guitar, hand claps, percussion, cymbals, and a few snippets of a gospel choir, the record sounded like a 3D kaleidoscope, a furious tangle of red lights, radio squawks, anger, wonder, and something like terror, all revolving around the cry of a panicked mother.

  When they finally delivered the album to Clive Davis, just in time for the summer of 1968, he was so delighted with what he heard that he decided to enhance the package with a full-color poster, and also a brand-new price tag that was a full dollar above every other album in the record stores. Davis called it “variable pricing,” the basic notion of charging a premium for in-demand products. Paul and Artie, on the other hand, called it an outrage. “They were concerned about the consumers which was laudable,” Davis wrote in the mid-1970s. “I was concerned about the increasing cost of recording and a shrinking margin of profits.” So, as it turned out, Columbia wasn’t going to pick up the tab for all that time they’d spent in the studio, not by itself, at any rate. And maybe there was nothing Paul and Artie could do about it. But if their records were worth that much to the company, it was definitely time to start renegotiating their contract.

  Davis knew it was coming, and that was fine: business was business. But their attitude dismayed him. He loved their songs, for one thing: when he got home at the end of the day, the Columbia Records president would play Simon and Garfunkel albums like all the other fans, because Paul’s songs spoke to his soul. Davis was a few years older, but they had all followed the same path, outer-borough kids who had gotten themselves educated—Davis grew up in Brooklyn and had attended New York University and then Harvard Law School—fought their way into the record business and then to the top of their fields. Paul and Artie had resisted everything Davis proposed to them over the last year, but when they finally did go along with his plans, and every one of the executive’s far-fetched predictions—that The Graduate album would be a smash, that Bookends would follow suit, and that they’d come out of 1968 as superstars—came to pass, neither of the musicians ever acknowledged, let alone declared their appreciation for, what he had done for them. Instead, they had manager Mort Lewis renegotiate their contract, one that guaranteed them, among many other things, the then-exorbitant royalty rate of fifty cents per album sold.

  * * *

  Released on April 3, 1968, Bookends came into the world a day before Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder and eight weeks before the killing of the surging presidential candidate Democratic senator Robert F. Kennedy. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, of race riots, of the antiwar de
monstrations that spurred a bloody police riot outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In November, the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, won the presidency, due in part to his promised “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War, a scheme that required more guns, bombs, and anger. So, hey, look, what’s that sound? In 1968 it was nihilistic outrage amplified until it looped back on itself, the Doors’ psychedelic carousel spinning into the Who’s exploding guitars, the Grateful Dead’s acidic feedback jams, and the morning-after dissonance pervading the Beatles’ White Album—a collection of rock ’n’ roll songs that would soon be twisted into one madman’s vision for mass murder in the hills above Los Angeles. If all these happenings didn’t eat at your faith in the nation, society, and the existence of God, you probably weren’t paying attention.

  Bookends is a product of these same times, but its perspective, and anger, are refracted through layers of intellectual, artistic, and emotional remove. It was intended as a concept album about life’s course from childhood to adulthood to senescence, but the narrative structure never quite takes hold, due to Paul’s inability to produce the songs necessary to tell the story. Indeed, for an album many fans and critics call Simon and Garfunkel’s best, Bookends is a surprisingly grab bag affair. Of the twelve tracks on the record, only eight were previously unreleased, and one of them isn’t anything like a song (“Voices of Old People”). Two are different takes on the same tune (“Bookends Theme” and “Bookends”), and one (“Mrs. Robinson”) is an expanded version of a song from The Graduate soundtrack. Yet Bookends is packed with riches.

  Released as a single two days after the album, the finished “Mrs. Robinson” bulleted through the Hot 100 to the top spot, which it occupied for three weeks in June. Driven as much by its unexpected musical and lyrical textures as by the nation’s ongoing obsession with The Graduate, “Mrs. Robinson” played on AM radio’s maximum rotation for the entire summer and later became the first rock ’n’ roll tune ever to win Record of the Year honors from the starchy members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.* Like so many era-defining hits, the record sounded nothing like anything else in the Hot 100. From the start, the music feels slightly off-kilter, the opening guitar riff spiraling out of a Latin shuffle that pulls the verses through a loop of spiky chords that take flight into the ringing “Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson” chorus, which holds until the whoa-whoa-whoas pull us back to the slap of the congas. The song’s lyric extends The Graduate’s story in flights of cryptic satire. Mrs. Robinson has been relocated to a vaguely Orwellian mental institution. “We’d like to help you learn to help yourself,” the doctors promise, but what’s waiting for her on the other side of the wall? Politics, religion, society’s empty rituals—welcome to the America of 1968. Only, it wasn’t always like this, not back in the not-so-long-ago times when the nation’s ideals were alive all around us, even (especially?) in the great American ballpark, back where the uniforms were baggy but backs were strong, eyes clear, and spirits pure. Of course Paul’s mind spun back to Yankee Stadium. Gehrig, Mantle, DiMaggio—they don’t make ’em like that anymore, do they? “Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away, / Hey hey hey.”

  The same yearning animates “America,” the other great highlight on the album. While “Mrs. Robinson” is social commentary dressed up as a character study, “America” is the opposite: an internal journey that presents itself as a portrait of a spiritually lost, postidealistic nation. The lyrics—which contain a total of zero rhymes, for which Paul is proud, and rightfully so: the narrative is so consuming that the structural obligations cease to matter—open on a tale of two casual lovers jumping a Greyhound bus from the upper Midwest. Paul sings in the first person and identifies his lover as Kathy, as if he’s confiding details from an actual journey taken with the girlfriend who meant so much to him during his prefame days in London. And there they are, stocking up on junk food, magazines, and cigarettes, then finding their seats as the bus rumbles out of the station and onto the highway. They chat, read, and watch the scenery pass, all in pursuit of some indistinct vision of the American ideal. But as we reach the final verse, he confesses that the crisis of faith he’s experiencing is rooted within, not around him. “Kathy I’m lost,” he tells her. “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.” Empty and aching and unable to connect to anyone or anything—he can confide in Kathy only when he knows she’s asleep. And when he notices the drivers of the cars around him, realizing that they’re all speeding toward New York City, the traditional destination for immigrants, pilgrims, and other seekers, he realizes that the one thing that connects them amounts to E Pluribus Unum in reverse: an entire nation bound only by its citizens’ alienation from one another.

  There it is again, that same sense of desolation, the emptiness within, the bleakness without, the nauseating understanding that your entire existence amounts to little more than a cloud of dust and static cling. “Voices of Old People” is an audio vérité montage of elderly folks talking about their lives, the shattered stretch that leads to the end of the road. More interesting in concept than in execution, the Artie-curated snippets go on for two minutes and twelve seconds that would have been better spent on nearly anything else. There are grimmer revelations to come: the spiritually withered heir in “Fakin’ It,” the young codger shivering through “A Hazy Shade of Winter,” and the couple in the surgically precise description of a terminal love affair in “Overs” (“We’re just a habit, like saccharine”). The desolation becomes most vivid in the mini-suite of the title track and in “Old Friends,” both of which at least sound like they could be about good times and sweet memories. But of course not.

  “Old Friends” opens with acoustic guitar and distant strings that grow steadily more elaborate before gaining horns and percussion to fill a lengthy instrumental break that veers from melodrama to Metropolis-like horrors before fading into the background. The intensity in the orchestral arrangement (by conductor/arranger Jimmie Haskell) is drawn from the lyrics, which describe a pair of septuagenarians sitting together in a city park. Given no sense of their lives, we know the men only by their desolate appearance. Paul’s lyrics are dense with subtext. The old men don’t notice the newspaper scuttling through the grass. The shouts and honks of their inheritors float by unheard. The men wear old-timey shoes and overcoats like funeral shrouds. “Winter companions … waiting for the sunset.” Remember the lonely drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike? Here they are again, too old to do anything of an afternoon but share their silent dread of the approaching darkness. Paul turns the feeling outward as “Old Friends” ends and the “Bookends Theme” rises. Singing in close word-for-word harmony, Paul and Artie mourn a sweeter moment, “a time of innocence, a time of confidences,” that describes the start of their own friendship, a love affair, or something much larger than that. Are they using “confidences” to describe secrets once shared between friends, or the assurance of a society still basking in its hard-won triumph in World War II? Ultimately it doesn’t matter: as the old friends can attest, everything that matters to you will soon vanish. “Preserve your memories / They’re all that’s left you.”

  But the zenith of Paul’s infatuation with nothingness comes in “Save the Life of My Child,” the small epic that opens Bookends’ first side. As befitting their sonic backdrop, the lyrics begin in a recognizable urban scene and end in surrealism. A boy on a rooftop has threatened to jump. A mob gathers beneath, and the scene is soon bristling with police, firemen, and predatory tabloid reporters. We’ve seen this before. The barricades and orbiting red-and-blues, the electrified crowd, the wails of the panicked mother. Someone passes out and is carried away. The crowd blames drugs, cops blame the kids these days, and there we are again, poised on the threshold of a nightmare and unable to do anything except argue about whose fault it is. “Oh, what’s becoming of the children, people asking each other.”

  Go back a decade, read Philip Roth’s short story “The Conversion of the Jews”: the
same rooftop, the frantic child, the mob, the cops, the hook-and-ladder, firefighters, and lifesaving nets. But while “Save the Life of My Child” focuses on contemporary social problems, Roth’s vision traces the boy’s crisis to God and the irreconcilable contradictions of religion. The story focuses on Ozzie, a bar mitzvah student who wants the rabbi to explain why God would be capable of creating heaven, earth, and light—Ozzie is particularly hung up on light—in six days and yet not be able to impregnate a mortal woman with His son? And if so, how can we say Jesus couldn’t possibly be the son of God? Unable to answer Ozzie’s question, the rabbi, the boy’s mother, and other authority figures lash out physically and emotionally, until the boy bolts from class and finds refuge on the roof of the synagogue. Cue the crowd, the cops et al., and when Ozzie realizes how desperate they are to keep him alive, he orders the rabbi, his mother, and the entire crowd to fall to their knees and declare their belief in Jesus Christ. Transformed into a prophet, Ozzie leaps into the night, falling securely into the bright yellow safety net the firemen have been holding up to spare his life.

  Published originally in the New Yorker (and then as the second story in Roth’s first collection, Goodbye, Columbus), “The Conversion of the Jews” was greeted by many observant Jews as apostasy, a work troubling enough to require debates, public forums, and repeated denunciations. Yet, as signaled by Ozzie’s infatuation with light, the story celebrates even its most hidebound Jewish characters as true people of God. Given the choice between the strictures of their faith and God’s creation, they choose the boy, an act of mercy that affirms God’s presence even as it reveals the flaws in the conventions of His followers.