Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  The bleakness that had stalked Paul since he was an adolescent had never really cleared, the bitter fog drifting behind his eyes, taking hold even in the least likely moments. At the end of one Sunday evening during the Simon and Garfunkel tour in 1969, Hal Blaine had seen Paul leaving the dressing room with his cheeks radiant from the performance, joking and laughing until he glimpsed a solitary custodian sweeping up the garbage that had been left in the arena’s empty seats. Paul stopped abruptly. “Did you see that?” Paul asked the others. It’s Sunday night; that guy should be home with his family, but now he’s all alone picking up garbage all night. It seemed cruel, all the loneliness in the world. His shoulders stooped, Paul shrank inside himself, and when everyone else went for a drink, he slipped into his room and hung out the Do Not Disturb card.

  He started seeing a therapist. The actor Elliott Gould had a guy he liked, and Paul grabbed at him like a drowning man, booking four sessions a week to unpack everything he’d been lugging around, just to get to the point where he could have it organized enough to move a little more freely inside his head. He managed to cut it down to three visits a week by mid-1970, but there was still plenty of work to do: the Artie mess, Paul’s desperation to strike out on his own, and the terror of what might happen if he did. Maybe he should form a band instead? Or, as his father continued to insist, follow his example and build a more meaningful career in education? Teach! Teach! Paul didn’t let the old man push him around, but he also couldn’t help wondering, especially when it seemed that he’d lost his sense of direction.

  * * *

  Right around the time Artie unleashed his secret about Carnal Knowledge during the fall of 1969, Paul had gotten in touch with music department administrators at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and New York University to see if any of them would sponsor a workshop class in songwriting that he wanted to teach. Columbia turned him away, but the other two institutions loved the idea, and eventually Paul chose to go with NYU, due in large part to his relationship with David Oppenheim, who had left public television to run the university’s arts department.

  The memo Oppenheim had his staff post around the arts buildings sketched the specifics. “Paul Simon of Simon and Garfunkel has offered to teach a course in how to write and record a popular song,” it began. The class size would be limited, and all students would be selected by the instructor. The uncredited class would start in February and meet on Tuesday evenings until the end of the term in May. You didn’t have to be an NYU student to be considered, but only practicing songwriters with music and/or lyrics on hand should apply.

  Articles about the class turned up in the Village Voice, along with Billboard and other music publications, and Paul read through the applications and set up auditions based both on the uniqueness of the students’ work and on whether he thought he’d like them enough to spend three hours in their company each week. Oppenheim brought into the meetings (and the workshop) Jeffrey Sweet, a student who had won a coveted spot in Broadway musical composer Lehman Engel’s private theatrical music writing class, and he recommended Paul give a listen to some songs written by a recent NYU acting school dropout named Melissa Manchester, and Paul liked what he heard. When a pair of teenage sisters from New Jersey buttonholed him on campus just before the start of the first class, Paul steered them into an empty classroom and let them play a few of their original songs, including one that impressed him so much he invited them to stick around for the class, and then Maggie and Terre Roche were in the course, too.

  The class began with the start of NYU’s spring semester in January 1970, with the just-released Bridge Over Troubled Water rocketing up the album charts. Paul sat on the floor with his students and told them how their class would work. He had no idea what he was doing, he said, so it would be an experiment for all of them. When someone asked if he was getting paid, Paul shrugged—he wasn’t sure; he didn’t really care. The only thing he knew for certain was that they’d have to take a two-week break in late April so he and Artie could play shows in England and Europe. Other than that, they’d all figure things out as they went along.

  Eventually the class found its form. Each week, one or two students would hand around a set of lyrics and then perform their latest work. Paul read along, and when they finished, he’d have them play it again, and sometimes a third time. When he was sure he’d absorbed the song, he’d offer thoughts ranging from the general (“Part of the learning process is to imitate first”) to the very specific (“For staccato music you should have more dentalized sounds … more t’s and d’s”). He got bored quickly, and loved being surprised by an odd turn of phrase or a piercing image drawn from real life. When Melissa Manchester sang the phrase “laughing lagoons” in one of her songs, he suggested she change it to “laughing da goons” because it sounded more interesting. When another student’s lyrics struck him as flat, Paul told her to get a Bible; it was packed with odd, memorable phrases. “Just steal them,” he said. “That’s what they’re for.”

  Paul was particularly struck by the Roche sisters. Their song “Malachy’s” had leaped out when they played it during their impromptu audition, and the lyric about weathering a tough set in an Upper East Side club rang so true that it brought him back to when he and Artie had to sing above the disinterested crowd at Gerde’s. After the first class, he offered to drive the sisters back to the George Washington Bridge terminal so they could catch their bus back to the New Jersey suburbs. He was in his sports car that night, a two-seater with barely room for two people and a suitcase, but they all jammed in, and as they rumbled uptown he alternated slinging compliments and insults in a way that made Terre Roche think he didn’t like them very much after all. They were pretty good but nowhere near as good as they probably thought, he said. He turned to elder sister Maggie: Did she think she was as good a songwriter as Paul McCartney? She figured she was, and he gave her a sour look. “You’re not.” He dropped them at the station without a good-bye, but when they turned up at the next week’s class, he greeted them with a smile.

  So it went through the winter and spring. Off campus, Bridge Over Troubled Water dominated the airwaves and record stores, rapidly moving from being a hit to being a cultural milestone. But the adjunct instructor who came into NYU’s music building each Tuesday, dressed most often in jeans, a T-shirt, a sweater, and a heavy hooded parka that looked like army surplus, didn’t seem to pay much mind. He’d shuck his coat, find a seat, maybe talk about a song or two that had caught his ear on the radio, then invite the evening’s first presenter to play his or her latest tune. One week, he borrowed a guitar to play a fragment of a tune he’d just started to write, talking in detail about how it had come to him and where he thought it might go next. He’d think for a moment and try a chord or two. Did that sound like the right move? He’d try another chord, take it in another direction. What about that? Or how about this? “My sense was that he was searching himself,” Manchester says. “He understood that the writer’s mind is a muscle. It had to be trained to know how to play, how to get free.”

  Some weeks, Paul brought in special guests. One week it was Al Kooper, then the violinist Isaac Stern, who spent much of the time defending the character of classical music, assuming the young students all despised it. For the final session, Paul booked an entire day at the Columbia Records studios on West Fifty-Second Street, complete with an engineer and studio musicians so he could demonstrate how to turn a song into a finished commercial recording. The day was a whirlwind of studio preparations, arrangement scribbling, and overdub after overdub. A small camera crew tracked every move. The camera’s lens would hover inches from Paul’s face and, as Terre Roche recalled, he’d continue without flinching, without seeming to notice anything beyond the music in his ears and the space between what he was hearing and what he wanted to hear.

  * * *

  As the summer of 1970 fell to autumn, with no Simon and Garfunkel projects or tour dates anywhere in sight, it was hard to figu
re out what Paul should, or could, do next. He and Peggy were living in a brownstone near Central Park, on East Ninety-Fourth Street, having taken over a three-floor residence once owned by classical guitarist Andrés Segovia. Dark and still, filled with books and Tiffany lamps—Paul collected them—the place was much homier than the modern duplex he’d been in for most of the S&G years. Peggy read Gloria Steinem and pursued her interests in visual design and photography, but she was also the product of a strict, if troubled, family from a Bible-bred section of Tennessee, and took naturally to the role of the stay-at-home wife—albeit a wife who had no patience for a husband who kept complaining that he didn’t have anything to do. “You can’t just sit here,” she’d tell him. “Go to the office, do something!”

  If his term at NYU had taught Paul anything, it was that he wasn’t ready to obey his father’s wishes and toss aside his music career for the life of an academic. The songwriting workshop had its pleasures, but those were less about pedagogy than about being able to hang out with a handful of younger songwriters, hear their work, and, by passing along what he’d learned about songcraft, gain a different kind of insight into his own artistry. Paul had been writing steadily through the year, tapping into a stream of emotionally raw tunes that were faster and funkier than the songs he’d written for Simon and Garfunkel. No longer compelled to steer his songs toward Artie’s voice and tastes, he went back to the street corner singers and gospel/soul records that had first spun his head around when he was a teenager, the Latin swing from uptown and the rhythm and blues that had pulled his eyes away from his box score that summer morning when he was eleven.

  In late 1970 he went to see Clive Davis to tell him that he was about to record a new album. The only catch was that he wasn’t going to be working with Artie—definitely not this time, but probably not ever again. Davis, realizing that Columbia’s biggest act (all music’s biggest act, actually) had called it quits on him, responded badly. “Well, that’s the biggest mistake you could make,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how good your solo records are, none of them will ever sell like a Simon and Garfunkel album.” Paul, already dreading the prospect of not being able to make hits on his own, got just as upset. That might be true, he shot back, but it was also possible that one day Simon and Garfunkel would be a footnote in the story of his solo career. Davis didn’t disagree, exactly, but he also knew how the industry, and the world, worked. There were artists, but then there were institutions, and the former was never going to add up to anything close to the latter. That was just how the world worked. “I did try to reason with him,” Davis says. “Do an occasional solo album, fine. Just keep the institution alive. So there was definitely a disagreement there. But there was never any guile to it, there was never a disguise. He knew that I was always going to be honest with him.” And maybe that’s what Paul resented the most.

  At first Paul thought about forming a band. When he called London-based (but American-born) blues guitarist Stefan Grossman to ask if he’d play on his new album, Paul also mentioned the possibility of starting a long-term collaboration with a couple of other musicians, but the talk ended there. Instead, Paul let the songs dictate who would play them. In December he traveled to San Francisco, where Roy Halee had relocated to set up a state-of-the-art recording studio for the Columbia Records artists who didn’t feel like working in New York or Los Angeles. With a top-flight band made up of Stax bassist Duck Dunn, rock/jazz/blues keyboardist Mike Finnigan, and the versatile drummer George Marsh waiting to make music, Paul sifted through his tunes with Halee and got started. He ran through early versions of “Duncan” and “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” with the studio musicians, then spent some time working with Blood, Sweat, and Tears, the chart-topping jazz-rock group Al Kooper had formed (only to be forced out just before they became successful). When Rolling Stone writer Ben Fong-Torres came to check in after the first week of sessions, Paul confessed that the days had so far been fruitless. “I’ve gotten nowhere,” he said. “Magic doesn’t happen on a schedule.”

  Paul also didn’t hide from Fong-Torres that he was working on a solo album, his first without Artie since the UK-only Paul Simon Songbook in 1965. “Partly I’m looking forward to it just for fun, and partly as a manifestation of Artie’s movie commitment,” he said, going on to keep the Simon and Garfunkel door ajar, or perhaps to ease Clive Davis’s mind for just a little while. “When I finish with this he’ll probably be finished with the movie, and I’ll think about doing something else.” But Paul was much more excited to talk about where he was heading. “Maybe Nashville. Or Jamaica.”

  Jamaica? That was unexpected, coming from a folk-singing Jewish intellectual from New York City. But Paul had been entranced by the island’s offbeat bop since he heard it in London in the mid-1960s. The Skatalites, the Maytals, and Don Drummond had hits on the UK charts then, and their music’s chattering bang-bang got under his skin. He’d tried to capture it for “Why Don’t You Write Me” during the Bridge sessions, but while Hal Blaine had no problem mastering the cadence, and the rest of the musicians could follow him anywhere, something about it still rang hollow to Paul—an essence they couldn’t capture in the sterile confines of a state-of-the-art studio in Los Angeles. Still itching to feel that pulse in his chest, Paul thought again about “El Condor Pasa,” how he’d found the Chilean sound by repurposing Los Incas’s original track for his own lyrics and S&G’s vocals. Only, instead of using a prerecorded track, he’d sketch out an original tune and take it down to where the sound originated, where he could put it into the hands of the musicians who really lived by the rhythm they wrote and played.

  Paul got in touch with Leslie Kong, producer of dozens of hits for Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, and Bob Marley, hoping to track down the guitarist who had played on Cliff’s 1968 single “Vietnam.” That turned out to be Huks Brown, lead guitarist for Toots and the Maytals and part of the house band at Dynamic Sounds, the Kingston recording studio that had produced most of the significant records by Cliff, the Maytals, and Marley. Kong helped him book three days at Dynamic with Brown and a band made up primarily of Maytals members, and Paul was on his way—but not without a few anxieties. How could he, a white American pop star, jet to Jamaica and expect the local musicians to share with him the music style they had invented? It was easy to imagine they’d look at him like a thief, a musical carpetbagger stopping by just long enough to copy the most valuable thing they had, take it back to New York, and add it to his fortune.

  Yet when he got to Kingston and walked into Dynamic Sounds, he was greeted with smiles and the traditional celebratory herb. The studio had a fairly rustic setup, but the spirit within the red, orange, and yellow walls more than made up for whatever technical flaws the room contained. To get things started, Paul took his guitar into the studio to show the basic chords and structure of his tune, then retreated to the control booth to run the musicians through a few takes, then a few more. They were making progress, but as the hours passed, Paul couldn’t help noticing that Brown and his compatriots had started muttering and scowling. Soon he learned why: in Kingston, musicians got paid by the song, usually somewhere between seven and ten dollars per finished track. Given how quickly most producers wanted to work, it was decent pay. They had never even heard of someone who would want to stay on one tune all day long. Once someone clued Paul in, he called the musicians together and said he’d pay them as if they’d finished three songs each day, and the smiles and herb were back right away. The song still needed work—it didn’t have words yet, for one thing—but when he flew back to New York a few days later, Paul had the foundations of a track that sounded nothing like any song he’d ever recorded before, and also a style of working that would lead him in directions no one, including Paul, would have thought possible.

  Over the next few months, Paul worked mostly in Columbia’s studios in New York, recording a variety of understated tunes in styles ranging from front porch blues to Latin to art pop and beyond. He spent
ten days in San Francisco trying to record “Congratulations,” and came away with nothing but a drum sound for the tune. Grossman spent more weeks recording in New York and Los Angeles, playing lead guitar parts on songs that included “Paranoia Blues,” which, unbeknownst to him, Paul had also recorded with blues/folk guitar and mandolin player David Bromberg playing the lead part. Grossman is featured on the finished track, but nothing else he played over the weeks made it onto the album. Grossman, a seasoned studio player, knew better than to indulge himself with hurt feelings. “He paid for everything and really took care of us. First-class everything. And he’s a lovely guy … he’s trying to get something from you that you didn’t know you had.”

  Flying to Paris to record a new backing track with Los Incas, Paul set up a recording session with the jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt’s collaborator for many years, to work on a song called “Papa Hobo.” They had a famous time together, and when Paul went back to listen to what they had recorded he realized that the violinist had stretched out one of his breaks into an eighty-second-long digression that sounded so good he decided to stick it somewhere on the record. Mike Tannen, who had gone with him to France, proposed another idea: Paul could give the fiddle-led vignette a name, credit Grappelli as a cowriter, and it would still earn them publishing royalties as with any other song. Paul liked the sound of that, almost as much as he liked the prospect of having his name on a song with a musician whose name could also be found beneath the titles of some of the most influential music recorded during the twentieth century.