Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  As Landau wrote in his review for the Boston Phoenix, this was where the show turned magical. (“Imagine an American gospel group singing backup to a white folksinger’s reggae tune,” he wrote. “Even more difficult, imagine Simon pulling the thing off as if he was born to do it.”) Starting with “Mother and Child Reunion,” they moved into a six-voice arrangement of “The Sound of Silence,” the group laying their rich harmonies behind Paul’s lead. Paul left the stage so the group could perform two of their own songs, then returned for the evening’s climax, an arrangement of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” reminiscent of the gospel version Aretha Franklin recorded in 1971, which sounded fiery enough to be a completely different song. Built around Dixon’s church organ and Paul’s guitar, with the Dixon group’s bass and drums playing softly behind, the arrangement is slower than the original, the choir stepping in and out to echo some lines and joining in unison to emphasize others. The group plays in full force for the final verse, then softens into the start of a coda featuring Paul and one of the women repeating variations of “I will ease your mind.” Harmonizing here, echoing one another there, spurring Paul to a few shouted repetitions, his voice rising before melting back into the other singers’ arms for a round of “I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe I will ease your mind,” then “I believe, I believe, I really do believe,” and then drifting into one final unadorned “I believe, I believe I really do believe, I will ease your mind.” It was, Landau wrote, “a rare, privileged moment, a musical experience of the type I had forgotten takes place on the stages of rock concerts.”

  Landau concluded his review by noting how different Paul’s voice sounded when in the company of the gospel singers on “Bridge.” No longer hemmed in by his own seriousness and the restrictions of two-voice close harmony, he’d become a new singer. Free of inhibition, liberated from the complexities of his own mind, so lost in feeling that thinking was beside the point. “Perhaps sometime in the future he will elect to do more with it.”

  Separated into monthlong (give or take) legs, the Rhymin’ tour continued for a year, starting with a few weeks in American concert halls in May and then heading to London for a handful of shows at the Royal Albert Hall, then returning to New York in early June for a one-nighter on a larger bill at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum. A set of American college dates ran through the fall, followed in April by Paul’s first performances in Japan.

  * * *

  Even from the start, Paul and Peggy made an unlikely match: the New York City–raised artist/celebrity and the church-raised girl from Bybee, Tennessee. Paul’s life in Manhattan, including the professional artist part, flowed naturally from his childhood, while Peggy, even after fifteen years of being among (and married to) show business professionals, continued to feel like an outsider in the nightclubs, dressing rooms, and penthouse apartments. As Paul grew more comfortable in his fame, and more familiar with the movie stars he’d met through Mike Nichols in New York and during his own long stays in Los Angeles, the couple’s bond grew strained. Paul was always an attentive father. His job required him to be away from home—Peggy had always known that—but when he was home he treasured his time with toddler Harper. Yet there was a basic incompatibility between husband and wife. The runaway child of the chaotic southern family craved structure, and the dutiful son of the aspiring immigrant family was dying to cut loose.

  The split was nearly as amiable as a divorce could be. Paul got Mike Tannen to represent his side in the settlement, and also asked him to help Peggy hire a good lawyer to make her case. It sounds more manipulative than it turned out to be, given that Tannen hired Gertrude Mainzer, a Holocaust survivor known for being a fierce advocate in the courtroom. Paul moved into the Stanhope Hotel for a few months before buying a Central Park West apartment, a close walk from the family’s town house on Ninety-Fourth Street, making it easy for them to share custody of Harper. The arrangement also made it easy for Paul to expand his social life, moving into a nighttime circuit of actors, musicians, and writers that ran through spotlit premieres, celebrity-rich after-parties, and Elaine’s, the exclusive dining room on Second Avenue on the Upper East Side. On wilder nights he might find himself on the shiny dance floors and shadowed nooks of Studio 54, fast on its way to becoming the hottest discotheque in the world. Soon Paul’s well-known face was spotted in the company of starlets and other enchanting women, including the rising bistro singer/actress Bette Midler, movie actress Shelley Duvall, Saturday Night Live performer Gilda Radner, and the celebrity portraitist Edie Baskin, who would lead him into the center of another set of tastemakers. Paul became accustomed to riding in a chauffeured Cadillac limousine, a luxury that made him feel like a character in a film about high society. “You pull up in front of a place, just like in the movies, and when you get out the driver is there waiting for you. It’s the New York dream come true.”

  Many nights, Paul preferred to stay in his apartment, reading and playing with Harper or, if the energy was going his way, discovering the form of a new song. When Paul’s grasp on his music slipped, so did he, spinning into days of free-associating gloom, fretting over whatever consumed him at the moment. Maybe it was all a cover for the hot bolts he’d been feeling inside his left index finger, the captain among the five digits that coaxed music from the neck of his guitar. He’d had to take regular cortisone shots to dull the bite during the Rhymin’ tour, and when he took it to his doctor, the news wasn’t good. He’d developed calcium deposits, which not only hurt but also made his finger stiff and clumsy. Back home after the tour ended in mid-1974, he found that the only treatment his doctor could offer was rest, and lots of it. And it wasn’t working.

  How could he lead a life that didn’t have a guitar at its center? For twenty years the instrument had been his dreamcatcher, his coal mine, his pot of gold. Virtually everything that mattered to him came through the mouth of his guitar. In a life built around change, it was the most crucial constant. Yet Paul was surprisingly sanguine. He took singing lessons. He boned up on orchestration. Most significantly, he studied music theory and composition. He had always drawn from a broader palette than the other rock/folk songwriters—being raised in a house filled with jazz and the great symphonies had given him a taste for structural complexity and hepcat intervals that most folk, rock, and blues-inspired writers wouldn’t imagine. And that only made Paul keenly aware of everything he didn’t know about music, particularly when his pen got stuck mid-song and he had no idea where to jump next.

  Paul called Phil Ramone, the producer who had been so integral to There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, asking if he knew an educated musician who could help open some new doors in Paul’s songwriting ability. The tiny world being what it is, Ramone put Paul in touch with Chuck Israels, the music camp instructor whom Paul met during his summer in Stockbridge in 1967. Israels was already a schooled musician back then, but his skill and reputation had grown over the years, and Paul was happy to submit to his tutelage. They started meeting regularly at Paul’s apartment on Central Park West, Paul paying a hundred dollars a session (a fantastic sum for an hour-long lesson in those days) for Israels to detail the essentials of music composition—repetition, sequence, inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion, augmentation, diminishment, and so on—to ease his way when his pen got stuck during a writing session. Not that Paul hadn’t already incorporated those techniques into his songs; he’d just done it intuitively—which was great until his muse sputtered, reducing him to something like a blind man groping his way through a maze.

  Reading music or being able to write in notation still held next to no interest for him. He was after some new writing techniques and a more strategic approach that would help him understand what he already had, recognize its melodic patterns, and let them reveal the way into new sections that grew naturally from themes that had been established in the song’s earliest bars. Israels had other tricks, such as knowing when it was best to skip a troublesome section in order to write the end, thereby allowing Pa
ul to return to the tough spot already knowing where it was headed. Appearing on Dick Cavett’s late-night talk show in the midst of his studies, Paul took up his guitar to play the start of a song that was so lightly sketched it didn’t even have a name. All he had, Paul demonstrated, were two verses about meeting an old girlfriend on the street, going out for a beer, and then going home to reflect on his inability to change. Both verses ended with the same line: “Still crazy after all these years.” And while he had no idea where the story would go next, he said, he already knew what his musical choices were, and why they made sense. And he looked really happy about it.

  Paul was so delighted with what Israels had taught him, he began to incorporate the bassist/composer into other parts of his life. Invited to a party at Paul’s apartment, Israels found himself standing between Shelley Duvall, Mike Nichols, the actor Peter Boyle (then costarring in the smash comedy Young Frankenstein), and the British actor/writer Eric Idle, whose innovative troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus was rewriting the rules of comedy on both sides of the ocean. They all seemed nice and welcoming—Israels was Paul’s guest; it was clear to them that he belonged—but the speed and complexity of their repartee left him speechless. Israels’s parents were important musicians and teachers, too; his kid brother’s godfather was Paul Robeson. He came home one afternoon to find Lead Belly sitting at the family’s kitchen table, feasting on a chocolate cake that he washed down with glasses of Muscatel. Israels had also been an early protégé of eventual Simon and Garfunkel producer Tom Wilson, who had the college-age bassist play on sessions with Art Blakey, Hank Mobley, and other leading jazz players of the era. It was not a slow-moving crowd. But among Paul’s friends that night, it was all Israels could do to keep a handle on his wineglass. “I know I’m smart, I know I’m educated,” he says. “Generally I can hold my own. But around those people I’m a blithering idiot.”

  If Paul noticed, he didn’t care. As he continued to write songs for the new album, he turned to Israels repeatedly for help, coming to him with songs that were half-written, maybe just in chunks, using his teacher to analyze what he had and to suggest where he might go next. When the recording started, he’d have Israels come to the studio, and once Ramone got to know him better, the producer grew fond of him, too. They asked Israels to write an arrangement for one of the songs, and though Israels didn’t hit the mark, Paul and Ramone kept inviting him to sessions, introducing him to other musicians and producers, and telling them what a great musician and writer he was. It occurred to Israels how eager Paul was to get him hooked into his circuit of successful musicians and producers, to put him in a position where he could work at the top of his game and make the kind of money top-caliber musicians deserve to make. When the album was nearly finished, Paul asked Israels if he wanted cowrite status on any of the songs he had helped Paul write. Israels demurred: he hadn’t written anything, he’d only shown Paul some options. But the gesture was just as meaningful as it was unexpected.

  Most often, Paul’s recording process moved at a glacial pace. He’d fill the studio with a handful of New York’s best rock and jazz players and do his usual thing of showing them the outlines of the day’s song, then describing how he wanted the tune to feel. The players would figure out the rest for themselves, digging into their own sack of riffs to fill the groove Paul yearned to hear. It was never an efficient process, but as long as the ideas flowed Paul was delighted to spend the day hearing his music being shaped by such graceful hands. The musicians were delighted, too; Paul paid far more than union rates, and even if he didn’t end up using their work simply having a Paul Simon session on your résumé was a prized accomplishment. Everyone knew that Paul Simon worked only with the best, most distinctive players.

  The day’s recording sessions were often just the start of the gig. Paul grew close to the people he worked with, and when the sessions ended he and Ramone would sweep up a few folks and take them to dinner at the House of Chan, a cloth napkin Chinese restaurant that had been an institution in Midtown for decades, and which happened to be on the same corner of Seventh Avenue where Ramone’s A&R Studios were. They’d stay late, hanging with whatever friends or celebrities happened to drop by, all of them eager to talk in depth about the pursuit of the elusive perfect drum sound, or which studio had truly capable tech guys available at 3:00 a.m., which publicists could get a story on the cover of Rolling Stone, and how much Fleetwood Mac really got in that new contract from Warner Bros. And Paul was the center of it all, the most valuable player, the home run king circling the bases with that spark in his eye.

  Oh, to be young and rich and famous and admired by Casey Kasem and Leonard Bernstein, Neil Sedaka and Isaac Stern, People magazine and E. L. Doctorow. There was nobody else to be, no other city that was better, no better street in a better neighborhood, no speedier private elevator to a better-appointed duplex with a better view of Central Park. Nor a sleeker art deco piano or more tasteful selection of modern art and minimalist, yet comfortable furniture. No cuter son or friendlier ex situated more conveniently, no better recording studios just a short hop, skip, and limousine ride away. And yet, and yet, and yet.

  CHAPTER 16

  THROUGH NO FAULT OF MY OWN

  The possibility always dangled between them. Whenever they had dinner or trooped together past the photographers outside a premiere or a party, they decided to go to together. It was never just Paul and Artie having a night out. Because look, everyone, it’s Simon and Garfunkel! Passersby would stop and point, they’d go away to tell their friends what they had just seen: I thought those guys hated each other, but I just saw them together outside the Ziegfeld, and it sure looked like they were having a great time … Even when they were alone, hanging around in one or the other’s apartment, they’d get in a mood and sing a few tunes, something by the Everlys, Sam Cooke, whatever—and there it was again, that sound they could only make together.

  The half decade of independence had eased the friction between them. Paul and Artie had kept in touch for most of the time; it would have been difficult to avoid each other even if they had wanted to, given the many friends and colleagues they had in common. They orbited the same professional loop, too, since they were both still recording for Columbia Records. When Artie performed at a Columbia sales conference at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles while promoting his first solo record in 1973, Paul, who was there to prime the pump for There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, chased him down just after his set to tell Artie that he needed to work on his between-song patter. “Paul always gives you a critical rundown,” Artie said a few months later.

  When Paul had digested Artie’s solo work, he fixed immediately on what bothered him the most: the songs were nowhere near as smart as the Artie he knew. Garfunkel had fallen in with pop songwriters and producers who smoothed everything down to a chromium sheen. So pretty, and so empty. What he needed, Paul was sure, was a new song that was just as dark and complex as Artie was. So he set himself to writing just that song.

  Actually, Paul had been working on “My Little Town” for months, intending to put it on his own new album. When it seemed the tune wouldn’t fit with the rest of the album’s tunes, he took it to Artie, who had already heard Paul play it in an earlier form. At first it seemed like Paul wanted to hand off the song and be done with it—do with this whatever you like. But when he was teaching it to Artie, they started to sing it together, slipping into their usual blend, harmonies and all. And when Artie’s suspicion that Paul would end up wanting the song back turned out to be right, they started thinking about how they might pull it off together as an old-fashioned Simon and Garfunkel song. Would Paul produce it with Phil Ramone, or would he coproduce with Artie? And if they did that, should they bring in Roy Halee, who had worked on every other song they had recorded? And if they had a finished Simon and Garfunkel song, they’d have to figure out how to release it. Just on Artie’s new album, or on Paul’s? Should they put it on both their albums, or make it a stand-alone Simon and
Garfunkel single? Or maybe it should be part of something else altogether.

  Eventually they decided to put the song on both their albums, and to release the records on the same day, so they’d both get the same lift from the inevitable uproar that came from the reunion. That settled, they went with Phil Ramone to three-way-produce recording sessions with the gang in Muscle Shoals. The session went quickly, and almost everyone agreed that it came out sounding exactly as you’d expect Simon and Garfunkel to sound in the mid-1970s: bittersweet, thoughtful, and just a few ticks punchier than the tracks that had made up Bridge Over Troubled Water. Released along with their albums in early October with the B-side split between “You’re Kind” and Artie’s new cover of the Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll,” the song was an instant add for radio stations across three or four formats and quickly become the latest of the duo’s many Top 10 hits. They’d hinted at what was to come by surprising audiences at each other’s concerts in recent months, the pair of them stepping out to end the evening with a mini-set of Simon and Garfunkel classics, performed together as easily and cheerfully as ever.

  * * *

  Oh, the life of a wealthy, high-brow pop star in mid-1970s New York City. The parties and the premieres, the ripple that ran through a room whenever he stepped inside. The starlets so pretty and so ripe for the picking. Some days, he glided the streets in limousines; other days, he walked the sidewalks, a white sailor’s hat pulled low, the brim shielding his eyes. He went to ball games and scampered through the playgrounds of Central Park with Harper. He supported high-minded civic causes and fit easily among the politically and socially powerful. The whole Richard Cory package, from the common touch to the power, the grace and the style. But no gun. When the gloom came for him, he’d throw himself into his music, diving in as deep as he could get.