Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Recorded mostly in the last months of 1974 through the summer of 1975, the album Paul called Still Crazy After All These Years reveals the artist in songs that are darkly comic, songs that are tentatively hopeful, songs that are down but not quite out, and songs that all but vanish into the gloom. Most of the lyrics are lightly sketched, alluding to things that are never fully explained, then ending while the characters are still in motion, their destinations and fates unknown. The real story comes through the thrum of the chords, the flight of the melody across the rungs of the clef, rising, falling, then somersaulting in the least-expected direction; looking beyond the end of this song to see into the next; recognizing the themes and textures of each tune and then creating a dialogue between them in order to construct the larger narrative. There is so much you can’t control in life, but thanks to Chuck Israels’s lessons Paul could steer his music lessons, with more precision and delicacy than ever before.

  That fragment of a tune he’d previewed on The Dick Cavett Show became “Still Crazy After All These Years,” the lead song and title track of his new album. The song’s title phrase had come to him when he was standing in the shower one day, contemplating his life as a divorced father in his midthirties, moving from one romance to another, still searching for a relationship that could withstand his moods, his schedule, his full-body immersion in his work. The way his life was now, he realized, was the way it had been ten years earlier and, it seemed, the way it would be in ten or twenty or thirty years. He’d nearly burst into tears. But as his pain bent into art, the creative process gave him focus, and his new compositional skills an increased sense of control, which in turn gave the songs a paradoxical nature: tales of emotional chaos written with extraordinary discipline.

  Nowhere is this clearer than in the title song, which sets the album in what first seems to be a jazz-rock terrain: the Muscle Shoals guys lay back as the singer’s tale unfolds. Meeting his ex on the sidewalk, having a couple of drinks, going home alone. The bridge leaps up the scale, but the singer sinks more deeply into his malaise: life is miserable, and then you die. Star saxophonist David Sanborn gets sixteen bars to elevate the mood and sets up the dark climactic joke: the singer could start killing people without having to fear prison. He’d end up in a mental hospital. Still crazy after all these years.

  Turn to the cover of the album to glimpse the misanthrope in the flesh, and he seems to be overstating things. Snapped by then-girlfriend Edie Baskin, the photograph has Paul on a fire escape three floors above Crosby Street in Manhattan, bending his mustache cheerily from beneath a Stetson that looks far more urbane in SoHo than it would on horseback. His jeans are stylish and snug across his slightly cocked hip, his white linen button-up shirt open to reveal a thick tuft of chest hair. For this moment at least, he’s riding high. But when the party’s over, the winner’s smile fades and the sorrows of the past rise.

  As the next track begins, the electric keyboard is replaced by an acoustic piano playing in its lower register. An acoustic guitar and funereal drum arrive, then Artie Garfunkel’s tenor rises, Paul joins with a lower harmony, and we’re back in time. The excitement of having a new song by the reunited Simon and Garfunkel, the first since Bridge Over Troubled Water, deepens the meaning of “My Little Town” and its place in the album’s narrative. Their restored harmony is soothing, but also alludes to the tension between them: the swells of jealousy and anger, the knives in the back, the bitter currents in the headwaters of their art, their ambition, their thorny love for each other.

  A song titled “My Little Town” could be mistaken as a work of nostalgia, but here it’s a horror show, a portrait of a childhood spent in a small town defined by a vengeful God. Rainbows paint the sky black. The weight of the past smothers the future and sends the narrator into the world “twitching like a finger on the trigger of a gun.”* The song ends in a fury, both singers calling out to the dead and dying as horns blare and walls crumble, and childhood’s end becomes the Battle of Jericho, the slaves’ eternal pursuit of liberation.

  When the scene returns to the present tense, the colors return in garish shades. Introduced by a piercing clarinet, a slurry guitar, and a persistent bell, “I Do It for Your Love” sifts the wreckage of his broken marriage, recalling a rainy day civil ceremony defined by paperwork and a world that can’t stop protesting the union. Colors reverse (“The sky was yellow and the grass was gray…”), the besotted lovers continually infect each other with a cold. When the narrator buys a rug for their new home, the rains blow in to ruin it before he gets home. An accordion leads a Parisian vignette that is both graceful and sinister, like an approaching street mime. “Love emerges and it disappears,” he realizes, and at this point it feels like a mercy.

  When the mood turns wicked, “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” tucks adultery into a martial rhythm, then struts shamelessly through the ABCs of abandonment: “Make a new plan, Stan / You don’t need to be coy, Roy.” A roguish fantasy for listeners, but not far from the truth of Paul’s final months with Peggy. And for this moment at least he’s happy to shrug it off. Who’s to say it was entirely his doing, anyway? But the rush is fleeting, and as the perspective shifts to interior matters, the breeze chills and the lights go out.

  The album bounces from mood to mood, from the louche resignation of “Have a Good Time” to the philosophical self-pity of “Some Folks’ Lives Roll Easy” to the gospel ecstasies of “Gone at Last,” made all the more majestic by Phoebe Snow’s wild co-lead vocal. The cold calculation played for laughs in “Fifty Ways” returns in “You’re Kind,” in which a gleefully detached fellow inventories his lover’s virtues only to rub in how arbitrary his decision to leave her truly is. “I like to sleep with the window open / And you keep the window closed, / So goodbye,” he says, already halfway out of the door.

  The slinky “Have a Good Time” plays the same way, a footloose man’s blues dressed in silky resignation. But the admission that ends the first verse (“I should be depressed / My life’s a mess”) hints at the darker truth.

  The despair defines the funereal tone of “Night Game,” which begins with a baseball game at the peak of excitement. It’s the bottom half of the eighth inning, the score tied, two outs, and all the world’s glory hanging in the balance. But before anyone can cheer for anything, the pitcher collapses and the mound becomes his grave, marked only by his tattered uniform and empty spikes. Winter blows in, the stars become bones, the stadium may collapse. By the end, every form of hope has been extinguished: the third batter strikes out, the season ends ingloriously, the tarpaulin rolls over frozen grass.

  Given Paul’s devotion to the New York Yankees and to the restorative rituals of baseball, “Night Game” feels that much more mournful, as if he’d come to doubt the central pillars of his consciousness. Things had grown so chaotic by then that even the euphoric “Gone at Last” comes with a troubled backstory, stemming from Paul’s initial thought of making the song a duet with then-girlfriend Bette Midler. But their romance was short-lived, and ran aground completely during their attempt to record the song together. The collapse of the collaboration, and the relationship, grew so toxic Paul had to invent three different stories to explain why their duet hadn’t worked. “The record companies couldn’t agree on the details. That was the only problem,” he told Rolling Stone just after the record came out. Actually, the problem was the Latin-style arrangement he was trying, Crawdaddy was informed a few months later. Or perhaps, as he told the BBC a few years later, Midler’s sing-the-hell-out-of-it-and-move-on recording style clashed with his furrowed-brow sensibility. Paul restored order by bringing in the powerful, if less established, singer Phoebe Snow as his co-singer, and when he heard a playback of their joint performance his faith was restored. As Snow recalled the moment to Crawdaddy’s Timothy White in 1976, Paul was exulting even before the track was over. “Isn’t it nice to win?” he shouted, and she agreed, absolutely: “It really is, for a change.” But soon there would be other battles to f
ight, including the one he was already embroiled in with the actor/director/writer/producer Warren Beatty.

  In the thick of producing and playing the lead in his self-written fin de siècle film Shampoo, Beatty had asked Paul to write some tunes for the soundtrack. Paul took Beatty into the studio and played him an austere piano ballad that still needed lyrics. Beatty fell for it at first listen, saying it didn’t need any lyrics as far as he was concerned; he could use an instrumental version as the movie’s closing theme. They shook hands to seal the general agreement, but when Paul not only wrote lyrics but also recorded it for his album, Beatty protested heatedly. They’d had a deal! The song was supposed to be for his movie; Paul had no business recording a different version for his record. But of course Paul protested right back. A deal? What deal? They had shaken hands on an idea and hadn’t even started talking about the guts of a deal. Nothing about money, nothing about rights and restrictions. And that was supposed to be a binding contract? Paul didn’t think so. He also didn’t think Beatty had any business telling him what he could and couldn’t do with his music. Beatty was just as stubborn, and Paul told his lawyers to start drafting papers for a cease-and-desist order to keep Shampoo from using even a note of his song. They made a deal in the end—Beatty got to use the music in his movie, Paul got to record his own version, and everyone got paid—yet the whole affair clarifies the foreboding in the song Paul chose to conclude the album.

  It starts on the minor chord, a three-note descent into a vision of Jerusalem, the cradle of the Jewish people: a Jerusalem forsaken, weeping alone, her children scattered across the desert, lost to the wind, blown across the centuries to new lands, new cultures, new selves. The modernized, the secularized, the urbanized and popularized—this is Paul, so far gone from anything that can be called a tradition or a faith that even when he tries to heed her call, he knows he is too far gone to ever come home. And as he has always suspected, the toll for his indulgences will eventually come due.

  And we shall all be called as witnesses

  Each and every one

  To stand before the eyes of God

  And speak what was done.

  Musically sophisticated, lyrically probing, and yet pop-friendly, Still Crazy After All These Years was a pitch-perfect match for its times. While Bob Dylan’s landmark Blood on the Tracks goes after the breakdown of his marriage like a desperado across a lawless frontier, and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run tears down oil-streaked highways in search of deeper truths, Still Crazy documents the cynicism of the post-Nixon era through eyes jaundiced by political disillusion, professional success, and the stultifying comforts of home. It was released on October 25 to the usual praise and a few sharper takes on what some critics saw as Paul’s deepening self-involvement, self-pity, and “slick professionalism.”

  No matter, Still Crazy became his first chart-topping solo album, launching four singles into the charts, including the first Simon and Garfunkel release in half a decade (“My Little Town” peaked in Billboard’s No. 9 slot), Paul’s first No. 1 solo single (“Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover”), along with lesser hits “Gone at Last” (No. 23 in the fall of 1975) and “Still Crazy After All These Years,” which peaked at No. 40 on the pop chart, but rose into the top five of the adult contemporary list. The album sold enough copies to earn a gold record within weeks, and a platinum disc by the end of the year. In the course of its long arc to and from the top of the charts, where it remained for three weeks in the winter of 1976, “Fifty Ways” was nearly as ubiquitous as “Mrs. Robinson” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” had been in their day. Five years and three albums into his solo career, even in the wake of their one-song reunion, Paul could walk onstage without hearing anyone shout, “Where’s Artie?”

  Still, Paul and Artie’s collaboration on “My Little Town” had touched off a new chain of guest cameos at one another’s shows. Most often it came during the encore, a surprise introduction and then two or three songs, “The Boxer,” “Old Friends,” and maybe “The Sound of Silence.” They were all unbilled appearances, however. So when Paul signed on to host the second episode of a new late-night variety show and asked Artie to join him for an extended on-air performance, that was something else altogether.

  * * *

  Paul met Lorne Michaels through Edie Baskin, the photographer he was dating for a time during the Still Crazy After All These Years sessions. The thirty-year-old TV producer had hired Baskin to be his new show’s chief photographer. Baskin’s quirky portraits, along with the whimsical hand-tinting she added to some of them, were a perfect visual representation of what Michaels wanted his decidedly youthful ninety-minute comedy-music-entertainment program to be. The first-ever counterculture-fueled show to be broadcast on a major American television network.*

  Paul and Michaels clicked immediately; it was hard to figure out what they didn’t have in common: both were in their thirties, both assimilated Jews—Michaels’s real last name is Lipowitz—raised in families rooted in the entertainment business, both precocious as young men, and both comfortable assuming positions of authority. They also knew how to split the difference between their counterculture impulses and their desire to succeed within the structure of established institutions. Their friendship grew quickly, and Paul became a regular visitor to the show’s offices and to the long dinners Michaels had with a circle of friends drawn mostly from the show’s writing staff and cast. Sitting with Michaels and a rotating crew that included Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Michaels’s comedy writer wife Rosie Shuster (a key member of SNL’s first writing staff), Paul was present to witness the show’s birth. One of the show’s most talked-about early sketches bore Paul’s mark: when Aykroyd recalled seeing a relative making soup from a whole fish she had dropped into a blender, and proposed doing an ad parody for the Bass-o-Matic blender, Paul laughed so hard the writer-actor went back to his office and wrote one of the new show’s most famous sketches. “It’s hard to get Paul to laugh, you know, because he’s so intellectual, so smart … When he started to snort, I said, ‘Man, I got something.’”

  Paul had wanted to host the first episode of the show (known temporarily as NBC’s Saturday Night because ABC-TV had secured the Saturday Night Live name for a prime-time variety show it launched that same fall), but Michaels asked him to wait for the second go-round: he wanted to give the cast and crew a week to get comfortable before he had a friend take center stage. Michaels tapped the hilariously seditious long-haired comedian George Carlin to host Saturday Night’s October 11, 1975, debut, and when he brought Paul in to start building the next Saturday’s show, the atmosphere around the eleventh floor of Rockefeller Center’s GE Building became tense, particularly among the cast members. Everyone agreed the first show had gone well. They’d need to tweak a few things, of course, but all the time they had spent working together had paid off. The seven cast members had bonded enough to start playing off one another, while Michaels and the writers (many of whom were performers, too) were well on their way to developing a voice that really did sound like a new generation talking. But the show Michaels and Paul were planning had nearly nothing to do with the comic vibe the others had built.

  Obviously Michaels wanted to draw as much attention as possible to his newborn show. Just having Paul as a host was a coup, particularly with his new album on the verge of being released. But toss in the Simon and Garfunkel reunion, their first public performance in three years, and their first national exposure since Bridge Over Troubled Water, and it was a big enough deal to ensure not only that the second-week ratings didn’t fall off from the first, but also that there’d be a boost in the show’s viewership, which would only endear it to the NBC executives whose opinions spelled the difference between a show’s long, happy life and a fast, inglorious cancellation. So, at first glance, Paul’s commitment to hosting was nothing but terrific. Everyone liked the idea of having guest superstars on the show—until the guest superstar became the entire show. Because Paul had no int
ention of doing just a few songs with Garfunkel. He wanted to turn the spotlight on other artists, friends, and collaborators, too. Artie needed a solo spot, and Paul also wanted to do at least one song by himself. Add up all that time, translate it into network TV segments, and they had almost no time left for comedy, beyond a taped bit they planned for Paul and a short film by Los Angeles–based comedian Albert Brooks. Other than Chevy Chase, who Michaels thought had the charisma and looks to be a breakout star, the rest of the cast would be seen only in a thirty-second mini-skit with Paul.

  The resulting tension made for a long week. Belushi, whose wild-haired onstage persona was not so distant from his real-life persona, told Michaels that “the folk-singing wimp” was derailing their show before it had a chance to really get rolling, and Paul didn’t help when he kept disrupting rehearsals by staring into the monitors to make sure his bald spot wasn’t too visible to the cameras. When showtime arrived at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night, October 18, the scene opened on Paul sitting alone on a stool at the center of the stage singing “Still Crazy After All These Years,” the title track to the album that would be released in less than a week. Chase did the first of his soon-to-be-famous show-opening tumbles (“Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!) and then Paul was back, this time surrounded by the Jessy Dixon Singers for “Loves Me Like a Rock.” Next came Randy Newman to sing “Sail Away,” a tune Paul said he wished he’d written. After Chase did his “Weekend Update” news satire, Paul starred in a lengthy taped piece based on the absurd premise of him playing a one-on-one basketball game against the Philadelphia 76ers’ Connie Hawkins, then one of the biggest and most fearsome players in the National Basketball Association. Paul did a fine job handling his lines in a gag interview with sports announcer Marv Albert (“I’m spotting him a one-foot, four-inch advantage. I gotta admit that’s gonna be a factor in this game. He’s got me on shooting ability, but I just have to play my game as I usually play it … [and] stay with my strengths. Basically singing and songwriting.”). Hawkins responded just as ably when asked to size up his opponent (“He’s got a lot of savvy and a lot of chutzpah”), then the game began and the joke spun on its axis. From the opening tip, Paul dominated the game, crushing Hawkins beneath an avalanche of hook shots, outside jumpers, and sneaky lay-ins. Interviewed again by Albert after his easy victory, Paul nailed the punch line with a shrug. “When my outside shot is on, it’s on.”