Once again, the push-pull between them started almost immediately, with Artie asserting himself in his passive-aggressive way, showing up late some days, talking at length about a song’s particular color or shape, and so on. For a time Paul shrugged it off with a smile. They’d been friends and partners for so long; he knew Artie’s foibles as well he as knew his own. Waiting for Artie to show up one day he turned to the assembled producers and engineers and laid it out for them. “This is exactly what’s gonna happen when Artie gets here,” he said, amiably. “First, he’s gonna come in here carrying some incomprehensible math book. Then he’s gonna put it right here”—Paul pointed to a spot on the control board where everyone could see it clearly—“where we can all see it. Then he’ll pull out a joint. He’ll sit down, take a hit, and then hold it out and ask if I want some. Now, Artie knows I don’t want a hit. But he’ll do it anyway. I’ll say no, and then he’ll shrug and take another hit.” That was funny enough, but when Artie walked through the door a little later it took a turn for the riotous. Just as Paul had foretold, there was the math book in his hand. He parked it almost exactly where Paul had predicted, then sat down and, yes, out came the weed. And indeed he took his hit and held it out to his partner. Paul made a no-thanks gesture and shot a knowing smile around the room.
They moved the recording sessions to New York to make it more convenient for Artie, but the tension between them only grew more pronounced. One day when Artie settled in to the studio, he took out a sheet of paper and referred to it as he sang an arc of notes that made Paul sit up straight. He hadn’t heard that before. He couldn’t remember asking Artie to do anything beyond a basic harmony. Artie added a second and third part, a small chorus of Arties, and, after listening for half an hour or so, Paul finally turned to Waronker. “What’s he doing?” Something beautiful, the producer thought, but Paul didn’t hear it that way. Even when Paul wasn’t in the studio, Artie had a way of making things complicated. He resisted guidance from the control booth. A persistent cigarette smoker, he started smoking heavily enough to corrode the delicate folds in his vocal cords. Sometimes it took ages to get a usable track out of him. Other times, it was completely hopeless so the producer and engineers had to send him home to rest until his voice recovered. Weeks would pass, until it seemed that Artie was dragging his feet on purpose. He’d need extra time to figure out what he wanted to sing. Months passed. Nineteen eighty-two ended, and the first weeks of 1983 slid past. Then Artie decided to take a walk.
He’d started making long-distance hikes a few years earlier, after walking across Japan, a relatively short jaunt given the slim geography of the country. Just after Simon and Garfunkel did a brief swing through Australia in early 1983, Artie decided to walk west from his Fifth Avenue apartment to the sandy edge of the Pacific Ocean. He was too busy to walk the whole thing in one go, so he decided to do it in sections, working for a week or ten days, then going to do whatever he needed to do, and eventually returning to where he had left off to resume his adventure. This time he’d make a tape of the songs he still had to work on and do his arranging while he was walking. By the time he got back, he’d have all the parts written, and they could knock out the vocals quickly. So, see you in a bit, Paul, okay?
The tour legs, which interrupted the recording sessions every few months, became increasingly fraught, too. Paul had looked forward to the 1982 tour with real enthusiasm; during the first Simon and Garfunkel tour in the sixties, he’d been so wrapped up in the angst of the moment he barely remembered what their concerts felt like. Now he’d finally get a chance to take in what was going on and really enjoy himself on tour. But once the European shows got rolling in 1982, Artie turned icy. He kept his distance from Paul for most of the summer, and wouldn’t say what was bothering him. When Paul finally told him how unhappy it was all making him, Artie told him not to take it so personally. “Don’t be hurt by my behavior,” he said. “Don’t think that I don’t like you.”
Paul didn’t believe it. “On a certain level, not too far from the surface, he doesn’t like me,” he said. “I don’t even know if Arthur admits that. The same goes for me.” But that was only one facet of their baffling brotherhood. “You have to remember that there’s something quite powerful between us. This is a friendship that is now 30 years old. And the feeling of understanding and love parallels the feeling of abuse.” They both had their reasons. When Artie finally broke down and told Paul why he had been so furious with him during the tour, the conversation wound up right back where their troubles began, on that day in December 1957 when Paul finally confessed that he had secretly recorded a solo record even as their longtime dream of succeeding as a duo was coming true. Didn’t Paul see how hurtful that was? How he’d been fucking Artie over since they were kids? Paul couldn’t believe it. “I was fifteen years old!” he shot back. “How can you carry that betrayal for twenty-five years?” Let it go, Paul begged. Even if he’d been wrong, how could Artie keep punishing him for a mistake he made when he was a teenager? Artie wasn’t moved. “You’re still the same guy,” he said.
* * *
The album they decided to call Think Too Much wasn’t finished in time for the 1983 American tour. The world would have to wait for another few months to get Simon and Garfunkel’s new record. Maybe fall, maybe in time for Christmas. Meanwhile, they focused on the shows, getting the band and themselves back in shape for the July 19 premiere in Akron, Ohio. They had created an enormous show meant for colossal stadiums, with a megawatt, multiplatform sound system and video screens to rival the Central Park extravaganza. Given the hours required to piece it together night after night, they had two identical stages made (a variation on the Central Park rooftop stage, designed once again by Eugene Lee, who had created the stage for the Central Park concert) and two sound/video setups hopscotching one another across the country, with no fewer than 110 crew members keeping it running from night to night. They called it the One Summer Night tour, taking the name from the sugary ballad that sold a million copies for the Brooklyn doo-wop group the Danleers in 1958.
Nearly two years had elapsed since the Central Park concert, which the vast majority of Americans hadn’t been able to attend anyway, so by the time they got to the tour opener in Akron, public anticipation was keen, to say the least. Traffic was so backed up on the roads leading to the Rubber Bowl that the band’s bus was still a mile from the venue when the radio announced that the concert would begin in precisely one minute. When they finally got onstage, the fans in front of the stage went wild. During “Scarborough Fair” a swarm of crazies hopped the barricade and made it to the stage, where at least one tried to tear guitarist Arlen Roth’s shirt off his back. At Patriots Stadium outside Boston a few shows later, fans twirling glow sticks over their heads started letting them fly from their hands, bombarding the stage with a high-velocity fusillade of iridescent missiles. Everyone onstage got hit; Paul took one in the face.*
Anticipating the wild energy of stadium shows, Paul roughed up most of the arrangements, bringing in Roth to toughen the guitar attack, adding surprisingly delinquent guitars and a slam-bang coda to “My Little Town,” and taking the pairing of “Kodachrome” and “Maybelline” from a sporty sedan to fire-belching drag racer. They also worked up a handful of the new songs, choosing three or four to play each night. “Allergies,” the song Paul started writing on Dr. Gorney’s guitar, had turned into a spiky rocker with a vicious guitar solo, a shoes-in-the-dryer rhythmic attack, and intriguingly discordant harmonies from Artie. “The Late Great Johnny Ace” gained close harmonies during the second verse and lovely double-voiced ending, while “Cars Are Cars” mimicked the red light/green light pace of the streets with synthesizer honks and interlocked vocals. “Song About the Moon” was a mid-tempo ballad with surprisingly few harmonies. The surreal ballad “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War” made fuller use of their blend, as did the faster, funnier variation on the album’s pair of title tracks.
When the
tour got to New York for a show at Giants Stadium and a Queens homecoming in Shea Stadium, the mania took a sour turn. Before the first show, the FBI received a death threat against the duo that it took seriously enough to make Paul stone-faced for the first hour of the show. (After which he realized it had all been a hoax and his life would be spared. “God, I felt great,” he told the Washington Post. “I sang great. Artie sang great.”) It poured rain through the afternoon and evening of the Shea Stadium show, but that was merely a nuisance. For Paul, though no one else onstage knew it, the deluge was another symbol of the reckoning he was facing.
Paul called Waronker, by then the president of Warner Bros., and asked for him and Titelman to come to New York for a meeting. Roy Halee, who had been doing the engineering on the New York recording sessions, was there, too, the three of them turning various shades of surprise, confusion, and distress when Paul said that there was no way he could continue to work with Artie on the new music, that the entire project, the very idea of a modern Simon and Garfunkel album, was misbegotten from the start. Artie was impossible to work with. He’d put them off for so long, more than a year in the end, that they’d blown all their deadlines. What was worse was that nothing they recorded sounded honest to Paul. The songs had come from such a significant turning point in his life, they were too personal to be sung by anyone else. Paul knew it would be terrible news for everyone around him. Noting the particularly baleful cast to Waronker’s eyes, he addressed the company president. “You’re against this, aren’t you?” What could Waronker tell him except the truth? They’d been building expectations, including their own, for almost two years. If there was anything like a guaranteed smash hit in the music business in 1983, a Simon and Garfunkel reunion album would be it. And Paul understood that. But Waronker understood Paul’s problem, too. If Paul needed to call a halt to the new Simon and Garfunkel album, that’s what they’d do.
Not long afterward, Paul called Artie with two pieces of news. First, he had wiped all of his partner’s vocal parts off the album, which would be released in the fall as a Paul Simon solo album. Second, he and Carrie were getting married on Tuesday and they wanted Artie to be there! “I guess I was supposed to conclude that Paul was the cutest guy I know,” Artie said later. “I guess that [was] the message.”
CHAPTER 19
THESE ARE THE ROOTS OF RHYTHM
They fought a lot. It’s hard to imagine how they wouldn’t, this pair of highly creative celebrities, both of them so successful: she since before she turned twenty-one, he since a few weeks past his twenty-fourth birthday. Paul and Carrie burned brightly together and then cratered with just as much force, and not always because something had gone wrong, exactly. “I not only don’t like you,” she screamed at him in the middle of one particularly explosive encounter. “I don’t like you personally!” The bizarre assertion ended the fight on the spot—they were both laughing too hard to snarl anymore—but the peace was, once again, short-lived.
Their love was just as combustible. Paul and Carrie were almost exactly the same size, and their bodies fit together so naturally that if they weren’t holding hands or draping arms over each other’s shoulders, they were often squished up together on the sofa, more or less on top of each other. Carrie added velocity to his life, a kind of wild energy that often set him alight and sometimes made him scream. No, he did not want to roam Greenwich Village boutiques to buy hand-torn T-shirts. He didn’t have the energy to pick himself up at midnight and go dancing in Tribeca until dawn. He also didn’t want to have to deal with Carrie when she came pinballing home with Christ only knew what powders and pills sizzling inside her feverish skull. Then it would be her turn to crash back to earth, ashamed of her wild moods and indulgences, suddenly convinced she had neither the brains nor the maturity to keep up with her older genius boyfriend.
Carrie’s drug use escalated in the late seventies and early eighties, and she spent more time around the likes of Saturday Night Live’s John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and writer Michael O’Donoghue. She also became close to Penny Marshall, the costar of ABC’s Laverne and Shirley sitcom. When Marshall was divorced from actor husband Rob Reiner (Mike in All in the Family), Carrie set her up with Artie, and they hit it off so well they began a serious relationship soon after. The two couples spent a little time together as a quartet, but it was usually Carrie and Marshall off together, hanging out with Belushi and Aykroyd on a movie set somewhere or on some extravagant, drug-fueled vacation in Switzerland, the Caribbean, or the Hamptons. The time apart, along with Paul’s disapproval of Carrie’s supersonic habits, tore at the fibers that held them close. They were so burned out around each other by mid-1983 that they started talking about breaking things off for good. But then they thought again. Breaking up would be too sad. So maybe they should stop talking about that and start talking about getting married. So they did, and that was such a happy prospect they fell in love all over again.
* * *
The wedding took place in Paul’s apartment on the evening of August 15. Rabbi David Greenberg presided, with Lorne Michaels serving as Paul’s best man and Marshall as Carrie’s bridesmaid. Artie was there, too, as were Paul’s parents and his brother, Eddie, and Carrie’s famous parents, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, and her born-again Christian brother, Todd. And so many others: Mr. and Mrs. Robin Williams; Randy Newman; the actress Terri Garr; Billy Joel and his new missus, the model Christie Brinkley; George Lucas; Mike Nichols; and a hundred other friends, family, and collaborators. It was a glorious evening, and the fun continued as the tour resumed in hurricane-wracked Houston, where the show had to be canceled due to Hurricane Alicia. Paul ushered his new wife onstage to sing along.
If Artie felt weird about singing his parts on the songs Paul had snatched away from Simon and Garfunkel, he didn’t let it slip onstage. What came across most clearly was how thrilled Paul was to be liberated from one partner and officially bonded to another. While they performed in Vancouver, British Columbia, on August 22, the shiny ring on Paul’s left hand set the tone for his somersaulting mood. He danced and beamed through the show, and cracked up completely when he and Artie both forgot when to start singing during the intro of “Think Too Much.” “We both did it this time!” he shouted just after they’d found their way to the third line. He did it again during his introduction to “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” during the encores. “Here’s a song I wrote in 1966, one day when I was in a good mood,” he said, pausing for a beat. “And today here again,” he continued, already laughing. “Two good moods! Two decades!” A rare moment, indeed.
The collapse of Simon and Garfunkel’s Think Too Much came to light on October 8. News that the same material would soon appear as a Paul Simon album called Hearts and Bones was, to put it mildly, disappointing. The lead-off single, “Allergies”/“Think Too Much” (the slow version) emerged in early November to very little interest, peaking at No. 44. The follow-up single “Think Too Much”/“Song About the Moon” (the fast version) didn’t sell enough copies to make the charts at all. When Hearts and Bones emerged in early November, some critics dished up their usual plaudits while others heard nothing beyond self-pitying naval gazing, and most record buyers opted not to get involved at all. Hearts and Bones stalled at No. 35 on the American charts, and climbed only one step higher in England. It barely nicked the Top 100 (No. 99) in Australia, where Paul and Artie had played to hundreds of thousands of fans just a few months earlier. Even the Japanese fans looked the other way. Scandinavian fans, particularly in Norway where Hearts and Bones climbed to No. 2, showed a bit more interest. But everywhere else it was a washout.
Maybe the global disinterest in Paul’s record had nothing to do with music. Maybe it was the video-fuzzy cover shot of Paul, standing alone in front of a newsstand display of magazines, that didn’t read right. Maybe it was the empty space to his right, where Artie had so recently been standing. Yes, the cover picture, along with the inside shot of Paul sitting alone on a train s
tation bench, had come from the same photo session originally commissioned to make a cover for the Simon and Garfunkel album, the once-and-again partners welcoming us to a new adventure.
Instead, the much-anticipated Simon and Garfunkel reunion album just sort of vanished, leaving the familiar solo Paul and a series of explanations that didn’t add up. Artie had had trouble with his voice? For a little while, sure, but he’d just spent two years singing beautifully on stages all around the world. Paul’s songs were too personal to be sung by anyone else? It certainly didn’t sound that way when they were singing them together onstage. Everything about the last two years of Simon and Garfunkel activity, that great traveling show of personal and artistic reconciliation, had been leading to the real symbol of reunion, return, revivification: the first Simon and Garfunkel album in thirteen years. And now we’re hearing that that was just an illusion, a bait-and-switch? Well, fine. Just don’t expect your audience to care that much.
And the thing is, Artie had already recorded parts for most of the songs. The piercing harmonies on “Allergies,” a shared lead and towering backgrounds for “Cars Are Cars,” close harmony support for the more boisterous version of “Think Too Much,” and others. What’s more, Artie had returned from his walk with detailed notes describing exactly what he still intended to add to eight of the ten songs that were bound for Think Too Much only to wind up on Hearts and Bones. As ever, he had turned his thoughts into a graph, his precise lettering laying out step-by-step instructions for what he planned to sing in each song, with each entry codified further by bubbles indicating whether the change was absolutely necessary or still being considered. To read along while listening to Hearts and Bones and the version of Think Too Much* circulating among collectors is to glimpse an alternate version of musical history.
Just as the songs on Bridge Over Troubled Water projected the often-conflicting feelings contributing to Simon and Garfunkel’s fracture in 1970, the songs on Think Too Much/Hearts and Bones capture the tangled impulses surrounding their reunion. Paul had spent most of his career describing and attempting to resolve conflicts: the primitive authority of rock ’n’ roll versus the intellectual nuances of pop and jazz; the internal debate between thought and feeling, between whop-bop-a-loo-bop and the words of the prophets. These conflicts played out in the persistent weaving of musical styles, too, rockabilly with mariachi, the lush “woohs” of doo-wop with the chill atonality of modern classical. To the New York Times’s Stephen Holden, the musical and lyrical complexities in Hearts and Bones proved the vigor in the artist’s pursuit of “a nobler idea” in popular music. The album was “the most convincing case for using rock ’n’ roll as the basis of mature artistic expression,” he wrote. On a traditional Simon and Garfunkel record the contrasting thoughts would also be heard in the sound of the singers: the lower, darker voice and its lighter, dreamier companion both contrasting and supporting each other.
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