Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  As Berlin recalled, when he relayed all of this to Hidalgo, Rosas, Perez, and Lozano, they finally threw up their hands and said sure, fine, whatever, let’s just get this fuckin’ thing over with already. They all showed up the next day, took up their instruments, and heard the voice from the ceiling telling them to play something, whatever they had. They spent another futile hour or two achieving nothing, until Hidalgo started playing some chords the other guys recognized from recent band rehearsals and jumped in after him, playing a driving two-chord progression that jumped into a simple but catchy chorus with contrasting rock and Mexican-style guitars, a nice accordion riff, and Berlin’s saxophone adding texture to the lower registers. They had already put some time into it; everything about the tune came straight from the same well that had sprung the title track of their first album. So of course that was the point where everything turned around.

  “Wait, what’s that? What are you playing there?”

  Now the voice from the ceiling was intrigued. Hidalgo looked up to say it was something they’d been working on.

  “Okay, how’s it go?”

  Hidalgo led the rest of the group through the tune, all of them so relieved to glimpse a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Paul was sold. “Let’s work on that,” he said, and two or three takes later, he declared himself happy, and the Los Lobos guys were out the door, then back in their cars headed for home. Paul wrote some lyrics to go with the tune and called Hidalgo and Perez in to sing it with him. And that was the last they heard from him until Graceland came out and “All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints” was credited as a solo Paul Simon composition.* At first the LA band was sure the printer had made a mistake, that they’d get a call from Paul’s office offering profuse apologies and the next printings would be more accurate.

  But that didn’t happen, and no wonder: Paul disputes the Los Lobos musicians’ entire account of their collaboration, claiming that he’d just been after a “generic Los Lobos dikka-de-dikka guitar sound,” and that he had helped shape the music they recorded.

  But a similar story seems to lie beneath the album’s other non–South African track, recorded with the New Orleans zydeco band Rockin’ Dopsie and the Twisters. “That Was Your Mother,” as Paul titled the tune, is a light-footed zydeco shuffle that boasts another great lyric, a tongue-in-cheek lecture to a child about how much better his dad’s life was before he was born. The track is great, too, a hippity-hop zydeco shuffle built around an ear-grabbing accordion riff, with a great sax solo that takes the tune to another level. Seven years earlier, a strikingly similar set of chords and central accordion riff were part of a Dopsie song called “My Baby, She’s Gone,” which was credited entirely to Alton Rubin Sr., Rockin’ Dopsie’s legal name. Granted, Dopsie’s original has a bluesier melody and a slightly crooked beat, and the sax solo is different from Paul’s version. But the heart of the tune bears a distinct resemblance to the 1979 recording. And yet Graceland credits only one writer for the song: Paul Simon.

  Maybe Dopsie figured that was a small price to pay for the global exposure and additional work he and his New Orleans party band would undoubtedly receive for being on an album with one of the music industry’s biggest stars. But Los Lobos weren’t quite as hungry for the Paul Simon bump. How Will the Wolf Survive? had sold far better than they imagined it would; their label was behind them and they were sifting through a pile of offers, including the one that would net them a No. 1 single in the theme song to the Ritchie Valens biopic La Bamba. But they also knew that they made themselves vulnerable. The group’s manager, a dedicated, hardworking young woman named Linda Clark, had been an assistant publicist at Slash Records when they met. She signed on to be the group’s manager and the arrangement worked perfectly when they were a regional band touring clubs and making records for independent labels. But when they launched themselves into the big time the terms of Clark’s job changed dramatically. But Clark had little experience in the rough-and-tumble of big money entertainment and, like her clients, had gone into the Paul Simon session figuring that they would all work on a handshake and trust the fraternal feeling between Warner’s artists. As a result they had made no presession agreements beyond the understanding that they would earn double the union’s hourly scale for playing the sessions. Writing credits and royalty splits never came up, and in the end he took them all for himself. The members of Los Lobos were understandably outraged, but once again Paul felt he had nothing to apologize for.

  With the company riding high on Graceland’s global success, Waronker asked Berlin to convince his bandmates to keep their displeasure to themselves: the last thing the label needed was more controversy around their biggest hit of the year. When a couple of band members couldn’t resist grumbling in public, Waronker was adamant: Don’t do this, guys, don’t speak ill of Paul, it’s bad for the family. He’d make it up to them, he’d make it good, Waronker swore he would. And they had no doubt that he would. They wanted to be loyal to Warner Bros. and Lenny really was a great guy. A gentle soul who cared deeply about music and musicians. Still, Linda Clark felt obligated to confront Paul, to tell him and his management that the members of Los Lobos felt that the song was at least half theirs and were pissed off about what Paul had done, and that if he didn’t do something to make it right, the next call they would get, she promised, would be from a lawyer. According to Berlin, the response from Paul’s office was unapologetic.

  You don’t like it? Sue me. See what happens.

  And that, according to Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section’s bassist David Hood, was more or less the same thing they had heard a decade earlier when they inquired why the production royalties they were supposed to earn for the tracks they had played on There Goes Rhymin’ Simon stopped coming.

  * * *

  See what happens. See Graceland: The African Concert tour roll into Rufaro Stadium in Harare, Zimbabwe: Paul in his immaculate white T-shirt and black jeans, his all-African band bloused in yellows, golds, black, multihued stripes—all moving, ducking, and rolling to the rhythm as the ten orange-bloused singers of Ladysmith Black Mambazo dance across the stage; a smaller line of women singers in black skirts and silver glinting tops; then Hugh Masekela with his brass horn and jazzbo brim. They’re playing “Township Jive,” a feel-good jam that the main musicians, Paul, Ray Phiri, Masekela, and Joseph Shablalala, came up with for a show opener. An overture of sorts, a party starter—it works like magic, the floor of the stadium alive with motion, raised hands and open, smiling faces; and here the colors are just as varied and just as vivid: black faces, brown faces, white faces, babies on their shoulders, children dancing at their sides. And they’re writhing out of the bad juju of “The Boy in the Bubble,” then jumping like street partiers through “Gumboots,” which segues sweetly into the Del-Vikings’ “Whispering Bells.” Then here’s Masekela again, righteous and joyful as he sings and plays his horn through his “Bring Him Back Home,” a plea for the release of Nelson Mandela, still locked in his bare cell on Robben Island. Coming from a black man whose words are amplified by tens of thousands of black, white, and brown male and female voices, it’s as pure an affront to apartheid as could be created anywhere. And no one needed to get anyone’s permission to make it.

  See Paul at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles a week later, running onstage to collect his Album of the Year trophy from actors Whoopi Goldberg and Don Johnson, and the guy is so happy, just bursting with it, it’s like he’s shining, gleaming in the spotlight and just kinda dreamy as he thanks good old Roy Halee, studio genius, and then of course Mo and Lenny. Paul calls out to Los Lobos from East LA, and Rockin’ Dopsie in New Orleans, and then, with a serious face now—this is a statement he truly must deliver correctly—his African compatriots in music.

  “They live, along with other South African artists and their countrymen, under one of the most repressive regimes on the planet today, and still they are able to produce music of great power and nuance and joy.” He pauses, seems
to choke something back. “A-A-And I find that just extraordinary, and they have my great respect and love.”

  CHAPTER 21

  THE WHOLE WORLD WHISPERING

  Graceland sold more than six million copies around the world during its first year, making it the highest-selling solo album that Paul had ever made. By the time the album collected yet another Grammy in 1988—the title track won Song of the Year honors due to its being released as a single in late 1987—he had ascended to a sphere of fame and influence he hadn’t seen since Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water peak in 1970. And he had done it in a style so exotic that virtually no one in the pop mainstream had known it existed. There was no one in pop music to compare with him, or in all of popular culture, for that matter. He had refashioned himself into a completely different kind of artist with what seemed to be a completely different career. And again, he had made it look easy.

  He revived Graceland: The African Concert for a European tour in the summer of 1989, and when South Africa’s apartheid government released political prisoner Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years, Paul was the most prominent artist invited to perform at the 325,000-strong welcoming rally held in Los Angeles when Mandela got to the United States in the early summer of 1990. Paul came with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and spoke of Mandela not as the Communist he’d dismissed in 1985, but as one of the world’s last heroes. “To me, the message is that a moral position cannot be broken and will prevail,” he told reporters backstage. “We are lacking that moral conviction in the world today.” Whatever anger remained in the antiapartheid movement, and in the scrum of political groups vying for authority in the looming postapartheid South Africa, kept out of sight. For the time being, anyway.

  Standing on the big stage in Los Angeles that day, arm in arm with the living saint of the antiapartheid movement, Paul hovered above all the protests, the shouted diatribes, and the published canings. He’d been proven right again, both as a moral actor and as one of the modern era’s most daring artistic visionaries and most successful popular artists. His ambitions now leaped to all-new heights. Thirty years after breaking in with “Hey, Schoolgirl” and twenty years after reaching number one with “The Sound of Silence,” he felt he was finally finding his artistic stride. There was still so much to discover, so much life to live, so much music to make. And he was already headed to the jungle, some labyrinthine river valley near the southern tip of South America, Roy Halee at his side and a new musical vision steeping in the medicine man’s magical pot.

  * * *

  Paul got the idea while chatting in the New York nightclub SOB’s with Puerto Rican pianist Eddie Palmieri and jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Palmieri brought it up first, half-jokingly. Graceland was so great, he said, you should keep going. South Africa may have the continent’s great singers, but Africa’s great drummers were on the continent’s West Coast, which was the launching pad for the African diaspora, first to the lower reaches of South America, then through Brazil, and up to the Dominican Republic and Cuba on its way to Miami and New Orleans. Paul was intrigued. He’d already worked with the Senegalese singer/drummer Youssou N’Dour and with Nigeria’s dynamic singer/showman King Sunny Ade, so he knew something about Africa’s many sounds and cultural styles. The one thing he lacked was a starting point, someone to step into the role Hilton Rosenthal had played in Johannesburg, the local expert who could clear his way, bring in the right players, and make the crucial introductions.

  A few weeks later he got a call from Quincy Jones asking if he’d be up for singing a duet with Milton Nascimento for the new album the great Brazilian pop singer was recording in Los Angeles. Paul was already a fan, so he went to California,* and when they were finished with the track he asked if Nascimento could help get him set up with drummers in Brazil. The singer took his guest up to the control booth, where his producer, Marco Mazzola, one of the central figures in Brazilian music at the time, had been working. They had a nice chat about the drumming traditions that followed the Africans from Guinea to Puerto Rico and beyond, so Mazzola was surprised to pick up his home telephone a few weeks later and hear Paul’s voice. It took a few minutes for Paul to convince him that he wasn’t some wise guy playing a prank, and once they sorted that out, Paul told him his plan. He’d be flying down in just a few weeks. Would Mazzola have time to work with him? If so, could he pull together some interesting music and musicians for him to listen to when he got there?

  Paul arrived at Mazzola’s studio in Rio de Janeiro with engineer Roy Halee and friend and sometime coproducer Phil Ramone. Given the size of the country and the low-to-the-ground ways of its best drummers, Mazzola knew they wouldn’t be able to corral the musicians in a big-city recording studio. Instead, he packed up his visitors for a two-hour flight to Salvador, a small city in the northeast of the country, where the Banda Olodum drumming group worked out of the cultural center they had set up in the old town’s Pelourinho Square. The group had a staunch commitment to protecting the perennially threatened rights, lives, and culture of the nation’s dark-skinned African Brazilian community. It was a struggle, particularly given the currents of tribalism, racism, and corruption in the region, so they pursued their calling with fiery eyes and gun-heavy belts.

  After hearing the fourteen-strong drumming group perform in Pelourinho Square, Paul went to Olodum’s leaders to arrange a recording session. The guns stayed holstered, but the talks grew tense, particularly when Paul explained that along with their services he needed to buy the rights to everything they played when they were recording for him. At first that was a problem—what was business as usual for professional musicians was something else to activists whose entire mission was built around keeping their traditions in the hands of the people whose forebears spoke through the skin of their drums. In the end, though, the prospect of being featured on an American superstar’s next hit album was too compelling to pass up. They signed Paul’s contract, he wrote a significant check, and they set a time for the next day.

  Olodum had too many members to fit into any of the recording studios in Salvador, so Paul and his helpers arranged to have a portable eight-track recorder flown up from Rio de Janeiro, setting it up on the edge of Pelourinho Square, where it would connect to the microphones Halee hung from strategically placed wires, light posts, and balconies. The group got started on one of their standard patterns, a nearly martial beat that took on new layers that gradually bent the rhythm into a juju that pulled at the ankles and migrated up into the hands and chest. Paul, Halee, and Ramone caught forty minutes of it, then took the recording back to Rio and then up to New York.

  When Paul returned to Brazil six months later, he recorded the work of Uakti, an instrumental group led by Marco Antonio Guimarães, a classically trained cellist whose handmade instruments were constructed from specially cut PVC tubes, foam rubber, and other found objects. Inspired in part by a South American myth about a hole-filled creature who beguiled the local ladies whenever the wind blew through his body, Guimarães’s creations were tuned instruments that came together into a melodic rumble that was a cross between a mbira, a marimba, an electric bass, and a bag of hollow coconuts and gourds. Quite a bit gentler than Olodum’s thunder of the gods, but every bit as mesmerizing.

  It was that spell, the hypnotic charge in the ecstatic pounding, that drew him in in the first place. When Paul followed the drummers’ trail to Brazil, he hadn’t come with any songs or even ideas for songs. The inspiration for his next album would spring from the rhythms the musicians created when he was with them. That’s why he kept going back, back to the land of the musical trees, the thrumming water bowls, the agogo bells, the talking drum and dancing bongos, the congas and the bow, the arrow and gourd-built berimbau. Each time, he worked with a different set of players, a different set of instruments, all invoking the voices of the spirits, the ancient ones and the timeless ones, too. He was looking for anything that could gather him up and give him vision, show him his path forward.


  * * *

  The divorce from Carrie hadn’t taken. They spent a few months apart, then started talking again, then seeing each other. Then they were back to living together in his apartment when she was in town, and in her Beverly Hills cottage when he was in LA. There had always been something perfect about them when they were getting along: the way they huddled together, the way he grounded her, the way she could make him laugh so easily. And he loved her, with a desperation that sometimes frightened him. Then he’d say something too cutting, or she’d move like a tornado for days or weeks, a ball of energy raking the countryside until it ran itself into the ground, so tangled in its own wreckage it could be days or weeks before she righted herself. In the mid-1980s, Carrie had taken herself to rehab to shed her drug habits, but drugs were only symptomatic of the manic-depression she’d suffered her entire adult life. She’d recognized it in her father when she was younger, the outlandish moods and compulsive habits that had consumed her throughout her adult life. Her depths were unimaginably deep, and Paul’s were nothing to sneeze at, either, so they clung to each other with a passion that could both soothe and abrade.