Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Maybe the jungle held more spells for him, and maybe for Carrie, too. When she joined him on a float trip down a remote stretch of the Amazon, Paul got to talking to one of the boat hands and learned that the river would take them through a village close to a brujo, a spiritual healer whose magic called to unwell and unhappy people from miles away. Invited to walk the half mile to the brujo’s house, Paul and Carrie set out in the late afternoon and arrived to find the doctor tending to other clients with his tribal cures, applying herbs, speaking incantations, praying to the gods in the air and in the bush. After dark, the brujo began an ayahuasca ceremony, a spiritual cleansing ritual that begins with a long icaros, a songlike incantation meant to enhance the visionary effect of the thick, brown tea he was brewing from a combination of caapi vine and the leaves of psychedelic plants known only to the brujo. Once they’d consumed the tea, the doctor, speaking through an interpreter, prepared his patients for the visionary experience they would encounter that evening. “The anaconda will appear to you in a vision,” he said. “But don’t be alarmed—it’s a vision.” The appearance of the snake would herald hours of seeing into their deepest spiritual selves, and communing with a higher power, a divine, all-knowing presence that would reveal the essence of their souls and uncover where they had been broken and perhaps, if they were lucky, how they might dispel the bad energy that had fixed itself to their spirits.

  Paul and Carrie settled into one of the doctor’s treatment rooms, actually a rustic shack near his house, and fell into the spell of their hallucinations. The brujo came to check on them (with an interpreter) and asked if they had specific problems they hoped to resolve. Carrie said she did have a problem, and the brujo nodded and said he already knew what it was, and he knew where she would find her solution. When he turned to her companion, Paul could only say that one of his elbows had been bothering him lately, maybe just a little bit, which only earned him an aggravated glance from the brujo. “He said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing.’ Like, don’t come here with an elbow problem, we’re dealing with serious problems here!” Paul recalled a few years later.

  After the brujo left, Paul lay back, resting his head on Carrie’s lap, while she stroked his hair and then laid her hand across his forehead, first just feeling his warmth, but then becoming aware of an odd vibrating sensation. “It felt like it was pulsing and growing,” she said. “Like … WAAHHHHWRRR!” Just another sizzle-brained fantasy, or a transcendent flash from somewhere beyond the inky jungle night? As close as they were, Carrie still talked about feeling pinned beneath Paul’s ever-spinning, ever-controlling brain; about the way he, like so many powerful men she knew, assumed his expertise and control over every situation. When Carrie complimented him for having so much self-discipline, Paul got cranky because, he said, discipline had nothing to do with it. He was just well organized. “It’s not an argument, more like debate club,” she said. “It’s not that you disagree with [him], you just didn’t agree in the right way.” He was mercurial: sunlit and laughing one day, consumed by his work the next, then wandering blindly around the moors the day after that, kicking his fools and bellowing into the murderous gale.

  They had spent most of twelve years together, driving each other wild in all the best and worst ways. When they came down from the ayahuasca tea and found their way back to the boat and the stretch of river that would take them to Rio and their flight back to New York, their joint adventure was finished. She spun away from him and didn’t come back, leaving him feeling withered and defenseless. Soon Paul would listen to one of his Brazilian drumming tracks and hear the story of a man pinned beneath the rubble of his shattered heart. “Abandoned and forsaken,” he wrote. “As if she’d captured the breath of my voice in a bottle / And I can’t catch it back.”

  * * *

  His voice was still very much his own. After four trips to Brazil, Paul worked with the drum tracks in New York, listening to the tapes with a pen in his hand, a sheet of paper filling with whatever came into his head.

  “If I have weaknesses / Don’t let them blind me.”

  Something like that, and he’d feel his way into the beats and bangs and the sharp rat-a-tat of the congas, and look for a melody, humming and la-la-ing and scatting this or that, something from the sheet of phrases or something bound for it.

  The man was wearing jacket and jeans,

  The woman was laughing in advance.

  Song dogs barking at the break of dawn.

  Effortless music from the Cameroons

  The spinning darkness of her hair.

  As he’d hoped, everything came through the drums: the anxiety and the wonder; the anger and the surrender; the steady current of imagining and laboring, dreaming and carving, pulled him forward. He’d take his chords and lyrics to the Hit Factory recording studio on Fifty-Fourth Street, thread in the tape, and figure out which sections were the most interesting and then get Halee to slice and dice, matching one section to a verse, another to a chorus—cutting and trimming, mixing and matching. Then they’d call in other musicians: old New York favorites Randy and Michael Brecker on trumpet and saxophone, keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, and Paul’s most trusted drummer, Steve Gadd. Graceland players Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ray Phiri and Bakithi Kumalo on guitar and bass, and new discoveries from West Africa and the diaspora route, including guitarists Vincent Nguini and Rego Star, and the Cameroon brothers Felix and Armand Sabal-Lecco, on drums and guitar, respectively. High-profile visitors included blues guitarist J. J. Cale, Fabulous Thunderbirds singer/harpist Kim Wilson, zydeco hero Clifton Chenier on accordion, and Milton Nascimento, the singer who set Paul’s most recent journey in motion. Paul would play them the original drum and percussion track, then sketch his chords on his guitar, sing a bit of melody, and let the musicians invent their own parts as he listened, sifting what he liked from what sounded wrong or what maybe would be best used in another song. When they were done, Paul and Halee would do more editing and revising, building, reconsidering, rewriting, and then start the process again. The sessions went on for months, then a year, two years, then three. The budget hit the seven hundred thousand dollars it had cost to make Graceland, and kept rising. When they finally finished in the spring of 1990, Paul had spent a million dollars on the project.

  He called the album The Rhythm of the Saints, referring to how the traditional African drumming ceremonies had to be altered for post-Columbian South America, where the Europeans’ religious authorities tried to force the natives to abandon their deities for Jesus. Instead, the immigrants dressed their deities in the robes of Catholic saints and held their sacred drumming and chanting ceremonies as they always had, only with different names. It didn’t matter. The spirit power in the music remained. Paul carried no brief for anyone’s god or saint, but he felt the spirit in the rhythm pull him deeper into his subconscious, only to emerge with one of the most haunting works of art he had ever created.

  The record starts with a sharp report from Olodum’s fourteen drummers, a fast rat-a-tat from the snares, then a sturdier pulse from the bass drums, a rolling beat that propels the opening strums of one of Paul’s chipper schoolyard melodies, a variation on the “Me and Julio” theme, anchored to a multigenerational tale called “The Obvious Child.” He’d started singing that phrase, “the obvious child,” as fill-in syllables when he was wiring the song. But as the verses strung into a story of parents, children, and the passage of time, the abstract phrase, along with the pregnant assertion “the cross is in the ballpark,” became the most meaningful lines in the tune. Paul thought he was writing about stadium-size Christian rallies, but his characters had their own concerns, and reminded themselves that their burdens weren’t quite as impossible, and their rewards not nearly as remote, as they assumed.

  Some people say the sky is just the sky

  But I say

  …

  The cross is in the ballpark

  Why deny the obvious child?

  The liquid pulse of the Uakti group’s tuned P
VC instruments sets the uneasy mood of “Can’t Run But,” a fresh variation on the techno-dystopianism of “The Boy in the Bubble,” with the meaning and marketing of art, contrasting again with the mystical sounds of the South American jungles and rivers. It’s that very spirit that illumines the jangling guitars and rattling gourds, bells, and shakers in “The Coast,” a sparkling benediction for musicians and their creation, the essence of beauty in a world riddled with loneliness and need. The even livelier “Proof,” a fast-moving contraption built of bongos, talking drums, chakeire, synthesizer, electric guitar, and accordion, pushes the buoyancy even higher, its anticipated triumphs (a fortune, a marriage, and endless luck) claimed in the here and the now because “Faith! / Faith is an island in the setting sun / But proof, yes, / Proof is the bottom line for everyone.”

  The worrying thump of the bass drums, soon joined by gourds, congas, bongos, and bata, set the backdrop for “Further to Fly,” the first of two songs haunted by Carrie and the end of their love affair. Here, thoughts about the end of love weave with aging and death, a grief so deep it could be insanity or, as Paul sings, “a morbid little lie.” He summons the rose of Jericho (a self-renewing plant that dies in drought, only to be reborn in rain), but ends with a more realistic if still impossible-seeming wish for “the strength to let you go.” “She Moves On” tells the same story in sharper terms, its anxious guitars and throbbing bass revealing a woman ravenous for speed and distance. You can sense Carrie’s illness in the woman’s midnight fevers, but the singer can’t help seeing her restlessness as hostility. “You have underestimated my power,” she whispers, and is gone again.

  “Spirit Voices” appears like a jungle waterfall, a rain of chiming guitars, triangles, and synthesizers recalling the Amazon brujo and the power of his spells. Through sparkling eyes, the natural world trembles with meaning. A bright green lizard appears; a spider weaves a perfect web; water sings from the river, mingles with the sea, and returns as holy water. “Then the sweetness in the air combined with the lightness in my head / And I heard the breathing in the bamboo,” which emerges in the heavenly voice of Milton Nascimento, promising that no matter what the morning brings, it will definitely come, and it will be powerful.

  If Paul ventured into the jungle in search of immortality, he came close to his target. For the length of The Rhythm of the Saints’ nearly forty-five minutes you could believe that he’d hit it exactly. The music is that full, the artistic spirit that generous. The ancient music had connected him to something deeper than his busy, busy brain could ever perceive. Like the brujo’s tea, the rhythm had ushered him into the darkness and shown him his demons. They squirmed through the songs, a parade of beasts and usurers, lost lovers and waning powers, all massing into the verses of “The Cool, Cool River,” where love is anger, where justice is corrupt, where prayers are little more than memories of a vanished deity, and where hope still persists, where suffering will end, and where a resilient heart can still make a difference. The song, and the album, climaxes with a ringing fanfare of horns, guitars, and bass and a shouted declaration:

  “Hard times?

  I’m used to them.

  The speeding planet burns

  I’m used to that.

  My life’s so common it disappears.”

  Miracles come and go; even music falls short. But just as the rhythm revealed his own hidden spirit, it also uncovers the divinity of simply being alive, with the most essential rhythm in heaven and on earth pulsing in your chest.

  * * *

  This time no one at Warner Bros. had to wonder if Paul’s latest safari into the wild would find an audience with American record buyers. Once again, the radio was probably a lost cause, but as they had discovered with Graceland, you could sell millions of records without even approaching Billboard’s Top 40 singles chart. Paul might be closing in on his fiftieth birthday, but a lot of the fans he’d collected during the 1960s and ’70s were into their forties and still buying records. And given the popular momentum he’d amassed with the South African record, Paul’s equally exotic follow-up drew more attention than any record he’d released since the record he and Artie didn’t release after the Central Park reunion tour.

  The Rhythm of the Saints made its entrance on October 16, 1990, riding a surge of television and newspaper stories that was soon swelled by a rush of reviews that were just as ecstatic as the notices attending Graceland. The new record might not be the global wingding the previous one was, but as the critics noticed, that’s because it was deeper and more complex in its music and lyrics. In the afterglow of Graceland, the public might not have needed convincing. Saints jumped up the charts in double time, reaching No. 4 (Graceland had peaked at No. 3) and selling its first million copies within the first month of its life. The record did even better in the United Kingdom, where it topped the album charts while climbing nearly as high in countries ranging from Finland to Australia and Japan to Hungary. News of a year-plus-long global tour of sports arenas and stadiums created box-office mob scenes where longtime fans jousted with youngsters to score the best tickets. And when there was a little public dustup about how the tour’s commercial sponsor, American Express, was hoarding some of the best seats for its elite Gold Card customers, Paul apologized quickly and unequivocally, and all was forgiven.

  The tour opened on the second day of 1991 with a stop at the Tacoma Dome, outside Seattle. It was the first time Paul had performed in the Pacific Northwest since the Simon and Garfunkel swing in the fall of 1968,* and the sold-out crowd stayed on its feet for most of the evening. The ensemble spent the next week polishing the show, then started the tour in earnest with a show in Vancouver on January 9, followed immediately by a night in Portland. Paul performed with a seventeen-member band (including the three members of the vocal group the Waters) he’d built from the same mix of old accomplices, Graceland veterans, and the West African and South American musicians he’d met on the Rhythm of the Saints sessions. The show was held on a multilevel platform that descended to meet the fans at the front of the stage. As thunderous as they were delicate, the concerts led off with “The Obvious Child,” “The Boy in the Bubble,” and “She Moves On” before an mbaqanga arrangement of “Kodachrome” established how the night’s older songs would be reinvigorated by Paul’s globalized sensibility—which had also reinvigorated Paul, elevating him to new levels of perception and musical imagination that had less relaunched his career than started it again, as if his older songs were the work of a completely different artist. The opening chords of “You Can Call Me Al” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” spurred bigger ovations than “Still Crazy After All These Years,” while the final notes of the just-released “Proof” and “The Coast” incited roars bigger than what came after Simon and Garfunkel standards “Cecilia” and even “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (due also to the gospel-reggae arrangement that played against the original’s emotional grandiosity, but still). The audience preferred the new stuff to the classic hits. Had any other fifty-year-old pop star come close to being able to claim that?

  The Born at the Right Time tour would continue to the end of 1991, but the climax of the year, and of the Graceland–The Rhythm of the Saints era, came on August 15, 1991, on a cloudy day in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, not far from Paul’s living room windows on Central Park West. It had been ten years since Simon and Garfunkel’s reunion spectacular in 1981, and a decade later Paul no longer worried about being able to draw citizens out of their apartments on his own power. Because it wasn’t just him; it was Graceland and it was The Rhythm of the Saints, the hearts and hoofbeats of half a dozen cultures all twirled into one massive, irrepressible sound, with Paul’s melodies and words draped over the top. They bowled over crowds, shook the stands, and detached roofs from arenas night for night for night, sending the patrons back into the street three hours later with feverish cheeks and tingling feet. So a summer night in Central Park? This show was built for that.

  Offstage, Paul be
came wound tighter as the day drew nearer. Most artists get edgy before playing New York and Los Angeles, the big industry towns where the crowds are so much more jaded and easily bored. Toss in the homecoming stakes and the back-in-his-own-footsteps and the many pitfalls of playing an outdoor show in the middle of a big city, and it could all seem overwhelming. When Chris Botti, a late addition to the band on trumpet, asked Paul how he could bear the pressure of such a massive event, Paul projected the entire affair into the ballpark. Playing on a smaller or more remote stage, he explained, he’d come onstage hoping to nail a single or a double. But when you’re a born slugger and you work your way to Yankee Stadium with everything at stake, there’s only one thing you know how to do: swing for the fences.

  In New York, the dawn came in humid murk. Early forecasts declared that the bad weather would hold through the day, then take a turn for the worse with the sunset. Rain for nearly certain, possibly lightning and thunder. Still, the stage had been built, the video screens and sound towers standing as high as the trees. To account for the sound lag in the back, they’d engineered a digital delay long enough to fill two stadiums with crystalline sound. Once again, the people flooded into the park from every direction. The skies lightened with the afternoon, then broke apart into a puffy blue ether. Streets crowded and choked; the coolers and blankets spread from Seventy-Second Street into the Nineties. When the show began, Paul came out at a jog, guitar in hand, skipping down the stairs to his microphone three steps from the bottom. The Olodum drummers, flown in specially from Salvador, Brazil, stretched across the top row at the back, and with Paul’s signal they fired off the first drum beats of the evening, launching “The Obvious Child” into Sheep Meadow, over the reservoir, through the trees, and beyond—everywhere there were ears, 750,000 sets of them, according to the city’s crowd estimators.