Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  It was the same onstage: the ten-member band built from musicians drawn from Africa, South America, Europe, New York and Oregon, all bending to fit Paul’s peripatetic vision. Each of the major works was informed by still other musicians, traditions, and muses: Artie’s harmonies during the first half of the show; then the many-hued second set, starting with the Los Angeles–based Mighty Clouds of Joy bringing the gospel to “Loves Me Like a Rock,” New Yorker Phoebe Snow doing the same for the urban-secular gospel of “Gone at Last,” then Ladysmith Black Mambazo bridging the African American traditions to the roots of the African veld, the headwaters for so much of the music that had flowed through Paul since he opened his eyes and ears five decades earlier—a lifetime of influences and inspirations, of collaborators and creative partners.

  All Paul’s collaborators had influenced his music, but none could claim anything like the power Artie held over him. As much as Paul tried to deny it, the partnership had marked him, and not just because a world of fans couldn’t get past it. At first Paul reveled in their resumed harmony—mostly. “I felt a lot of affection for [Artie] from the audience,” he said after the first few shows. “It feels great when I see that.” Did that sound, in the midst of Paul’s extraordinary popular comeback, just a little bit patronizing? When a New Yorker magazine writer called to talk a few days later, Artie sounded something less than loving when he shared his thoughts on “America”: “That’s Paul Simon taking a posture of disappointed world-weariness,” he said of a song many people had come to see as a vital document on the post-idealist America of the late 1960s. “It is sophomoric, inflated talk when you’re just out of college. Now I’m older, and I know honor, money, love, loss, competition. I have a child. I don’t feel I’m lost … it behooves me not to accept that. I live in a troubled country, but I won’t cashier it. Make something better of America, or else drop the subject.”

  Then it was happening again: the averted eyes, the stiff atmosphere backstage, the toxic silence. It went on like this for weeks, all the way until just after the third-to-last show, when something set them off so badly during the encores that they stormed back into a dressing room, slammed the door, and ripped it all open again, the decades of hurts, and the grudges: harsh tones growing into shouts, holding there for a while and then rising into sustained bellowing and then, good God, full-on screaming. And even though the door was shut and locked, you could hear it everywhere: down the hall and up the stairs, and then the throats went, vocal cords knotting, fraying, and popping. Neither could speak the next morning. They had to cancel the next show to recover their voices. Amazingly, the final shows were every bit as smooth, their between-song patter just as warm, as they had ever been.

  * * *

  They were teenagers in the late 1950s, a pair of young immigrants set loose in a frigid, steely city. Like Paul and Artie, they took to the street corners to meet their compatriots in teenage hijinks, affected fancy clothes to maximize their impact, and found their way to the west side of Midtown to make their stand. But instead of taking a song to Tin Pan Alley, Sal Agron and Tony Hernandez went to a street corner park in Hell’s Kitchen known as a hangout for the Norsemen, an Irish street gang that had recently thumped a friend of theirs. Agron and Hernandez, both fifteen years old, were members of the Vampires, a Puerto Rican gang from uptown. At least a few of the guys in the park were members of an Irish gang, and it didn’t take long for trouble to start. When it was over, two of the Irish kids were mortally wounded, stabbed repeatedly by Agron and left to bleed to death on the concrete.

  A tragedy by any measure, but in the New York City of 1959, when street gangs (including the Parsons Boys, who tormented Paul and Artie on their way to and from Parsons Junior High) had become the urban menace of the moment, the crime became an instant sensation, and not just because it involved teenage members of a street gang and not just because Agron and Hernandez had committed their crimes while clad in a black cape and wielding a black umbrella, respectively. It was also because they were Puerto Rican, the fruit of the latest wave of immigrants whose darker faces, foreign accents, and inscrutable ways clashed with the upstanding values of the New Yorkers who had the common decency to be descended from one of the earlier waves of immigrants. And if all of that wasn’t enough tinder for a blazing tabloid series, think again of those costumes.

  Agron and Hernandez had vanished on the night of the bloodshed, so the saga of THE CAPE MAN MURDERS (which is how it always appeared on the front page, in all caps, 24-point type) began as a mystery. They were captured soon afterward, but the newspapers kept them in the headlines for more than a year, through the investigation, to the trial, to their sentencing hearing. A few things didn’t add up. Agron’s knife was unmarked by blood, as were his cape and shoes. But how could you reconcile those facts with his glee at being identified as the murderer? Found guilty, the sixteen-year-old was the youngest person ever to be sentenced to death by the American judicial system. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller commuted the death sentence a few years later, at the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt, among others, and Agron went on to become something like a model prisoner, earning high school and college degrees and developing a passion for social justice, particularly when it came to the inequities of race and class. Paroled in 1979, he had seven years of freedom before dying of a heart attack in 1986 at forty-two. Once past the initial rush of infamy, he declared himself innocent and never displayed much sympathy for the surviving family of the boys who died that night in Hell’s Kitchen.

  Tracking the story in Kew Gardens Hills, Paul had felt a kinship with the murderer. The middle-class honor student Paul was in many ways the opposite of the impoverished, uneducated ghetto kid. But Agron’s look and attitude—at the time, he told the reporters that he didn’t care if he burned for the crime—thrilled the good boy from Queens. The Puerto Rican gang member was an outsider, young and wild in the streets, with no interest in anyone’s expectations of how nice boys were supposed to behave. And what buttoned-down high schooler doesn’t secretly yearn for the weight of the leather? “There were gangs in Queens … I felt the typical middle-class aspiration to be [in one],” Paul said. “I was in a couple of fights.” Thirty years later, Agron reminded Paul of early rock ’n’ roll: the curl of his lip, the absence of remorse, the raw power of not giving a fuck. At the same time, Paul could hear the echoes of the Latin dance bands he’d seen sharing the stage with the Lee Simms Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom and the Latin rhythms and voices coming from the fringes of the radio dial, the sound of his youth, the essence of the New York that had created him and then, like his youth, slipped away. Between his memories of the crime, the echoes of the music, and the deeper implications of Agron’s jailhouse rebirth, Paul recognized a multilayered tale that was dramatic and exciting, tragic and hopeful, a New York story that spoke as clearly about America as it did about any one man’s life. It was a story shot through with rock ’n’ roll, with doo-wop, with the passion of Latin dance: music, murder, and redemption—a perfect night in the Broadway theater.

  The marquees in Midtown had beckoned Paul for years. In late 1967 he had signed up to compose the music for Jimmy Shine, a Broadway show about a struggling Greenwich Village artist that the playwright Murray Schisgal had written for Dustin Hoffman. Paul’s first shot at theatrical songwriting didn’t last long. Overwhelmed by Simon and Garfunkel work, he stepped aside and was replaced by Lovin’ Spoonful leader and songwriter John Sebastian. The allure of the theater didn’t leave him, though. Still, as he often did, Paul revealed the distance between his ambition and his confidence in tones of disinterest and contempt. Speaking to Jeffrey Sweet, the theater-focused student in his New York University songwriting workshop in 1970, Paul said he could never get past the artifice of theatrical music—especially, he said, when the characters onstage burst into song in the middle of a conversation. It was absurd; nothing like that ever happened in real life. Sweet countered that it was just as unrealistic for Shakespeare’s kings and
knaves to chat in perfectly composed iambic pentameter, but Paul was having none of it. “If I ever write a musical,” he told Sweet, “there will be a big radio upstage, and when it’s time for a song, they’ll go upstage and turn on the radio, and that’s where the music will come from.” Wanting to show his famous teacher a more contemporary form of musical, Sweet offered to take Paul to a second-night performance of Stephen Sondheim’s innovative musical Company, and at first Paul seemed interested: “I might do that,” he said. Sweet gave him one of his tickets, but when showtime arrived Paul’s seat was empty.

  His wheel of fascination/scorn continued to spin. In 1973, Paul declared that the score of the supposedly revolutionary hit Hair, despite its long-haired cast, flashes of nudity, and knowing references to drugs, sex, and revolution, was a pale imitation of real rock ’n’ roll. “That’s because the best writers of popular songs never wrote for the stage,” he said. “Consequently you get people who did poor imitations getting the big hits.” Still, he said he was eager to get to know Joseph Papp, who ran New York’s purposefully offbeat Public Theater. Maureen Orth noted similar statements in Newsweek a few months later, but only a few weeks after that, Paul dismissed talk about pursuing theater as “bullshit,” adding, “I have absolutely no plans for something like that.” But, he added, “I’m not saying I wouldn’t be willing to do it someday.” By 1980 he put writing a musical on the very short list of projects he wanted to finish by the end of the decade.

  * * *

  That didn’t quite happen, but he did settle on the Capeman murders as a subject, sketched a plot about the life of Sal Agron, and composed a handful of songs before putting the project aside to focus on the The Rhythm of the Saints album. Other than the Concert Event of a Lifetime shows in 1993, once Rhythm was done, he devoted himself to the Capeman, diving into the facts of the story: Agron’s birth in Puerto Rico, the fight in the playground, his rebirth in prison, and then his premature death in the mid-1980s. Paul couldn’t see why he needed to fiddle with the story. It would be as exciting as the tabloid stories that had thrilled him as a teenager and as beautiful as the music at its core. That it was also entirely true would give it exactly the kind of literary gravitas Broadway hadn’t seen in generations: a murder story with huge social and moral implications.

  But Paul also knew that a Broadway musical wasn’t just music. It was a story and a script. Directing, set designing, casting, acting, singing, and dancing—each practice had its own traditions, rules, ideals, and vocabulary. If writing, producing, and performing music required a community of talents, staging a full-blown musical demanded the skills and commitment of an entirely different set of people working jobs Paul didn’t understand, applying skills he didn’t have, and enacting visions that weren’t necessarily his own. For a fiercely willful man intent on not just joining but actually reinventing an artistic medium that he kind of despised, it would be a herculean undertaking. Paul knew he’d need help, but he also needed to keep enough control so that the final product would be the fully formed version of his creative vision.

  Eager to consult, and possibly collaborate, with someone whose work he respected, Paul took his script-in-progress to the novelist E. L. Doctorow, whose Ragtime had recently been adapted into a popular and acclaimed musical. Doctorow wasn’t interested in collaborating on anything, as it turned out. And after reading the “Capeman” manuscript, he had one piece of advice for Paul: throw this out and rewrite it as fiction. The facts were interesting, sometimes even thrilling, but they didn’t add up to a story, with the deeper emotional and artistic truths that reality could rarely touch. Paul and Doctorow talked for a while after that, and Paul thanked him for his advice. But he had already mapped the stars, and he wasn’t going to change course now. Still hoping to find a collaborator to shore up his story for the stage, he went to Derek Walcott, the Saint Lucian poet whose blend of formal language and Caribbean imagery had earned him a 1992 Nobel Prize and a global reputation as one of the world’s best living writers. An admirer of his work, Paul had befriended Walcott in the 1980s and turned to his poems for inspiration when he was writing the songs for The Rhythm of the Saints. Later Paul dedicated “The Coast,” one of the most beautiful songs on the album, to the poet. Walcott, who also wrote and directed his own plays from time to time, was happy to be asked, and they started working together immediately.

  They made a good creative match. Eleven years Paul’s senior, Walcott had also succeeded early in life, and had nurtured a world-beating reputation ever since. A mixed-race child, one of twin boys whose grandmothers were Caribbean-born black slaves and whose grandfathers were British slave owners, Walcott was raised in opposing cultures, strung between the classical literature of his imperial grandfathers and the brilliant colors and lofting breeze of his grandmothers’ Caribbean. While he proved a brilliant student as a child, the African strain in Walcott’s mixed blood shamed him no end. “He had prayed / nightly for his flesh to change,” he recalled in verse. Inspired in equal measures by shame, anger, self-loathing, and self-assurance, Walcott was both an insightful observer of the world and an enthusiastic chronicler of his own life. He was still in his thirties when he wrote the explicitly autobiographical Another Life (published in 1973) and spoke often of the torments of writing and of simply being himself. “Caught between two races and two worlds,” wrote critic William Logan in 2007, “[Walcott] has sometimes succumbed to pride or self-pity, or to that pride indistinguishable from self-pity.” Still, when Walcott took pen in hand, all these emotions fueled one of the most illustrious bodies of literature of the twentieth century.

  At first collaborating wasn’t easy for either of them. Both were stubborn. Neither was accustomed to having a coauthor. The more he read about Agron, the less Walcott could stand him. Paul refused to write music to fit Walcott’s verse, insisting that it had to be the other way around. When Walcott had an idea, Paul would grab his guitar and play snatches of the tunes he had yet to match with lyrics. The rhythm is too fast? How about this one? Does it sound like this melody? It was an eccentric and often creaky process, but they made it work. A reference to St. Lazarus tucked into one of the songs about Agron made Walcott realize that the heart of the story was about redemption and the progress of Agron’s soul. Had his crime been imprinted on him before he was even born? A childhood visit to a Puerto Rican Santero, a priest in the blended Yoruban/Catholic religion, seemed to reveal the darkness in Sal’s future, spirituality draped all over the facts of Agron’s life.

  Meanwhile, Paul worked on the music, writing song after song after song in a litany of styles. Doo-wop, plenas, rockabilly, a bomba, and more. As the pieces fell together, Paul happened to have lunch with his old friend, lawyer, and partner Mike Tannen, and ended up inviting him over to hear the new music and take a look at Walcott’s hand-drawn sketches of the scenes they had written. It had been a long time since Paul sought his counsel, but Tannen felt obligated to tell his old friend two things: the music was jaw-dropping, maybe the most powerful set of songs Paul had ever written, but the story, he said, would be a problem. The character of Agron was unsympathetic at first and unredeemed at the end. Audiences accustomed to experiencing stories through the eyes of a likable protagonist would find it difficult to root for a character as troubling as Agron. “The whole project’s on a razor’s edge,” Tannen told his former client. “I can see it going either way.”

  Paul wouldn’t budge. For all that he valued the thoughts of his friends and compatriots, he couldn’t let them push him away from what felt right. Did they think he was a pop star who had wandered out of his depth when he’d made a left turn onto Broadway? Well, he was finished with being a pop star—no more records, no more tours, no performing of any kind. To symbolize the decision, he got rid of his lush brown hairpiece, covering his nearly naked pate with either a baseball cap or, if he felt like it, nothing at all. He hated all the fuss of being a star, he said, and he was finished with doing things he hated to do. Was Paul Simon making h
imself clear? Forty years of stardom was enough. Take him or leave him; just don’t expect him to alter a note or change a word.

  * * *

  From the sketching out of the story, the writing of the songs, the pursuit of investors, and all the way to the final curtain call on opening night, they have a way of doing things in the theater. Paul had no intention of doing them like that. Rather than make a demo reel of the songs in the score, he worked in the recording studio for more than a year, creating a fully produced album of finished songs. Rather than pursue investors with the expertise to help shape the production, he and close advisers Peter Parcher and Dan Klores, a lawyer and publicist respectively, got their seed money from investors who worked in music and television. The one exception, James L. Nederlander, came from a long line of theatrical investors and producers, but unlike most of his family members James was strictly a moneyman, with next to no experience working on a developing show. When one of his investors convinced Paul to meet with a few producers from the successful Dodger Theatricals outfit, Paul heard their advice to hire a seasoned Broadway director as an insult. “You’re telling me I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. That kind of talk could destroy his confidence, he added angrily. And given the sorry state of Broadway, why would he want to let them push him into making another show just like the ones he already didn’t like?