Paul played plenty of his familiar songs, but he couldn’t imagine spending this new phase in his career as an oldies act. Bits of new songs started to come to him in 1998, and though the pace was closer to a seep than a flood, he managed to get a handful of instrumental tracks recorded before breaking for the Dylan tour in 1999. By mid-2000 he’d produced enough music to fill an album of deceptively tranquil love ballads, narrative story-songs, and explorations of the end of life and the start of what might come next. Working with the core of his globally sourced band (drummer Steve Gadd, bassist Bakithi Kumalo, guitarist Vincent Nguini, percussionist Jamey Haddad, and the many-handed guitarist Mark Stewart, who doubles on every other stringed instrument plus horns and vocals), Paul crafted tracks that incorporated nearly all the sounds that had entranced him over the years: the restless percussion and tinsel-stringed guitars of South America, the bouncy beats of South Africa, the banjos and Dobros of American folk and blues, the processed sounds and drones of the modern avant-garde. Throughout the album, he sings with an actor’s grasp of character, speaking some lines and singing others in a voice that bends from sweet to sarcastic to hushed with the enormity of life and the finality of death. He called the record You’re the One and released it in the early fall of 2000, less than a year and a half after The Capeman’s collapse.
Nearly sixty years old, Paul had achieved a kind of domestic tranquility that seemed like a scene from someone else’s life. Married in 1992, he and Edie started their family as soon as the fertility gods allowed, welcoming a son named Adrian in 1992, a girl named Lulu in 1995, and their youngest, Gabriel, in 1998. It was a fresh start that seemed charmed. They moved to a large but homey house in exurban New Canaan, Connecticut, and basked in the same wonder that puts so many parents in mind of life’s great pleasures and terrors. “This is near enough to bliss,” Paul sings in “Look at This,” before acknowledging the other end of the parental bargain: “If you’re looking for worries, you got ’em.”
Harper, the son he had with Peggy in 1972, had given Paul plenty of worries over the years. He suffered the usual adolescent struggles, compounded by all the temptations of children of the rich and famous and, worse, his own bouts of depression. Even as a young teenager, Harper became a regular at CBGB, downtown, drinking heavily and fooling around with weed and LSD. Paul and Peggy weren’t naïve; once your son starts getting kicked out of schools, the situation becomes clear. Raised in part by Carrie, who had come into his life when he was five, Harper asked to live with her in Los Angeles, but by the time he turned twenty-one he was out of control, using heroin, Demerol, speed, and morphine until, as he recalled, the mixed-up powder was tumbling out of his pockets and nose. “Like Rainbow Brite in a nasty mood.” He eventually got the help he needed and family order was restored.
You’re the One takes on love and contentment with a realist’s eye for the meteor plunging from the clear blue sky. “Darling Lorraine” follows a long marriage from romance to separation to reconciliation and death, while “Quiet” anticipates a senescence peaceful enough for the singer to “lie down on my blanket / And release my fists at last.” “The Teacher” sinks deepest to its creator’s bone. Equal parts awed and bitter, the song describes a life spent in the shadow of a great and wise man, a philosopher-king of sorts, who leads a tattered group of immigrants over raw hills to a paradise he can describe but never quite reach. Still, they follow because “it’s easier to learn than unlearn / Because we’ve passed the point of no return.” The teacher grows older and stronger; his appetites strip the hills and drain the rivers. His words come inscribed upon tablets, and though his acolytes know his flaws, they can’t resist his authority, or the memory of being carried away from danger in his arms. “Carry me home, my teacher / Carry me home.”
Released in September 2000, You’re the One lacked the energy that defined virtually all Paul’s previous records, but its rise to No. 19 on the Billboard list (twenty-three slots higher than Songs of the Capeman had reached three years earlier), along with a chorus of encouraging reviews, was a step in the right direction. The album earned Paul his sixth nomination for the Album of the Year Grammy, and though he eventually lost to Steely Dan’s reunion album, Two Against Nature, simply being included felt like a welcome-back hug from his many friends, colleagues, and admirers in the music industry.
Another new album came in 2006, this one a jaunt into the electronic textures of Brian Eno, the British producer who had helped the likes of the Talking Heads, David Bowie, and Robert Fripp create some of their best-known albums. With Eno’s metallic whooshes and clicks as a sonic landscape (as described in the album credits), Paul worked with small combos of mostly rock players to craft a steelier set of songs for the post-9/11 America of the Bush-Cheney years: songs about conflict, about desperation, about love, prayers, and escape. Called Surprise, the album veered from modern pop to the deliberately obscure to the sweet and delicate (“Father and Daughter”). The last was actually a bit of a retread, a slightly enhanced version of a song Paul had written about his daughter, Lulu, then contributed to the soundtrack of the animated movie The Wild Thornberrys. Built around a tumbling guitar riff reminiscent of “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” the song resonated deeply enough to score an Academy Award nomination for Best Song, and a nod in the same category at the Golden Globes. Surprise sold better than its predecessor, debuting at Billboard’s No. 14 slot before dropping out of sight.
Paul’s music had been one of the defining cultural forces during the last thirty-five years of the twentieth century. But the dawn of the twenty-first century launched a fifth era in his recording career, the point where his storied achievements both gilded and deflated his new work. He’d spend two to four years producing a set of songs and then present it to the world in a downpour of excellent reviews. His best in a decade! His best in twenty years! His best since Graceland! He’d play a couple of the new tracks on Saturday Night Live and sit for some interviews, talk about the new songs, the good old days, and, with varying degrees of patience and crankiness, the bad old controversies. His fans would run to the local record store or hit the Buy button on Amazon or pick it up at the Starbucks counter along with their grande macchiato and slip it into the car’s CD changer to listen to on the way home. It’s actually really good, they’d tell their friends at a Saturday night dinner party. Well, it’s no Graceland, but it sounds just like him.
As Paul knew, the modern pop mainstream had no room for a legacy artist in his sixties, a man old enough to be the average pop radio listener’s grandfather. It didn’t bother him, he said. He would have been shocked if the kids of the day paid attention to what he had to say. So he would say what he felt, make it sound good to his own ears, and get it out there for whoever wanted to hear it. He’d sell a decent number, enough to put him in the Top 20 for a week or two, but it was a different game now. When his contract with Warner Bros. ended with Surprise in 2006, he became a free agent. It didn’t bother him that much. The morning after the deal expired was the first day he hadn’t been subject to a recording contract since the fall of 1963, when he was twenty-two years old.
Now was the time for more inductions and awards, for even greater tributes, for fancy-dress evenings in columned stone buildings. In 2001 he was welcomed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame again, this time for the solo career he had launched amid so much anxiety in 1972. Wearing a white suit over a black T-shirt, he sat patiently at his table in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom and took in Marc Anthony’s loving, if teasing, induction with a flickering smile, the light fading a little when Anthony joked about their both being in federal witness protection since The Capeman. The crowd responded lightly to Anthony’s praise, and didn’t warm up very much when Paul took the stage. He played it humble, mentioning so many friends, colleagues, and compatriots that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s record keepers noted that his fifty-name list set a new record for the most thank-yous in one speech. When Artie’s name came up, Paul first turned plaintive:
“I hope that one day before we die, we’ll make peace with each other.” Then, with a sly smile: “No rush.”
The applause was polite, the cheers measured, the sound of respect, as opposed to a rush of affection. Was it the lingering effects of the Graceland controversies weighing down their hands? The reports of back-alley tactics used to snatch up what his collaborators, and many others, assumed was theirs? Or maybe it was the criticism he’d dealt to so many of his fellow travelers over the years. Or maybe they were just envious of everything he’d achieved, and how easy he had made it look. No matter: Paul was named the Grammy Awards’ MusiCares Person of the Year a few months later, as a tribute to his charitable work, particularly with the Children’s Health Fund, an organization devoted to caring for the children of impoverished families that he’d cofounded with Dr. Irwin Redlener, who, coincidentally enough, was related by marriage to Paul’s first mentor and manager, Charlie Merenstein. Kennedy Center Honors came a year after that, and in 2007 Paul was the first recipient of the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for excellence in popular song. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, and in 2012 the Royal Swedish Academy of Music gave him a Polar Music Prize, an award for great contributions to music whose previous winners included Bob Dylan, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ravi Shankar, Led Zeppelin, Isaac Stern, and the Baltic states.* Then came honorary degrees and doctorates from his alma mater Queens College, from Berklee College of Music and Yale University, and from ten times others that he turned down because who wants to listen to that many speeches? It was more than he’d wanted, more than he ever could have dreamed.
* * *
Heading to England for the You’re the One tour in the fall of 2000, Paul dug out some of his old diaries and made a short list of names of the friends from his London era, when they all lived the day-for-night lives of young musicians, trading sets during the evenings and then staying up until dawn sharing their riffs, songs, and stories. The older he got, the more he understood that those precious few months in the mid-1960s, the last days before the fame struck, were the happiest of his life, when he was so young and unencumbered, surrounded by friends and music and then resting in the arms of Kathy, the love of his soft-cheeked young life. Their romance hadn’t ended happily. Pulled away by the sudden success of “The Sound of Silence,” Paul had sworn he’d be back within a few months, half a year at most. But then his life spun in a very different direction, and when the six months were over he was on an orbit Kathy could never have entered. She went in the opposite direction, back to the hills of Wales and to a husband, kids, and the quiet family life she was born for. When Paul finally got through to her in the late 1990s, she greeted him warmly and they chatted for a long while.
Paul also spoke to Martin Carthy, the folk guitarist who showed him how to play his distinctive finger-picked arrangement of “Scarborough Fair,” only to be shocked when Paul adapted it to Simon and Garfunkel’s style and, with the benefit of Artie’s “Canticle,” made it into a cross-national hit, crediting himself as arranger and making no mention of Carthy. Carthy, who soon became one of the most admired folk guitar players in England, with an influence that extended to blues aficionados Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and countless others, had spent years feeling bitter. Paul had made a fortune and never so much as acknowledged Carthy’s contribution. “I really became the full-fledged victim,” he said. “And that’s a very comfortable place to be.”
Until it wasn’t, until that was one of the only things people asked about when he’d rather have been talking about his music, a ritual he started thinking of as, in his words, “trudging the grudge.” Carthy had already stopped feeling upset about “Scarborough Fair” when Paul called from Stockholm in mid-October 2000 to say he’d be playing London at the Hammersmith Apollo and wanted Carthy to play the song with him, at last. Carthy accepted the invitation even before Paul told him his side of the “Scarborough Fair” story, how he really had been paying royalties all that time with no idea that Carthy’s manager hadn’t been forwarding his client his fair share. That night, Paul and Carthy performed the song together for the first time, and stayed up for hours after, talking about old friends and old songs.
* * *
Paul had been kicking it around for years, trying to work out exactly what went wrong with The Capeman, and why. He had talked about the show in the decade since its collapse in varying tones of regret, mea culpa, and flashes of anger. He’d complain that the journalists and critics had come in disinterested in Puerto Rican culture, that they had it in for him personally. That terrible Vogue story, the one where he’d said, supposedly, that he didn’t give a rip about what the Broadway community thought about anything, was totally phony, he said. “I never said any of those things.” That neither Paul nor his managers had ever demanded a retraction and had made similar assertions to other reporters must not have registered* in his memory. But then, a few breaths later, he’d think again. “Okay, maybe it didn’t flow slickly. Maybe it was a little static. Okay, it wasn’t a perfect thing by any means.” A few weeks later he was ready to accept that The Capeman really had been kind of, well, substandard. “I made a lot of mistakes. I didn’t know anything; I only knew what people told me. Different people told me different things, and I picked a piece of information that I thought applied, and it was wrong.”
Then again on the other hand he could think it through a million times and what would it matter? All he could do was let it go and have faith that someday, somewhere, someone would dust off the Capeman and give it another chance. Maybe that’s when people would be able to really listen and finally figure out what he had been trying to do.
Almost exactly ten years after the final curtain fell, Paul and The Capeman got their chance. The Brooklyn Academy of Music put on a month-long series of shows focused on Paul’s music. Billed collectively as Love in Hard Times, the series consisted of three separate programs, each featuring a different set of guest stars performing Paul’s works. The first, “American Tunes,” covered the singer-songwriter days, with half a dozen artists (pop-classical singer Josh Groban, the Roches, alt-country singer/guitarist Gillian Welch, multi-instrumentalist Olu Dara, guitarist Amos Lee, and Brooklyn’s own indie-rock heroes Grizzly Bear) performing Simon and Garfunkel and Paul’s songs from his pre-Graceland solo years, and with Paul performing “How Can You Live in the Northeast?,” one of the highlights from his then-current album, Surprise. The “Under African Skies” shows covered the Graceland–The Rhythm of the Saints period with the help of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, David Byrne, and a few younger African and Brazilian singers. Paul and members of his band performed on about half the songs in both programs. But he sat out all but one of the songs in the third and most daring program, an evening dedicated entirely to the music of The Capeman.
The passage of time had a miraculous effect on how New York audiences and critics perceived The Capeman, particularly in the oratorio form in which it was performed at BAM. Divorced from the play’s book and the awkward turns in its staging, Paul’s songs soared. The show received enormous ovations each night, and a new generation of critics couldn’t say enough to celebrate what they’d heard. “‘The Capeman’ might be [Simon’s] most important and enduring work,” the New York Post’s Dan Aquilante wrote, describing “a classic tragedy firmly rooted in modern times.” The New York Daily News’s Jim Farber, one of the most venomous critics from the show’s original run, tried to pick up where he left off (“It’s still a tepid, ponderous and repetitive affair”), but he had to admit that the show’s new iteration worked much better than the original production, particularly given such moving performances by the singers. The New York Times’s Ben Ratliff was also restrained in his praise, but still acknowledged the beauty of the music, particularly in the pair of albums (Paul’s and a belated only-on-iTunes release of the original cast album), which, as he noted, were now usually described in print with the prefix “the underrated.”
The Capeman’s redem
ption tour continued in the summer of 2010, when New York’s Public Theater, best known for its Shakespearean productions in Central Park, presented a three-night staging of the show, once again minus the book, at its open-air Delacorte Theater in the park, again in oratorio form, the singers performing a streamlined version of the show from behind music stands. The show enraptured the eighteen-hundred-strong audience on all three nights, spurred even greater praise from the New York critics, and not-so-hushed talk about how the last revived Broadway show to follow the path from Off-Off-Broadway to the Delacorte and then back to Broadway was the late-sixties hippieish show Hair. Would The Capeman make the same leap? Maybe someday. Stranger things had happened.
* * *
“It’s over. Long over. I can’t even imagine why people would be interested.”
That was Paul in 2000, and you already know what, and who, he’s talking about, and which age-old question he had just been asked.
When are you and Artie Garfunkel going to get back together?
Paul could get pissy about the topic, but it was hard to blame him. They had already tried it twice, once in the early 1980s and then again in 1993, and each time had been disastrous—not musically disastrous: their voices had always slipped back together so easily, their unified sound rich and dense with feeling. But then there was that other thing, the nearly lifelong connection, the bond that sank so deep it felt like an invading presence that could turn malignant at any moment. That had to be expelled at all costs.
Sometimes Paul would tell his friends that he didn’t even like Artie. They were brothers, sure, but a lot of brothers can’t stand each other, and that’s the kind of brothers they were. He couldn’t talk to him anymore, couldn’t talk about the weather without it triggering a nasty crack about something that had been said, or not said, decades earlier. At one point in the mid-1980s they were so estranged that they refused to stand close enough together to take a portrait for the cover of a greatest hits collection for the European market, and they eventually came to one of the more absurd compromises in the history of rock ’n’ roll: the European record label could find a pair of Simon and Garfunkel–esque models, put them somewhere scenic, and photograph them from afar. Then the real Paul and Artie, in their separate rooms on their separate sides of Manhattan, would try to agree on which shot was best, and that would be the cover.
Homeward Bound Page 44