Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  * The hint of violence echoes the final verse of “Still Crazy,” only without the yuks.

  * CBS’s Laugh-In, despite its hippy-dippy characters and occasionally bawdy jokes, doesn’t count. Its producers were establishment professionals who knew that dressing up the usual Hollywood shtick in long hair, sideburns, and body paint would be a clever gimmick. When it started to work, their first impulse was to use the show’s popularity to make then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon look with-it. Sure, Lily Tomlin came out of Laugh-In, and Michaels was a low-level writer there for a while, but the show’s voice was still laced with an older generation’s bourbon and cigarettes.

  * Intriguingly, the end of Davis’s career at Columbia marked the end of Paul’s hostility toward the former president. Now they lived in the same building, sent their kids to the same school, and had taken to hanging out together. They have gotten on well ever since.

  * The younger Jonah is played by Paul’s son, Harper. An earlier version of the script restaged the entire sequence of a tuxedo-clad Louis leaning in to compliment the boy’s singing, but was replaced by a simpler shot of the kid at his little keyboard.

  † Based quite obviously on Kal Rudman, whose radio tip sheet Friday Morning Quarterback was enormously influential in the seventies and eighties.

  * In 1980, this was a new and somewhat shocking idea. The 1960s rebels stooping to commercialized package tours? No way that could really happen!

  * Concert promoter Ron Delsener on the size of the audience: “I forget what the police said, and of course it’s always a fake figure, but if you have X amount of acres, one person takes up three square feet. So that’s what we figured, X amount of people. They go half a million, I go I didn’t say half a million, you guys did. But that sounds great to me.”

  * That was the plan until David Geffen, who had become friendly with Paul, took it upon himself to save the musician from Walter Yetnikoff’s ongoing wrath by buying the international rights from CBS and releasing it on his own newly launched label. Instead of pleasing Paul, the move infuriated him, possibly because he knew that with the album at CBS Yetnikoff would have no choice but to praise it to the skies, just a few years after pledging to ruin Paul’s career. Instead, Geffen snatched away the rights, and Paul’s revenge, behind his back.

  * Whether you liked it or not.

  * They had confronted similarly wild crowds in Europe the previous summer, especially at a beachfront concert in Nice, where enthusiasts started pelting the stage with Evian water bottles, at least one of which clocked Paul in the head.

  * Provenance, mix status, and where it fit into the ongoing stages of the album unknown.

  * Marshall Chess, the son of Chess Records founder Leonard Chess and record man on his own, believes the tape originated with him. Turned on by shipments of albums from South African record companies he made many tapes of his favorites and distributed them to friends, who also passed them on.

  * And avoided them for good after that by working with only English-speaking musicians. They made a few exceptions later, but not many.

  * The song “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” doesn’t really count, given that the headlines about the Richard Speck murders, the death of Lenny Bruce, and so on are less political than simply bad things that happened in America in 1966.

  * Paul’s lyric is an abstruse analysis of fame, identity, and the myth that anything or anyone can’t become something or someone else at will. Or, as the famous talk show host says about fingerprints, “I’ve seen ’em all, and man they’re all the same.”

  * Nascimento sent Paul a recording of the song and asked if he could write a part for himself with original English words, a task Paul found impossible to perform. He became so panicked about having to let down Nascimento that he became feverish and exhausted and convinced himself he had the dread tick-borne Lyme disease. But when he told this to Warner Bros. uber-boss Mo Ostin, the executive proposed that Paul’s symptoms were entirely psychosomatic and he should focus on writing his part. Paul rejected this diagnosis—“I don’t do psychosomatic,” he assured Ostin—but when he brought what he had to the studio and Nascimento told him it was beautiful, Paul soared through the all-night session. “Lyme disease,” he noted, “completely and miraculously cured.”

  * While also composing “The Boxer.”

  * Even given the double entendre—it’s the concert event of Paul’s lifetime—the title, particularly the “Event” part, seems much more appropriate for a Streisand-Liza-Celine-caliber show that would involve dancers and rockets and probably bubbles or lightning bolts and would require the construction of a specially designed concert hall on the Las Vegas Strip.

  * Not a band, but the governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in honor of their support for national music culture and publishing rights organizations.

  * As Paul should have remembered, the entire interview had also been captured on tape and been vetted by several layers of editors before being published in the fall of 1997.

  * The reference to “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” was obviously intended.