Simon & Garfunkel

by Spencer Leigh

  The press was having a field day reporting on the production difficulties for The Capeman. Sid Bernstein, the promoter of the Beatles at Shea Stadium, was often in coffee shops around Broadway and he told me that the main problem was Simon’s arrogance: highly experienced Broadway personalities were making suggestions and he was taking no notice. At one point, he held the entire production up for thirty minutes as he found the right spot to place a gourd player.

  Simon wanted the show done his way and he overestimated his power at the box office. He did consider joining the cast for a couple of the songs every night but that wasn’t going to save the show and could make it look ridiculous. Simon said that he was taking ‘a psychological beating, a gleeful pummelling’ and he was defending his decisions at every opportunity. He told the press that this was not a happy 50s rock’n’roll musical like Grease or Happy Days.

  To add to the problems, the victim’s families objected to the deaths of their loved ones being used for entertainment. They could not be placated and in the previews and on opening night, the theatregoers had to walk through the protesters.

  Opening on 29 January 1988, the New York Times said it was ‘sadly inept’ and that the music was ‘a hopelessly confused drone’. Apparently, and I never knew this and find it hard to believe, theatregoers could buy tickets ‘pending good reviews’. The reviews were bad and the New York papers had headlines like The Capeman – Slip Slidin’ Away, so the attendances dropped to half full. The Capeman closed after sixty-nine performances on 28 March, which was not disastrous but nowhere near good enough. It had had four directors and the investors had lost $6.7m, a key investor being Paul himself. ‘It was a privilege,’ said Simon. ‘I can afford it.’ Although he never said so, I suspect that Simon saw this as his folk opera, his Porgy and Bess. Sorry, Paul, not even close.

  The Aftermath

  Sadly, The Capeman was not staged in the UK although a one-hour documentary, The Roll of the Dice, narrated by Michael Gambon, was shown on TV. The cast album never materialised. However, the original album has been enhanced with two superb bonus tracks. ‘Born In Puerto Rico’ is a new version of the song with an intense vocal from José Feliciano and ‘Shoplifting Clothes’ can be seen as the other side of the Coasters’ doo-wop classic ‘Shopping for Clothes’.

  Two subsequent albums perhaps show the direction that Simon should have taken. The first was New York Voices Sing the Songs of Paul Simon (1997). His songs were reworked with considerable ingenuity into jazz arrangements. ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’ was exceptional, with the group revelling in the many different rhythms and tempos. The misty ‘I Do It for Your Love’ featuring an accordion was very good.

  In 1998 there was The Paul Simon Album: Broadway Sings the Best of Paul Simon. It was showy and brassy but illustrated how the songs could work for the big Broadway voices. In the midst of ‘Kodachrome’ and ‘Homeward Bound’, ‘Bernadette’ sounds fine. There is a hidden track on this CD – a rap version of ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’ and you’ll be laughing as much as the girls are.

  In 2010 The Capeman was produced in a new stripped-down form at the Public Theater in Central Park, New York. Derek Walcott was annoyed that much of his work had been cut but the New York Times gave it a good review.

  In 2015 Ray Davies accepted an award for his Kinks musical, Sunny Afternoon, in the West End, astutely commenting that he had got it right the second time. The first time he had tried an original musical, which had flopped, but the new one with the old hits had become a West End favourite. Simon should have considered how his old songs could have been shoehorned into a show, now rather disparagingly called a jukebox musical. He would have discovered how a musical worked, probably netted a small fortune, and then decided the best way forward for The Capeman.

  There has been no official Simon and Garfunkel musical yet but The Simon and Garfunkel Story has had success in London and in large regional theatres, especially when billed as part of the fiftieth anniversary celebration, whatever that might be. It toured large regional theatres in the UK early in 2016.

  But for all that, Simon could have had a success with The Capeman. At the time, The Capeman was the most expensive musical to fail on Broadway but then came Spider-Man with music from U2. This had a disastrous time with major upsets in the production, but the theatre kept promoting it and eventually turned it around.

  And here’s the way to do it, my friends: here’s the way to make millions. At the core of Simon and Garfunkel is this fascinating, troubled relationship between Simon and Garfunkel. Nearly all of Simon’s songs on the Bridge Over Troubled Water album touch upon this. Therefore, you build the musical around the recreation of this album with a few flashbacks to Tom and Jerry and to Paul Simon on his own in London.

  Of course there are fifty ways to find an audience and maybe a straightforward jukebox musical might work best. In I Am a Rock Musical, Simon could collaborate on new songs with Andrew Lloyd Webber: “Your words are too nice, Rice. Write me some gall, Paul.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Simon and...

  Roy Halee commented, ‘The Capeman was such a disaster that I thought Paul would be gone for a while but then before I knew it, he was back in the studio and out on the road with Bob Dylan.’

  Paul Simon’s ego was badly bruised after The Capeman had closed so dramatically. Maybe he had been hoping for a new life in the theatre but that was no longer possible. His new songs had not taken off with the public so what was there to do? The one sure-fire way to restore his bank balance and retain his popularity, the one thing he knew as well as the back of his hand, was to go on tour with his hits. He could have reached out to Garfunkel but that would have been too humiliating.

  Simon did like the idea of a double-top though and, starting in June 1999, he and Bob Dylan toured North America together for thirty-eight high-priced concerts at large arenas. The tour was called Still Cranky After All These Years – sorry, I made that up. They alternated as to who would open and who would close, and they usually did four songs together ‘The Sound of Silence’, Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’, and a rockabilly medley of ‘I Walk the Line’ and ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’. They tried ‘Forever Young’ once and dropped it and they sometimes sang ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and ‘The Wanderer’ in a medley. For the second leg of the tour in September, they began with ‘The Boxer’. One of the shows was Dylan’s homecoming in Hibbing, Minnesota with a Ferris wheel behind them and 30,000 fans in front.

  At the Hollywood Bowl, Simon opened with ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ but his only other song from the 60s was ‘Mrs Robinson’. He introduced ‘Trailways Bus’ by saying, ‘Here’s a song from The Capeman, sometime referred to as The Ill-Fated Capeman.’ The set was perfectly prepared and performed, but he allowed himself some scat singing on ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’.

  Dylan was mostly leaning towards the 60s, although often nobody knew what he was singing. The sign language interpreter at the Hollywood Bowl concert had a difficult job, but did the deaf people at Bob Dylan concerts in fact enjoy it more than the people who could hear?

  The double bill with Bob Dylan came as a surprise because the general feeling was that Dylan and Simon had no time for each other. In terms of sales, Simon was the major success but in terms of credibility, Dylan was way out in front. It would have been ridiculous if Lennon had sung, ‘I don’t believe in Paul Simon.’

  It’s a question of perception. Dylan has a remarkable image – nobody really knows what he thinks and his song are seen as the antithesis of the Brill Building, that is, his songs are written with real passion and commitment. Simon is seen as someone who labours over his songs so long that the passion has been drained out of them. Although that is true of their approach to songwriting, there is no reason why a carefully polished song shouldn’t retain its initial spirit, possibly even more so because the songwriter has such faith in it.

  As it happens, Dylan is far more sociable than the press s
uggests, often working with other performers (Baez, Cash, Harrison, McGuinn, Costello and the Traveling Wilburys, for starters) but somehow retaining that reclusive image. Simon was less inclined to work with others as he demanded full rehearsals, but he definitely wanted to replenish his funds after The Capeman. There were no reports of rows or tensions between them and, to everyone’s surprise, they got on well.

  Apart from bootlegs, there was no live album following these concerts but both artists had released enough of them anyway. Simon did contribute to a charity album for the Rainforest Foundation, Carnival. He sang a new song, ‘Ten Years’, to praise the foundation which had been set up by Sting and his wife Trudie Styler some ten years earlier. Simon put in the sleeve note, ‘I believe there is an urgent need for us all to do our utmost to look after our planet, for the sake of our children and our children’s children. Time is running out.’

  Although it was written for a specific purpose, ‘Ten Years’ is an exceptionally good song, which has been overlooked, not least by Simon himself. Maybe he thought it wouldn’t work out of context but the same could be said of songs from The Capeman. The album is a little gem, also including Rubén Blades’ own song ‘No Voy a Dejarte Arder (I Will Not Let You Burn)’, and James Taylor’s ‘I Bought Me a Cat’ with the San Diego Symphony orchestra.

  Simon came slowly to appreciate Sting’s music. ‘At first there was a little too much fashion in the Police for me. It was distracting, although I accept that good haircuts are fairly important for No. 1s.’

  If I owned a record label and had limitless money, I would have invited some great, socially aware songwriters (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Ian Dury, Jarvis Cocker) to contribute songs for the new century. Nobody asked them and none of the artists did that individually. Still, why should they? When Britain’s greatest living playwright, Harold Pinter, was asked to comment on the year 2000, he said, ‘I have no millennium message to give to the fucking world.’

  In 2000 Paul Simon’s main activity was touring. He had become a relaxed and mature performer, confident that he had a very strong catalogue and that the audience loved the songs.

  Art Garfunkel was enjoying family life so much that he even agreed to an ‘at home’ feature for OK! magazine. He sang a fine composition, ‘If I Ever Say I’m Over You’ with the theatre composer John Bucchino on piano for the album Grateful – The Songs of John Bucchino. He also sang ‘Grateful’ itself for a children’s book and CD put together by Julie Andrews. He sang ‘Morning Has Broken’ with Diana Krall as guests of the Chieftains. He performed ‘America the Beautiful’ for his baseball team, the Philadelphia Phillies.

  After punishing reviews for The Capeman, Simon was wary about throwing himself into the critical arena again, but he continued writing. He told the music journalist Bill Flanagan that he was writing every day. He might discard what he wrote but he wanted to keep the creativity flowing. Not many major songwriters thought this way and it is an extension of what he witnessed in the early 60s around the Brill Building.

  The next Paul Simon album, You’re the One, was recorded at the Hit Factory in New York City and with familiar musicians: Vincent Nguini (guitar), Bakithi Kumalo (bass) and Steve Gadd (drums). They laid down instrumental tracks and then Simon wrote his lyrics. The music was stylish and beautiful, rock music with African overtones and if Simon had not written any words, it could have been marketed as a New Age album.

  By now Simon had a settled life with a new baby, but the contentment of family life is not apparent from his songs, and his cynicism is at variance with the New Age concept. He had retained his conversational singing style, first seen in Graceland and throughout The Capeman. Once again, he was singing more subtle melodies and not going for the big notes.

  Half the songs had been completed before touring with Dylan and the album was finished at the start of 2000, being released in September. There was some unexpected publicity, though not really wanted, when Karen Schoemer, the rock critic of US Weekly, resigned because her editor, Jann Wenner (a friend of Simon’s), refused to publish a poor review. She told the New York Post, ‘I felt like I wasn’t free to say what I thought. I’m not a publicist and I’m not paid to promote records.’

  ‘You’re the One’ is a realistic love song from Paul Simon but with a surprisingly banal title. The song goes into several different rhythms, so it could never be a dance hit. The opening section with the reference to ‘a waste of angels’ is reminiscent of the ‘Third World’ line in ‘You Can Call Me Al’.

  Buddy Holly’s rhythms are at the centre of ‘Old’ and the singer is namechecked. However, the song is not about Simon himself as he was not twelve when he first heard ‘Peggy Sue’, more like sixteen. It’s an amusing song in that being old is nothing compared to the age of the universe, which is hardly an original thought. ‘Look At That’ includes a reference to the Marcels’ ‘Blue Moon’.

  The best song is his narrative ‘Darling Lorraine’. Frank from New York meets Lorraine and Paul Simon takes us through their relationship. It is often funny – ‘What? You don’t like the way I chew’ – but it ends with her death.

  ‘Señorita With a Necklace of Tears’ is a song about writing a song and it would have been better if he had written a song about a señorita with a necklace of tears as that sounds a winning combination, like ‘Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes’. As it stands, it is a noodling composition with some good passages.

  Mark Stewart added pedal steel and dobro to ‘Pigs, Sheep and Wolves’, which gives it a bluesy country feel. It starts as a children’s story but it’s hard to predict where this song is going and even harder to care. Even odder is ‘Hurricane Eye’ which ends with Paul Simon rewriting ‘There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe’. I don’t mind someone being surreal but these songs seem pointless.

  There is a good song, ‘Love’, about being grateful for what we have and the album ends with the contemplative ‘Quiet’ featuring organ, harp and a vintage Spanish instrument, a vihuela. The song is contemplating death and so is an appropriate closer.

  You’re the One was a good album but I was never drawn to it. It seems slight in comparison to Rhymin’ Simon, Still Crazy or Graceland.

  To give Simon some street cred, extracts from ‘Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes’ were included in some dance remixes of Missy Elliott’s ‘Work It’.

  Simon said that he would continue to tour, using the same musicians and doing some lesser-known songs. I caught the tour at the Summer Pops in Liverpool in July 2002. Top marks for Paul Simon, but very few for the audience. Close to me, a lady turned to a couple and said, ‘I am not going to listen to you two arguing all night.’ She called the security guards who evicted the bickering pair, ironically when Paul Simon was singing ‘The Sound of Silence’. I wish they had removed the girls in front of me too, but I am too docile to complain. During the evening they went back and forth to the bar at least six times, were totally bladdered and one of them was constantly calling ‘Paul, it’s my birthday’ as if this occasion would hold some significance for him. Keeping the bars open while performers are on stage is not a good idea, but it has now become standard practice.

  The opening act, Menlo Park, was a hybrid band – Jagger/Bowie movements from the lead singer, Chris Taylor, and alt country, rock and Lee Hazlewood influences in the songs. They sounded interesting but it was hard to make out the lyrics, which were often about sexual perversions. One of the musicians was Harper Simon, who returned at the end of his father’s set. Their biggest applause was for saying, ‘Paul Simon’s on next’.

  Paul Simon presented a two-hour show with his twelve-piece band and said little. He introduced the musicians from time to time and said ‘Thank you’, but his only acknowledgement of Liverpool was, ‘It’s a long time since I’ve been here. This one is for you guys’, before singing ‘Homeward Bound’. He opened, quite surprisingly, with ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and he didn’t sing the final line, thereby avoiding t
he top notes.

  I loved the smoky verses to ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’, the slow ‘Slip Slidin’ Away’, the rhythms of ‘Late In the Evening’ and the various Graceland tracks including ‘You Can Call Me Al’. The set moved very swiftly along and featured much of You’re the One, indicating that this was the end of the tour to promote his last album. I thought he wasn’t going to do many Simon & Garfunkel songs but then we had ‘The Sound of Silence’, ‘Homeward Bound’, ‘I Am a Rock’ and ‘The Boxer’ in quick succession. Among the songs he didn’t perform were ‘A Hazy Shade of Winter’, ‘America’, ‘Mother and Child Reunion’ and ‘Kodachrome’.

  Without having to do anything, Simon & Garfunkel’s past was brought into the present with the West End productions of The Graduate, written and directed by Terry Johnson. I saw it at a London matinée in 2001 and I was a little disappointed. Mind you, I saw a very unlikely performance. The actor playing Mr Robinson had an accident during the first half and he was replaced by another actor for the second, who in turn was replaced by somebody else. I reckon I have seen the only performance of The Graduate with three Mr Robinsons.

  That was unfortunate and my main gripe was that the music was only used in snippets for scene changing, whereas it was such an integral part of the film. David Nicolle was fine as Benjamin Braddock but he was playing him more like Woody Allen than Dustin Hoffman. Linda Gray, who played Sue Ellen in Dallas, was a very good Mrs Robinson. Other Mrs Robinsons have been Kathleen Turner, Amanda Donohoe and Jerry Hall. The theatre was half full but the production was closing soon and going to Broadway with Kathleen Turner. The Broadway production ran for 400 performances and so was more to audiences’ tastes than The Capeman.