Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  Sitting at his desk at the Warner Brothers Records office on Burbank Boulevard in Burbank, California, Stan Cornyn glanced over the list of the label’s upcoming releases. As vice president of creative services, Cornyn was responsible for the company’s clever, postmodern ad copy. (A print advertisement for a new album by the Fugs, the ragged East Village folk-rock anarchists, said, “You will find the usual Fugs quota of atonal masochism . . . In spite of this, there are redeeming qualities in this album.”) Physically, Cornyn embodied the new breed of music business executive. With his horn-rim glasses, Cornyn looked bookish, but he’d stopped wearing the blue suit jackets favored by Warner executives in the early ’60s and had begun growing out his hair. The makeover helped him forge a bond with the younger acts on Warner and its sister label Reprise: One day, Joni Mitchell dropped by his office with a notebook of lyrics she asked Cornyn to type out for liner notes.

  Of a typical batch of new albums released by Warner in any given week, two or three would be the label’s big guns—Peter, Paul and Mary, Bill Cosby. As for the rest, they were nobodies—“the weirdos,” Cornyn would call them. As he prepared to bang out copy for ads that would run in the music trades the first week of February, Cornyn noticed one of those oddballs on the list: James Taylor.

  Cornyn knew the basics: Taylor was a twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter, guitarist, and apparent nomad (his homes had included Martha’s Vineyard, Manhattan, North Carolina, London, and currently the couch in his producer’s house in town). He’d recorded an album for the Beatles’ Apple label, and Joe Smith, the president of Warner, had snatched him away and was releasing Taylor’s second album, Sweet Baby James. Cornyn also knew the Apple album had received good reviews but hadn’t sold, and that Smith’s enthusiasm alone didn’t guarantee anything. His knowledge of Taylor pretty much ended there. Cornyn was accustomed to seeing musicians pop in and out, like Neil Young storming out of Reprise head Mo Ostin’s office. But Cornyn had yet to meet Taylor or even glimpse him around the building.

  Taylor had actually visited Smith’s office a few weeks earlier, but Cornyn, along with most of the Warners staff, simply wasn’t told. The scrappy, avuncular Smith had first caught sight of Taylor at the Newport Folk Festival the summer before. Taking in the sights during an after-show party at one of the plush estates near the festival grounds, Smith saw a tall, lanky kid taking long strides across the lawn. At times he seemed to be staggering, as if he were on one substance or another.

  When they met, Smith instantly recognized Taylor’s name from the Apple release. Taylor, who was performing at the festival, began complaining about the Beatles’ shaky organization and indicated he was looking for a new record deal. Smith introduced Taylor to the Everly Brothers, who’d integrated Appalachian harmonies into rock and roll in the late ’50s and were now struggling to look and sound contemporary. Right there on the lawn, the three began harmonizing together on one of Taylor’s songs, “Carolina in My Mind.” Smith took note: If two of rock’s greatest singers could easily adapt to one of Taylor’s songs, maybe plenty of other people could appreciate Taylor too. Smith wound up signing Taylor.

  On a midwinter January day, Taylor and his manager, Peter Asher, visited Smith’s office to play him what they had of Sweet Baby James. The two were quite the pair. Taylor was all arms and legs; his shoulder-length hair, parted in the middle, slouched down either side of his face. He had a penetrating gaze and a high forehead. Asher, though older than Taylor by four years, looked younger: With his dark-rimmed spectacles and red mop top, he could have easily passed for a polite British schoolboy.

  Normally, Smith invited other label executives to sit in during listening sessions to meet the artist and get an early feel for the music they’d be marketing. But he sensed Taylor was different—that he’d be easily spooked by the presence of strangers—so Smith decided the meeting would be restricted to himself, artist, and manager.

  Asher and Taylor arrived and handed Smith a tape. Smith popped it in as the two men sat on the other side of his desk. From the opening line about a young cowboy on a range, Smith was hooked. He reveled in the easygoing lull of the songs and Taylor’s upright but soothing delivery. The music was gentle, melodic, and direct. It wasn’t rock and roll, nor was it imbued with even a millisecond of political consciousness. But Smith related to it in ways he didn’t always with other acts he’d signed, like the Grateful Dead. Smith kept hoping and praying the Dead would record something approaching a single (when they finally did a few months later, with “Uncle John’s Band,” he literally whooped with joy).

  Throughout the playback, Smith made appreciative comments about the songs. After a while, Smith realized Asher did all the talking; Taylor said little, if anything. He mostly nodded and, once in a while, flashed a bemused expression. Smith had amicable relationships with many artists on his label, but he sensed he wasn’t going to get to know Taylor very well. Later, when Smith heard about the heroin bouts, the wards with locked doors, and Taylor’s stay in a psychiatric hospital only months before, Taylor’s mood that day made sense. But at the moment, Taylor simply seemed shy and fragile.

  Long after Taylor left the Warner compound, Stan Cornyn sat behind his typewriter and banged out copy for the ad touting the label’s forthcoming releases. “Last year, James Taylor’s first album, on friendly competitor Apple, was dearly loved and glowingly reviewed,” he wrote. “This year the same will happen to James Taylor’s second album, Sweet Baby James. Only much more so.” Like all commercials, it was noticeably optimistic. Since the album cover wasn’t finished, Cornyn opted for an in-joke: a photo of an Apple with a bite chomped out of it. Even if the record tanked, like those by so many other unknowns, he hoped everyone would at least remember the ad.

  PART ONE

  WINTER INTO SPRING A Song That They Sing When They Take to the Highway

  CHAPTER 1

  Smack in the middle of a workweek—Wednesday, February 11—Mort Lewis took the type of call any music business manager longed to receive. A friend at Columbia Records informed him that the company had officially shipped one million copies of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. At a time when the bar for success was the gold album for sales of half a million, the figure was especially remarkable. Days later, Lewis, a tall, toothy World War II veteran who’d become Simon and Garfunkel’s manager in 1965, received an honorary souvenir from Columbia commemorating the conversation: a dime mounted on a wooden plaque with the inscription, “To Mort Lewis—For Posterity.”

  Lewis chuckled, as he would for years afterward whenever he saw the plaque, but he was also relieved. Between the creation of the album, the constant interruptions, and that damn television special, the previous year had been a trying one for his clients.

  Not that they hadn’t asked for it, to some degree. Like everyone who worked with them, from Columbia president Clive Davis to the session musicians who had to repeatedly replay their parts in the studio, Lewis was painfully aware of how exacting Simon and Garfunkel could be. The creation of their fifth album stretched back to January 1969, when the duo went to Nashville to record—or, it turned out, start recording—one of Simon’s new songs, “The Boxer.” The track began simply, with Simon and session guitarist Fred Carter Jr. fingerpicking the gentle sway of Simon’s melody on Martin guitars. Then Simon, Garfunkel, and their coproducer and recording engineer, Roy Halee—a Columbia staffer and native New Yorker who had become an intrinsic member of their tightly knit team—began layering the track to enrich the sound. Only later did Simon add lyrics—the story-song of a worn-down prizefighter meant to be a metaphor for Simon and the criticism sometimes leveled at his work.

  In the end, “The Boxer” incorporated a tuba, harmonica, drums, and a mournful, otherworldly solo that combined a pedal steel guitar cut in Nashville with a piccolo overdubbed in New York. For the “lie lie lie” finale that never completely satisfied Simon, Garfunkel suggested they record at a chapel at Columbia University; the echo would be just what
the song needed. Columbia Records balked at spending so much money on one song, but they had little choice in the matter. The duo’s track record of hit singles gave them the latitude to take however long they wanted, and however much money it would take.

  A few months later, in the summer of 1969, Simon and Garfunkel left their hometown and decamped to Los Angeles. Simon rented a house on Blue Jay Way in the Hollywood Hills, a home previously occupied by George Harrison, who’d immortalized it in a drony piece of psychedelia of the same name on the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. With the Beatles still on his mind, Simon brought with him a new song he’d begun in New York. His lawyer Michael Tannen had first heard it when Simon showed up late at Tannen’s birthday party on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I’ve just written my ‘Yesterday,’” said Simon, who, despite fending off a cold, sang it for the partygoers.

  As with “The Boxer,” “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” as it was first called, was no painless undertaking. Starting with the simple strum of an acoustic guitar, Simon’s demo of the song was understated and gentle. “When peace is all you seek, I will be there,” he sang, almost as if he were back in the British folk clubs he’d played earlier in the decade. Then, reflecting one of his newfound musical passions, his voice glided up into a falsetto inspired by Claude Jeter of the Southern gospel group the Swan Silvertones. (It was the Silvertones’ “Oh, Mary Don’t You Weep,” with its line “I’ll be a bridge over deep water if you trust my name,” that inspired Simon to write his own variation.) At the Blue Jay Way house, Simon sang it for Lewis and Garfunkel. Lewis loved it right away, and Simon suggested it as a showcase for his partner. Surprisingly, Garfunkel initially demurred, not feeling the song was a perfect fit for his voice. Simon persisted, and Garfunkel eventually agreed.

  To begin the process of capturing the song on tape, Simon called in Larry Knechtel. Born in southern California, the twenty-nine-year-old Knechtel had worked with them on their previous album, Bookends; his extensive résumé also included playing piano in the famed Wrecking Crew, a group of renowned Los Angeles session musicians featured on more hits (by the Mamas and the Papas, the Beach Boys, the Fifth Dimension, and many others) than an AM radio could handle. Knechtel, a taciturn professional with shaggy sandy-brown hair, had seen it all—or so he thought. Starting August 1, 1969, he clocked in at Columbia’s basketball-court-size studio on Sunset Boulevard, joining Simon, Garfunkel, and Halee. Simon played Knechtel the new song on guitar and told him he wanted to center it around a piano instead. Once the chords were transposed with the help of arranger Jimmie Haskell, Knechtel devised an introduction and an outro, and the rehearsals began. Knechtel took a seat at the piano, and Garfunkel stood next to him, both donning headphones, microphones dangling from the ceiling to capture as full a piano sound as possible.

  As Simon watched with hawkish intensity from behind the controlbooth glass, Knechtel and Garfunkel began performing “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” That day alone, Knechtel worked from 10 P.M. to 4:30 A.M., with a half-hour break. Knechtel knew his bosses could be exacting, but over the days ahead, he didn’t expect to play the song—two verses, totaling just under three minutes—as many times as he did. His own estimate was seventy-two takes. “Paul wanted it to be gospel, but not gospel,” Knechtel recalled. “That was the hard part, since Art couldn’t sing that stuff.” Knechtel admitted he probably screwed up a few times; he wasn’t used to so many replays. Meanwhile, Simon rewrote some of the verses and changed “waters” to the singular “water” in the title phrase.

  Once Simon decided on a take he liked—the second, it turned out—it was then to stage two: a muted drum part by Hal Blaine, another member of the Wrecking Crew; two bass parts by Joe Osborn, also a veteran of Simon and Garfunkel sessions; vibes; drums recorded in an echo chamber; a string section. Realizing the song was too short, Simon told everyone to leave space for a third verse he’d write later. Inspired by the sight of his girlfriend Peggy Harper looking in the mirror at the Blue Jay Way house and seeing a gray hair—“silver girl” was the phrase that came to mind—Simon finished the new words, and Garfunkel sang an early draft of them on August 13.

  And yet work on the song was only just beginning. When they returned to New York, Garfunkel began two painstaking weeks of vocal work at a Columbia studio. Garfunkel could be as exacting as Simon, but during the session, Simon would nonetheless get visibly angry if his partner sang a note Simon hadn’t planned out beforehand. Although he’d known his collaborator for nearly fifteen years, Garfunkel was still taken aback. He’d been gone most of the previous few months, on a movie set, and had to readjust to Simon’s demanding ways.

  Tensions between them were nothing new; if anything, they were as much a part of their lives as their shared borough backgrounds. In Nashville during initial work on “The Boxer,” the two were driving around one day with Halee and arguing about who could run the fastest. Right then, Simon demanded a race. Halee pulled over into an empty parking lot, and all three jumped out and bolted across it. Simon finished first, Halee second, and Garfunkel last. Nothing about the incident—the impromptu contest, the sprint, the results—surprised anyone who knew them.

  They’d been friends and competitors as long as anyone could recall. One day in the fall of 1957, when they were both sixteen, they’d gone shopping together for sweaters. Even though they were mere Queens high-school students, they’d actually placed a song on the charts, “Hey, Schoolgirl,” and needed to spruce up their wardrobes. In the store, they began arguing: Simon wanted one type of sweater, Garfunkel another. In the end, they couldn’t agree on what to wear and wound up leaving with nothing. A few hours later, they laughed about it, and the cycle began again.

  As children, they’d lived within three blocks of each other, in the middle-class section of Queens, New York, and went to the same elementary school, P.S. 164 in Flushing. Simon had migrated from nearby Newark, New Jersey, where his father, a bass player and bandleader named Louis Simon, had been born. The family—which also included Louis’ wife Belle, who taught school, and a younger son, Eddie—moved to Kew Gardens Hills, a largely Jewish section of the borough. Garfunkel was already living there with his parents, Jack and Rose, and his two brothers, Jules and Jerry. Simon had taken note of Garfunkel’s singing during a school talent show. “I saw you on that stage and I thought, ‘That’s how you get popular,’” Simon told him after they’d become friends. Garfunkel took note of Simon’s sense of humor, and they finally met during a sixth-grade production of Alice in Wonderland.

  From the start, rock and roll drew them together. Inheriting his father’s love of music, Simon began learning guitar and playing his own type of music. At a ninth-grade dance, he and Garfunkel joined up to sing Big Joe Turner’s recent hit “Flip, Flop and Fly”—“I’m a Mississippi bullfrog, sittin’ on a hollow stump,” went part of its rollicking lyrics. By the time they were attending Forest Hills High School, they were singing songs by the Crew Cuts and their heroes, the Everly Brothers. Once, when they were trying to learn the Everlys’ “Hey Doll Baby” from memory, they inadvertently came up with a song of their own, “Hey, Schoolgirl,” in half an hour.

  While they were putting it on tape in a Manhattan studio, Sid Prosen, owner of a local indie label with the presumptuous name of Big Records, overheard them. In the immediate way in which the early rock and roll business worked, he offered to make a record out of it on the spot. Prosen spoke with their parents, cut a deal, and, two days later, shipped fifty thousand copies of “Hey, Schoolgirl” to record stores and jukeboxes. One obstacle remained to assimilating themselves into the culture: their names. They rechristened themselves Tom and Jerry: Garfunkel was now Tom Graph, a nod to his love of math and charting pop hits on graphs, while Simon rechristened himself Jerry Landis.

  With its “who-bop-alook-chi-bop” hook and its tale of a smitten teen who eventually lands the girl, “Hey, Schoolgirl” recalled the Everlys enough to peak at a respectable number 49 on the charts. Before they kn
ew it, Tom and Jerry were wearing white bucks and singing the song on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand around Thanksgiving 1956. They were rock stars—but, it turned out, only for a moment. Tom and Jerry’s second single, the less confident “Our Song,” recycled the “Hey, Schoolgirl” chords and died quickly. A third single, “That’s My Story,” amounted to banal white doo-wop and also withered. By the time they graduated from Forest Hills High School, their career was finished.

  For the next few years, they barely spoke. Mere months after “Hey, Schoolgirl,” Simon had cut a single on his own—a hiccupy slice of Queens rockabilly called “True or False,” under the name True Taylor. The secretive recording signaled that Simon was intent on a career in pop music—and that he suspected his partner wasn’t equally driven. Garfunkel, who had such a sharp, numbers-driven mind that he was already tutoring math in high school, was miffed by Simon’s side project. They went off to different colleges—Garfunkel to Columbia to study architecture, Simon to Queens College, right near his parents’ home—and fell out of touch.

  As “Hey, Schoolgirl” proved, Simon was a quick, savvy study when it came to pop music trends. Those skills were only sharpened in the early ’60s, when he took jobs at song publishing companies during his noncollege hours, where he’d sing on demos of songs being pitched to stars. In the process, he learned about record-making—and, just as important, which pop styles were in vogue at what moment. Cutting records on his own with various pseudonyms, he tried his hand at sweet ballads with pitter-patter beats (“Just a Boy,” “Shy”) and Elvis imitations (“Teenage Fool”). A savvy bid at airplay, “Play Me a Sad Song,” implored a disc jockey to spin something woeful to ease his angst. In “It Means a Lot to Them,” he was the archetypal nice Jewish boy, concerned about receiving the consent of his girlfriend’s parents. The tracks were polished and au courant, but the arrangements—syrupy backing vocals and clip-clop rhythms—sank them. His sense of humor and developing sense of rhythm only poked through on “The Lone Teen Ranger,” a novelty record with a honking sax solo that tapped into the Lone Ranger TV show frenzy.