Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  With its cinderblock seats and dirt field, Downing Stadium wasn’t a particularly scenic locale, and the festival, starting Friday, July 17, only seemed to grow gnarlier by the hour. As thousands set upon the gates, the promoters had no choice but to give in or risk mass injuries. The locks were removed, and tens of thousands bulldozed in without paying. Inside, an announcement on the PA warned concertgoers of bad acid making its way around the field, and a woman claiming to be a member of the renamed Weather Underground alerted the crowd that the group would attack a “symbol of American justice” shortly after the festival ended. Security was being provided by the radical collective, not police, leading to disorganization both in the crowd and backstage. “There were lots of good vibes,” remembered Jimi Hazel, a teenage Bronx rock fan taken to the festival by his older brother, “and then you’d come across something.”

  Onstage late that first night, Hendrix was visibly unnerved by the jittery crowd and a malfunctioning sound system. “The equipment was picking up radio frequencies through the amps,” Hazel recalled. “Some Spanish cab driver would come out of the amp.” During “Foxey Lady,” Hendrix turned to drummer Mitch Mitchell and exhaled a tired “whew.” After trudging his way through a set, Hendrix told the crowd, “Fuck you, and good night,” and left the stage.

  When word began to spread that the promoters might not be able to pay them, many acts scheduled to play the second night—Delaney and Bonnie, Indian music composer and sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, and Richie Havens—either stayed in Manhattan or visited the site and left without getting anywhere near the stage. The heat and humidity soared on the second day, adding to the strain. Adhering to their increasingly erratic behavior, Sly and the Family Stone, the planned headliner for the third night, was a no-show. When New York Pop finally tumbled to a close, organizers dubbed it a financial debacle.

  The next month, the third annual Isle of Wight festival off the British Isles experienced much the same turbulence. Charlie Daniels, who’d flown to Europe after the George Harrison and Bob Dylan session to play bass with Leonard Cohen, found himself onstage with Cohen, looking at fires in the distance. Security was so lax that several stoned fans wandered in front of Cohen. The throng kicked up so much dirt that everything felt covered in rust. “That was the old hippie attitude,” Daniels recalled. “Everything ought to be free. Everybody will be workin’ for free. Love ought to be free. This and that oughta be free. And the world just can’t work that way.” After playing “Woodstock,” a rattled Joni Mitchell scolded the boisterous, not especially mellow throngs: “Will you listen a minute? ... You’re acting like tourists, man. Give us some respect!”

  At summer’s end, the head of Capitol Records suggested a fact-finding study to “save rock festivals.” But it was too late. “The general consensus,” Billboard reported after the last bonfire at the Isle of Wight cooled down, “is that it was everybody’s last festival.”

  To the outside world—or at least to Peter Yarrow—the first suggestion of trouble in the Simon and Garfunkel camp came at another festival in midsummer. Despite Hendrix’s meltdown, the Winter Concert for Peace in January had been a financial success. In April, Moratorium co-organizers including David Hawk and Sam Brown announced the Moratorium was shutting down. They cited a drop-off in public interest, Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy (withdrawing American troops to supposedly prepare the South Vietnamese for self-defense against the North), and radical elements that disrupted the generally peaceful Moratorium events. The committee was also at least $100,000 in debt.

  But the November midterm elections remained in sight, and Brown, Hawk, and Yarrow, along with a ragtag group of organizers and philanthropist Stewart Mott, decided to adhere to their earlier plan of raising money for Senate and House candidates opposed to the war. Once again, Yarrow took charge of lining up the talent, this time placing one of his calls to Simon’s apartment on East End Avenue.

  Three years Simon’s senior, Yarrow, whose goatee and earnest air lent him the look of a rabbinical student more than a folksinger, had known Simon since their Village days. He’d become a star with Peter, Paul and Mary in the years between Tom and Jerry and “The Sound of Silence.” (Yarrow would later record his own version of “Groundhog,” one of the leftovers from Bridge Over Troubled Water.) Yarrow made his pitch, and Simon was somewhat open to performing at the concert. Then Yarrow dialed Garfunkel, who was far more hesitant. “Those were not uncomplicated discussions,” Yarrow recalled of the half dozen conversations he had with Garfunkel. Simon also called his partner to recruit him. For reasons Yarrow couldn’t quite ascertain, Garfunkel eventually passed. Yarrow then nudged Simon into doing the show alone, and Simon, after more conversations, agreed. At the time, Yarrow didn’t think much of it; perhaps the two men merely had conflicting schedules.

  By August 6, the day of the show as well as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Yarrow had succeeded in assembling a respectable lineup for the Summer Festival for Peace: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Miles Davis, Poco, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Johnny Winter, Janis Joplin’s former band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and, in his first solo performance since his London days over five years before, Paul Simon. With the help of wealthy donors, the concert committee, Peace Incorporated, had leased the fifty-seven-thousand–seat Shea Stadium for the event; a stage was erected near second base.

  Yarrow was feeling less than hopeful about the times. Although he’d been involved in the October Moratorium and the following month’s March on Washington, they felt like postscripts after the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy and the assault on protesters by police at the Chicago Convention. “That was the end of a kind of momentum we could have had,” he recalled. “Nineteen sixty-eight signaled the very unhappy reality that the social movement lost the possibility of being a dominant political force.” Peter, Paul and Mary were themselves coming apart. A decade of nonstop touring, recording, and bickering—sometimes over the lyrics to each other’s songs—had taken its toll. Noel Paul Stookey had become a born-again Christian and, to Yarrow’s discomfort, was talking about his conversion on stage. Each wanted to spend more time with their families, so they’d decided to take a hiatus once their summer concert schedule was over.

  Yarrow carried on, singing at whatever rally he could find the time to attend. But he felt the political and musical shifts, especially when it came to the antiwar movement. To the frustration of many opposed to the war, Nixon’s troop withdrawals—implemented at the same time he was revving up the air strikes and the Cambodian assaults—had succeeded in making the most unpopular president in decades appear a champion of peace. On June 24, changes at the Selective Service System brought both good and damaging news. Instead of drawing from the large pool of eighteen- to twenty-six-year-olds, the draft would limit its intake to nineteen-year-olds, those born in 1951. For millions of young men, the pressure was suddenly off, as the horrors of war in Southeast Asia were no longer a possibility.

  As he took the stage at the Summer Festival for Peace, Yarrow and the co-organizers witnessed the change in mood for themselves. The stadium was less than half full. Even with Janis Joplin announcing on television that she would reunite onstage with Big Brother, ticket sales had been sluggish. By the time the show began in late morning, only fifteen thousand of the twenty-five thousand tickets had been sold.

  Even more revealing, those who’d shown up weren’t the politically charged concertgoers of the January concert, the ones with memories of the Moratorium still fresh in their brains. “The summer event was more like a music festival,” recalled Hawk. “It was for people who missed out on Woodstock: ‘Here’s another one, at a stadium near you.’” The fans in the bleachers smoked, drank, and sailed Frisbees through the humid August air. At one point, some started leaping from the bleachers onto the Astroturf. Knowing that any destruction of the grounds would result in fines, Yarrow walked onstage and admonished the kids, saying they could feel free to jump on it,
but if they did, it would be akin to jumping on a dead soldier’s chest. To calm them down, he sang “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which, despite its reputation as a drug song, didn’t fully do the trick.

  Then came the inevitable gatecrashers, the true soundtrack of the summer. Yarrow had just led the crowd in a sing-along of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” (“Say it so Nixon can hear you!” he implored them.) Outside the Shea gates, a small but unruly cluster gathered, demanding to be let in for nothing. Yarrow went outside and, standing atop a fire hydrant so he could be seen and heard, pleaded with everyone to calm down. At one point, he broke down in tears. Eventually, the crowd dispersed.

  By the time Simon walked out onto the Shea stage with his acoustic guitar, the crowd was no longer his. A year before, when he and Garfunkel had played Forest Hills for the second time, it had been; the response was rapturous. Two years before that, at Monterey Pop in 1967, it had been theirs too. Along with John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and others, Simon had helped curate the first major—and incident-free—outdoor festival of the decade. Simon’s haircut was far shorter than any of those onstage—the lineup included Hendrix, the Who, and David Crosby of the Byrds sitting in for the first time with Stephen Stills and Buffalo Springfield—yet he and Garfunkel were nonetheless welcomed, the crowd clapping in time with “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”

  By the time of the Summer Festival for Peace, the inevitable backlash had set in. It wasn’t their fault that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” had become a beloved middle-of-the-road staple, covered that year by a raft of acts from Ray Conniff to Elvis Presley. But it was still ironic that the duo who’d worked so hard to beef up their antiestablishment credentials with the Songs of America TV special were now seen as representing all that was unthreatening, apolitical, and eye-rollingly old-fashioned. Unlike the rock acts who dominated FM radio, Simon and Garfunkel had seemingly appeared on whatever TV variety show invited them, including one hosted by banal balladeer Andy Williams. The days when The Graduate spoke for an entire troubled middle- and upper-middle class were suddenly over. “I consider his soft sound a copout,” wrote New Yorker music critic Ellen Willis of Simon. “And I hate most of his lyrics; his alienation, like the word itself, is an old-fashioned, sentimental, West-Side-liberal bore.”

  At their Royal Albert Hall show in April, critic Miles Kingston defended the group—“There are very few Paul Simons around,” he correctly observed—but added, “Some people hate Simon and Garfunkel because their music has no guts, because it is a middle-class look at life, because it slips too easily from idiom to idiom.” With more than a touch of sexism, he dryly observed the “squads of dumpy girls half-heartedly invading” the stage during the encores. Even their groupies (whom Garfunkel later described as “the left-out kids—the loners, the bookworms, the fat girls”) weren’t sexy.

  In a stadium the size of Shea, capturing a crowd’s attention with one voice and one guitar was challenging enough. But as he began singing, Simon heard the jets overhead, on their way to JFK, and saw how far off the audience was, scattered around the bleachers rather than on the field. They wanted to party, not parse articulate rhymes, and barely noticed anyone was onstage. “He was not received all that warmly,” Yarrow recalled. By the time Simon launched into his third song, “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” with its delicate, folk-club chords, apathy had turned to pockets of booing. Rather than continue, Simon stopped and left the stage. The Summer Festival for Peace continued without him.

  That same summer, Simon was invited by Leonard Bernstein to collaborate on music for a Franco Zeffirelli film, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, about the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Over the course of two weeks, they met at Bernstein’s home in Connecticut and the conductor’s Manhattan apartment. Little was completed; Bernstein and Simon didn’t click musically, and Bernstein withdrew from the project.

  For his Mass the following year, though, Bernstein included a quatrain Simon had contributed, part of which read: “Half the people are stoned/And the other half are waiting for the next election.” The words appeared to sum up Simon’s disillusionment with both rock fans and their culture. Simon never talked much about the Summer Festival for Peace, not even with Lewis. Yet as his manager was beginning to learn, Simon didn’t always tell him everything.

  CHAPTER 10

  Why not take a crack at “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” someone at Music City Studio asked Ringo Starr. The very thought was absurd; Starr’s voice, homely if likable and charming, was nothing like Art Garfunkel’s. Then again, no one would have predicted that Starr would be in Nashville at the dawn of summer, surrounded by some of the city’s most preeminent pickers and making, of all things, a country album.

  For someone who’d sought to avoid as much turbulence as possible, Starr had had a taxing first half of the year. The sight of McCartney yelling at him and asking him to leave the Cavendish Avenue home had been rattling enough. In the spring, he’d learned his wife, Maureen, was pregnant with their third child, who would join four-year-old Zak and two-year-old Jason. With no further Beatle albums on the horizon, Starr needed to work as much and as quickly as possible before the baby arrived.

  His first musical foray outside the Beatles had struck a misguided note. Sentimental Journey, the collection of non-rock standards he’d worked on throughout the winter, had been released in March. In his home country, it climbed to number 7 on the charts; out of loyalty, just enough Beatle fans in the States bought it to push it to number 22. But the album was little more than a novelty, and it was hard to tell if Starr himself was in on the joke. Everyone from faithful fans to close friends had a difficult time listening to him reinvent himself as a big-band crooner, warbling pre-rock standards like “You Always Hurt the One You Love” and Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” as if he were in a local talent show. Klaus Voormann, who at Starr’s request arranged a version of “I’m a Fool to Care,” would cringe at the memory of the song. “I gave it a try,” he recalled. “I thought if I showed it to George Martin he wouldn’t like it, but he said, ‘Oh, Klaus, that’s very good.’ But it’s awful, terrible.”

  By way of his close friend Harrison, Starr had already moved on. In the weeks after McCartney’s press statement, Harrison had decided the time had come to make an album of his own. He’d first ventured into solo waters with Wonderwall Music, a collection of mostly instrumental electronic tracks released in 1968 as the eponymous soundtrack for a film, but he now had a stack of songs left over from Beatle sessions as well as new ones he’d composed at Friar Park. With the encouragement of Voormann and Chris O’Dell (who helped him type out the lyrics), Harrison made plans to put his songs on tape.

  The previous December, Harrison had sat in with Delaney and Bonnie (and their mutual friend Eric Clapton) on some of the American soul duo’s European shows. Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett—he from a small town in Mississippi, she from St. Louis—had made their name in Los Angeles as a white-trash version of Ike and Tina Turner. Clapton had seen their fiery stage show firsthand when Delaney and Bonnie opened for his now-defunct band Blind Faith and, inspired by their R&B and soul grooves and onstage hospitality, had hooked up with them as a backup guitarist, at least temporarily.

  Harrison had much the same experience. Weary of open warfare in the Beatle camp, he’d sat in with Delaney and Bonnie onstage in London in December 1969. (Lennon attended the same show, and Bonnie Bramlett was struck by how small he was in person.) At his wife’s urging, Delaney Bramlett invited Harrison to join them for a few of their European shows. “I said, ‘Just ask him—what’s he going to do, say no?’” Bonnie Bramlett recalled. “He hadn’t played in three years and his fucking band broke up. Ask him!” Harrison told them they should drive up to his house and simply knock on the door; his wife, Pattie Boyd, would be too polite to turn them down. The Delaney and Bonnie caravan did just that, and Harrison emerged with his guitar and hopped aboard. The experience gave him the chance to play guitar in a relaxed
, nonjudgmental atmosphere, without any attendant Beatle hysteria. The Delaney and Bonnie gigs also introduced him to a group of superb American musicians—keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle, drummer Jim Gordon—while cementing Boyd’s growing infatuation with Clapton. At her and Harrison’s house, Boyd told Bonnie Bramlett and Rita Coolidge, one of their backup singers, that she was in love with Clapton and was thinking of leaving Harrison. Neither Bramlett nor Coolidge knew what to say.

  By way of Charlie Daniels, the bass player at his casual session with Dylan, Harrison had reached out to Pete Drake, one of Nashville’s most revered pedal steel guitarists. Harrison loved the use of steel guitar on Dylan’s recent albums and wanted to integrate its sweet, supple cry into his own work. At Harrison’s recording sessions, Starr, who drummed on a good deal of the tracks, told Drake he was in a bind. He wanted to make another album in London, but between scheduling time and finding the right pop producer, the process could take months. Inspired by his drive into London—he was picked up in Starr’s six-door Mercedes and saw piles of country cassettes strewn about—Drake flashed on an idea: Why not make a record in Nashville, a town known for its quickturnaround schedules? With Drake producing, the whole thing most likely wouldn’t take more than week.