Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  The walls of the Old Caf rang with talk of all these movements and initiatives—but not with the guitar or voice of Paul Simon, who kept almost all his political sympathies out of sight. As much as he liked the subtextual meanings in folk music, Paul preferred songs that didn’t sound like editorials set to music. The music he connected with most closely were the folk ballads and quirky old-timey tunes that came from the likes of the Kingston Trio and the Brothers Four. So he did most of his strumming in the new cafeteria, entertaining the other students with a few frat brothers in tow, whipping through some familiar folk and pop tunes before closing with his popular cover of the Kingston Trio’s arrangement of the little-known cocktail jazz tune “Scotch and Soda.” That always got a big hand, but not from everyone. When newly elected student body president Mark Levy, who had campaigned with a promise to launch an on-campus folk festival, agreed to let Paul audition for his show, he balked at Paul’s pop-folk pleasantries. “I was reaching out to blues players and Appalachian players. Some old guy who played the dulcimer,” he says. “All Paul had were these silly romantic songs. Nothing political, nothing ethnic, nothing that, in my limited mind at the time, qualified as folk. So I wouldn’t hire him.”

  Though too bourgeois for the hard-core folkies, Paul also wasn’t entirely clean cut. He smoked marijuana enthusiastically and often. What bugged his close friend Brian Schwartz was that the stoned Paul wasn’t anywhere near as forthright or reliable as the sober Paul. Sometimes pot made him giggly; other times he became prankish and heedlessly sharp-tongued, much like his new hero Lenny Bruce, the so-called sick comic whose unsparing and often lewd social commentary was as liberating to some as it was offensive to others. Paul’s sense of humor evolved accordingly, and like Bruce, who spent most of the last decade of his life fighting obscenity charges in New York City and elsewhere, it sometimes got him into trouble.

  Paul had a severe distaste for academics who condescended to the students, particularly when the student happened to be Paul. He’d already hung a few of his professors out to dry in his Follies skits, but he could also take a much more direct approach, as he did in a class on Middle English taught by a professor notorious for his leather-patched tweeds and his gratingly stentorian boom. Assigned to read a section from the original text of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Paul used his ear for music and rhythm to great effect, gallivanting through the six-hundred-year-old meter and pronunciation with no problem. When he finished, the professor jumped to his feet, the better to drape his student in garlands of claps and bravos: “Magnificent, young sir!” Paul responded with a shrug: “Yeah, well, we speak Middle English at home.” The other students laughed. The professor didn’t. Cheeks ablaze, he nodded curtly and called on the next student. At the end of the term, the professor paid Paul back for his impertinence by giving him an F for the course. Brian Schwartz, who was also in the class, was enraged on Paul’s behalf. He was vice president of the student body; he could launch an official protest with the administration and get Paul the grade he deserved. Paul waved him off. He’d suck it up—better that than becoming best known for being a victim.

  * * *

  The only problem was figuring out how he did want to be known. Paul continued working as Jerry Landis through 1962, but from a greater and greater remove. That guy, with his shiny white bucks and shimmering hair helmet, was a projection of Paul’s high school fantasies of the music business. Four-plus years and nearly his entire college education later, Paul had taken on an entirely new palette of feelings and ideas: serious thoughts about identity, morality, and the pursuit of justice. He had read the timeless writers and studied the great philosophers. Like many others on campus, he’d been influenced by the work of Queens College’s increasingly well-known philosophy teacher John J. McDermott, whose analysis of the existentialism lurking beneath America’s faith in assimilation and self-determination touched the core of Paul’s conflicted, post-immigrant consciousness.

  The small-time music industrialists in Midtown Manhattan couldn’t have cared less about Paul’s consciousness—they had no idea who Paul Simon was. When they needed someone to record a bunch of demos or come up with a cheap but plausible stab at a pop radio hit, they called for Jerry Landis. That’s the guy they knew, the Tom and Jerry guy who had written and produced the Tico and the Triumphs records, the guy they saw pictured in the ads for his occasional solo singles. But when he sat down to write his own songs, Paul’s mind flashed to images much darker and deeper than the high school romantic Jerry Landis could ever imagine. The months of playing folk music led his fingers to new chords and less frantic rhythms. His interior geography was shifting; everything he had learned at college had started to give voice to feelings that had evaded expression for too long. At least one other guy in New York, a newcomer, even, had poured similar feelings into a raw but gripping album of folk songs that Paul’s hipper pals at school and in Midtown couldn’t stop talking about. Then Paul got his own copy of Bob Dylan’s self-titled first album and heard it, too.

  By the time Dylan’s debut on Columbia Records came out in the early spring of 1962, his reputation as a performer—he had barely started writing songs—and interpreter of Woody Guthrie’s free-ranging spirit had made him a kind of superhero to the folkie demimonde in the city. Guthrie was the lanky outlander who had blown across the prairies and highways of the real tumbledown America, collecting old stories and songs that revealed as much about modern times as they did of the old. Dylan’s own story was a bit of a mystery. He told some people that he was part Native American and others that he had spent his childhood traveling the nation with a circus. He didn’t tell anyone that his real name was Bob Zimmerman or that he had been raised in a middle-class Jewish family in Hibbing, Minnesota, but all that would emerge later.

  Paul had already listened to the Dylan record a few times when he dialed up Al Kooper, a neighborhood guitarist he’d met at the height of the “Hey, Schoolgirl” moment, when both their groups were playing the same sock hop. Kooper’s family lived just four blocks from the Simons in Kew Gardens Hills, and they had stayed friends. Kooper had skipped college to focus on his music career, so when Louis asked Paul to play a few dance numbers for the kids at Lee Simms Orchestra gigs, Paul often called on Kooper to play the lead guitar parts. It made for a dull evening for the boys, except that Louis paid exceptionally well—Kooper recalls earning one hundred dollars a night—and when they weren’t playing, he and Paul could talk about records and bands and, on this one night in the spring of 1962, the much-talked-about record by this Bob Dylan kid.

  Of course Kooper had heard the record—and had quickly dismissed it because, as he told Paul, he couldn’t stand Dylan’s exaggerated prairie whine. At this, Paul waved his hand. “Don’t listen to the singing. Listen to how he plays the guitar!” Paul dropped the needle on his copy of the album, and after a track or two Kooper knew what he was talking about. Rather than strumming the strings like nearly all the other folk guitarists, Dylan was fingerpicking in a driving, bluesy style that gave the songs a crunch forceful enough to make the Kingston Trio’s sweaters unravel. Kooper went home a convert, and altered the course of his career accordingly.*

  Paul followed Dylan closely after that, and Dylan’s influence on him grew even more powerful when Paul started writing his own songs. There was an intelligence to Dylan, a literary sophistication that came through not just in his performances but also in how he carried himself. He didn’t waste time trying to mimic other artists’ hits; he sang what he wanted to in exactly the way he wanted to and wound up winning the support of John Hammond, the Columbia Records A&R man whose discoveries included Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Billie Holiday. And Paul was still trying to pump out hit songs for Jerry Landis?

  When the Queens College spring term ended in 1962, Paul packed his acoustic guitar and a few other essentials and traveled to California. He explored the cities and visited friends here and there, but he focused much of his time and attention on finding and connect
ing with the folk clubs and musicians. He’d go to shows and introduce himself to the players and their friends and hang out for a while. If he was lucky, he would find a sofa to sleep on, and then they’d be up all night, drinking wine, smoking dope, and talking politics, poetry, songwriting, and anything else that seemed to matter. He’d play open mics at folk clubs, and if he connected he’d approach the owner and see if he could play a full set. A few days later he’d be doing it again, in a different town—Berkeley one night, San Francisco the next, and so on. By the time he got back to New York to prepare for his next, and final, term at Queens College, he had found a new voice and the stirrings of a new identity.

  * * *

  Many of those late-night talks in California during the summer of 1962 touched on the civil rights movement and the stand-off between the Kennedy administration and the state of Mississippi over African American student James Meredith’s right to attend the publicly funded University of Mississippi. The constitutional arguments for integrating the school seemed obvious, but some hearts beat a crooked rhythm in a nation built on slave labor, so Mississippi governor Ross Barnett planted himself in the doorway and swore and swore. For so many of the students and folkies Paul met that summer, just as for the friends he would soon see again at Queens College, the civil rights movement had become the central battle in the war between the nation’s past and its future. When the news came on, they’d sit together and watch Barnett and his fellow racists blocking the doorway at UMiss, another reminder of the ugliness of institutionalized prejudice—which, as Paul knew, was also practiced by the national leaders of his own beloved Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity.

  It was right there in the fraternity’s charter, and they’d all lived with it ever since: the fraternity would not open its doors to black men. But wasn’t AEPi supposed to be the house for intellectually enlightened Jewish men? Paul had kept his distance from the fist-in-the-air types, but now he saw something he could do, a significant change he could make within an institution by maneuvering its parliamentary process. With a national meeting of the AEPi chapters scheduled for the end of the summer in Buffalo, Paul launched a nationwide effort to strip the offending rule from the organization’s charter. Tapping a few Queens College brothers to help him work the phones and tally votes, he and his friends pushed their issue to the threshold of victory—the frat’s active members voted to pass the measure—until a cabal of alumni, known as “grandmasters,” only just managed to tilt the balance toward the “no” votes.

  At that point Paul and his brothers could have escalated the fight. They could have organized a walk-out from the convention or gone even further and recruited like-minded chapters into a full-scale revolt, tearing up their AEPi charters and forming their own fraternity, one that stood for equal rights and equal admissions for qualified pledges no matter their racial or religious background. But no one joins a fraternity because they’re itching to tear down institutional structures. These were organization men, adherents to Robert’s Rules, willing to wait until the times tilted in the right direction.

  When James Meredith was finally allowed through the door of the University of Mississippi that fall, Paul performed in Queens College’s celebratory folk hootenanny, playing guitar and harmonizing with fraternity brothers Brian Schwartz and Larry Mandelker and an African American student, Pat Dagler, in an ensemble the Phoenix called the Freedom Criers. Although the show was set to take place in the campus’s central quad, a rainstorm chased it into the cafeteria, where the tidy group—Schwartz wore a three-piece suit, Mandelker buttoned a clean white shirt beneath a blazer, Dagler chose a skirt and blouse, and Paul wore a less formal V-neck sweater and T-shirt—sang impassioned versions of Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer,” “We Shall Overcome,” and all the songs of hope and deliverance a guitar player could sing with his chest out, his mouth wide, and his eyes raised to the light in the sky. Everyone sang along, and cheered for James Meredith, and for President Kennedy and the men in his federal brigade, and also for the movement as a whole, the arc of justice, and the strength of their own voices and convictions.

  Some of them were already working for justice and some were about to start. Student body president Ron Pollack invited the civil rights movement’s leading activists to use the college as a central organizing spot for the Bus Project, an effort to send sympathetic college students from the northern states to join the effort in the most racist corners of the Deep South. Paul’s AEPi brother Mark Levy, past president of the Queens College student body, traveled to Mississippi to help prepare the students’ organizational and survival tactics. Classmate and AEPi brother Michael Schwerner signed on to ride, and so did Paul’s friend June Tauber, who bused to Prince Edward County, Virginia, for the summer of 1963 to build schools and register voters. When she got back, Tauber spoke at churches and college campuses to recruit more Riders. After one presentation at Queens College, a younger student named Andy Goodman came up to ask her what the experience had felt like. Tauber knew him already: he was a theater student, a sweet-faced young man who was more artistic than political, a soft-spoken outsider who couldn’t stand bullies or unfairness of any kind. Face flushed with the overwhelming sense of purpose the work had given her, Tauber gazed into Goodman’s eyes and put it as clearly as she could.

  “It’s the most alive you’ll ever feel in your life.”

  It was the last time she saw him alive.

  CHAPTER 7

  WHAT ARE YOU SEARCHING FOR, CARLOS DOMINGUEZ

  Originally scheduled to graduate with his class in the spring of 1962, Paul opted to stay for another semester. He spent part of the time boning up on the subjects he’d need to get a quick start in law school, the destiny he had predicted for himself since he’d started talking about what his future might hold. When he wasn’t at school that fall, he was writing and recording an upbeat novelty called “The Lone Teen Ranger,” a silly song based on the popular Lone Ranger TV Western. The tune begins with pistol shots and then a doo-wop-style Brrrrr-bop-bop-bop-Brrrrrrr-bop-bippy-bippy-bop vocal to set up a galloping Jerry Landis plaint about the masked TV cowboy who has stolen his girl’s affections. “She even kissed the TV set / Oh, it’s a crying shame!” It’s hard to hear the Wallace Stevens influence here, but a catchy novelty tune could go a long way in those days, so the industry trade journals gave the song a thumbs-up. “Teen Ranger” earned pick-hit status from Billboard, Cash Box, Variety, and a dozen other publications and radio tip sheets. Once again, though, Paul’s best efforts couldn’t carry him past the lower rungs on the Top 100. “The Lone Teen Ranger” climbed to No. 97 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in the early weeks of January 1963 and then faded to nothing.

  Paul finished his bachelor’s degree in January 1963 and then turned his attention to starting law school in the fall. It was an easy call to make, a natural fit for an ambitious young man with the intelligence and work ethic he’d always shown in school. It was also a future he knew Louis and Belle wanted him to pursue. A serious career in a profession that could take a hardworking young man nearly anywhere he might want to go.

  Paul certainly overflowed with aptitude for the practice of law. He was fast on the uptake, a poised communicator, seethingly competitive, and naturally argumentative. The only necessary thing he lacked was any real interest in being an attorney. Yet how could he ignore his parents’ wishes without at least giving it a try? So he’d long since accepted the law as his destiny: he wrote “Law” in the space beneath his graduation headshot in the Forest Hills High School yearbook where you’re supposed to describe your future, and told the admissions office at Queens College that he planned to be a prelaw student. Then the towering marks he received on the law boards clicked the lock once and for all. When Brooklyn Law School accepted his application for the fall of 1963, his future was set—for the time being anyway.

  With eight months left before he had to return to the lecture halls, he went back to producing demo recordings, many for the large and enduring Edward B. Mark
s Music Company. Most were the same bland pop tunes he’d always worked on, but with increasingly recognizable flair. He recorded the folky tunes with a single voice and guitar accompaniment, dressed up others with Latin percussion, still others with an airy bossa nova treatment, and sang one updated Latin traditional, called “Coplas,” entirely in Spanish.

  Without thinking about it, Paul had started constructing a bridge between the English major and pop songwriter holed up in the opposing hemispheres of his brain. Forget the lovesick teens, sock hop dance songs, and TV cowboys; forget the billowing strings, guitars, and tinkly pianos. Now he was dreaming songs carved from a voice or two and acoustic guitar, with plainspoken lyrics about the world and the internal riddles of the soul. The first of these songs he took to Midtown was “Carlos Dominguez,” a Spanish-style ballad of an “unhappy man” who wanders the world in search of truth and comes home empty-handed. The gently fingered “The Side of a Hill” draws a wartime parable from the imagined land of Somewhere, where a single cloud weeps upon the grave of a child killed in a battle over something no one can remember.

  The more intriguing “Bleecker Street” describes the seamier side of Greenwich Village, the seat of New York City’s folk renaissance, in strikingly biblical terms (“it’s a long road to Canaan on Bleecker Street”) and with a melodic grace that points to much of what would follow. But the real knockout was the most direct of them all, a protest song so in tune with the times that the event it describes wouldn’t happen for another year. So much lay ahead. But in the spring of 1963, “He Was My Brother” stood out only as Paul’s best attempt at writing in the journo-poetic tradition renewed by Bob Dylan. And what a great distance it was from the black-and-white TV frontier of “The Lone Teen Ranger” to the crimson dirt of America’s Deep South. A reckoning was coming somewhere, but for Paul in Kew Gardens Hills, the most significant collision that year came in the form of Artie Garfunkel.