Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  It was late spring, somewhere in the midst of Paul’s transformation into a modern folk singer-songwriter. He has described it again and again—how he was out for a walk in the neighborhood, crossing a bridge over a pond, and looked up to see blond curls and a familiar smile. Oh wow, Artie. Had it been a while? Was it in fact the first time the old friends had shaken hands since they swiveled their tassels and walked out of Forest Hills High School for the last time? That’s how they both recall it, and it is a pleasingly romantic vision. The boyhood besties who made it big, fell out, and then by kairos were brought together again. Crossing a bridge from opposite directions, lingering for a little while against the railing, ducks adrift below their feet, and then walking off together, back to their brotherhood and to the creative union they were born to serve.

  Then again, maybe it didn’t happen exactly like that. Maybe they had been in touch throughout their college years, not seeing each other nearly as much as before, but still seeing each other. And maybe they still worked together, too, earning good money for playing pop hits, dance numbers, and a few of their own songs as Tom and Jerry. They definitely performed for some very impressed campers at Camp Washington Lodge where Paul worked in the summer of 1958. They also played the La Salle Junior High School’s GO! dance in the fall of 1962. Both were well-received performances, still recalled by the kids who were there, most of whom left with memories of fast-moving shows that seemed quite well rehearsed.

  Or maybe it really had been five years, and maybe Paul was both surprised and delighted to hear that Artie had also fallen for folk music, getting heavily into Dylan and the disarmingly beautiful California priestess Joan Baez, whose songs were far more political, and whose voice was so much stronger, than those of Greenwich Village’s footloose idol. When Paul pulled out his guitar to play his new songs, Artie tapped his foot to each one. Yet “He Was My Brother” was the one that made his eyes gleam. Inspired by the growing violence directed against civil rights workers in the South, the song tells an imagined story of a Freedom Rider’s death at the hands of racists. As personal as it is political, “Brother” packs a punch other protest songs often lack, particularly during the tune’s final moments, when Paul’s lyrics transform the notion of brotherhood to include all humanity: “He was my brother / And he died so his brothers could be free…”

  They sang it together a few times, and Paul’s face lit up—that voice, that blend. Though Artie was planning to spend his summer hitchhiking through California with little brother, Jerry, and while Paul already planned to travel through Europe, they resolved to sing together when they got home in the fall. Both had visions of singing their way through their travels, and both did. And the thing Artie noticed that summer was that whenever he got up to sing folk tunes for his friends or at open mics, the song that got the biggest response was always the one he had just learned from Paul, the song about the murdered civil rights worker, “He Was My Brother.”

  * * *

  Flying into London with his guitar, limited cash, and no contacts, Paul scuffled around the city for a few days, singing to empty street corners and seeing only disinterest in the faces of the passersby. Paris proved far more hospitable, however, and he fell happily into the wandering bohemian folkie life, learning the tricks of the busker’s trade—how to position yourself in a storefront entrance so its windows become an amplifier, the benefit of drafting a cute girl to pass the hat—until he could reliably draw a crowd and squeeze a few francs out of their pockets. If he collected enough to buy food, he’d eat; if he got enough for a hotel room, he’d sleep in a bed. If he didn’t, he’d sleep on the bank of the Seine, beneath the Pont Neuf, and when tourist boats full of wealthy Americans puttered past he’d holler, “Capitalist pigs!” at them and laugh when they gaped back at him. When he wasn’t busking, he took in the sights, sticking out his thumb to catch a ride to a cathedral or a particularly lovely garden, and then hang around for a while, taking it all in.

  He was doing just that, kicking back on a garden lawn somewhere, when he noticed another young traveler speaking English to a companion. The thin, dark-haired guy spoke with a British accent and wore the jeans and sweater of a proper college man, so Paul sidled in closer and, with a companionable smile, introduced himself. They chatted for a few minutes, the basic “Where are you from?” and “How long have you been around?” and “What have you been up to?” stuff. Then, with a casual grin, Paul asked his new friend if he had any grass on him. The fellow smiled approvingly and Paul shook hands with David McCausland, a college student from Essex, England, a patchwork of farms and suburban villages about thirty miles east of London. McCausland was a folk music fan, too, and the co-owner and co-manager of his own folk club, so when Paul told him he was a folk musician busking his way across Europe, McCausland wrote his name and address on a scrap of paper and invited Paul to stay with him and his family when he got to England.

  It was a dreamy summer, even given—no, especially given—his dusty hand-to-mouth existence. For those precious weeks, Paul went wherever the wind and whimsy took him. Europe was full of young travelers, many moving by thumb, and if you were on the circuit of the roadways, hostels, coffee shops, and folkie college pubs, you’d start recognizing faces. “Didn’t I just see you in Amsterdam? I didn’t know you were going to Copenhagen, too!”—a whole continent full of places he’d barely heard of, places he knew nothing about. Imagine poor old Carlos Dominguez on his tragic quest for truth, only Paul was having a ball, and finding what he was looking for nearly everywhere he went. And it was all new, and completely detached from where he’d been and whom he knew. It was a kind of liberation he’d never experienced before, which only made it that much more painful to go back to Queens at summer’s end with nothing but law school awaiting his return.

  At least Artie was waiting for him, too. One year into Columbia University’s graduate program in mathematics, he was back living at home, so there they were, once again living just a few blocks apart. They started singing together in earnest, working out harmonies for Paul’s new songs, Artie encouraging him to write more, the two of them trying to create their own arrangement of Orlande de Lassus’s a cappella “Benedictus.” They mastered a few folk standards, and also the camp song about the dog named “Bingo,” for which Paul had an inexplicable fondness, and then started to think of places where they could perform. Greenwich Village was the center of the scene, so why start anywhere else? They got their names on the list for the Cafe Wha’s Monday night hootenannies and sang into open mics at the Gaslight Club and Gerde’s Folk City. On October 22 they landed their first scheduled show in Greenwich Village, supporting the vintage Tennessean banjo player Clarence “Tom” Ashley and the Clancy Brothers-esque Irish Ramblers. Unheralded and not quite in their element among the downtown hipsters, the clean-cut duo Kane and Garr did their best to seem at home.

  Those were the names they used when they first relaunched themselves as folksingers. Paul was still Jerry Landis when he ran the Tin Pan Alley circuit, and when he hired on as a song plugger for the large and enduring Edward B. Marks. It wasn’t a bad job; he earned $150 a week to take the latest crop of songs by the company’s staff writers to the producers and record companies who had the power to make them into hits. The entry-level job came with a lofty pedigree. Both Irving Berlin and George Gershwin had been song pluggers before they hit it big as songwriters. Still, Paul could barely stand it. He had very little interest in selling songs written by other people, especially when the songs didn’t suit his taste. How could he sell products he didn’t believe in? He couldn’t, really—a failure he couched in a know-it-all swagger that drove some colleagues to despise him. But it was steady work, and as his bosses made clear, they would be happy to publish whatever marketable new songs he might have to sell. And that’s what Paul did with his new folk songs, selling to Marks “Carlos Dominguez,” “He Was My Brother,” “Bleecker Street,” “The Side of a Hill,” and his and Artie’s new arrangement of “Benedictus.�
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  Paul would come to regret that decision later, but his most immediate lament that fall and winter involved his decision to go to law school. As he had feared, you could have all the aptitude in the world for law and still be out of place in law school. The intricacies of torts and civil procedures dribbled across his skull like water torture. Not even his appreciation for a cannily drawn subclause could fuel an interest in contracts. In the evenings, he would study among his friends at the Queens College library, and when Brian Schwartz saw how quickly his once-inspired mentor fell asleep over his new textbooks, he started urging Paul to toss the books, and law school, into the garbage. Paul had shared his new songs with Brian, and Schwartz knew exactly where his friend’s passion lay, and how far it might take him. “Focus on your music,” he urged when Paul drove him to the subway every night. “That’s your path! That’s what you’re meant to do!” Paul shrugged it off for a month or two, but when the As and Bs he earned during the first quarter sank to Cs and Ds at the end of the semester, he knew something had to change. But what? And at what cost?

  * * *

  One evening that fall, Paul took his guitar into the bathroom, locked the door, and turned on the sink’s spigot. The sound of the water soothed him, and kept the music from echoing into every room in the house. Usually he’d switch off the light and sit on the tile floor, the coolness against his haunches, and strum a chord or two to see what came into his mind. Or maybe, on this gloomy night in late 1963, he was more interested in getting things out of his head—the ongoing disaster of law school and the dread that settled over him whenever he thought of giving up. The dismay on his parents’ faces and then the guilt that would surely follow. And then there was everything else in the world. The murder of President Kennedy; fires, bombs, and bullets raining down on civil rights activists in the South. Could he really risk it all on his guitar and the second-rate Dylan songs he was trying to write? He struck a minor chord and followed it down.

  Hello darkness my old friend,

  I’ve come to talk to you again …

  Then it all started to come, a nightmare tumble of dreary weather, chemical streetlights, throngs of human automatons, ignored wisdom, and soul-sucking isolation—all of it cloaked in silence, a suffocating hush deep enough to still tongues and deafen ears. Wisdom can be found; it’s literally written on the walls. Yet if anyone bothers to look, they still can’t see it; if anyone speaks it, no one listens. The hush is paralytic. The creeping tendrils of a living death. So speak up! “Hear my words that I might teach you / Take my arms that I might reach you.” The singer shouts it to the skies and receives only an echo in return. Hear my words, take my arms: Is he offering comfort or begging for it? Is he addressing a single person or society as a whole? A lover? A parent? A child? Or maybe he’s talking to himself, to the gloom in his own soul, to his guilt and anger, to his stymied connection with friends, a woman, an audience. Paul called the song “The Sound of Silence” and built it on a spare sequence of chords designed to fit a melody line that moves repeatedly from flat to vaulting to towering before sinking down again—a song desperate for attention, that would not be ignored, that would change his life.

  Yet first he needed to get away. Memories of his European summer had sustained him through the fall, and with more than a month between the end of fall classes and the start of the winter term at Brooklyn Law, he calculated the cost of flights and set his sights on England. Particularly on London and its bustle of folk musicians and its pubs, nightclubs, and social halls where audiences gathered to hear them sing. Better still, London was only a short train ride from Essex, where David McCausland, the hospitable fellow he’d met in that Parisian garden a few months back, lived in his parents’ meandering suburban home. And hadn’t McCausland said he ran a folk club? Paul wrote a letter to the address he’d been given and started preparing for his journey.

  When Paul’s letter got to England, its recipient was flummoxed. McCausland certainly remembered Paul, and also his invitation to come visit him in Essex, but now the American was expecting to play in his Brentwood Folk Club, and not just once. Paul’s letter proposed that he start a full residency in the club, performing each week he was in Essex, for a full five pounds a show. Five pounds was a decent rate for an established musician, but McCausland had never seen or heard Paul perform. He had no idea if the guy could even carry a tune! McCausland passed the letter to his musician friends to see if any of them had ever heard of this Paul Simon bloke. They were all mystified, but when he got to Martin Carthy, the guitarist urged McCausland to book Paul. Carthy had seen American musicians before. Most British folksingers tended to plant themselves behind the microphone with shoulders hunched and eyes closed. But the Americans, even the ones who weren’t very good at music, all seemed to know how to entertain. They told funny stories, and they knew how to play and sing loud enough to be heard in the back of the room. Carthy figured the Americans must teach it in their schools. “So I told David he’d probably be great,” Carthy says. “And if he wasn’t, he could always sack him.”

  So Paul had a gig. In England he grew close to David and his parents, who enjoyed the American’s excellent manners and his eagerness to turn dinners into long conversations about the United States, philosophy, and religion, which he loved to discuss even if he couldn’t believe in it. In the evenings, David took Paul to his friends’ parties, where Paul charmed and joked and entertained with his ever-present guitar, belting out the latest Dylan or Tom Paxton and, once the ale had been flowing, his favorite pop hits by Elvis, the Everlys, Dion, or whatever got his new friends clapping, singing, and dancing. They’d all laugh and applaud and slap him on the back, and when the time came for the next Brentwood Folk Club show at the Railway Pub, they came flocking out to see him and hear some more.

  The Brentwood Folk Club met weekly in an empty room above the Railway Tavern, one of those cozy neighborhood pubs where the owner pulls pints of ale, bitter, and stout for his customers without having to ask who wants what. McCausland had cofounded the folk club with David Rugg, a young accountant he’d met at the folk clubs around Essex. Unlike London, where folk clubs were regular nightclubs that booked performers night after night, the suburban folk clubs met only once or twice a week. They ran like any other club, with membership fees, faithful attendees, and the easy conviviality shared by the like-minded. Noting the lack of a club near Brentwood, McCausland and Rugg had made an arrangement with the Railway Tavern’s owner, posted notices in the other clubs to spread the news, and signed up enough members to book their first show in early 1963. They didn’t fill the room’s eighty-person capacity that night, but they brought in enough cash to pay for the next week’s booking, and with local performers happy to play opening sets for free the club thrived.

  At one of his first shows that winter, Paul sat at a table with friends while his opener, a guitar-playing husband-and-wife team, performed the requisite British country ballads with the crisp locution of the educated middle class. The room warmed once the chairs filled and the pint glasses started thumping onto the tables. The duo closed with a few bawdy tunes about whip-happy coachmen, randy barmaids, and so on, and left to a nice hand, making room for Paul, who stepped up to solid applause and cheerful shouts from pals in the room. He strummed a few chords and seemed to be starting something, but then stopped abruptly.

  “Ha. It’s good to be here at the fabulous London Palla—”

  A voice called out, “You’d never hear Pete Seeger say that!”

  “Well, if you see Pete, make sure to tell him about all the political things [I] said tonight!”

  He launched into Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” got halfway into the first verse, and then cut off abruptly.

  “Ooh! Sorry, Nigel, I lost my head, played a Bob Dylan song!”

  He got back into it, strumming another few chords before cutting it off again.

  “Aw, I don’t like that one anyway. Let me think…”

  Next cam
e “Man of Constant Sorrow,” delivered in a variation of Dylan’s parched prairie voice, the Is coming out like Aaaahhhhhs, and then more joking, which turned out to be a central part of Paul’s act that evening. Did anyone want to hear his new poem? “Oh, yes, let’s have your poem!” a woman shouted back, so he took a dramatic moment to compose himself. Then:

  My name is Fred. I sleep in a bed.

  I used to have to sleep in a cot but when my mommy saw how big I got

  She knew I couldn’t possibly fall on my head. So now I sleep in a bed.

  That bit of nonsense earned great cheers, which Paul acknowledged with a shrug: “A little existentialism with your folk music.” Then came a kid’s song or two, then a request for an original—“One of your new songs, Paul!”—and then the opening guitar figure to “The Sound of Silence” brought all the tittering to an abrupt halt. He sang quietly at first, then with gathering intensity, biting down so hard on the final verse that it took a moment for the crowd to start what became a loud, sustained ovation.

  So it went whenever Paul stepped up to a microphone that winter, starting in Brentwood and then moving to the other suburban clubs, and then into the London clubs, the permanent fixtures such as the Troubadour and Les Cousins, where he could sign up for a floor spot, a two- or three-song mini-set delivered from wherever you were standing. He’d perform the same blend of traditionals, kids’ songs, a Dylan cover or two—they were basically required from all but the most hidebound folk musicians at that time—gospel songs favored by the civil rights movement, and then these stunning bolts from the blue: “Sound of Silence,” “He Was My Brother,” “Bleecker Street,” the just-composed “Leaves That Are Green,” and a growing list of others that would silence the crowd and pin them to their chairs, breathless. The music was accompanied by a comedy shtick lampooning intellectuals, folkies, mainstream showbiz, and, increasingly, Bob Dylan, whose overwhelming authority among the folk music circles had clearly become an aggravation to Paul.