Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Oh yeah, how’s it going? You’re Kornfeld’s friend, right? So, yeah. Hi. Okay.

  Then back to their separate corners, separate friends, and separate visions of the world and their rightful place within it. Maybe it was the same place, and maybe there was room for only one of them in it. This may be why Shelton described that night at Gerde’s as “an encounter typical of New York’s paranoia and instant rivalries,” which makes his claims of innocent snickering seem a wee bit less convincing.

  Dylan wasn’t the only Village folkie rolling his eyes at Paul and Artie that night. “Their ethereal harmonies,” Shelton wrote, “sounded out of place at Gerde’s, home of weather-beaten ethnic songs.” Indeed, the folk ethic in Greenwich Village, and throughout the revivalist scene, was governed by a traditionalist notion that defined a musician’s authenticity by the dust in his guitar, the sweat on her banjo, and the songs of chains and ropes, hammers, shovels, and pickaxes; of rounders and ramblers; of hard luck and midnight trains; of the blues and the bottle; of deceit, death, and the glory of God. It was the homegrown, yet exotic, sound you heard then from cowboy singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott or the modern scalawag Dave Van Ronk or, of course, from Dylan, who had blown into New York like a folktale in boots, telling tales of a childhood spent on Indian reservations, in a traveling carnival, and among the hobos riding freight trains and holing up in the ghost towns of the windblown Southwest.

  Compare those real-world vagabonds to the soft-cheeked boys from middle-class Queens, with their Windsor knots, college degrees, and bourgeois agonistes. No wonder their songs sounded so self-important and so very melodramatic. “Hello darkness, my old friend”? For a time that spring, you could march from apartment to apartment on Macdougal Street and get a laugh in all of them by summoning your inner stentor and reciting the opening phrase of “The Sound of Silence.” Hello, darkness … To the beatniks and the leaflet distributors, the purists and the deeper-in-the-gutter-than-thou, it was easy to see how phony these boys were: rich kids pretending to be the real folks.

  Oh, but the crazy irony of it all! Because self-styled rodeo rider, steer-driving, country-wandering Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was actually raised as Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a well-to-do doctor in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. And you know who thought that was truly and deeply hilarious? Bob Dylan, of course, who was sitting with Kornfeld, Paul Stookey (Paul from Peter, Paul, and Mary), and a few others at Le Figaro coffeehouse when Kornfeld told the tale. The hilarity stayed with the folksinger for the rest of the evening, so whenever Kornfeld leaned in and whispered, “Adnopoz,” Dylan would lose it all over again. Soon he’d be laughing out of the other side of his guitar, because the Little Sandy Review, a small folkie magazine published by strict constructionists in Minneapolis, would pull the rug out from beneath his own vagabond tales, revealing that the part-Cherokee carny hobo with the name of a poet was actually Robert Zimmerman, a nice Jewish boy whose father owned a successful electronics store in Hibbing, Minnesota. And those wild tales about Dylan’s family and his drifter’s childhood? He’d lifted all of it from Woody Guthrie, adopting the legend’s fantastical past for his own.

  None of it mattered, though, not for Dylan and not for Ramblin’ Jack, either, just as it hadn’t mattered for Gershwin, Berlin, Lee Simms, Tommy Graph, Jerry Landis, or any other showbiz-savvy performer who knew how to shake off the limitations of family and religious history. So what names would Paul and Artie choose to be their sophisticated-but-folky alter egos? When Paul sold “Carlos Dominguez” and “He Was My Brother” to Edward B. Marks, he was still using the Landis imprimatur. But when he published the first of his folk songs, he felt that it was time for a change. He credited the songs to a new alter ego he named Paul Kane, and when Tribute Records released the tracks as a single in August 1963, the (solo) performances were credited to an imaginary group that was called either the Voices of Paul Kane (the credit in Billboard) or the Paul Kane Voices (per Variety), as if the bare-bones guitar-and-voice arrangements were performed by a folksy chorale. When Paul and Artie started playing their folk material that fall, they called themselves Kane and Garr. Then Paul’s success under his real name in England convinced him to continue using it at home. So they were Simon and Garr through the winter and spring of 1964. Then Artie got tired of Garr and said he wanted to use his real name, too. Paul shook that off. For all that Simon was a Jewish name, it was also short and easy to say. But Garfunkel? No, no, no—too long and too clumsy. People would assume they were comedians, or tailors, even. So how about Garfield instead? They kicked that around for a while. Artie didn’t like it, but he knew how show business operated; he’d never worked or recorded under his real name. Eventually he gave in. Simon and Garfield it was.

  Except Tom Wilson didn’t like it. He’d bitten his tongue whenever Paul and Artie debated names and pseudonyms or when the Columbia executives who consulted on the names of acts and records called to talk about the name of the company’s new folk duo. The execs didn’t like the duo’s real names, either—Simon and Garfunkel just didn’t sound like a name that could catch on with anyone. At first the execs thought they could sidestep the problem by calling them Paul and Artie, but then someone remembered that just a few years earlier they had released an album by another pair of young folksingers who went by Art and Paul.* So they considered other young protest types and proposed another approach: how about the Catchers in the Rye? Paul and Artie just laughed at that one. Paul, now with Artie’s support, went back to Simon and Garfield, and that was when Wilson put his foot down. He’d loved “The Sound of Silence” the moment he heard it, but it was “He Was My Brother,” the impassioned civil rights anthem, that had convinced him to invest in their future. Paul wrote so powerfully about civil rights and justice; they both sang the songs with a righteous fury that was really stirring, particularly for Wilson, a black man who had lived with racism his entire life. So how was it that they were so gutless about their own ethnicity? Were they really going to let the bigots tell them that there was something wrong with having a Jewish name, just so they could sell more records? Well, they’d done that before, so, yes, that’s exactly what they were going to do.

  The publicity guys at Columbia felt the same way, all of them telling the same story: the duo’s real names would be off-putting to the anti-Semites behind the radio dial, along with all the average folks who just felt more—how can I put this?—comfortable around less ethnic types. But the world was changing, Wilson protested. There were hardly any anti-Semites left! That last argument was more aspirational than factual, unfortunately, but when Wilson and the other executives laid out the dispute to Columbia executive vice president Norman Adler, he let out an exasperated sigh. “Gentlemen, it’s 1964,” he snapped. “They’re Simon and Garfunkel. Next record?”

  * * *

  With the Columbia recording sessions finished and the release date still months in the future, Paul returned to London to resume his career there and his love affair with Kathy Chitty. This time he got his own place, in Hampstead, a bottom-floor studio apartment in a house three doors down Haverstock Hill Road from the Belsize Park tube stop. Folk guitarist Martin Carthy had lived there for months but was moving at precisely the right time. Paul figured he’d stay there through the spring and summer. Starting with shows back at the Railway Inn in Brentwood, and at many of the other clubs he had played earlier in the winter, he threw himself into the serious business of building his reputation in London and beyond. Not the least bit shy about publicizing himself and his work, he launched a one-man campaign of telephone calls and neatly typed letters, all noting his previous appearances at the London clubs, the upcoming American album to be released by Columbia Records (Dylan’s label, of course), and his new asking price of seven pounds per show.

  His first break came at the Troubadour Club, on the Old Brompton Road, near Shepherds Bush. The Troubadour was arguably the most important folk club in London. Bob Dylan beelined to the place when he got to town in 1962. Paul had pl
ayed a handful of floor sets there during his first visit to England and made enough of an impression to land a booking soon after his return in April 1964. The new songs he’d written that winter were just as popular as the ones he’d played a few months earlier, but “The Sound of Silence” was always the highlight. It was also the song that hit hardest for record company artists-and-repertoire man Bill Leader. “This terribly well-written song, meaningful, hung together beautifully and played on the guitar in an extremely competent way,” Leader said. Paul also knew how to connect with his audiences, making eye contact, projecting his voice and the driving feeling inside the song, unlike so many of the mumbling British folk performers. He stood out in other ways, too. He’d buzz to gigs in a red Sunbeam Alpine sports car, and dressed almost entirely in black. Leader, who worked for Topic Records, Britain’s most significant folk music label at the time, also noticed the fans who came to see Paul every time he performed, and the fact that they started turning up even when he wasn’t on the bill, just in case he put in a surprise appearance.

  After seeing two or three shows, Leader introduced himself to Paul. Did he have a record deal in the United Kingdom? Well, how about recording an album for Topic? Paul definitely wanted to do that, so a few days later he took his guitar to Leader’s home. His host led him to a back room where he had set up the portable Revox tape recorder and microphone. They spent a few minutes figuring out the sound levels and microphone angles, then Leader turned on the machine and Paul got to work, singing his latest songs over the rumble of the buses and trucks just outside the window. The noise didn’t disturb him. He nearly burst the seams of “The Sound of Silence,” jabbing at the chords and spitting the words with a raw force that collapsed to a whisper at the end of the third verse, only to rise again in the final lines. He went in the opposite direction with the just-written “April Come She Will,” a hummingbird of a song he’d based on a three-hundred-year-old British nursery rhyme. Borne on a sparkling guitar pattern played high on the neck, and sung in Paul’s moist, boyish voice, the tune traces a love affair from the dawn of spring to the first chill of autumn, with the tinge of mortality lurking at the edge of every verse.

  Leader took the tape to the next executive meeting at Topic, figuring the handful of songs he’d recorded were finished tracks for an album he and Paul would complete in another session or two—Paul had already updated his pitch to club owners: “I also record for Columbia Records in the States and will cut my first LP for Topic Records over here,” he wrote to one regional booker on June 12—but the other Topic executives who heard the Revox tape shook their heads. How could an American songwriter possibly be a Topic artist? Founded as the publishing wing of the Workers’ Music Association in the late 1930s, the label had been created specifically to serve the British labor movement. Simon’s songs about American racism and civil rights had a spark of protest to them, but very little to do with Britain or British laborers and even less to do with proper British folk music. So, no, thanks.

  Leader was less surprised than exasperated by his colleagues’ reactionary thinking. But that’s how the folk music world ran in Britain, where rules for what constituted a legitimate folk song, or an authentic folk performance, of a song that was part of British folk culture, were dictated almost entirely songwriter, scholar, and unapologetic Stalinist Ewan MacColl.

  Born as James Henry Miller to socialist laborer parents in Lancashire, England, in 1915, MacColl became a Communist during the Great Depression. He devoted himself to left-wing theater until the late 1940s, when he came across a copy of American folk historian Alan Lomax’s book People’s Songs (cowritten with Pete Seeger) and decided to start playing folk music. Although he had grown up in England, both of MacColl’s parents had been born and raised in Scotland. Given that connection, he adopted his parents’ Scots heritage for himself and changed his name to Ewan MacColl. In 1953 he cofounded the club Ballads and Blues—its name was eventually changed to the Singers Club—which grew into a capital for England’s most influential folk musicians and scholars. MacColl’s Marx-inspired disdain for popular culture and anything else that seemed to violate the established doctrines of British folk music came to define the scene. Eventually he formed a committee to set criteria for defining folk styles and judging which musicians could be trusted to perform truly authentic folk music at his club and every other serious folk club in the British Isles.

  MacColl was less successful at ridding folk clubs of the long-standing tradition of floor spots—when audience members can stand and do a song or two, and there was always the chance that someone might play something impure—but his loathing of popular music was shared by folk aficionados around the Western world. Some also rejected the idea that any modern songwriter could contribute to the folk culture, though MacColl, who wrote songs himself, figured that was okay, as long as the songs weren’t intended to be commercial. No one could rival his disdain for American popular culture, whose influence over Britain since the end of World War II struck him as catastrophic to the nation’s history and character. An entire generation, he proclaimed, “were becoming quasi-Americans, and I find it monstrous!” Never mind that the inspiration for his devotion to folk music had come from a book written by two Americans, or that he was now married to another one.* No matter: MacColl’s tastes reigned, and to a generation of folk aficionados, including the executives at Topic Records, the likes of Paul Simon, an American songwriter bred on Elvis Presley, was anathema. Just like Greenwich Village, just like every other self-selecting society, the MacColl-inspired British folkies played things by the book: the contempt for outsiders, the blockading of the bridges, the loathing of the new and the different, the feverish testaments to “authenticity” and “legitimacy,” the worship of credentials. As always, though, the calcification of the institution only clarified and strengthened the revolution.

  By the time Paul was digging into the British music scene, Dylan’s gravitational pull had sent compasses spinning, particularly for the new generation of fans. For them, the old songs were less a destination than a foundation for songs that still needed to be written, the songs that would document their lives, their loves and lusts and loathing, their growing belief that it was up to them to set things straight and change the world. And though Paul had been too buttoned down to impress the Greenwich Village regulars, their counterparts in London saw him as positively dashing. He didn’t dress like the British folkies did. His boots were stylish, as were his woolen donkey jacket and black V-neck sweaters. Paul could be serious but also hilariously funny; his wit filtered through a postcollegiate sophistication. And even if his banter fell flat, it was impossible to ignore those finely wrought, emotionally piercing songs.

  “I’d never heard anything like him,” says singer-songwriter Harvey Andrews, who first glimpsed the American singer at a club in Birmingham. “His guitar work was better than anybody I’d ever seen.” Fifty years later Andrews still remembers the songs he heard that night. “‘A Church Is Burning,’ ‘He Was My Brother,’ ‘Sound of Silence’ and ‘Most Peculiar Man.’ That [last one] was a story song, and a very interesting one, very different. ‘Sound of Silence’—well, there had never been anything like that in a lyric. And ‘He Was My Brother’—I’d never heard one like that before, either. When he was finished I was sort of gobsmacked. What is this? Who is this?”

  Who, indeed. Without knowing of Paul’s travel plans, the UK-based Oriole Records had purchased the rights to release the “Carlos Dominguez”/“He Was My Brother” single from Edward B. Marks and released it on May 8 as a Jerry Landis record, with the songs credited to Paul Kane. Not much of a calling card for Paul, but the record did gain the interest of a rising middle-of-the-road singer named Val Doonican, who included “Carlos” on his 1964 debut album, The Lucky 13 Shades of Val Doonican. The long-player hit No. 2 on the British charts and stayed on the list for six and a half months, but neither release did much to enhance Paul’s reputation. No matter, he kept working.

&
nbsp; Soon he had played all the leading clubs in London. The Troubadour, of course, and also the Black Horse, the Roundhouse, and the Enterprise. The more friends he made, the wider his network became. Dolly Terfus, who had come to know a huge swath of musicians and club owners while working the door at the Troubadour, helped him book dates all over the United Kingdom, then called on friends to put him up when he got to their town.

  So off he went, to Hempstead, Chelmsford, Leicester, Cambridge; then south to Romford and Bexhill-on-Sea; then north again to clubs in Hull, Liverpool, Birmingham, Widnes, Birstall, and Edinburgh, Scotland. Most often he took the train, which clanged by fields and factories, smoke-stained homes, going from one concrete platform to another, then carrying his guitar and bag of clothes, shoes, and notebooks to the next smoke-draped club, to have a pint with whoever else was playing that night—the chances were increasingly good that it was someone Paul knew. The shows always seemed to go well, even when he made a crucial mistake, as when he arrived at a hard-won show at the Jug O’ Punch club in Birmingham precisely a week after he’d been booked to perform. The club’s owner, musician Ian Campbell, had another performer booked that night and at first refused to allow Paul even to do a floor spot between sets. Campbell eventually relented, allowing his apologetic guest a four-song set, and when the last notes of “The Sound of Silence” faded from the air, the crowd leaped to their feet to cheer.

  In London, the hipper musicians were migrating into Soho, the glittery if sometimes sinister, nightlife district. Introduced to the scene by Redd Sullivan, a sailor turned musician with flaming hair whose broad frame housed a decidedly outsize personality, Paul hustled to draw crowds and juicier gigs. While the bigger clubs had barkers calling passersby to their evening shows, Paul and Sullivan promoted their sets with impromptu sidewalk performances that began with Sullivan calling Paul a towering figure, the largest talent in London, the biggest thing in England and all of the United Kingdom, too. When enough people had gathered to catch a glimpse of this great artist, Sullivan would spread his arms and stand as tall as possible as the relatively elfish Paul leaped from behind him, smiling impishly and already strumming his guitar.