Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  So sad, and yet so afire with energy, ambition, and self-assurance. A regular in the Soho clubs, particularly at the just-opened Les Cousins, a basement club beneath a restaurant on Greek Street that became a rallying point for musicians, Paul continued honing his image, which drew even more attention to his songs and performances. “He was creating a package,” recalled fellow musician Harvey Andrews. “The little man with the chip on his shoulder, who was lonely, lost, and in need of mothering. And he was going to be immensely successful.” Paul had always imagined he’d be the reigning champion of something, but the more songs he wrote, the more his Five to Ten success swept through the increasingly packed clubs he played, the more confident he became. When Brentwood Folk Club co-manager David Rugg booked him to open a theater concert in Chelmsford for the popular American folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie, Paul took the gig happily, but showed up that afternoon beneath an angry little cloud that he took straight to Rugg. Now Paul insisted that he be the headliner; he had constructed an entire argument about it. Obviously, Sainte-Marie was an out-of-towner. He, on the other hand, was the local hero with a loyal fan base. Clearly, Sainte-Marie should open for him. Rugg could only stare. Sainte-Marie was an international star; the club had sold out the four-hundred-capacity Shire Hall on the strength of her name. So no. Of course not. Paul didn’t push the point much further, but the moment resonated. “He was very friendly, and an outgoing sort of person,” Rugg says. “But he had these ideas about where he was going and how important he was.” And if you didn’t pick up on that by yourself, Paul wasn’t shy about telling you all about it. “If I’m not a millionaire by the time I turn thirty,” he told suburban Liverpool folk club manager Geoff Speed, among many others, “I shall be very disappointed.”

  Paul didn’t like to be disappointed. If someone in an audience was talking too loudly while he was playing, he’d stop midverse and deliver a scolding. If someone had the gall to heckle him, he’d shout him or her down with arctic efficiency. When he got to a scheduled gig at Soho’s Les Cousins club only to discover that the blues singer Long John Baldry had also been booked for his slot, both musicians went after each other, their ensuing argument was so loud and bitter that people still talk about it. When manager Graham Wood managed to book Paul to play “I Am a Rock” on the hit pop music TV show Ready, Steady, Go! a few months later, Paul responded to the producer’s last-minute instruction to play only half the song—the live show was running long—by stubbornly performing the entire tune, thus forcing headliner P. J. Proby to cram an abbreviated version of his current smash, “Let the Water Run Down,” over the show’s closing credits.

  Among a set of musicians whose shared ethic valued humility and understatement, Paul’s audacity amused some and infuriated others. Bert Jansch, perhaps the most influential British guitarist of the mid-1960s, shared stages with Paul on many occasions and had more than a few opportunities to hear him predict the glories of his own future. “Very American! He used to say stuff like ‘Oh I’m gonna be really big one day and make lots of money, I’ll invite you all over to America!’ He did of course make it very big, but never asked us over,” he said. Some musicians found nothing to like about Paul, as guitarist Ralph McTell recalled. “He had a reputation as a miserable little man and was not popular among the other musicians.” Things would get only more strained as Paul’s fortunes rose due to the help of a generous friend whose grasp of business wasn’t nearly as sharp as Paul’s—but that was still a year or two off in the distance.

  Still, Paul could also be remarkably generous, as both an informal guitar tutor and a songwriter with a deep understanding of musical and lyrical structure. If another musician needed help getting to a show, Paul would volunteer his car and his own chauffeur services. And when he started earning headliner’s wages, he would end a long night of performing and jamming at Les Cousins or the Troubadour by gathering up every musician in sight and leading them to the Golden Egg diner, where he would treat everyone to an early breakfast. He spent a third of his ninety-pound advance for his solo album from CBS-UK to produce an album for Piepe flatmate and fellow American songwriter Jackson C. Frank, who Paul thought deserved a much larger audience than he’d been attracting. The sessions weren’t easy. Frank, who had nearly died in a school fire when he was a child, was so terrified of the recording studio that he would play only behind a barrier that blocked the control room window’s view of him at the microphone. Paul took the time to ease him through the sessions, paid cash to sign the songwriter to a publishing deal with Eclectic Songs, and then made sure the record got released in England. Frank’s record didn’t find an audience, but Paul’s generosity continued through the decades, especially after his friend’s emotional troubles became debilitating. Paul didn’t show that side of himself to everyone. And sometimes the side he did show made it seem impossible for such kindness and compassion to exist within the consciousness of the same man.

  * * *

  Committed to staying in England through the summer, Paul was on hand for the release of CBS-UK’s four-song distillation of Wednesday Morning, 3 AM tracks in June, and also for the release of his first solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, when it emerged a few weeks later. The album was fronted with a photo of Paul and Kathy sitting on a cobblestone street next to the Thames, both playing with children’s toys. The picture could be interpreted in several ways, either as a romantic portrait of young love or as a reference to the famous shot of Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It might also have been a parody of Dylan’s cover, or just an image Paul dreamed up thinking it would look cool in a record store. The liner notes on the back open with a self-lacerating essay by Paul that leads with the admission that “I start with the knowledge that everything I write will turn and laugh at me.” That thought introduces a brutal conversation between Paul’s creative and critical voices, both answering to the same name, with the more vulnerable voice in boldface.

  PAUL: (Reading notes of LP) Who wrote this junk?

  PAUL: You know very well who did it.

  PAUL: (In mock astonishment) Don’t tell me it was you.

  More self-directed criticism follows. Paul calls himself a phony; he dismisses the older songs as juvenilia (“I don’t believe in them as I once did”), then concocts another fantasy dialogue, this one between himself and a poppy seller. Next comes a song-by-song analysis by Piepe, who shares none of Paul’s stated antipathy toward his work. Most of the mainstream British music publications ignored the The Paul Simon Songbook altogether, though Melody Maker’s critic took the time to dismiss “I Am a Rock” as reheated Dylan (“Sorry, this guy is trying to take off Bob Dylan in every way”). Still, the British folk publications covered the album, most of them in generous terms. Those reviews helped attract more folkies to Paul’s club shows, while his manager, Graham Wood, tried to interest the mainstream music magazines by emphasizing Simon’s connections to Dylan and the Greenwich Village scene in New York. Wood’s work paid off, and a few reporters started to pay attention. The New Musical Express’s Keith Altham went to Paul (“A small, dark, intense man from Greenwich Village”) to ask about Dylan and Joan Baez and then quoted him extensively in the resulting story. Unsurprisingly, Paul had more praise for Baez, who he said had succeeded “naturally,” while Dylan had been borne up by a tidal wave of publicity. And when good old Ewan MacColl lashed out at Dylan in September, Paul played both sides of the fight, agreeing that his fellow American’s lyrics were lousy (“rehashed Ginsberg”), while also arguing that Dylan had “written some very good songs.”

  Paul’s attitude toward publicity was simple. If he had an opportunity to promote his work or himself, he took it. It got tricky only when he needed to explain to others how he’d somehow become a party to such naked displays of self-promotion. Performing at the Red Cow in Cambridge soon after his Ready, Steady, Go! appearance, Paul turned his TV spot into a joke, a comedy of errors whose central benefit was that it gave him an oppo
rtunity to call cohost Cathy McGowan a “nit” on the air. He had done no such thing, of course—his rebellion had been stealing airtime from the hapless P. J. Proby—but the club audience howled like mad at the story, then redoubled when Paul fretted that he would no longer be able to play “I Am a Rock” now that it had been corrupted by its appearance on a mainstream pop music television show.

  When Artie came to spend a few weeks that summer, he moved into Piepe’s flat, too, and he and Paul set to crafting duo arrangements for his new songs, working out a solid set of tunes they could perform together in the London clubs. Feeling penned in the apartment, they took to rehearsing at the launderette down the street. The first time, they came with their laundry and played around while their shirts and pants and socks spun behind the glass. But when they heard the ringing acoustics in the tile-and-steel-filled storefront, they went back the next afternoon with nothing but Paul’s guitar. When the neighborhood ladies started applauding, they made it a daily ritual, spreading the word among their friends, telling everyone that even if they knew Paul’s songs and had heard him play, they really needed to hear him play with Artie at the launderette; it was a completely different experience. Friends started to show up, and it wasn’t long before they were telling more people about what they came to call the “launderette sessions.” They ran like open rehearsals, with Paul and Artie playing through a few songs the crowd already knew, then working on something new for a while, then performing the new arrangement. Most days, they went on for two or three hours, with customers and friends cycling in and out. Most of the customers came to adore the boys, even if some of Paul’s friends thought it was a bit, you know, too much. “Typical brash Americans, I thought initially,” says Hans Fried, a fixture on the London folk scene. “Even though I was sort of bohemian I still had a certain amount of that English reserve in me.”

  Paul started bringing Artie to shows he’d booked as a solo act, sometimes demanding that the club pay a premium for having the duo rather than a solo performer. The two always did well, and it wasn’t long before audiences began to show up expecting Artie to be at Paul’s side. One night near the end of Artie’s stay in September 1965, Paul started gabbing about the new pop hybrid that people called folk-rock music. “So you have the Byrds doing Bob Dylan, Manfred Mann doing Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan doing Bob Dylan.” The crowd tittered, and Paul kept on because, wouldn’t you know it, their own producer, Tom Wilson, also the producer of Dylan and so many others, turned out to be the guy who was behind the whole thing. He had even proposed that Simon and Garfunkel do some folk-rock, and they had agreed to give the new genre a try. They weren’t selling any folk records, right? So, Paul continued, they had taken the lyrics of the song “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” and “we put it into a beat thing. So we’ll give you a taste of that.” He played a few descending minor chords, and together he and Artie sang the familiar lyric, only now with a bluesy edge that made the once guilt-racked lover seem thoroughly unrepentant. He wasn’t mourning anything—just gathering the loot and getting out of town before the cops showed up.

  A few people laughed after the first line or two, and more giggles struck when Artie’s voice cracked, purposely it seemed, on his high notes. So they were making fun of folk-rock? Maybe so. And maybe that was why Paul strummed a few bars of “Twist and Shout” afterward, then proclaimed “Lahhhk a Rollun’ Stone” in his best dull-witted Dylan voice. A few people laughed at that, too. But none of this is as significant, or as surprising, as the one thing the audience did, with no hesitation: they applauded the song as if it weren’t a joke after all, as if blending a folk sensibility with rock ’n’ roll urgency actually sounded pretty good, as if Tom Wilson might be on to something after all.

  * * *

  Nearly everything Paul said onstage that night in London was true. After Wednesday Morning, 3 AM flopped so spectacularly, options for the duo’s future had dwindled toward zero. When Paul came back to New York City for a visit in April, he and Artie scheduled a meeting with Tom Wilson, who filled them in on the latest excitement around Columbia and the New York industry: Dylan had hired a rock band to play with him on his just-released album, Bringing It All Back Home, while the just-signed Byrds had released their own sparklingly electric cover of Bobby’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” So much more was on the near horizon, and just as Paul would tell his audience in London a few months later, Wilson popped the question: Why don’t you guys give it a try, too?

  If Paul had any reservations about keeping his folk music pure, they didn’t keep him from getting to work on this new assignment. Starting with the opening chords of Davy Graham’s “Anji” and the “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” opening lyrics, he came up with the swaggering “Somewhere They Can’t Find Me,” which they recorded with a full rock band, percussion, and a horn section. They spent the rest of the session on another minor chord rocker, sung this time by a lover determined to keep his baby from leaving him because, as the title asserts (with notably eccentric spelling), “We’ve Got a Groovey Thing Goin’.” The second song runs on an appealingly funky keyboard riff, and the more prominent horns give it a kick, but the paper-thin lyrics (“I never done you no wrong, / Never hit you when you’re down / Always gave you good lovin’, / Never ran around…”) make it the slighter work, a B-side if ever there was one.

  With that, they satisfied their producer’s request and pushed the Simon and Garfunkel ball as far as their record label would allow. Still, Columbia Records didn’t issue that or any new Simon and Garfunkel single. As far as Paul and Artie could see, their career as a duo was over, at least for the time being. Paul went back to England. Artie spent the summer traveling in Europe and prepared for another year of labor on his PhD in mathematics. The Beat sound of Bringing It All Back Home took Dylan to Billboard’s top three, while the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” lodged itself at the top of the singles charts. Tom Wilson’s reputation soared, too, and not just in the Columbia offices. But he was still sensitive about the colossal flop Simon and Garfunkel had made for him, and when Stan Kavan, the label’s chief of promotions, buttonholed him in the hall to tell him that Wednesday Morning, 3 AM had sold a thousand copies, the producer grimaced. He’d heard that sad number months earlier. He knew the record was a flop. No need to rub it in now, man. The executive laughed. He wasn’t talking about that thousand copies. He was talking about the thousand copies the supposedly dead-as-a-doornail album had just sold in Miami. Did Wilson have any idea why that had happened?

  A few months later Billboard made the chain of highly unlikely events into a feature article, an object lesson in how good intracompany communication can lead to the most unexpected, and delightful, places. Not that it didn’t take a while. Reports of a burst of Wednesday Morning, 3 AM sales in Dallas that February didn’t impress anyone in the label’s New York headquarters; nor did early news of the Miami outbreak in early May. Instead, they told Southeast region distributor Mark Weiner to forget about that folk music flop and spend his time on records that actually had a chance. But Weiner wouldn’t shut up about it. As he knew, the trigger in Dallas and in Miami was “The Sound of Silence.” It was a very simple calculus. Once a radio station started playing the song, listeners rushed out to buy the album. Yet there was no “Silence” single on the market. The big execs still didn’t believe it, but when Weiner saw Wilson at a company meeting, he gave him a crucial suggestion. Instead of releasing the original “Silence” as a single, they should get some electric guitars and drums on the track and make a folk-rock record out of it. That got Wilson’s attention.

  At a Dylan recording session a few weeks later, Wilson asked a few of the musicians to stay late to help him on another small project. He played them the original acoustic recording of “The Sound of Silence” and gave them a little while to figure out parts for electric guitar, electric piano, bass, and drums. Once they had the feel, it took only a few tries to get it onto tape. Wilson, who hadn’t needed his artists’ permission to alter their
record, waited until the session was over to tell Artie what he was up to. At first Artie shrugged it off. He could tell they were trying to turn Simon and Garfunkel into the Byrds, and as far as he was concerned it sounded kind of cute. “I was mildly amused, and detached with the certainty that it was not a hit.” He passed the news of the recording session in a letter to Paul in London, who had almost exactly the same response. “I was at that point sort of successful on the folk scene in England,” he recalled forty years later. “No, more than sort of successful. I was very successful; I was one of the most sought-after performers.”

  He’d found a kind of success, for sure. But, really, he had no idea. He really didn’t.

  * * *

  Columbia released the “The Sound of Silence”/“We’ve Got a Groovey Thing Goin’” 45 on September 13. The record broke across the Boston radio stations a few weeks later and soon spread to other cities. It made the lower reaches of the Billboard national charts in October, and as it drew closer to the Hot 100 in November, Artie called Paul to say that something had started to happen. Paul was delighted—or he didn’t pay much mind, or else he was deeply offended and thoroughly outraged. His recollection of that key moment in his career depended on where he was, whom he was talking to, and when the conversation was taking place.