Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  When Paul’s copy of the record was delivered to Piepe’s address that fall, Al Stewart was there to experience his flatmate’s anger and angst. He was furious! Columbia was so determined to make him and Artie pop stars they had taken Paul’s very serious song and dressed it up in a clown suit. Argh! Actually, Paul’s biggest problem with the record that afternoon was that he couldn’t get it to play correctly. The house record player had only the thin 33 rpm spindle, and because all British records were designed for that size, they didn’t have one of those plastic doodads that fill in the wider hole of American 45 rpm discs. Stewart helped Paul fashion a 45 adapter with coins, beads, and other random bits, but it was far from perfect. You could see the disc going a bit wobbly on the turntable. No matter. Paul thumbed the needle into the groove. And of course it sounded off: the drums quavering, the guitars out of tune, and everything going geeerrrr-wahhhh and eee-ew-waaaaang. Paul’s cheeks went red. What the fuck is that? When the song ended he plunked the needle back to the start, and got even angrier. Fucking hell!

  With Stewart watching, Paul dialed the Columbia Records offices in New York and demanded they withdraw the offending record from the shops as soon as possible. He could do a much better job electrifying the song himself; just give him a shot. The voice on the other end tried to soothe him: did Paul know that the record was No. 1 in Boston and catching fire all over New England? They couldn’t pull the plug on it now, even if they wanted to, which they didn’t. Why didn’t he take a week to think it over? Seven days later he called back, and this time the record executive laughed at him. Now “The Sound of Silence” was No. 1 all over New England, had jumped into Billboard’s Top 50, and was a good bet to hit No. 1. Instead of complaining, he needed to get his ass on an airplane, get back to New York, and climb aboard for the ride. “So that’s when it sort of hit him,” Al Stewart says. “And then he did get on an airplane and buggered off for New York.”

  In another room with someone else, Paul shrugged it off with a smile. “I don’t feel it at all,” he told a New Musical Express reporter within a day or two of his raging around Piepe’s flat. “I’m here in England, and I’m goin’ to folk clubs, and I’m working like I was working always. It hasn’t changed me at all. Oh, I’m happy, man. I’ve got to say I’m very pleased. It’s a very nice gift!” Two years later he couldn’t even remember being angry about anything. “I wasn’t violently against it. It sounded okay after a couple of hearings. I didn’t think it was great, though. I didn’t say, ‘Oh, they screwed up my song.’ … I was pleased with that. It grew on me. Now I strongly prefer the electric version.”

  In 2006, Paul described the episode as an old-fashioned hero’s journey, recalling how he’d monitored the Billboard charts from London, noting the jump “Silence” made from 111 to 101 and realizing that the next week’s chart held the key to his future. If the song hit the Hot 100 above the No. 80 spot, it would come in with a bullet, Billboard’s symbol for fast-rising records, which would guarantee far more radio station pickups and a chance to climb a lot higher. He was headed to Denmark to play some clubs that week, and after taking an overnight ferry from Arhus to Copenhagen that landed at 6:00 a.m., he realized he had to wait four hours until he could get into the offices of his Danish publisher and check the new numbers in Billboard’s international edition.

  Paul spent the time walking past the towering glass-fronted skyscrapers and comic book–colored wooden structures and feeling his future hanging in the balance. When 10:00 a.m. finally arrived, he skipped to the publisher’s door and followed the secretaries inside. They handed him the morning’s Billboard, and he fingered his way to the Hot 100 with his heart fluttering in his chest. The suspense was excruciating. He figured he’d focus his search by starting with the lowest twenty slots, Nos. 100 to 81, knowing that if “The Sound of Silence” wasn’t there, it meant one of two things: the song had either collapsed entirely or jumped high enough to earn bullet status, a crucial designation for a rising hit. After not seeing it there, and feeling optimistic, he checked the 79–70 segment. Nothing. Then he started taking it slot by slot, up through the 60s. Still no “Sound of Silence.” “I said, ‘Shiiiit.’ It didn’t make it. I’m really dragged, you know.” But he couldn’t give up now; he had to keep looking, just to see.

  And then he saw it. “The Sound of Silence” had leaped all the way to No. 59, where it resided next to a bullet. A fifty-two slot leap.

  “I remember this very clearly,” he said. “I’m alone in the Danish publishing office, and I thought, ‘My life is irrevocably changed.’”

  One of those versions of the story has got to be true. Or maybe none of them is, or maybe all of them are. What mattered is that “The Sound of Silence” was exploding in the United States, and no matter how successful he’d been in England and Europe, no matter his many friends, no matter how free and happy he’d been there, no matter his love affair with Kathy, he had just discovered where his destiny lay. But knowing it didn’t mean he knew how to accept it.

  Not yet, anyway. He still had shows to play, fans to win over, a perfectly happy existence to live, doubts about American pop stardom to entertain. After Copenhagen, Paul headed to Holland, where CBS’s affiliated record company Artone had set up a show at a folk club in Haarlem, to draw attention to its releases of Songbook and Wednesday Morning, 3 AM. Harry Knipschild, the young executive who had set up Paul’s visit and accompanied him as he made his rounds to a newspaper interview, a seasonal Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) event, and then to the night’s gig, listened to Paul vent about that “Sound of Silence” single. The thing was, Paul hated folk-rock—Dylan, the Byrds, Sonny and Cher, all of it. Folk wasn’t supposed to be commercial; that was the whole point. “I’d rather not have a hit at all than hit with a folk-rock song,” Paul declared.

  That evening, a sparse audience of maybe twenty people greeted Paul at the Haarlem club owned by Dutch folksinger Cobi Schreiber. He wasn’t going to earn anything for his work, but he gave the show his all, playing a set list packed with, yes, folk-rock songs. By the end of the evening, Knipschild had seen enough of the chest-first way Paul walked, the confidence in his voice, and the assurance in his playing and singing to understand one thing: no matter how much he complained and fretted about fame, Paul already had the kingly bearing of a star.

  CHAPTER 10

  IT MEANS NOTHING TO US

  The legend puts Paul and Artie in the front seat of Paul’s car, parked beneath a tree on a dark corner one chilly Sunday evening in late December. Paul has been back in New York for a few weeks, and they’re both living in their parents’ houses, so they have to sneak off somewhere to get stoned. This is why they’re in the shadows of 70th Road and 141st Street, passing a joint between them as they listen to the week’s top hits march to the No. 1 spot, just as they’d been doing for more than a decade. Up to the top of the charts! The king of the mountain! Who would it be this time? Actually, they already knew. This was the week “The Sound of Silence” reigned at No. 1. It was still too strange to take it in. So they sat there listening to the song, passing the reefer, and gazing silently through the cloudy windshield. A minute or two into the song, Artie exhaled drily.

  “Simon and Garfunkel.”

  “Yeah,” Paul said.

  “Number one in the nation.”

  “Incredible.”

  “I bet those guys are having a great time right now.”

  “Yep.”

  Was it really them? That the electrified record sounded nothing like the tune they recorded made it feel even less real. Back in London, Paul couldn’t bring himself to cancel his remaining shows, pack up his life, and fly back to New York until he picked up a telephone and dialed a familiar number he hadn’t called in months. It was dinnertime in Queens, and all the Merensteins were at the table when the ringing phone pulled Charlie’s wife, Harriet, to her feet. She handed the receiver to her husband, and there was the prodigal surrogate son Paul, looking for a little more career advice. He explain
ed what was happening, how he’d been minding his own business overseas and now everyone at Columbia was yelling that “The Sound of Silence” was going to be huge, that he had to abandon his life in London to come back home. It all sounded great, but there was so much bullshit in the music business. Now Paul needed an honest answer from the only music guy he could really trust. Was “The Sound of Silence” really that big a hit? Yes, it was, Charlie said. “You’ve really got a hit record.”

  Paul responded immediately. “Okay. I’m coming back. I’ll call you the moment I get home.”

  He left London in a rush, packing up his clothes and shoes, finding a place to leave his car and everything else he couldn’t carry on the airplane. Promising everyone that he’d be gone for just a few months, he canceled only a few shows, rescheduling others for a visit he was already planning to make in February. Talking to friends and fans, he shrugged off his American star turn as a brief distraction he’d get out of the way by the spring. He’d stay only as long as it took to make the money he’d need to live in London for a year or two without having to hustle for gigs. Then he’d be right back to the folk clubs to play music that really mattered.

  But for the time being, there were so many other important things to do in America, so many decisions to make, so many problems to fix. Not long ago Paul would have handed it all off to Charlie without a second thought, but back in New York, he came to realize that things were different now. “The Sound of Silence” was on track to sell a million copies. A million copies. A huge number, and with it came huge opportunities that presented questions and potential problems of equal magnitude. The Columbia executives were already demanding a new album, one that sounded more like the electric “Sound of Silence” than the buttoned-down acoustic Wednesday Morning, 3 AM. Tom Wilson, who had left Columbia to take a bigger job at MGM Records, was no longer available for guidance, and Paul and Artie had no idea who their next producer would be. Was Charlie really equipped to navigate the hazard-pocked terrain just ahead?

  Apollo Records had struggled throughout Charlie Merenstein’s tenure as its chief. He’d had his successes, but he’d also made some crucial mistakes, particularly when it came to enforcing his contracts. Charlie was a quirky guy. When he made deals with an artist, he was also making a friend, starting a personal relationship that was as much about trust and loyalty as it was about whatever deal they signed. Charlie knew he’d live up to his end, and he expected his artists, his friends, to do the same. But it hardly ever worked out that way in the music business, particularly when an Apollo act scored a moderate hit record or two. That’s when the guys from the major labels would come swooping down from the tall buildings, beaks ruffling with bigger, richer contracts. And that, far more often than not, was the end of that up-and-comer’s days at Apollo. Because even if a musician was already signed to Apollo for another two or five or ten records, Charlie could never bring himself to hold an artist back. Because: if they don’t wanna do business with me, I don’t wanna do business with them. He’d rather have let the big companies work out a small settlement, or maybe he wouldn’t even take it that far. If he had a friend who turned out to be a rat, why spend any more time thinking about him? Fuck ’em. Move on.

  Only, you can’t run a record company, or any kind of company, like that, and when Bess Berman finally lost her patience with her brother in 1959, he left the company and, after a few years of living off the settlement Bess gave him, bought a route as a pretzel distributor in New York, dragging his still-athletic body out of bed before dawn six days a week to drive his pretzels. He kept a hand in the business, usually managing and producing an artist or act somewhere, but that was a part-time pursuit, and sometimes much less than that. As he told his sons, the product he sold in his new business was so much easier than what he dealt with in the music industry. Pretzels, he explained, don’t talk back. Paul never called. Charlie wouldn’t hear his young friend’s voice again for more than twenty years.

  * * *

  Whether Paul had ever intended to reinstall Merenstein as his manager isn’t entirely clear. Charlie was Jerry Landis’s guy, a good navigator through the Midtown pop factories. Now Paul was an artist of musical, poetic, and social sophistication, and also the creator of a million-selling No. 1 hit single. Whatever happened before this moment no longer mattered. In fact, it mattered so little that it probably hadn’t happened at all.

  Paul and Artie had hired a new manager not long after they signed with Columbia in early 1964. Producer Tom Wilson had recommended Marvin Lagunoff, who also managed the Pilgrims, the African American group Wilson had hoped to equip with “The Sound of Silence” when Paul first played it for him. Lagunoff’s real specialty was in movies and television—one of his first ideas for the Wednesday Morning, 3 AM–era Paul and Artie was to make them hosts of a Hootenanny-style folk music TV show. Nothing came of it, or from anything Lagunoff might have done to promote the release of Wednesday Morning, 3 AM. He wasn’t involved with the overdubbed/hit version of “The Sound of Silence,” either, so it had been easy to forget about him, or at least expect that he was as through with them as they were with him.

  Having reported to Columbia’s offices in Midtown to meet with the label’s chief of promotion, Gene Weiss, Paul and Artie were on their way out the door when label president Goddard Lieberson stopped them and congratulated them on their success. They must be on top of the world, Lieberson proclaimed. The whole nation was talking about them! It was nice to hear, but they didn’t feel like they were on top of anything, given that the only show their booking agent at William Morris had been able to set up for them was a two-night, four-show gig at the Coconut Grove nightclub in Miami, for which they would be paid the not-terribly-grand sum of a thousand dollars. Obviously they needed help, a new manager, pronto. Lieberson couldn’t recommend anyone in particular, since whoever they hired would be the guy he’d be dealing with when they had disagreements. But since they obviously needed to focus on younger fans, Lieberson advised, they’d be smart to talk to a couple of managers who had the college circuit down cold. The first was Albert Grossman, who handled Peter, Paul, and Mary and Bob Dylan, among others. The second was Mort Lewis, who had the Brothers Four, the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, and a few more. Paul, who was well aware of Grossman’s tight bond with Dylan, had one question: “What’s the name of that second guy again?”

  Born and raised in Minneapolis, Mort Lewis was a jazz fanatic who had found his way into the industry when he got back from World War II and started managing artists in the early 1950s. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was smart and hardworking, and also a ladies’ man, with a freewheeling panache that earned him friends ranging from Duke Ellington to Lenny Bruce.

  When Paul called, Lewis invited the two musicians to meet him at his east Midtown apartment that evening. After shaking hands and handing off his coat, Paul noticed the copy of Bruce’s latest album propped up against Lewis’s hi-fi. The comedian had just sent it over with an inscription on the cover—“To Morty, I hope you like it! Lenny”—and the sight made Paul’s eyes pop. “Wow! You know Lenny Bruce?” Lewis nodded, and Paul looked over at Artie. Cool.

  They sat down to talk about Paul and Artie’s new set of problems and opportunities, and Paul brought up one particularly maddening thing: when they walked onstage at some venues, they’d find only one microphone, which they would have to share. It was a pain in the neck, literally, given their differences in height. Their vocal blend suffered, too, but somehow there was nothing anyone could seem to do about it. Lewis shrugged. Just write it into the contracts. If someone wanted to book them, there was always an agreement about how long they should play and how much they’d get paid, right? Just add a clause that says the contractor must supply two microphones, state-of-the-art, preferably.

  “It’s that easy?” Paul asked.

  Lewis nodded. “If you know what you’re doing.”

  They continued the conversation over corned beef sandwiches at the Hole in the Wall deli, nea
r Lewis’s apartment. When the waitress brought the coffee, the manager sketched the terms for a two-year management contract on the back of a paper napkin. The next day, the three of them met with their lawyer, Harold Orenstein, and Lewis predicted that Simon and Garfunkel should and could be earning as much as ten thousand dollars a week. Orenstein, who also knew what he was doing, proposed adding a clause that fixed the number into the deal. If they weren’t earning ten grand a week after six months, then Paul and Artie could call off the contract. Lewis agreed, and the deal was done. Back in his office, Lewis quickly pulled together some college shows for the next weekend. Paul called Barry Kornfeld, a young bassist named Tom Dawes, an old frat brother who could play the drums, and a few others to serve as a backup band. They met up that Friday afternoon and hit the road. When they rolled back into the city on Monday morning, they had earned slightly more than ten thousand dollars.*

  * * *

  From the start, they performed mostly on weekends, a restriction set by Artie’s postgrad classes at Columbia University. Taking a break, or dropping out entirely, might have made more sense if the military draft and the Vietnam War hadn’t been waiting to claim him should he have lost his college deferment. Paul had nothing to worry about from the U.S. Army—he had been diagnosed with a slight heart murmur that barred him from any kind of military service. The university’s Christmas break freed them up to work on their second album, a hurry-up project pushed into immediate production by Columbia Records executives made ravenous by the unexpected success of the “Silence” single. Rereleasing the acoustic Wednesday Morning, 3 AM wasn’t going to cut it. Simon and Garfunkel were folk-rock artists now, so that’s the kind of music they needed to deliver. A dozen tracks that ran deep but also rocked hard—and that could be finished within, say, three weeks or less. A lunatic demand, really, particularly for a group with a solitary songwriter who was not known for working quickly.