Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  But first they had to record a follow-up single, and immediately. If they wanted to capitalize on the success of “The Sound of Silence” they’d need to get the new song out while the old one was still on the charts. Just after Paul got home from England, he met Artie in their old workshop in the Garfunkel family basement to strategize. The new single, they felt, had to be as strong as “The Sound of Silence,” but in a different way. “To show people [that] it wasn’t a fluke,” Artie said. “And show that we could make an interesting record in a whole other vein.” They settled on “Homeward Bound,” a road song Paul had written and performed during his most recent residency in England. It was a pretty simple song, an acoustic tune with just bass, drums, and piano accompaniment. But they took care with the recording, tossing out a first attempt that didn’t sound quite right for a second take they cut with local musicians in Nashville. Indeed, “Homeward Bound” had a very different sound from “The Sound of Silence,” but connected as solidly as they hoped when it was released in January, rising to No. 5 on the Billboard charts. But they still had a whole new record to make.

  Fortunately, Paul had a backlog of songs, most of which he’d been polishing on the English folk circuit for the last year. He and Artie had worked out harmonies during those launderette sessions the previous summer, so all they needed to get going was a producer who could take over for the departed Wilson. Columbia assigned them Bob Johnston, who had also taken over for Wilson in Bob Dylan’s recording sessions. Unlike his predecessor, who defined sophisticated cool, Johnston had a little crazy in his eyes. A Texas-born shouter and arm waver, he had a wild admiration for the headstrong artists he worked with (including Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Aretha Franklin), and made a point of deferring to their inspirations and whims. “Dylan or somebody would come up to me and ask what they ought to do,” Johnston told me a year before his death in 2015, “and I’d say, ‘Fuck you! You’re the genius! You tell me what you want, and I’ll make it happen!’” What Paul and Artie wanted was to make the best-sounding record possible, the fewer limitations the better. Message received, Johnston urged them to look for good musicians in other cities, pointing them first to Nashville, then cleared the way for them to head to Los Angeles to work with the studio players there who would be known eventually as the Wrecking Crew. Of the eleven songs on the new record, five were revised versions of songs first heard on the UK-only Paul Simon Songbook, while “The Sound of Silence” appeared on both that album and Wednesday Morning, 3 AM. “Somewhere They Can’t Find Me” and “We’ve Got a Groovey Thing Goin’” came from the first folk-rock session with Wilson in April, leaving only “Richard Cory,” “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall,” “Blessed,” and Paul’s solo cover of his favorite guitar piece, Davy Graham’s “Anji,” as new songs.

  Dressed up in folk-rock’s Beatles-sharp threads, the songs sparkle here and snarl there, at times leaping in unexpected directions and then veering back to Dylan-worn paths. A few songs (“Kathy’s Song,” “April Come She Will,” and “Anji”) are left in purely acoustic form, but given Paul’s years of studio experience, it’s not surprising to hear how winningly the other songs incorporate the new sounds. Perhaps the most glaring exception is the jangling harpsichord that overwhelms the sweet melancholy of “Leaves That Are Green.” “Blessed,” by contrast, profits enormously from the electric guitars that wail and chime in the space between the circular drum pattern and the singers’ fierce harmonies. The contemplative “A Most Peculiar Man” makes do quite nicely with light percussion, a mostly unheard electric guitar played well beneath the chords held on a quietly seething organ. The guitars, organ, bass, and drums give “I Am a Rock” a reined-in variation on Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” sound, while the snapping snare, organ riffs, and a growing bass riff add a sooty funk to “Richard Cory.”

  Thematically, the album covers the sweep of Paul’s previously established subjects. “Blessed” contrasts the blessings Jesus bestowed upon the powerless and impoverished with images of the deprivation and decadence so common in London’s Soho district, while “Kathy’s Song” identifies the singer’s lover, rather than God, as the sole source of grace in his life. But even love is something less than pure. The larcenous narrator in “Somewhere They Can’t Find Me” seems quite comfortable trading his girlfriend for the spoils of a liquor store heist. “Somewhere” conveys a sense of wicked fun, what with all that creeping down the alley and flying down the highway and leaving the cops scratching their heads, but it’s still of a piece with the bleak lives described in “A Most Peculiar Man” and “Richard Cory,” both of which read like case studies in the existentialist’s handbook. The nameless suicide at the center of “Peculiar” takes form only by dint of his self-destruction. And while the high-flying heir Mr. Cory (whose tale is borrowed from a poem of the same name by Edwin Arlington Robinson) is renowned for his wealth, looks, and elegant manners, the only thing that truly humanizes him is the bullet he shoots through his head.

  “I Am a Rock” portrays the same internal despondency as the repurposed “Sound of Silence,” and together the collection of songs creates a loosely interlocking narrative that bonds the writer’s personal angst with the overarching social and philosophical concerns of the moment. To the children of the Cold War, now coming of age in a decade that still seemed so full of possibility, the desperate love at the core of “Kathy’s Song” took on the gravitas of philosophy, while the sociological abstractions in “Blessed” felt as brokenhearted as a tale of lost love. It was as if Paul’s most intimate sorrows, fears, and hopes had come to express the feelings of an entire generation.

  * * *

  Released on January 17, 1966,* Sounds of Silence (the plural underscoring that it’s an album of songs) jumped immediately onto the Billboard album charts, peaking at No. 21. Not quite a chartbuster, but still light-years beyond Wednesday Morning, 3 AM. And in an industry still defined by singles, it was far more significant that “Homeward Bound,” released just two days after Sounds of Silence (though it wasn’t included on the album), catapulted its way up Billboard’s Hot 100, hitting No. 5 on April 2, before falling back to make room for “I Am a Rock,” which jumped into the top three. The back-to-back-to-back hits quickly established Simon and Garfunkel as incisive social commentators, yearning romantics, and prophets of alienation and disillusionment. They were, in the words of their official Columbia Records bio, “rather intense, though hardly solemn, young men with literary interests that ranged from Joyce to ‘kids who write on subway walls.’ … They are both twenty-three, direct, witty and very hip.”

  The full-page ads Columbia put into the trade magazines to promote Sounds of Silence and “Homeward Bound” were dominated by a shot of the duo huddled together in matching pea coats and striped scarfs, peering down at the lens with cigarettes smoldering between their fingers. Artie’s blond curls and soft eyes give him a poetic air, while Paul’s hooded eyes and the debonair pose he strikes with his cigarette suggest a louche Austrian count, a young man with a castle and personal problems. None of Columbia’s bios or press releases hint at their Tom and Jerry days, or at the quantity of songs Paul wrote, produced, and released under different names. Speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ralph J. Gleason, the first American music critic at a major newspaper to write seriously about rock ’n’ roll, Paul told a version of the breakthrough story of “The Sound of Silence” that made it seem that he was completely unaware of the single’s existence until he stumbled upon a copy of Cash Box in Copenhagen and discovered that his song was in the Top 10. “How could this happen?” he said, adopting the gee-whiz voice of an artist-naif. “It was quite an experience.” Gleason was impressed. “These two young men are excellent songwriters and fascinating performers,” he wrote. “They ring changes on almost all the top people in the ‘New Sounds’ and ‘Top 40’ field.”

  Touring as much as Artie’s class schedule would allow, the two worked their way through the college field houses and concert halls,
and also drew crowds to theaters and clubs in major cities coast to coast. Reviewing Simon and Garfunkel’s first nonclub appearance in New York, an afternoon show at Columbia University’s McMillan Hall on May 1, 1966, the Times’s music critic Robert Shelton (the same fellow who had accompanied Dylan to the notorious Gerde’s Folk City show two years earlier) began his rave review by noting how the duo seemed to speak “to, and perhaps for, their student audiences.” Back in the Bay Area a few weeks later, they played a May 28 show at the Berkeley Community Theatre, where the already enthusiastic Ralph J. Gleason noted the “almost biblical morality” of Paul’s songs, with “their concern for the fundamentals of love and justice and beauty and salvation in the midst of corruption, [which] reflects the attitude of much of the New Generation.”

  Simon and Garfunkel came on like musicians-artists-statesmen, two young men in dark suits and ties, singing from an austere stage whose two microphones, two glasses of water, and single stool underscored the stark heart of their songs. Onstage, they took their music and themselves seriously, both lasering into the heart of each note and syllable. They brooked no interruptions or shouted requests. Offenders suffered the lash of one or the other’s furious tongue, then were gang-stomped by the crowd’s laughter and applause. You idiot. You’re supposed to pay attention; these songs are broadsides from the heart of the youth movement. The action on the streets, the life of the mind, the writing on the motherfucking wall. “Pop music is catching up with film as the leading medium in which to make some comment about the world for a large audience, just as film caught up with literature,” Paul told the New York Times’s Shelton. “Pop music is the most vibrant force in music today,” Artie told Time magazine. “It’s like dope—so heady and alive.”

  They could be funny onstage, and even self-effacing, but as the New Musical Express proclaimed to British fans, Simon and Garfunkel were rock ’n’ roll’s first intellectual sophisticates. “Their intellectual prowess and less-than-consuming interest in music separate them from the ‘normal’ performer,” wrote Tracy Thomas, who went on to (mis)identify Artie as an architecture student, which only used to be true, and Paul as a writer who only sort of dabbled in music. “No matter how successful we are,” Paul told her, “I’ll quit in a couple of years.”

  It would be harder to quit than Paul thought. Riding high on the charts, higher still on reams of critical acclaim, and from the right critics, and traveling on jets and in limos to sing truth to power, he would have to figure out where to store the sacks of money people kept hurling their way. Back in London in the spring, Paul couldn’t help talking about the absurd numbers he kept seeing on the checks they got each night, even giving the New Musical Express’s Keith Altham a specific figure. “Do you know how much we earned last night in a concert in America? $4,300!” And that was just one hour-long show. “Art might turn to me after a couple of concerts and say, ‘We earned $13,000 this weekend.’ I kinda shrug and say, ‘That’s a good two days’ work!’” But then he’d shrug and roll his eyes, because what difference did it really make? Nothing meaningful. “I just can’t grasp it—it means nothing to us.”

  * * *

  In the early fall of 1965, when Artie was studying mathematics in New York and Paul was an up-and-coming folksinger in England, Paul went to the London Palladium to meet the Seekers, a pop-folk vocal group that had relocated to England after making several hits in their native Australia. Paul had heard from the group’s publicist, Allan MacDougall, that the group was looking for material. With the electric “Sound of Silence” still weeks away from being released (or even entering his awareness), Paul was happy to pitch a song or two to a group riding high on three straight hit records. The Seekers’ Bruce Woodley, tall, bespectacled, and as authoritative as a successful young musician of the mid-1960s could be, handed Paul his guitar and said, “Sing!” Paul did just that, la-la-ing a song that bounded genially through some interesting chord changes. Woodley and his bandmates were impressed. Come back with some lyrics, he said, and that’s something we can work with. Three weeks later Paul returned with a song now called “Someday, One Day,” and the Seekers recorded it as their next single.

  The song took the Seekers to No. 11 on the UK pop charts, but Woodley, who also wrote songs for the group, didn’t wait that long to ask Paul to collaborate on another tune or two. Their first attempt, a yearning love song called “I Wish You Could Be Here,” also got tapped as a single for the group. Next Woodley pulled out an upbeat, pop-smart number that lacked only a set of lyrics, and Paul said he’d be glad to scratch something out. He composed lyrics for a song that came to be called “Red Rubber Ball,” a cheerfully bitter sendoff to a lover who was never all that into him in the first place. “The roller coaster ride we took is nearly at an end,” he proclaims. “I bought my ticket with my tears, / It’s all I’m gonna spend.” When the dawn lights the horizon, the rising sun is as bright and carefree as a child’s playground ball. Another swing, another home run. That’s how it struck Woodley, who figured he had just heard another Seekers single. When Paul offered to publish the song through his own company, Woodley shrugged and said sure. They’d share the writers’ royalties fifty-fifty either way. They went to a studio to record a demo, and Paul sent it to Eclectic Music’s office in Barry Kornfeld’s living room on Waverly Street in Greenwich Village.

  “The Sound of Silence” pulled Paul home after that, but Woodley came to New York in early January 1966, and Paul met him at Kornfeld’s place. After a bit of mood-enhancing conviviality, they got to work. Woodley presented a simple riff with a melody built on an inverted C chord, and when Paul started playing and la-la-ing a melody, he repeated the word cloudy … cloudy. In search of a good third chord, he fingered a diminished F-sharp, which jolted the tune into a new, if similarly relaxed progression through a misty northern California afternoon. The smoke in the air put them in a trippy mood, a tableau of finger-painted smiles, mind-bending sun breaks, and low-hanging puffs whispering why? When it was done, they both blinked and nodded and were quite happy. Another good song! Who knew where it was all going to lead? “Paul Simon is getting in our groove now,” Woodley told a Melody Maker reporter a week or two later.

  The Seekers weren’t the only performers drawn to Paul and Woodley’s new songs. When Kornfeld brought the “Red Rubber Ball” demo to the Cyrkle (an American group whose members included the same Tom Dawes who had accompanied Paul and Artie, along with Kornfeld and the drummer from AEPi, on their first ten-thousand-dollar weekend) they grabbed it. Originally named the Rhondells, Dawes’s group had recently been signed as clients by Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who changed their name* to the Cyrkle. The tune clicked for Dawes and his bandmates, and they made it the title track for their first album. Released as their first single, the record detonated on impact, taking the group to No. 2 on the Billboard list, and ultimately selling more than a million copies.

  Even in the midst of Simon and Garfunkel’s first run of hits, it was a huge deal. Another entry for Paul’s hot streak and, it went without saying, a new gusher of royalties, money he would split evenly with Woodley, according to their handshake deal. But there was a catch. Instead of registering “Red Rubber Ball” to Eclectic Music in the United States, Paul had assigned the rights to his self-owned British publisher, Pattern Music Ltd., which, as per long-standing music publishing tradition, automatically took 50 percent of every song it published—meaning that Woodley’s 50 percent share in the song actually added up to only 25 percent of its proceeds. The other 75 percent went to cowriter/publisher Paul Simon.

  Who knew the song would become such a huge hit? Or how Paul’s casual proposal that they publish it with his company would so drastically alter how the profits were calculated? When Woodley got his first royalty check, he assumed there’d been a mistake. Paul had never mentioned that his British publishing company would siphon off such a huge chunk of money from their joint composition; surely he intended to respect the spirit of the fifty-fifty split they ha
d agreed upon. But he didn’t.

  It was Music Industry 101, what he’d learned during his days in Tin Pan Alley: if you could find an advantage, you took it, and a deal was a deal. Yet his logic didn’t cut both ways. When the overwhelming success of “The Sound of Silence” made the fifty-fifty deal he’d made with Barry Kornfeld to run their co-owned publishing company Eclectic Music seem far too generous, Paul took Kornfeld out for a cup of coffee and proposed reducing the split to something more appropriate. Say, ninety-five–five, in Paul’s favor. More than a little chagrined—Paul had approached him about cofounding the company with the very terms he was now calling unfair—Kornfeld refused to commit to anything. Instead, he applied one of the music industry lessons he’d learned on his own and immediately hired a lawyer.*

  It was a lot of wheeling and dealing for a fellow who talked so much about how little money mattered to him—but, in a sense, Paul hadn’t been lying about that. On one level, he really didn’t care that much about money and the things it could buy. Sure, he liked having a sporty car and would soon buy himself a two-level Upper East Side apartment that looked over Gracie Mansion and the East River. But the decor was minimalist: a single guy in his mid-twenties who traveled a lot had little use for expensive furnishings. As long as their business manager sent him his seventy-five-dollar weekly allowance and paid the bill for his credit cards, he was fine. “All I need is somewhere to eat and sleep, and buy guitar strings,” he said. “I haven’t had any real need for money yet.” But there were other aspects to the money side of the business. If numbers couldn’t define the entirety of a man, Paul had read enough box scores to know that they could tell you who was winning and who was losing.