Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  The Seekers’ “Red Rubber Ball” wasn’t released as a single but the success of the Cyrkle’s version was overwhelming enough to make the song a part of Simon and Garfunkel’s stage act for the next year or two. Artie set up the tune with a comically rueful tale, telling the crowd how he and Paul had recorded virtually all Paul’s original songs, except for the one of which the Cyrkle (“who used to be good friends of ours”) had gone and sold 890,000 copies,* ha ha. “Red Rubber Ball” always got a good ovation, but something about the tune grated against Paul’s skin. When he had come calling at the Seekers’ dressing room at the London Palladium in the fall of 1965, they were the stars and he was just another songwriter hoping to land a song with an act that could push it into the Top 10. But now that he’d had hits of his own—all of them far more serious and significant than anything the Seekers had done—his attitude was different. For all that British critics celebrated the group’s instrumental prowess and exquisite singing, the Seekers came off like sleek entertainers, their songs crowded with horns and strings, all rough edges buffed to a high sheen.

  Had Woodley actually said that Paul was getting into their groove? That kind of talk made Paul recoil. So did the melodramatic cover version of “The Sound of Silence” that the mainstream group the Bachelors made so popular that Simon and Garfunkel’s version barely dented the UK charts. “What kind of image are we getting with our songs being recorded by groups like [the Bachelors and the Seekers]?” Paul complained. “I think it strange that the Bachelors should choose to record a very hip song when their style is so conflicting. I feel that some artists never get as much out of a song as I have put into it.”

  To say nothing of what he was putting into his public image, which was fast evolving from thoughtful young folkie to enlightened hippie oracle. His hair now bristled past his ears, and he took to wearing capes, psychedelic ties, and high-heeled black boots, the garb befitting a young man who had in just a few months become a leading voice of his generation—like Dylan, people kept saying, much to Paul’s chagrin. “Unfortunately, I’m always being compared to Bob Dylan,” he told the New Musical Express that spring. “Our philosophies are different. He is always dumping [on] people more than I do. It’s really easy to put somebody down. The biggest thing Dylan has going for him is his mystique.”

  Not that Paul was beyond a little mystique creation. About a year into his UK residencies, he had developed an English accent, layering the tony Londoner’s misty vowels (cahhn’t for can’t and so forth) and precise diction on top of the muddy bray and aggravated consonants he’d absorbed on the streets of New York. It was an unlikely blend, and he didn’t always remember to do it; on Sounds of Silence his accent is most audible on “A Most Peculiar Man” (mahhn) and “Richard Cory” (who “owns one hahlf of this old town”) and is only slightly evident on “Patterns.” All these were songs he wrote and set in Great Britain. You can feel the tug of the Thames here and there on the coming Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album, too, though not at all on the New York fantasia “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” But Paul used it so consistently onstage that it took years for some fans to figure out that Simon and Garfunkel weren’t part of the Beatles-sprung British Invasion.*

  An accent wasn’t the only souvenir he brought back from England. At the same time that he joined Britain’s serious guitarists in mastering the finger-knotting intricacies of Davy Graham’s “Anji,” Paul followed his peers in the pursuit of Martin Carthy’s unique arrangement of the British folk standard “Scarborough Fair.” Dating back to at least the late seventeenth century, the wistful ballad had been a pillar in the British folk catalogue for centuries, usually played with the most minimal of instrumental accompaniment. As per Ewan MacColl’s typically faithful rendition on his 1957 album Matching Songs of the British Isles and America, the standard performance set the vocal against basic chords strummed only once or twice per change. Carthy, however, sang “Scarborough” to a kaleidoscopic finger-picked pattern central enough to serve as a countermelody. Entranced, Paul saw Carthy at a club and asked for, and received, a private tutorial on the new arrangement. Another friend did him the favor of writing down the lyrics, and when the time came to start work on Simon and Garfunkel’s third album, Paul added the song to the list of potential tracks.

  * * *

  The writing rarely came easily. Paul usually couldn’t compose on the road, not even in the hush of a hotel room. He needed things to be familiar, and comfortable, to know that he wouldn’t be disturbed, that nothing would break the spell of creation. Even under the best of circumstances it took time. When he sat down to write, it might take him three days just to get started. He’d never been a good contract writer; when he tried to write to a formula, the melodies flattened and the lyrics rang false. You couldn’t believe a word out of Jerry Landis’s mouth when he sang; even the teenyboppers could hear the difference. Now it was all real, every word an expression of a resonant feeling, a memory that rippled, a thought that had pierced. The wanting and the needing; the anger, jealousy, and contempt; the love and the loneliness; the fleeting moments of ease and happiness—all of it swirling around while he strummed and picked at the strings, until a thread emerged and wove into another, and then another after that. But the frenetic pace of concerts, interviews, and parties, along with the weird way fame and money had of disrupting and realigning even the most long-standing relationships, made it all the more difficult for Paul to connect with the vital core of his muse.

  He had only three new songs to offer, but happily he still had a few tunes left over from his time in England, as well as the hit single “Homeward Bound.” He also had arrangements for two folk standards, including “Scarborough Fair,” so he didn’t have to panic about filling the required twelve tracks. This time around, it was much more exciting to think about the recording process. It would be their first chance to really settle into the studio, to explore the songs and produce them with the same care and feeling that Paul put into his writing and composing. It was his first opportunity to build on the skills he had learned during all those hours he’d spent recording publishing demos and those custom-made vanity records. With Bob Johnston sticking to his do-whatever-you-want-you’re-the-fuckin’-genius production technique, their primary studio collaborator became Roy Halee, the Columbia Records staff engineer who had worked the knobs on every song they had ever recorded.

  A linebacker-size fellow who had grown up in a musical family—his father provided speaking and singing voices for cartoon characters, including Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle—Halee had started his career as a production assistant for CBS-TV in the late 1950s. His background as a student of the classical trumpet helped get him started in the network’s audio department and launched half a dozen years of working on live broadcasts of The $64,000 Question and other CBS programs. Told that his job would be moving, along with most television production, to Los Angeles, Halee decided to stay in New York, and took a job at CBS’s Columbia Records, where he spent a torturous few months at a tape editing desk, slicing up whatever was handed to him. Pop, folk, classical—it didn’t matter. Exquisitely bored, Halee was working his way into record engineering when Tom Wilson scheduled the Simon and Garfunkel audition in late 1963. As the low man in the department, Halee got tapped to record the duo’s studio audition and found himself falling in love with what he heard. Wilson was so impressed with the sound of Halee’s recordings that he began hiring the engineer for Bob Dylan sessions. It made sense that Halee would engineer Simon and Garfunkel’s sessions for Wednesday Morning, 3 AM.

  The simplicity of the first album and the frenetic pace of the sessions for the second hadn’t allowed for much sonic experimentation. It was all they could do to make sure one song had stuck to the tape before they moved on to the next. But with four months to produce the third Simon and Garfunkel album, neither Paul nor Artie had any intention of rushing things, and as long as his bosses were willing to pay the bills, Halee was happy to
spend as much time as it would take to help them make a truly distinctive recording. The sessions went on for nearly three months, but only on a handful of days scattered across the summer, with most of the work completed over five busy days in June, a single recording date in July, and two days in August.

  They kicked things off on June 8 with “Patterns,” a song that had first appeared in a solo acoustic arrangement on The Paul Simon Songbook a year earlier. This time they underscored the panic in the lyrics—the realization that life is as preordained as a rat’s path through a maze—with jumping bass notes, fast-slapped bongos, keening organ notes, and acoustic guitar runs that veer from bluesy whimpers to sitar-like exotica. Artie limits his harmonies to shouts on key words (“Casting … And the light!… my death!… Like a rat!”) and when Paul gets to the climactic phrase (“until the rat dies”), his voice is filtered to invoke an oppressive 1984-esque authority. Each song has its own flavor. The whimsy of “Cloudy” comes through with bells, finger snaps, and harmonized double-guitar runs evoking a bouzouki player in a Greek restaurant. Artie doubles Paul’s lead vocal, but his voice is much more prominent on the rainbow oohs he adds to the second half of the verses, a counterpoint as airy and drifting as the clouds in the title. Paul’s urban feel-good tune “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” for all its hippie cheer, got its bounce from bassist Gene Wright and drummer Joe Morello, both members of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Much of the production is relatively understated. An acoustic guitar, an electric bass, percussion, and organ for “Homeward Bound” and a more driving variation on the same to draw out the rattling subway cars on “A Poem on an Underground Wall.” A basic rock combo serves for the album’s pair of glib social commentary songs, the newly written “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine” and the revised (and far more hostile) Dylan rip “A Simple Desultory Philippic.” The yearning “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her,” requires only a twelve-string guitar to anchor Artie’s fervent solo.

  On some tunes, they strain to match their own reputation as poets-slash-commentators. The closing track, “Silent Night/7 O’Clock News” attempts, but falls well short of, profundity by superimposing a newscaster’s dismaying recitations (Lenny Bruce’s death, civil rights protests, House Un-American Activities Committee investigations into Vietnam protesters, et cetera) over a sweetly harmonized “Silent Night.” The biggest miscue, however, is easily the melodramatic “The Dangling Conversation,” which mistakes literary pretense—she reads Emily Dickinson; he prefers Robert Frost: “And we note our place with book markers that measure what we lost”—with profundity while harps sigh and an overexcited string section wails in mourning.* But the album’s failures still can’t compete with its high points, particularly “Scarborough Fair.”

  While the song has been performed for centuries with the weatherbeaten rumble of a lonely farmer, Martin Carthy’s quicksilver guitar arrangement points “Scarborough” in a more mystical direction. The singer’s demands of his former lover—she must perform a series of miracles in order to regain his affections—along with the repeated refrain of “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,” seem to describe the rituals of some mysterious village sorcerer. To emphasize the song’s transcendent spirit, during their vocal sessions Paul and Artie placed candles around the studio and had Halee turn out the lights. Paul slid his capo seven frets up his guitar neck, giving the notes a crystalline ring that combines with a spinning harpsichord and bells to move the song’s setting from the fields to something like a cathedral, the notes echoing off the stone walls. Retitled “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” Simon and Garfunkel’s version adds an original countermelody that is actually an entirely different song, a revised version of Paul’s antiwar ballad “The Side of a Hill.” As rewritten by Artie, the song’s new melody plays in perfect counterpoint to the “Scarborough Fair” theme, while the words, revised into a series of dreamlike visions, move in and out of focus with all but a few phrases (“the child of the mountain … order their soldiers to kill … long ago forgotten”) more felt than heard.

  Released on October 10, 1966, the album they called Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme came in a cover that portrayed the artists in a flowered garden. Artie is sprawled in jeans and a royal blue sweater, while Paul rises just behind, the modern poet-troubadour clad in cambric and shadow, the both of them elite practitioners of a new pop art form that, as described in a back cover essay by Ralph J. Gleason, projects “the prevailing philosophical current of the New Youth which is that of creativity AGAINST the machine and, thus, FOR humanity.” Poets. Visionaries. Sages. “The songs in this album are songs for all time,” Gleason concludes, and the New Generation agreed. Rising quickly to Billboard’s top five, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme became Simon and Garfunkel’s first smash hit album, selling strongly enough to stay on Billboard’s charts until the end of the decade. It ratcheted their fame to a new level, and solidified their reputation as artists and celebrities, while also touching off another unthinkable geyser of cash

  “People say I’m a dollar millionaire. I don’t know. It could be,” Paul said to Disc’s Penny Valentine a few months later. “All I know is I’m a lonelier person than I ever was at the beginning. It’s a lonely life being part of this business. People watching you, looking at the things you do. It’s been bad lately.”

  CHAPTER 11

  SOME DREAM OF WHAT I MIGHT BE

  When Louis Simon set up his first classroom at La Salle Junior High School in the fall of 1961, he brought his double bass and set it on its stand in a corner near the chalkboard at the front of the room. Mostly the thing stood alone, a symbol of a life his students’ English teacher had lived before he found his way to the front of their class. They were an elite group, part of the first batch of fourteen-year-olds to join the Special Progress Enrichment Program, an experimental advanced study project housed within a Hell’s Kitchen junior high. Louis was a soft-spoken instructor whose gentle ways cushioned his strict standards. The program’s designers had taken care to recruit some of the district’s most sophisticated educators to work with the special students. Louis’s advanced training—he was close to earning his master’s degree in education from New York University and was working for a PhD in special education—made him an easy hire.

  He did not disappoint. He helped edit the school’s literary magazine and encouraged the students to read widely and think deeply about what each author had to say and how he or she was saying it. “He had this ease of getting across things that could have been complicated, but weren’t,” recalls Daphne Maxwell Reid, who would eventually become a successful stage and television actress in New York City. “And you didn’t see him fly off the handle. He was such a patient and serene person.” Louis didn’t talk much about his past or his family, but when the students started planning an all-school dance in the fall of 1962, he mentioned that his son Paul and Paul’s friend Artie were experienced pop musicians who were always eager to play school dances. The boys were famous, too: they were the Tom and Jerry who’d had a pretty big hit song just a few years ago. The dance planners liked the sound of that, so Paul and Artie, one a college graduate and the other in his final term, played the best of their Tom and Jerry songs, along with the hits of the day and a few duo renditions of Paul’s better Jerry Landis tunes. The kids had a great time, dancing like crazy, and Mr. Simon was there for the whole thing, standing by himself in the corner, gazing up at his son with a proud smile.

  Five years later, with his PhD under his belt and a new job as a lecturer at the City College of New York’s Graduate School of Education, Louis was much less supportive of Paul’s career in music. Interestingly, Louis’s disapproval grew all the more pointed as his son became more successful. Even after Paul had earned millions of dollars and been celebrated as a poet and generational spokesman, his father continued to shake his finger. All the boy saw were the lights, the cheering throngs, and the adulation from the teenyboppers. “Is this all you want?” he’d ask, “to be a
rock star?” Paul barely knew what to say to that. “I said, ‘Yeah! Why not? What am I supposed to be?’” Louis always had the same answer: a teacher. But Paul loved making music, and people loved the music he made. What could be wrong with that?

  Plenty, the grumbles in his own gut insisted. It had all come so easily to him, the playing and the singing and the songwriting. Paul felt wonderful when he did it, that he was in the right place at the right time doing precisely the right thing. But later the voice of his father would echo through the silence. If it was that easy for him, how could it be valuable? Important things should never come easily.

  Then again, Louis had never achieved what Paul had. Not even close. The Lee Simms Orchestra did well enough for a local dance band, but they were never going to make a real impact by playing other bands’ songs. Louis logged countless hours trying to write original material, but almost never came up with something that fit his own standards. He kept trying, but the one record he did manage to get released, the “Blue Mud/Simmer Down” single that Sid Prosen put out as part of the contract with Paul and Artie for “Hey, Schoolgirl,” had flopped. So maybe he was jealous, and maybe contempt was the only way to assert his superiority over his brilliant son. Paul’s songs might be at the top of the charts, his name celebrated by leading critics around the world, but it didn’t mean much, Louis said. Not compared to what really mattered in the world.

  “Teach! Teach!” Louis insisted. “That’s the only important thing!”