* * *
As work on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme continued through the summer of 1966, Paul called Bruce Woodley in London. As Woodley recalled, a few months had passed since they spent that long winter night writing songs in Barry Kornfeld’s bedroom, and now Paul was thinking about “Cloudy,” the bittersweet tune they had set around a hitchhiker’s meanderings in northern California. He’d played it for Artie, and now they were both thinking it’d be a great addition to their new album. And wasn’t that great news for Woodley? Paul knew it was. Simon and Garfunkel had become one of the hottest acts in pop music. Having a copyright on their new album, even half a copyright, would create a burbling income stream even if the song never made it as a single. There was just one hitch. If “Cloudy” was going to be on a Simon and Garfunkel album, Paul needed it to be credited to Paul Simon alone. Woodley’s name would stay on the copyright, and he’d get all the royalties due to a cowriter, just not the spotlight. So would that be cool? Well, no, of course it wouldn’t be cool, Woodley recalled. In fact, it was an insult. But once he calculated the value of the copyright, which could have been in the tens of thousands of dollars, he sighed, and agreed.
At least Woodley got something out of the deal. Martin Carthy, whose arrangement for “Scarborough Fair” was so crucial to Simon and Garfunkel’s version of the song, received nothing for his contribution. Worse, the composer’s credit on Parsley, Sage didn’t even acknowledge that “Scarborough” was a standard folk song. Instead, it credited Paul and Artie as coauthors, as if the centuries-old tune had emerged entirely from their imaginations. And while Artie deserved credit for composing the “Canticle” melody, the British guitarist couldn’t get beyond the sight of Paul’s name where “Traditional” should have been, and where the credit for the arrangement should have been at least partly his. Carthy couldn’t resist grumbling about it, but even if he hadn’t, all the other British folkies knew what he had contributed to the song. Like Paul, many had gone directly to Carthy to learn how to play it themselves. Word that Paul had taken the credit, and all the money, for himself cemented the sour impression many of them had been left with since the American appeared in their midst.
What none of them knew, Carthy included, was that Paul was sending royalties to the guitarist. At least, he thought he was. For, as it turned out, the guitarist’s publishing company, Sparta Florida, had already filed a copyright for Carthy’s arrangement of “Scarborough Fair.” Lawyers representing the company contacted Columbia Records soon after the release of Parsley, Sage to demand payment. Charing Cross Music, the company Paul set up after he folded Eclectic Music, had been sending royalty checks ever since. Only, none of the money ever got to Carthy. Like so many young artists, he had been less than canny about negotiating, or even taking a close look at, the contracts he’d signed over the years, including the one that relinquished all his financial claims to “Scarborough Fair.” Oh, it’s just a court thing, he recalls being told. “It’s not important.” Carthy had been steeped in folk culture for most of his life, and believed strongly that the public domain was less an archive of precious artifacts than an open warehouse for do-it-yourselfers. Step inside and you could hear the voice of the ages singing into your ear. Listen, sing along, or take it apart and put it back together to fit the world around you and leave it for the folks still waiting to be born.
* * *
As Paul would soon learn, there’s a difference between engaging in folk culture and making yourself a part of it. Once you work your way into the spotlight, you become a part of the public domain, too—not just your work or your ideas, but your life: where you grew up, what your house was like, what your parents did for a living, whom you might be screwing, what you’re smoking, and why you keep answering those questions with one breath and then using the next to insist that you’re a very private person who can’t bear talking about your private life—once you become part of the public domain, you no longer have control. Whatever you’ve carved off for the marketplace is set loose in other people’s imaginations to represent this and symbolize that. And by the time you realize what’s happening, it’s too late to do anything about it except kick yourself and wonder what you were thinking when you said so much to that reporter and why you already know you’ll blurt out just as much to the next one who comes knocking.
Now Paul faced the many demands and pressures running through his days: to turn his deepest feelings into hit songs, to both woo and face down the press, to serve his fans’ appetites, to be the best version of himself every time, all the time. Eventually it all ran into a blur. “They’re not yelling at me,” he told the New Musical Express. “They’re screaming for what they think I am—some dream of what I might be.” Paul would hear himself singing on the radio and have no idea what he was singing about, even though he had not only composed the song but written it about his own life and the people who mattered most to him. Asked about “Homeward Bound” in 1967, he raised his palms to the ceiling. “I don’t know how I wrote that,” he said. “It’s not even me.” Even the praise began to get under his skin. He scorned the critics who called him a poet. “The people who call you a poet are people who never read poetry. Like poetry was something defined by Bob Dylan,” he said, tossing his rival into the fire for good measure. Had none of these people read Wallace Stevens? Did they have the slightest idea what real literature was?
He’d see pictures of himself with Artie, examine their public smiles and sulks, see how they draped their scarves around their necks; or, worse, he’d catch up with what they had been saying about themselves to reporters. It was like seeing a movie about himself written by someone he’d never met and starring an actor who had never turned an ear to his music. “Simon and Garfunkel are fictitious characters,” Paul insisted. “How can anyone have a joint identity with anyone else? And there’s a big difference between me and the Simon of Simon and Garfunkel. He’s a songwriter and performer and so am I, but otherwise he’s a fictitious character.” And the only thing that aggravated him more than praise was his suspicion that anyone who glanced at a picture of the duo would automatically assume that the guy with the sparkling blue eyes and halo of blond curls had to be the one who’d written all those delicately constructed songs. He was the one with the angelic voice, wasn’t he? “He should have been the one who wrote the songs,” Paul said in the mid-1980s, still steaming twenty years later “That body should have contained the talent.”
Then someone would call Artie a sex symbol, and Paul would go wild. For fuck’s sake! He’d known Artie since they were eleven years old: Artie with braces, Artie with zits, Artie with a yarmulke on his head surrounded by all the bearded old Jews hoisting the Torah around the synagogue in Queens. Talk about absurdist fiction. “Can you imagine girls all over the country writing love letters to someone called Garfunkel? Or chicks spending the cold winter nights up in New England towns stitching ‘Garfunkel’ on a pillow?” Paul would break up, his cackle a ratcheting crow’s caw. “Man, the whole idea of people accepting Garfunkel as a sex symbol. Can’t you picture it? Someone in Hollywood saying, ‘Get me a new sex symbol like Garfunkel!’” Paul snorted just as derisively to think there could actually be a folk-poet act called Simon and Garfunkel. “It’s like the greatest put-on. Some music publisher or agent gets on the phone and says, ‘Bring me something for Simon and Garfunkel!’ Man, it’s funny.”
For all Parsley, Sage’s success, the singles from the album, and the ones that followed, failed to make a real connection with the New Generation of record buyers. “The Dangling Conversation” stalled at No. 25, “A Hazy Shade of Winter” did a bit better at No. 13, and “At the Zoo” got as high as No. 16, but “Fakin’ It” could manage only No. 23. After more than a year without a visit to the Top 10, you might begin to wonder if your public folk tale was coming to an end. And if that happened, if the world stopped paying attention to Paul Simon and Simon and Garfunkel, where did that leave you?
Paul didn’t want to quit anyt
hing. All that talk about quitting music to be a novelist was just another layer to add to the Paul Simon mystique. The cooler version of himself, the one who really was a step ahead and several sizes larger than the dumpy critter he recognized in the bathroom mirror every morning. If you were going to be any Paul Simon, he was really the one to be.
Except that guy was a songwriter, and now Paul was lost in the grim latitudes of writer’s block, just when he needed to write more and better. Yet it wouldn’t come. All that music in his heart, all the thoughts rattling across his brainpan, all of it stacking up and waiting for release—and still nothing. It was a classic case of creative block, a toxic confusion of desire, pleasure, and shame. As if artistic expression were reprehensible. As if the catharsis it spurred were a mortal sin. As if the artist’s need to reveal himself in his art, and the pleasure he took in his creation, were an embarrassment. And wasn’t that what Louis Simon couldn’t resist pointing out? “Okay, you made all this money, you gave it to everyone in the family and everyone loves you,” he’d tell his son. “But that’s not the purpose.” Paul traced his father’s words in the air and felt their bite. “My father,” he said many years later, “is the person who most influenced my thinking and my life.”
* * *
Not long after Paul wrote “Sparrow,” his avian variation on Thomas Hobbes’s bleak vision of life, he started introducing the tune with a story about, as he put it, one of “my many neuroses.” That always got a laugh, and the rest of the tale went on in that vein. He’d caught himself checking out his reflection in a mirror and decided that digging yourself, as he put it, was a terrible vice, and he vowed never to do it again. “I’m like shaving with my eyes closed, you know,” he said. The kick went on for months until he was walking past a drugstore at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan and caught a glimpse of his face in a blacked-out window. It had been a year since he’d seen himself, so he stopped to take a look. “I was digging myself for about forty-five seconds, an intense dig.” And he would have kept right on digging if it hadn’t been for the sparrow perched on a wire above his head, which, the moment before taking his leave, uncorked a bomb of his own devising that landed atop the crown of the self-digging fop below. Splat. “All I can think of is, ‘There goes a happy bird,’” Paul said, waiting for the chorus of laughs and applause to boil down to toss out the capper: “Don’t dig yourself. Relative to nothing, this is a song called ‘Sparrow.’”
It was all related, his alienation from himself and his grim sense of the world, people, and the forces that shove them together and yank them apart. On tour, Simon and Garfunkel could fill concert halls across the United States, and were even more beloved on the stages in England and Europe. While so much of the pop music scene was dominated by the Doors, the Who, and all the other decibel-banging bands pushing the line between cacophony and chaos, Simon and Garfunkel presented each note with care, even if the emotional landscape in Paul’s songs was nothing if not chaotic. But you had to listen closely to absorb the nuances, where all the tumult of the age could ring just as clearly in a hushed portrayal of a broken love affair. Not everyone got it, and some critics dismissed the duo out of hand, much like the widely admired jazz and pop critic Nat Hentoff, who called the neatly tucked S&G “a cul de sac” in popular culture. “Rock ’n’ roll for people who don’t like rock ’n’ roll,” added Robert Christgau. Future Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, then a music columnist for the University of California–Berkeley’s student newspaper, raised his generationally savvy snout, too. Simon, he wrote, “is neither a poet nor even an accurate observer of the current youth scene.”
Most critics, along with the other leading musicians of the midsixties, disagreed, including Mamas and Papas leader John Phillips and producer/record label owner Lou Adler, who in early 1967 came to Paul to help them put together the first festival for rock ’n’ roll, and for the New Generation, which they hoped to mount that June on an outdoor stage at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in northern California.
* * *
When Phillips and Adler started planning the Monterey Pop Festival they made one of their first calls to Paul, who quickly agreed to put up fifty thousand dollars seed money. Though they had conceived it originally as a business venture the two founders soon opted to make their event a nonprofit benefit for musical education programs around the country. Paul soon agreed to sign on to their board of directors, joining an all-star line-up that included Mick Jagger and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles’ Paul McCartney, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and Smokey Robinson, among others. Simon and Garfunkel agreed to headline the first of what was to be a three-day festival, anointing themselves in the first blossoms of the psychedelic moment.
Organizing the festival was a long and occasionally bumpy road. Some musicians, including Chuck Berry, refused to donate their services, as all the artists were asked to do.* Dylan manager Albert Grossman wouldn’t allow his other hot act, Mike Bloomfield’s blues freak-out group the Electric Flag, to play unless the festival also booked his completely unknown group the Paupers. Similar quid pro quo deals popped up among other headliners.† As a board member, Paul’s most important mission turned out to be brokering peace between the festival’s contingent of industry-savvy Los Angeles artists and the underground freaks from San Francisco. With Phillips, Adler, and their top aide, Derek Taylor (most famous for his long association with the Beatles), deep into the LA fabric, they sent the New York–based Paul as an emissary to the epicenter of San Francisco’s music scene, the Grateful Dead House at 710 Ashbury Street. The trip was a success: Paul helped resolve the tension, and by the end of the evening the members of the Dead had invited Paul to partake in an LSD ritual to make the rest of the evening really special. Paul begged off, but scooped up a handful of the tabs to take back to New York, where he could freak out by himself in the comfort of his high-rise apartment.
The festival didn’t disappoint for sweetness, surprise, or sheer oddity. While hippies and some celebrities drifted through a lysergic fog, the hotel lobbies and backstage passages choked with lawyers, managers, and A&R men, many of them negotiating rich deals for unknowns, including Janis Joplin (Columbia Records), the Grateful Dead (Warner Brothers), and the Steve Miller Blues Band (Capitol). Columbia president Goddard Lieberson (now elevated to CBS Inc. group leader) came along, too, and when Paul and Artie invited him to get high with them in their hotel room, he accepted enthusiastically, an aficionado of the evil wog hemp since he’d started hanging out with New York blues and jazz artists in the 1920s. Paul, meanwhile, sought out the reality-bending guitarist Jimi Hendrix, with whom he played a little acoustic blues before the festival-opening Friday night show began.
The first night’s performances began curiously with the sleek LA vocal group the Association (“Here Comes Windy,” etc.), who led off with a robotic narration describing each group member, all standing and moving with mechanized herky-jerking, as if they were widgets in a musical machine, which either commented directly on their industry-friendly style or was just a weird bit of shtick someone thought would be cool. Albert Grossman’s Paupers played a surprisingly raucous bit of rock ’n’ roll, setting the stage for the Neil Young–less Buffalo Springfield, whose remaining members elected to fill in their sound with the guitar and harmony singing by the Byrds’ David Crosby, marking the first time he would perform with the group’s co-lead guitarist Stephen Stills. The Grateful Dead played a short version of their acid blues freak-out, followed by the epochal American debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, blazing Stratocaster and all. Singer-songwriter Laura Nyro came next, belting a surprisingly soulful set of rhythm and blues–inflected songs. The singer Lou Rawls, still neck deep in Chicago blues, stirred things up again, followed by the patience-testing pop singer Johnny Rivers. Then, finally, came the night’s headliners, the collegiate folk duo from New York City.
John Phillips, tall, hip, and in control, a fur cap perched on top of his head, made
the introduction at 1 a.m. on Saturday morning: “We’d like to introduce to you at this time, two very, very good friends of mine and two people who in the music business are respected by everyone, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.” They came out in turtleneck shirts, Artie’s a golden yellow, Paul’s cream with thin horizontal red stripes. Standing close enough for their elbows to touch, they opened with “Homeward Bound,” then sang “At the Zoo,” a particularly high-spirited “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” made extra giggly by the light director’s decision to bathe the stage in red lights, a bit like an old-fashioned house of ill repute, a comparison Paul couldn’t resist making at the start of the song. “Ah, you dig the red lights … associated in my mind with, uh, for another good time.” The crowd laughed, picking up immediately on the naughty reference. “Very Pavlovian.” Their “Sound of Silence” sounded a gentler warning in the soft California night, and “Benedictus,” introduced by Paul as “a blessing for you,” did seem to elevate the day’s activities into the spiritual ether, as if they all were blessed by their own company, as if all the forbidden smoke and sex and lightning bolts to the brain were a passage to a higher consciousness.
When the ovation died down, Paul played the opening riff for “I Am a Rock,” thought better of it and switched to the as-yet-unheard “Punky’s Dilemma,” capping the evening with its hip stoner’s menagerie of self-aware cornflakes and stumblebum hippies. Another ovation and a hail of excellent vibes followed them offstage, and then to the limo park, where Paul recognized the British music journalist Keith Altham, a friend from his UK days, preparing to jump into a car with Jimi Hendrix’s entourage. “Keith!” Paul shouted. “Make sure to tell ’em what’s going on here when you get to England!”
* * *
The Graduate began as a lightly salacious satirical novel by Charles Webb, a recent graduate of Williams College. Its tale of an affair between a listless college graduate and a bored friend of his parents rattled some Updike-ish chimes upon its publication in 1963. As reenvisioned by Mike Nichols, whose ascendance as a stage and screen director followed a decade-long career as half of the gently subversive comedy team he’d formed with Elaine May during the 1950s, the story became an arch critique of both the older generation and upper-class American values: the moralizing, the hypocrisy, the primacy of appearances in the absence of actual thought or feeling. After a three-hit streak as a director on the Broadway stage and then a smash Hollywood debut as the director of the acclaimed and hugely popular film adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Nichols came to The Graduate with the ambition and industrial juice to do whatever he pleased.
Homeward Bound Page 18
