The nameless boy in “Save the Life of My Child,” cut loose from religious symbolism to become a symbol of generational conflict, performs the same leap with far less affirming results. Cut loose from gravity, he simply soars off into the night, his departure as mysterious as his initial motivations for self-destruction. There’s no meaning to his flight, other than as a surreal way to resolve a story of social alienation. While Ozzie lands safely in the embrace of his community, Paul’s miracle child has become just another celebrity, borne up on spotlights until he vanishes in the night, an airborne wraith with nowhere to land.
* * *
In early 1968, David Oppenheim, once an influential documentarian at CBS-TV but now at the helm of the Public Broadcast Laboratory, a live Sunday evening program from what was then called National Educational Television (later the Public Broadcasting System), worked with Paul and Artie to put on and film a college concert at the University of Moscow in the USSR. The hope was to create cultural understanding between the two rival nations by exposing the Soviet students to the United States’ most sophisticated, and popular, pop acts. “They are both college boys, very intelligent and sensitive,” Oppenheim wrote to Boris Sedov, a counselor* at the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. “The idea of going to the Soviet Union reflects a real interest in your country.” Oppenheim sent copies of Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, along with a set of lyrics translated into Russian, but for whatever reason the project fell apart.
Simon and Garfunkel drew increasingly large and adoring fans back at home. Critics described wild crowds, endless cries for encores, and “two of the finest singers of the age, prophets and balladeers at one and the same time.” Were they really prophets? How about generational spokesmen? “Nobody is talking for this generation. Nobody says, ‘If you want to know what I think talk to Simon and Garfunkel,’” Paul told a reporter from Time for a cover story titled “Rock! What a Gas!” “Everybody has got his own ideas. I don’t consider myself a poet. I’m a songwriter”—one, nevertheless, with a serious purpose. “Why is it I feel compelled to write about this pain I see? I could split and be free and do whatever I want. I said to myself, well, why don’t I? Because I’m here, that’s why.”
Performing to a sold-out Hollywood Bowl on August 23, 1968, Paul and Artie were greeted like heroes, and beloved all the more for their cheery, down-to-earth response to their fans’ adoration. Playing without a backing band, they led off with a spirited “Mrs. Robinson,” went back a few years for “Homeward Bound,” and then stopped everything when they noticed a metal lunchbox sitting by itself on the symphony-size stage. Artie grabbed the thing and brought it into the spotlight with them.
“It looks like somebody’s lunch,” he reported. Clicking open the latch, he looked within and reported his findings. “It is somebody’s lunch!”
Now peering into the box too, Paul turned back to his microphone.
“Did anybody lose a tuna fish sandwich?”
Without missing a beat, Artie continued the thought. “On white?”
At that, Paul started laughing. “Did you just … On white!”
Just a couple of old friends with the same sense of humor, a shared career, and shared fame.
They sang beautifully that night, their amplified voices rising into the soft summer air above the Hollywood Hills. Their repartee stayed light even when the songs got heavy, and as they moved toward the last few songs, Paul set up Artie’s most popular solo with another joke.
“There’s been a change of identity, or roles, in our group,” Paul said, sounding only slightly put out as he described how their media image had changed in recent months. “In our new capacity I am now the heavy of the group. I make nasty comments and, uh, kick kids, and uh, do things like that.”
He paused to let the laughs boil down.
“And Art has now become our sex symbol in this group.”
A swell of female cheers interrupted him, and then he got to the punch line.
“One newspaper referred to him as a frightened gazelle. At this juncture, the frightened gazelle will sing ‘For Emily, Whenever I Find Her.’”
CHAPTER 13
SO LONG ALREADY, ARTIE
Mike Nichols had a great idea. Sketching out his follow-up to The Graduate, a film adaptation of Joseph Heller’s satirical war novel Catch-22, he thought again about Simon and Garfunkel, and how perfectly their sensibility fit into his new film’s vision. He began to think of them as part of Catch-22’s expansive cast, and when he got in touch with Paul and Artie both of them were delighted. Now they could stretch themselves in a completely different direction, and who knew where it could lead? Of course they’d do it; just say when and where.
A few months later, Nichols called Paul with less happy news. His working script had expanded beyond all reason. He’d had to cut it, and unfortunately Paul’s character had fallen out of the movie. So that was the end of Artie’s role, too, right? Recalling the incident for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, Paul said he set Nichols straight immediately. He and Artie didn’t have to do everything together, and Paul knew how eager Artie was to dip his toe into acting. The shooting schedule required Artie to be in Mexico for only a couple of months, so of course Artie should be in the movie.
Paul had plenty of other things to keep him busy during Artie’s absence. The best one was his new girlfriend, Peggy Harper, whom he’d met in late 1965 when he and Artie first met with Mort Lewis in his apartment. Mort, to whom Peggy was married at the time, was thirteen years her senior; they met when she was the twenty-year-old girlfriend of Brothers Four member John Payne, whom she’d met when the group gave a concert on Atlantic City’s Steel Pier. The daughter of a troubled, very religious family in the rural village of Bybee, Tennessee, Peggy had come north as a teenager, eager to start a life as far from her parents as possible. Young, tall, and beautiful, she was drawn to the suave older man, and she married Lewis in 1961.
For a time, it was perfect. Lewis was sweet and funny, and though Peggy had a lot to learn about the city and the rest of the world, she was smart and independent enough to pursue her own career, first as a model, then as an editor in a film production house, and then in a graphic arts studio. But the more she became a part of her husband’s packed social life, the less she enjoyed it. He liked going out and having a big time; she really didn’t. She often balked when he wanted to invite friends home for dinner or cocktails. “I liked people, and she didn’t,” Lewis says. Their marriage was drifting by the time Paul came into their lives, and though Lewis knew his client was smitten with his wife, he says he had no reason to think Paul was making a play for her. But when Lewis and Harper divorced in 1967, Simon and Harper quickly came together. It was a little awkward from time to time. Some friends and colleagues averted their eyes or whispered urgently, asking what the hell was going on between Paul and Mort’s wife. Drummer Hal Blaine, who had recorded with Simon and Garfunkel for several years before joining their touring band in 1969, went straight to Lewis, who gave a breezy shrug. “We’re divorced,” he explained.
Just as Kathy had helped stabilize his moods five years earlier, Peggy gave Paul a sense of security. Two and a half years older and instilled with the discipline common to adults raised in chaotic families, she made certain, as their relationship grew, that Paul didn’t let his fame, wealth, or power distance him from the real world. When he drifted too far into the weird vapors of the bohemian artist, Peggy would strongly suggest he take out the garbage, walk the dog, or do anything that would get his ass off the sofa, for crying out loud. That was good; that was the same advice he’d grown up hearing from his father. Success was fine, but it wasn’t the point. And if you weren’t doing something that would be useful to others, what were you doing? And why?
* * *
Finally, Paul’s muse thawed. After so many months of struggling to wrench out new songs like a dentist going after a molar, he started feeling the melodies drift to him again. Words, phrases,
and stories fell into his head, then tumbled onto whatever scrap of paper he had to write on. On a flight to a concert in Portland, he borrowed a pen and scribbled on the pages of the in-flight magazine. He started with a few phrases. “Little and poor.” “Rock with easy motion and sing a humble song.” “My quests are such men daughters and sons I’d like to know.” “Here for workman’s wages, down the long aisle of the ages.” He was reading the Bible then; his phrases felt earthier, from some other time. Settled into the Benson Hotel in downtown Portland, he added more lines and started stringing them into verses. “I am but a poor song / Crying”—the rest is crossed out—“In the company of strangers / In the quiet of the evening / I will sing to you.” A page later, he had a better idea: “I am just a poor boy though my story is untold / How I squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles.”
“The Boxer” fell together quickly, so they decided to record it before Artie took off for Mexico, thinking it might make a good single for the spring. The music was fairly simple, a basic folk progression played on acoustic guitars supporting close harmonies. But the staunch voice of the “poor boy” at its center, the battered young man who won’t stop fighting for himself, seemed to require something more than a light acoustic treatment, a sound that would fit the biblical language that informed Paul’s writing. A thunderous noise, even: skies opening, a tempest unleashed upon the streets, thunder and sheets of black rain, and their voices above it all, ringing through the clamor.
When Artie left for his two months of Catch-22 filming at the end of 1968, they had already settled on how the next year would unfold. Paul would write songs and record some basic tracks with Halee until Artie got back in late winter, at which point they would work together as usual to produce the next Simon and Garfunkel album while also playing concerts around the country. Even though he’d been passed over, Paul wasn’t unhappy about Artie taking his shot at the movies. For the first time, Artie had a high-profile gig he could do on his own. That could only be good for his friend: maybe Artie could burn off some creative steam doing something that had nothing to do with the guy he had depended on for so long.
Then the two months passed and Artie didn’t come home—maybe for a short break or two, but the filming was taking much longer than Nichols had expected, so Artie had to go back to the remote Mexican village where they had been filming. And did he mention what a ball he’d been having down there? He was meeting all kinds of cool people, actors and writers and others; and when they weren’t working, they hung out at the pool or explored the hills, smoked dope, had a great time. And his acting was going great! Nichols kept telling him he could be a leading man if he really wanted to pursue it. Amazing, right?
Well, sure. How could Paul begrudge his partner’s success as an actor? Pretty easily, as it turned out. After years of dictating the wheres, whens, and whys of their relationship, Paul now had to compete for Artie’s attention. And now that he had new songs, they needed to record—and they did have an album to get out, after all—he didn’t want to hear Artie saying he wasn’t available. And in such a deliberately wounding way! It was as if Artie had been planning it all along, taking all his advantages over Paul (his looks, his height, his charm) and running off in a direction Paul had been barred from going. Worse, Artie’s absence meant that Paul couldn’t do his work. They were Simon and Garfunkel. Paul couldn’t make an entire album without Artie’s voice and ideas. He was the only guy, with the exception of Roy Halee, who could listen to one of Paul’s songs and know what Paul was hearing in his head, and how to help make it real. And now Artie had something better to do? Well, fuck him.
The resentment would flare up from time to time, particularly when Paul found himself alone in the studio trying to anticipate what Artie might think of this or that approach, or when he came up with a harmony arrangement that clashed with the guitar part he’d just recorded. Other times, he just missed his friend, his partner, the only other person on earth who knew how it felt to be a member of Simon and Garfunkel. He wrote letters telling Artie everything he and Roy had been up to, and how eager they were to have him back. Feeling lonely one day, Paul started writing “The Only Living Boy in New York,” a loving ballad addressing Artie as Tom, his name from way back in their Tom and Jerry days, when they sang in the basement and took their dates for sodas at Addy Vallens’s candy store. He describes his loneliness, admits to the sorrow of being the one left behind. But the point of the song is reassurance, a farewell hug and a benediction. Then the anger would well up again, and there were no words, let alone melodies, to express that.
It had always been part of their friendship, even when they were thirteen, comparing grades and pop song expertise while walking home from school, each of them angling for some measure of dominance, some point where they could prove, for the moment at least, which one was truly in charge. They’d spent the next four years sharing everything, staring so deeply into each other’s mouths that Paul had memorized the topography of Artie’s teeth, gums, and soft palate. Yet the fractures caused by Paul’s backroom deal with Sid Prosen hadn’t really healed, even when they went back to singing together. Strangely, the underlying tension had become part of their public mystique. The first promotional biography Columbia Records issued for them in January 1966 made the teenage breakup* a central part of their narrative, quoting them in unison calling it a “dig-yourself competition” that ended when they “got over it and got back together.” Whatever the Columbia publicity office’s reason for including the story in publicity, it only added tension to their comfortable harmonic identity: a hint of coming danger, a reminder that beauty never lasts, that the sound could always fade back to silence.
You didn’t have to look too far beneath the partners’ bonhomie to glimpse the agitation between them. Paul’s British friends could feel it crackling between them when Artie was with Paul in London. If Artie was in a mood, he turned haughty and insulting. Paul told some friends that he couldn’t wait to regain the independence he had as a solo act. It shouldn’t have been a shock. The most successful partnerships are often built between two people whose respective strengths and flaws act as counterbalances. So just as Paul’s songs were enhanced by Artie’s voice, Paul’s determination was offset by his partner’s more ethereal sensibility, sometimes to the point where Paul couldn’t stand it. During one tightly booked tour, Artie turned down a ride on the airplane Mort Lewis had chartered to take them from New York to Boston because he felt like spending the day hitchhiking. It took hours for someone to pick him up in New York City, and he arrived at Symphony Hall with only minutes to spare. Another time, Artie overslept and missed the flight he and Paul were supposed to take to a sold-out show at the Royal Albert Hall in London. By the time he finally roused himself, the only way he could get there in time was to spend ten thousand dollars to book a private plane for the journey. “We had to postpone the concert, return all the money, compensate the promoter,” Lewis says. “Paul almost smashed his guitar against the concrete wall at the airport, he was so mad.”
Artie the movie star. Mike Nichols telling everyone what a great, natural actor he was. So much presence. So much feeling in his dialogue. And so, so handsome. Movie star looks, they kept saying. And Paul? The shortness, the chubby face that made him look chunky even when he was muscle bound and, increasingly, trim—and just when he thought it couldn’t get worse, he started losing his hair. His friends in England could already see it when he was twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Paul became skilled with his comb, developing new and increasingly convoluted patterns to cover the pink top of his otherwise bushy head. No young guy ever wants to lose his hair, but it was worse than ever in the late 1960s, when the length of a man’s hair projected everything you needed to know about where he stood on the counterculture–civil rights–Vietnam War–Richard M. Nixon–Generation Gap spectrum.
Teaming up with Artie had relieved some of Paul’s anxieties about his looks and his voice; it never hurt to have a sweet-singing heartth
rob in your group—right until it hurt you more than you even knew how to express.
* * *
By the time Artie got back from Mexico in the spring of 1969, Paul had finished backing tracks for a handful of new songs. Before he started work on their fifth album, Paul’s first impulse had been to record it in Memphis, with Booker T. and the M.G.’s as their backing band. He even went down to Memphis to check out the Stax label’s studio and talk things over with Booker T. In the end, though, they couldn’t make it work, so Paul, Artie, and Roy returned to their usual pattern of dividing the session between Manhattan and Los Angeles, where the musicians they had worked with most often (bandleader/drummer Hal Blaine, pianist Larry Knechtel, guitarist Fred Carter Jr., and bassist Joe Osborn) lived. Setting up for a productive summer in LA, Paul and Artie rented a house in the Hollywood Hills just a few miles from the recording studio. The house on Blue Jay Way, the same place George Harrison made famous with his song “Blue Jay Way,” got to feel like a Southern California version of the ambassador’s house during the Stockbridge summer, the two of them at the center of a loop of girlfriends, friends, musicians, and occasional celebrity guests. Paul’s close friend, and the duo’s lawyer, Mike Tannen had relocated to Los Angeles to open a new office for his law firm, so he and Mary were around a lot. Tommy Smothers, of the counterculture-influenced comedy team the Smothers Brothers, came around to smoke pot and flirt with Peggy and Mary, while the actor Charles Grodin, who had befriended Artie on the Catch-22 set, also became a regular.
There was still plenty of music to record. Near the start of their LA visit, Artie noticed a Frank Lloyd Wright–designed house on a street nearby, and recalling his collegiate fascination for the architect, he suggested Paul write a song about him. Surprisingly, Paul did exactly that, though he took the tune in an unexpected direction. When inspiration struck in the midst of a late-night party, they used their home reel-to-reel to record a rhythm track built from thigh-slapping, dampened-string guitar strums, and piano bench slamming, and that became the basis for another new song. Paul introduced Artie to the Paris-based Peruvian folk group Los Incas’s recording of the South American traditional “El Condor Pasa.” Paul had fallen in love with the song when he heard the group perform it during his brief visit to Paris during the summer of 1963, and assigned Mort Lewis the task of securing the rights to use the original recording as a backdrop for new lyrics he had written for it. He also had another song he wanted Artie to sing. It was kind of his “Yesterday,” Paul said. And he wasn’t joking.
Homeward Bound Page 21
