Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  When they previewed the finished album Bridge Over Troubled Water to Columbia Records president Clive Davis and a roomful of family and friends, the reception was overwhelming. Paul, Artie, and Halee had figured that the up-tempo, slightly bawdy singalong “Cecilia”—the song set to the home-recorded piano bench, slack guitar strum, handclap, and dropped drumsticks backing track—would be the perfect lead-off single,* but after one listen to the title track, Davis insisted that no amount of industrial strictures against releasing long, slow piano ballads as pop singles could apply to such a strikingly beautiful song. Davis was correct, and when the album and single were released on January 26, 1970, the impact was extraordinary. Both were instant smashes, with the song topping the Hot 100 for six straight weeks between February and April, while the album spent an astounding forty-one weeks at the top during its three-hundred-week run on the Billboard charts, on its way to selling twenty-five million copies. All that talk of Simon and Garfunkel starting to rival the Beatles turned out to be true. Bridge Over Troubled Water outsold the Beatles’ Let It Be by 400 percent that year, and would also sweep the year’s Grammy Awards, winning Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Contemporary Song of the Year, while the now-estranged John, Paul, George, and Ringo made do with the Best Original Score trophy for the soundtrack of the Let It Be movie.

  More than revealing the duo’s new adult perspective, the album serves as the first pop cultural landmark of the 1970s, the decade when the New Generation, as Ralph J. Gleason had termed it, would assume the independence it had demanded for so long. The songs on Bridge Over Troubled Water tell the story in their own way: the title track’s declaration of spiritual commitment, echoed lightly in “Song for the Asking,” in the upbeat celebrations of the daily grind in “Keep the Customer Satisfied”* and “Baby Driver”; adult challenges and quandaries fading into memories of youthful abandon; the ageless wisdom in “El Condor Pasa”; the down-and-out fighter in “The Boxer”; the featherweight flirtiness of “Why Don’t You Write Me”; the carefree sexuality of “Cecilia”; and the close harmony pleasures of “Bye Bye Love”—all of which take on deeper resonance in the company of the elegiac diptych of “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” and “The Only Living Boy in New York,” the pillars that form the album’s emotional foundation, as well as the key to its mammoth impact not only on listeners who shared their generational and cultural experience, but also on those who lived in completely different circumstances and eras.

  From the opening verse of “Bridge” to the final, unadorned note of “Song for the Asking,” Bridge Over Troubled Water chronicles Paul and Artie’s friendship and musical partnership from the first joyful union of their voices to the bittersweet, perhaps inevitable divorce they were beginning to negotiate in the album’s songs. The story is neither linear nor directly stated. Only “Frank Lloyd Wright” and “Only Living Boy” address the separation head-on, but the other songs describe the singers’ friendship in other ways. By starting with its title track, the album begins at an emotional climax, the masterpiece Paul knew was the best song he’d ever written. And for all the adoration Paul’s lyrics held for his future wife, Peggy, the song is defined even more by his handing it over to the one person he could trust to express his most overpowering feelings with the transcendent force the song required.

  “El Condor Pasa” and “Cecilia” foretell Paul’s future in shades of cultural exotica and street corner simplicity, while the attempted reggae bounce on “Why Don’t You Write Me” falls flat, succeeding mostly as a lesson in why it’s best to record foreign grooves when they’re being played by the hands that originally defined their sound. The far more successful replication in the song, a feature it shares with the leaping and bounding of “Keep the Customer Satisfied” and “Baby Driver,” comes through in the vocal duets, all of which are sung entirely by Paul. This was not because the songs didn’t have harmony parts written into their structure—nearly every word of the lead in “Why Don’t You Write Me” is written to feature S&G’s close harmony—but these were the tracks Paul had recorded when Artie was still in Mexico. Too aggrieved by his absence to wait for his movie star partner’s return, Paul had performed all the parts himself, so expertly attuned to the timbre of Artie’s voice that most listeners didn’t realize they were hearing only half of the duo.

  The Paul and Artie blend shines brightly on “The Boxer,” Paul’s self-portrait as reflected through the cracked mirror of a cheap hotel room. Paul is an unemployed laborer, battered, lonely, and cold, yet determined to keep moving. In the final verse, he sees himself in a different form, as an unsuccessful fighter whose scars and humiliations bend but never break his will. “I am leaving, I am leaving,” he cries. “But the fighter still remains.” It’s Paul’s story told in the most personal terms, but he and Artie sing it together, the separate voices locked in the same unison they had been practicing since they were thirteen. They worked with Halee to create the ringing, booming backdrop, each drum strike the slam of a fist, each trombone blast a train shaking the sidewalk, a truck unleashing its air horn. It is a portrait of a desperate, punishing life, but Artie found its grandeur with an upward-bounding countermelody that, through the combined sound of horn and guitar, projected the dirt-stained fighter into silvered light.

  The subtext moved in the opposite direction when Artie suggested Paul write a song about his favorite architect. Paul took the idea, but only sort of. Rather than focusing his pen on Frank Lloyd Wright, the leader of the Prairie School of architecture, he turned the designer into a symbol for Artie, and the song a combination salute and farewell. Set to a Brazilian samba with a few modernist touches, the tune moves breezily beneath the singer’s gossamer delivery of his bittersweet tale. “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” speaks explicitly about moments in the duo’s shared lives: harmonizing all night, laughing themselves silly. There’s no harmonizing on this song: Artie sings the verses, and Paul comes in for a two-line bridge, celebrating his friend’s stubbornness, before handing the mic back so Artie can sing Paul’s sweetest acknowledgment to him: “When I run dry / I stop a while and think of you.”

  The real depth of Paul’s feelings for Artie, the years of friendship and interdependence, come through most powerfully in “The Only Living Boy in New York,” which rivals “Bridge” and “Kathy’s Song” for being the most heartfelt love song in the Simon and Garfunkel catalogue. Singing over a simple one-four chord progression set to an acoustic twelve-string guitar, a church organ, and jumping bass line, Paul’s voice is conversational; in the first verse, it’s as if he’s standing in front of his friend, straightening his tie and handing him his suitcase as the taxi to the airport honks its horn. The second verse sounds more like a letter from home: he’s lonely; you can hear the sadness in Paul’s voice. At first it’s amiable resignation, then sweet impatience. He’s happy to wait; he knows it’s his turn to be patient. But the more he reflects on their shared life, that disorienting blur of lights and noise and the empty dead of night—what does any of it matter, or mean? The final verse keeps the direct delivery—only now he’s speaking much more urgently. Their shared youth is finished. Now they have to become their own men. Paul’s parting line, delivered over a vast echoing chorus of his and Artie’s multitrack ahhhhhs, erupts in a torrent so emotional there’s a small but audible sob near the end.

  “Hey, let your honesty shine, shine, shine / Like it shines on me.”

  The conjoined songs that end the album, a bouncy live rendition of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” and the brief guitar ballad “Song for the Asking,” conclude the story in starker terms. The cheers for the song of Paul and Artie’s youth cross-fade into guitar and a string quartet as Paul bids farewell with something between an offering and an apology. The latter is unexplained; the former has been coming through your speakers for thirty-six minutes. And maybe it’s not enough. “Thinking it over I’d be more than glad / To change my ways,” he sings. As if it could be done that eas
ily.

  CHAPTER 14

  I’D RATHER BE

  When Bridge Over Troubled Water was finally finished and they were preparing to launch their fall tour, Artie told Paul a secret he’d been keeping for a few months. When he was in Rome filming the last of his Catch-22 scenes, Mike Nichols had asked if he’d be interested in playing a lead role in his next film, a drama about two sexually driven men called Carnal Knowledge. His costars would be Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, and Ann-Margret, all popular young actors, and the shooting would require his attention for most of 1971. Garfunkel said yes on the spot, but had decided to keep the news from his partner until the record was finished, so it wouldn’t dampen the mood.

  Artie’s keeping the news a secret only made Paul more furious: How could he have gone behind Paul’s back and taken a solo job without checking first? Didn’t he know their first commitment was to their musical partnership? If Paul noticed how closely Artie’s secret movie deal resembled his own hush-hush negotiations to leverage a solo contract out of Tom and Jerry’s first hit in 1957, he didn’t bring it up. They had plenty of other, more recent disagreements to unpack, and once he got going Artie didn’t hold back. He didn’t even want to see Paul when he was working on the movie. They would be shooting the film in and around New York City, but he ordered Paul to stay as far from the set as possible: no bringing his guitar to demo new songs, no kibitzing with Nichols, no hanging around when Artie was trying to get into character. In fact, don’t even come by to say hello—Artie was banning him from the set.

  Artie knew Paul’s weaknesses as well as he knew how he timed his inhalations before reaching for a high note. Generally, Artie did what he could to cushion his friend’s insecurities, complimenting his songs and his voice, hunching his shoulders when they were posing together, standing a step behind or sitting down in photo sessions so he wouldn’t seem that much taller than Paul. But now he worked over the insecurities relentlessly. Why should he build his life around pop music when movies were such a superior art form? Film was the most complicated, most fulfilling form of artistic expression, and he was already thriving in the medium. “I’m really only interested in movies,” Artie yelled at Paul. “I work with Mike Nichols and Jack Nicholson, and they’re my friends. I’m very good-looking. I look like a movie star.” Paul was flabbergasted. He was devastated. He was enraged. He’d urged Artie to do something for himself, away from the duo, and now the guy was attacking him with it. He could imagine Artie’s internal motivation: “I’ve always felt like a nobody. Now you’re going to be the nobody.” Paul said, “Part of him saw those movies as an opportunity to fuck me over … I mean, he really made me feel bad.”

  Yet Simon and Garfunkel still had work to do. They had already committed to weeks-long concert tours of America and Europe, where demand for tickets was beyond intense. After all those years of dreaming and working and worrying about this and that, they had reached the top of the top. No matter how pissed off they were at each other, they were still too smart to let a feud get in the way of being the hottest, most celebrated group in popular music.

  Dispensing with the backing musicians they had played with during the autumn tour, with the exception of pianist Larry Knechtel, whose sole appearance was on “Bridge,” they restored one kind of intimacy to the show. Still, the distance between them could be heard in the increasing number of solo vocals they put in the set. Artie had his star turns on “For Emily, Whenever I Find Her” and the climactic “Bridge,” so now Paul got “The Only Living Boy in New York,” his guitar workout “Anji,” and, most noticeably, a version of “Song for the Asking” that replicated the solo album performance rather than the lovely harmonized arrangement he and Artie had performed the previous fall. They also performed two new songs, “El Condor Pasa” and “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” that used both voices but in separate, unharmonized sections.*

  The 1970 tour concluded on July 18 with a homecoming show in the ten-thousand-seat Forest Hills tennis stadium. Performing on a pleasant summer evening in a cozy arena that was an easy walk from both their childhood homes, they looked and sounded delighted, joking easily with each other and with the folks in the crowd, all of whom cheered them on like the neighborhood heroes they were. They played “Roving Gambler” and “Put My Little Shoes Away,” both traditionals from the Everly Brothers’ album of Appalachian standards, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, then responded to someone’s request for doo-wop by whipping off a quick cover of the Dion oldie “Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love.” Feeling too happy to sing about alienation, they skipped past “The Sound of Silence” for the first time anyone could remember, concluding the evening with one last triumphant “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” When it was all over, Paul and Artie shook hands and walked off in separate directions.

  * * *

  Of course they weren’t going to break up. Sitting with a British writer in mid-1969, Paul noted that his connection to Artie, and Artie’s with him, wasn’t a matter of contracts and negotiations. “We’d have to stop our friendship if we were to split, and there’s no possibility of that,” he said. “We’ll always come back together on some venture.” Talking to Rolling Stone’s Loraine Alterman a year later, well after Artie’s Carnal Knowledge announcement, Paul barely hinted at their diverging paths. Certainly, Artie was busy with his movies, and Paul had some musical notions that might lead in other directions for a while, but that didn’t change anything, really. “We could easily do [a new tour in 1971],” he said. “As far as recording goes that’s a simple matter of saying, ‘let’s make another record.’ … Probably we will make another record.” There was no reason to doubt him. The same week the Rolling Stone interview came out in America, England’s Melody Maker reported that dates for a 1971 Simon and Garfunkel tour had already been booked.

  But he and Artie had no plans even to see each other, let alone to do any work together. They had been invited to co-headline the Summer Festival for Peace, a daylong all-star fund-raiser for antiwar political candidates planned for Shea Stadium on August 6, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Paul was eager to do it, but Artie refused even to consider the prospect. So did that mean Paul couldn’t do it at all? That hardly seemed right, given how much he believed in the cause, and how much attention the daylong festival would surely receive. So maybe he should go out and play by himself. The promoters were more than willing to book him as a solo. Simon and Garfunkel were so hot that even half the team would be a big draw for New York audiences. But Paul was terrified. He hadn’t played a show without Artie by his side for more than five years. Could he hold such a large audience’s attention without him? Could he do anything without Artie? No one wanted to hear Paul singing songs by himself anymore, even if they were songs he had written by himself. He’d work himself up like that, but then Peggy would talk him down. They had been married in September 1969, and he had come to depend on her counsel. She was smart, sensible, accustomed to being the boulder in a frantic sea, and she told him to stop being so silly. Of course Paul could do it alone; he’d done it that way for years, all that time in England, where fans had filled the clubs and hushed one another so they could hear every note, so they wouldn’t miss a word he uttered. The only thing that had changed since then was that he’d sold millions of records, including the biggest hit album of the year. Paul committed to playing the show.

  No one expected it to turn out the way it did. The same mix of peace activists and entertainment pros led by Peter, Paul, and Mary’s Peter Yarrow had put on an all-star Winter Festival for Peace at Madison Square Garden the previous winter, and it had been a smash. Jimi Hendrix; the Rascals; Blood, Sweat, and Tears; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and Richie Havens headlined that show, and the lineup for the summer festival was just as lustrous. Paul would share the stage with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steppenwolf, Miles Davis, Dionne Warwick, Johnny Winter, Joe Walsh’s James Gang, and many others. But even the hottest bands can’t sell tickets to fans who don’t know t
he show they’re playing exists: somehow the show’s promoters neglected to publicize the summer festival. There were few advertisements, fewer newspaper stories, and even the chatter in the hippie underground was muffled at best. Also, it was a daytime show scheduled for a Thursday. They eventually sold fewer than twenty thousand tickets for a space built for three times that number. To make matters worse, the sound system wasn’t powerful enough to drown out the jet engine blasts of the airplanes on their final approach to LaGuardia Airport, which posed a problem even for the superamplified rock ’n’ roll bands. And make no mistake, this was a rock ’n’ roll crowd: rowdy New York kids juiced for thunder and screams.

  It was not a crowd for one fellow with an acoustic guitar and thoughtful musings on social and romantic alienation. Coming out to light applause and the stubborn rumble of disinterest, Paul did the best he could, strumming and singing the songs that had made him famous, that only a few weeks earlier had inspired ovation after ovation from the ten thousand friends and fans gathered to see Simon and Garfunkel at the Forest Hills stadium. None of those people, it seemed, had come to Shea. These people weren’t even looking at the stage. They were talking, shouting, and tossing Frisbees, their occasional glances more impatient than intrigued. Was this real or an anxiety nightmare? Paul could feel the strings beneath his fingers, the lights in his face; and that was his voice, singing and talking, asking for a little quiet so everybody could hear, and then launching into “Scarborough Fair,” always a rapturous few moments during a Simon and Garfunkel show. But now it was all airplanes and chatter and laughter and—they were actually booing. Then he wasn’t playing anymore, and that was it. Turning away from the microphone and the dismal scene, stalking across the stage, shouldering past the throng of whoever the fuck was in the wings, slamming his guitar into his case, stalking wordlessly out of the trash-strewn bowl, into his car, and then—zoom!—a red streak out of the parking lot, out of Queens, back to Manhattan, and locking the damn door.