Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Stacked onto record store shelves on January 24, 1972, Paul Simon looked like a homey affair. Cover photographs shot by Peggy catch the newly solo artist peeking out from beneath the fur-lined hood of a heavy winter parka, his lips caught in a small, shy smile. Like the photo Paul McCartney’s wife Linda shot for the cover of his first post-Beatles album,* he looks thinner and less burdened than he did on the cover of his group’s last album. But while McCartney’s one-man band solo music was as homemade as its package, Paul Simon, for all its casual-seeming arrangements and performances, is anything but. Each song comes with at least one extraordinary performance set within: a reggae band here, Peruvian instruments there, Latin percussion, a great bottleneck guitar solo, jazz fiddle, and more.

  * * *

  There was plenty of discomfort at the heart of his new tunes, but the married thirty-year-old Paul had traded the theoretical angst of youth for the real grind of adult life in the modern world. The city is cruel, friends get strung out, relationships fall apart, even your subconscious gets overrun by fascist dictators, but the album is more tense than it is resigned. There are flashes of wit, active resistance, and even hope, as in “Mother and Child Reunion,” the finished version of the barely sketched groove he’d recorded in Jamaica. When Paul and Peggy’s dog was killed by a car, Paul channeled his grief into a lyric built around the name of an eggs-and-chicken dish he’d seen on the menu of a Chinese restaurant in the West Village. But the mourning in the verses is leavened by the persistent bounce of the rhythm, particularly combined with gospel piano highlights and the passionate voices of the backup singers, who find the uplift waiting just beyond the tragedy, the soul’s ascension back into the arms of its creator.

  The comfort of faith in “Mother and Child” is lost in “Duncan,” which counterintuitively pairs the story of a salt-stained runaway from Maine’s fishing piers with Peruvian flutes and strings. While the song is clearly descended from both “The Boxer” and “El Condor Pasa,” its title character, a guitar-playing youngster whose full name is the Yankee-to-the-core Lincoln Duncan, finds communion with God in the form of a female evangelist who relieves him of his virginity, leaving him “Just thanking the Lord for my fingers, for my fingers.” “Everything Put Together Falls Apart” and “Run That Body Down” describe the perils of overindulgence from two perspectives, the first as a gentle lecture to a strung-out friend; the second, an autobiographical account.

  Dystopian visions play out in “Papa Hobo” (life in Detroit), “Paranoia Blues” (life in New York City), “Peace Like a River” (a dream of life in a wicked totalitarian regime), and “Congratulations” (life in a troubled marriage). Throughout, the music leaps and then hangs back. The melodic uplift in the groove of “Mother and Child Reunion” is swept aside by the meandering, nearly a-melodic “Everything Put Together Falls Apart.” The joyful bounce of the Stéphane Grappelli track Paul called “Hobo’s Blues” makes way for the tinny skronk of “Paranoia Blues.” The spirit of inventiveness, particularly when it comes to blending sounds in unlikely ways, is as striking as it is unprecedented. Mainstream American radio had never entertained reggae music until “Mother and Child Reunion,” the album’s lead single, jumped into Billboard’s top five. The Latin-inspired “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” did nearly as well a few months later. The vaguely naughty song (the tale of some awful yet never-described scandal that took place between the narrator and his neighborhood pal Julio) made people dance even though its rhythm was made entirely by percussion and the chunk-chunk of an unplugged electric guitar, its dampened strings being strummed hard.

  As a solo debut, Paul Simon does a fine job of stepping away from the Simon and Garfunkel institution without going so far that listeners wouldn’t know what to make of it. Some songs are weaker than others (“Everything Put Together Falls Apart” is a trifle, and the gospel grandeur of “Congratulations” feels overblown), but critics sang happily, hoisting the record to No. 4 on Billboard’s album chart and moving nearly 1.5 million copies in its first year. Yet Paul was less than happy with the results. When lead Rolling Stone critic Jon Landau’s celebratory review described the album as a bit depressive, Paul got so upset he delayed an interview with the New Yorker for two weeks because, as a Columbia Records publicist explained to the writer, Landau had missed all the irony and humor in the songs. Soon thereafter, though, Paul was happy to have Landau interview him for a lengthy Rolling Stone feature, and their talk ran deep enough to read like a kind of public therapy session, particularly when it came to Paul’s relationship with Artie. “We get along by observing certain rules,” Paul said, explaining that the rules mostly involved each of them avoiding doing or saying things he knew would irritate the other.

  Still, even if Paul Simon had sold more than a million copies, it was a speck on the face of Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, a single album collection Columbia shipped to record stores in mid-June. Centered on original studio tracks, the album also included four previously unheard live tracks recorded during the 1969–1970 tours, and the combination hits-and-rarities lineup went on to rival Bridge Over Troubled Water’s sales, easily outselling Paul’s debut in 1972 and going on to sell fourteen million copies in the next decade or so. Paul chose not to mount a solo tour for his album, but when the actor Warren Beatty asked him and Artie to reunite for a benefit concert for the presidential campaign of South Dakota senator George McGovern, the Democratic candidate attempting to unseat President Richard Nixon, they both agreed to do it. Held in Madison Square Garden, the show played off McGovern’s campaign pledge to reunite the country by featuring reunions of disbanded partnerships: Simon and Garfunkel, of course; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and most exciting for some audience members, the comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, both of whom had gone on to big careers in theater and the movies.

  As the final act on the bill, Paul and Artie walked out to a standing ovation and, after waiting for the applause to fade, launched into the opening chords of “Mrs. Robinson.” Back in their traditional two-voices-and-a-guitar form, their harmonies rang as clear and effortless as ever, particularly in the second song, a close harmony arrangement of “El Condor Pasa.” They seemed relaxed, joking to the crowd—Paul got a particular kick when someone requested “Voices of Old People,” the Bookends montage of Artie’s interviews with the aged. They sang the third verse of “The Boxer” (“After changes upon changes we are more or less the same…”), which they had edited out in favor of Artie’s countermelody, then made a chugging ska arrangement of “Cecilia” into a medley with a harmonized “Mother and Child Reunion” and, a bit more awkward in its new Jamaican getup, “Bye Bye Love.” More familiar renditions of “Scarborough Fair” and “The 59th Street Bridge Song” and a particularly resonant “America” came next.

  When they started rehearsing for the show, Paul told Artie he wanted to try something different for the inevitable closer, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” They wouldn’t have a pianist for the show, just Paul doing what he could to replicate Larry Knechtel’s performance on his six-string guitar. Rather than having Artie sing the song alone, Paul proposed that they sing it together, Artie on the first verse, Paul on the second, and both harmonizing on the third verse and the climactic final chorus. At first Artie didn’t know how to respond. Did Paul really think it would sound better, or had he just found another way to shove him aside? “Cut me open and look at all my contradictory reactions,” Artie said a few months later. “Do I think that’s a good idea? Do I trust? Do I sense his ego trying to subtract from my ego?” No matter. Artie decided to do it Paul’s way, just as he had decided to help raise money for a candidate he didn’t like very much. After two years away, he was eager to step back onto the concert stage, in sold-out Madison Square Garden, no less, with friends and heroes on the bill. And as they stood onstage, weaving their voices together in public for the first time in two years, they were heroes, too.

  Both their faces tilting to the silver microphones, they loo
ked out at the arena, filled for the evening by a small city of thoughtful liberal urbanites, a gathering of the tribe. “Come home, America,” McGovern trumpeted that year. Shed your fears and unbolt your doors; hold out your hand to your friends, your neighbors, total strangers, your rivals, and your enemies, too. They played for half an hour, the crowd with them the whole time, clapping to the rhythmic songs, singing along to “The 59th Street Bridge Song”; then “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” that modern hymn to unity, to connection, to the old-fashioned notion that united hearts, hands, and voices can build anything. Remember when people really believed that? It could happen again, and here were Simon and Garfunkel back together, the sound of their voices leading us all home. “We’ve all come to look for America.”

  Just a few weeks later, Rolling Stone published Paul’s interview with Jon Landau. Paul was pictured on the magazine’s cover, a mid-distance portrait showing him, head to foot, walking toward the camera palms raised, a cap pulled down close to his eyes—but not close enough to cover the annoyance creasing his brow and, seemingly, erupting from his half-open mouth. He had a lot to say in the article: about how he’d always carried the vast bulk of Simon and Garfunkel’s creative burden. All those stories they had told about Artie arranging the songs, or even helping to arrange them, were nonsense. “Anybody who knows anything would know that that was a fabrication. How can one guy write the songs and let the other guy do the arranging?”—an odd argument, considering how often songwriters work with arrangers, and there were many accounts of Artie doing exactly that. Yet maybe Paul was venting something else entirely.

  “At a certain point it became very hard to take criticism from each other … I felt that if I had to go through these kind of personality abrasions I didn’t want to continue to do it.” Meanwhile, Artie had abandoned him so he could become a movie star. At that point, they just naturally went their separate ways. “I went to do my album by myself. We didn’t say that’s the end … but it became apparent by the time the movie was out and by the time my album was out that it was over.”

  “As I stand right now I have no partnership with Artie,” Paul said. “I find it a relief.”

  CHAPTER 15

  THAT’S IT, THAT’S THAT GROOVE

  When he told the Supreme Court of New York County where his career stood circa late 1972, Paul sounded gloomy. His solo album had, in comparison to Bridge Over Troubled Water, been a flop. In the first months of the 1970s, he had set out to make himself into an entirely different performer. “And in effect begin a new career—as Paul Simon,” he declared. “No longer can I rely on the great popularity of Simon and Garfunkel but rather must prove to the public and to CBS that the popularity and international acclaim I now possess can be sustained in this new phase of my career.” The professional future of the new recording artist Paul Simon, he continued, would be decided by the fate of his second album, which would be released just before he set out to reintroduce himself to concert audiences all around the world.

  He was bullshitting, mostly. Bridge’s popularity had been so far off the charts of anyone’s experience, it would take thirteen years and Michael Jackson to outdo it. Paul Simon had been a win by every conceivable measure, and so on and so forth, which was one of the reasons he had to sic his lawyers on the Edward B. Marks Music Corporation. Now that he had become a star in his own right, his former employer and, briefly, publisher had done a deep crawl through its archives in search of the songs Paul had sold them a decade earlier. Having exhumed not only lead sheets but also, in some cases, demo recordings of “Carlos Dominguez,” “He Was My Brother,” “The Side of a Hill,” “Bleecker Street,” and the Simon-Garfunkel arrangement of “Benedictus,” they recognized the potential of a belated return on their investment and mapped out an Early Songs of Paul Simon songbook and an album of Paul’s recordings of the songs. And instead of crediting them to Jerry Landis or to Paul Kane, as he’d preferred in those days, they were opting for his real name and therein lay his predictable ire.

  Paul won an injunction against Marks, then made a settlement with the company. Then it was back to smooth sailing for Paul’s business organization, the daily operations of which he’d entrusted to Mike Tannen, the young associate from Orenstein, Arrow who had made himself an expert on the Simon and Garfunkel account and then a member of Paul’s inner circle of friends. It was easy to see why they hit it off so well. Tannen was another physically compact, hotly ambitious Jewish kid with a professional music man for a father, the well-known country music publisher Nat Tannen, who had died unexpectedly when Mike was in college. Nat and Harold Orenstein, whose firm specialized in entertainment law, had been close, and when Mike graduated from New York University Law School in 1965, he had a job waiting for him.

  Tannen thrived, and in 1969 Orenstein sent him to Los Angeles to open a West Coast office for the firm. Paul wasn’t happy to see him go, but made a point of driving him and Mary to the airport, where he told them not to worry about getting a cab when they got to LA; he’d have a car waiting for them. The limo Tannen had expected turned out to be a new Porsche, a gift Paul intended as a symbol of his confidence in his friend’s future prospects. “I think you’re the best,” Paul told Tannen when his flabbergasted friend called to say thanks. “I wanted you to think you’re as good as or better than anyone out there.” It was easy for them to keep in touch, given the amount of time Paul spent working in the Hollywood recording studios, and when he started gearing up for a solo career in 1971, just as Tannen had decided to move back to New York, Paul asked the lawyer to help steer the business end of his ventures.

  Tannen took the job happily, moving back to New York and setting up shop in a town house on East Sixty-First Street, between Fifth and Madison. Along with the offices for Paul’s central enterprises, Tannen also set up a suite for Paul’s publishing company, Charing Cross, which had first operated in a space beneath the Orenstein, Arrow offices in Los Angeles. That office was managed by Ian Hoblyn, a former airline steward who worked with a few secretaries to administer the rights to the songs Paul had written.

  Already known among insiders for his business savvy—Bob Dylan came to him for advice before he started renegotiating his publishing and recording deals—Paul had built an impressive fortune by his thirtieth birthday. But while he knew it made financial sense to invest his money in real estate or some industry or another, he had little interest in ordinary businesses. He wanted his money to reflect his artistic sensibility and his lifelong involvement with music. Tannen suggested he follow the example of the great songwriter Frank Loesser, who eventually made more money as the publisher of other songwriters than he did as the author of “Heart and Soul,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and so many other hit songs. Paul liked that idea, so they started DeShufflin Inc., a company they could use to both support emerging artists’ careers and get a piece of the hit songs they wrote.

  The company’s first clients were Maggie and Terre Roche, the suburban New Jersey singing/songwriting duo Paul had welcomed into his NYU class during the winter of 1970. Two years later, the sisters had come from out of the blue, calling his office every day for a week until Paul called back to hear Maggie tell him about all the new songs they’d written since the end of class. Paul sent them to Tannen, who invited them to his family’s apartment to play a few tunes. When they were done, he made an offer on the spot, laying out terms that were surprisingly generous. He and Paul would not only give them a cash advance to live on while they readied themselves to record, but also rent them an apartment, get them top instructors to improve their guitar and piano technique, pay all their recording expenses, and then, with Tannen serving as their manager, help them land a deal with a record company. After they settled into a place in Greenwich Village, Paul took Maggie and Terre on a buying spree to Colony Records so they would have cool music to listen to while they prepared to start their careers in the big time. He had them sing on one of the songs for his next solo album, and when it came out mont
hs later, they were astonished to find their pictures on its inner cover, a deliberate move to create an instant buzz around the unknown duo. In the wake of some tough childhood experiences, Terre Roche wrote in her self-published memoir, Blabbermouth, that the career boost couldn’t have come at a more crucial time. “Paul Simon and Michael Tannen gave us a new lease on life.”

  * * *

  Although he was happily settled with Peggy, Paul still struggled with depression, though he found some relief when he’d read enough political philosophy to conclude that his gloom was actually the made-up pain of the middle-class intellectual. It was, he said, “a student’s fantasy, not the pain of poverty, war or even the tremendous emotional pain that people endure daily.” Peggy’s interest in feminist theory led Paul to the work of Kate Millett, whose controversial 1970 book, Sexual Politics, made him believe that his insecurities and hostility had, in the midst of a male-defined social and political construct, pushed him to the edge of violence. “The whole white male myth makes it imperative that the hero, the winner, be the Great Dane,” he explained. “That’s why I’m right there with the feminists, because I think the whole thing is debasing. Remember, there was rape long before capitalism.”

  Peggy learned she was pregnant during the winter of 1972, and when their son, Harper, was born on September 7, 1972, fatherhood grounded Paul all the more. Had he ever felt so relaxed and happy so much of the time? Picking up a nylon-string classical guitar one day, his fingers found a set of sweet, jazzy chords to suit the first unalloyed love ballad he’d ever written, a simply stated declaration to the woman who had inspired it. Singing at first in the voice of a restless traveler, Paul gave the song the title “Let Me Live in Your City.” Realizing that he’d already been home for quite a while, he changed it to “Something So Right,” in which his customary darkness plays as comic effect. “It’s such an unusual sight,” he sings of his odd sense of joy. “I can’t get used to something so right.”