Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  The new songs were upbeat, flooded with the light of gospel praise and the kinetic energy of modern rhythm and blues—faith and frolic, grace and gratitude, all playing out in a highly imperfect world. Listening to the laid-back funk of the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” on the radio one day, he heard the church-meets-roadhouse sound he was after. The Staple Singers always worked with a backing group, though, so to figure out who had played what, Paul got in touch with Al Bell at the Memphis-based label Stax Records to see if the black guys who played with the Staples might be available to work with a white artist. Bell laughed: they were certainly available, but they weren’t black. The band on the Staples’ record, the Swampers, was the house band at the Muscle Shoals recording studio in northern Alabama, and they were all, to a man, white. A bunch of farm boys who had spent years at FAME Studios playing on so many hits (by Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Etta James, and others) that they were, without a doubt, the definitive soul band of the era. And all Paul had to do to get their sound on his record was call them up and book some time in their studio.

  When Tannen got through to the Swampers, they were between sessions, playing cards in the lounge/office area of the squat industrial building they had made into their studio. Guitarist Jimmy Johnson took the call, holding his hand over the receiver to consult with his partners. Not entirely sure they were speaking to someone who actually did represent such a preeminent rock star, they made their demands increasingly rich, up to the point where they said they would need a producer’s credit, and the royalties that went along with it, if Paul really wanted to play with them. To their surprise, Tannen, having consulted with Paul, said that would be fine. When Tannen’s letter of agreement arrived a few days later, written on Paul Simon’s corporate stationery, the musicians got excited. As the appointed week grew closer, one of them brought in cassettes of Paul’s first solo album and Bridge Over Troubled Water so everyone could take a close listen. Without a cassette player in the studio, they all came out to the parking lot so they could pile into a car, crank up the volume, and really get a sense of how the guy made records. He was real good, they decided—but so were they, and if he wanted to throw a challenge their way, they were going to catch it and throw it right back.

  Paul flew down to Muscle Shoals with Phil Ramone, the hit-savvy producer he had hired to work on the new album, discovering that the town’s only hotel, a Holiday Inn, had set its marquee with a large sign: WELCOME PAUL SIMON AND PHIL RAMONE. After checking in, they met the Swampers at a nearby restaurant for an introductory dinner where they snuck in enough bottles* for everyone to have a few drinks and get nice and friendly. When the waitress asked the musicians which one of them was the star, they pointed to Paul and told her his name. As she absorbed this, Jimmy Johnson, a big boy with curly red hair and a bonus-size gut beneath his overalls, caught her eye and smiled: “And I’m Artie Garfunkel!” When she turned to look, her eyes widened. Really? “We all got a big laugh out of that one,” says bassist David Hood. When Paul paid the check a little later, he included a tip so generous that the waitress chased him down outside with a fistful of bills, shouting that he had forgotten all his money on the table.

  Paul had booked the Muscle Shoals studio for four days, hoping to get a completed take of one song, the plangent “Take Me to the Mardi Gras.” Sung in the voice of a man setting out for New Orleans’s annual bacchanal, the tune was all cheerful anticipation: a man on his way to his favorite city for its best party of the year. But as Paul told keyboardist Barry Beckett, the words left out one vital detail: “He wants to go, he’s gonna go,” Paul explained. “Nowhere in the song does it say that he might not get to go.” That was the trick. Paul needed Beckett’s keyboards to project that feeling of doubt. The keyboardist nodded, no problem at all, and they all set out on the trek to the perfect sound that Paul could sense but not quite describe. Like the man in the song, there was always a chance they wouldn’t get there in the end.

  Two takes and twenty minutes later, the basic track to “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” was finished. Paul listened to the tape once, twice, three times, and had no doubt. Ramone, whose standards of production were every bit as refined as his client’s, heard it, too: that song had been played. So what next? Paul took out his notebook of songs and leafed through the pages, coming up with “Loves Me Like a Rock.” He’d worked with some players in New York to get a gospel lope on this tune, but it wasn’t working. He liked his acoustic guitar part, so he had Hood and drummer Roger Hawkins play to that, and there it was again, two or three takes later, another finished backing track.

  He went back to the notebook, and out came “Kodachrome,” “One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor,” and “St. Judy’s Comet”—and by the end of the week, they had tracked half the songs Paul had planned for the album, and all of them with the snappy, soulful charm that flowed through that country-rustic studio as steadily as the current sliding past the banks of the Tennessee River. The Dixie Hummingbirds* gospel quintet came in from South Carolina and did such a great job rehearsing their harmonies on “Loves Me Like a Rock” that Paul and Ramone scrapped the real takes to use the one captured when they were standing in a circle practicing with their heads bowed together. The Rev. Claude Jeter, the celestial lead singer of the Swan Silvertones who had helped inspire “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” added his high falsetto to “Mardi Gras,” and when Paul and Ramone drove to Malaco Studios in Jackson, Mississippi, to record New Orleans’s Dixieland favorites with the Onward Brass Band, they found the musicians in full parade regalia, from the tips of their caps to the toes of their shiny shoes. Maggie and Terre Roche rode a Greyhound bus down from New York to sing on “Was a Sunny Day” and flew to London to work with producer/arranger (and ex-bassist of the Animals) Paul Samwell-Smith to get a stately string arrangement to go along with the one folk song on the album.

  In the wake of his trip to Jamaica, Paul stopped worrying about how he’d be received by the musicians and singers he traveled to work with. They all knew he was a big star and that he paid extremely well for their time and help. If he wanted to project their sound and their names to his enormous audience, how could that be a problem? Better still, Paul didn’t hold back his admiration for the other musicians’ work. By the time he ventured into someone else’s home turf, he’d know their catalogues and be able to cite specific songs and licks from their records. Paul always came in with a sense of the feeling he was after for each song, but also with a willingness to hear the other musicians’ ideas on how to get it. And if the backroads studios were less fancy than the ones he used in the city, that was just part of their sound and vibe.

  It was raining hard the day he first walked into the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, and the musicians had spent part of the morning sticking maxi pads to the control room ceiling in order to keep the building’s leaky roof from dripping onto the recording equipment. The baffling they used to focus the acoustics in the studio consisted entirely of burlap bags, and the between-takes goofing and guffawing was a fixture, too, which may have been Paul’s favorite part of the sessions. “He liked hanging with just good ol’ boys,” Hood recalls. “I think he thought of it as like hanging out with the ball team or something, because we were definitely a team.”

  Paul was so taken with the Muscle Shoals spirit that he had the musicians double as a backing chorus for “One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor,” making sure they were loose enough to laugh and carry on while they did it. Paul expected the musicians to put pieces of themselves into their performances. He never wrote out parts for the musicians to play; he’d just play and sing the song with his acoustic guitar, toss out a few words about how he hoped it might sound, and let them figure out how they could get him there. It was a pretty standard way to work with pop music players, particularly the ones who had as unique a sound as the Muscle Shoals guys did. The big studios in New York and Los Angeles teemed with technical players who could play perfect re
nditions of every form of music without breaking a sweat. But Paul wasn’t after perfect. He wanted the guys whose fingers went naturally to the notes and rhythms any another musician, even the superior technician, wouldn’t think to play. The rhythmic and melodic hooks to “I’ll Take You There,” the Staple Singers hit that had clamped itself to Paul’s ear, were both written by bassist David Hood in the midst of a studio jam session. Similarly, the descending piano chords that open and close “One Man’s Ceiling” were introduced to the track by keyboardist Barry Beckett. Yet neither Beckett nor Hood (nor anyone else in their organization) had argued for writing credits—and not just because Paul, who paid well over standard session rates and had also given them a coproducer’s piece of the royalties, was being so generous. As most studio musicians agreed, if you wanted to get writer’s credit, you were welcome to write your own songs and put out your own albums.

  * * *

  Released on May 5, 1973, and titled There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, a phrase Peggy heard herself saying about her husband in a dream, Paul’s second post–Simon and Garfunkel album came dressed for a party, its cover a whimsical mix of a rainbow, with a scattering of stars and confetti, above a mask-wearing mask across a graph paper backdrop like a high schooler’s collage. And just in case that wasn’t enough to convince you this wasn’t the work of a gloomy young intellectual, go to the opening line of the opening song to get the idea: “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school / It’s a wonder I can think at all…”

  And off he goes, running smooth on a sleek gospel-cum-rhythm and blues groove, the snare drum snapping in lockstep to the bass’s liquid propulsion and Paul’s acoustic guitar in the middle, revving the engine with a spinning riff that is in turn set off by Beckett’s double duty on the keys, comping lightly on the electric and ripping the hell out of a honky-tonk piano, first with rapid-fire chatter, then a succession of eighty-eight-key swoops, one going up, the next going down. That’s “Kodachrome,” the nostalgia song for anti-nostalgics who know that photos, just like memories, are rarely the best measure of what used to be. “Everything looks worse in black and white,” he concludes, and the tune finds a whole other gear as the final chorus segues into a double-time sprint, all hands racing so fast that they blow right through Paul’s that’s-enough-guys shout “Okay!” and keep on zooming, piano jangling, drums kicking, horns blaring.

  From song to song, musician to musician, style to style, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon runs on exuberance. “Kodachrome” fades into the languorous doo-wop of “Tenderness,” Paul singing sweetly above the billowing ooooohs of the Dixie Hummingbirds, admitting everything to his estranged friend while still holding out for a little empathy to go along with the bitter truth. “You don’t have to lie to me / Just give me some tenderness beneath your honesty.” “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” follows, its dreams of New Orleans, along with the Rev. Claude Jeter’s honeyed falsetto, intoxicating enough to float you to the city no matter where you’re listening. And more: “Something So Right” is unadorned feeling from a lover who has, against all expectations, surrendered his distance. Paul’s nylon-string guitar hints at the blues, then falls into line with the doubled basses (one acoustic, one electric) and doubled keyboards (ibid.), vibes, and then a chirping flute to let love speak as directly as possible. Songs about the past, about breaking up, about coming together, about fatherhood, about failing gracefully and feeling sanctified by your mama’s embrace—all of them different roads to acceptance, to letting go, to simply being without worrying about being something other than who you are.

  The outlier on the album, lyrically as well as stylistically, is “American Tune,” a folk-style song (Paul’s voice, an acoustic guitar, and string quartet) that retells the immigrant’s story from the sour perspective of the early 1970s, the time of Nixon, Watergate, and the fraying of the nation’s spirit. Adapted from a Lutheran hymn written by the German composer Hans Leo Hassler in 1600, “American Tune” begins with a weary traveler miles away from home and still distant from the glorious city he seeks. And it’s not just him. Everyone he knows feels just as lost, as if the road beneath their feet has bent in the wrong direction. When he sleeps at night he sees the Statue of Liberty, the immigrants’ beacon for nearly a century, only now she’s packed up her torch and taken her leave, bound for somewhere a huddled mass can still catch a break. For the child of an immigrant family, one of the hundreds of millions of citizens whose forebears were delivered to this land on a vessel of some sort, the contrast between hope and reality is almost too stark to contemplate. And still we must accept our fate and our daily burden.

  Tomorrow’s gonna be another working day

  and I’m trying to get some rest

  That’s all I’m trying, to get some rest.

  Commonly cited as one of his best songs, “American Tune” grounds the rest of There Goes Rhymin’ Simon in the larger story of the nation, particularly in its wholesale blend of cultures and styles. Even if the bleak vision of “American Tune” weren’t brightened by the singer’s resolve to work another day, the album’s multifarious sounds and voices would be enough to call Liberty back to her grimy pedestal in New York Harbor. All the songs work, most quite magnificently. But the most essential moment on the album doesn’t come in a song: in the seconds before “Loves Me Like a Rock” begins, Dixie Hummingbirds leader Ira Tucker, still rehearsing in a tight circle with the rest of the group, draws their attention to the magical approach they’ve all been trying to find.

  TUCKER: Mm-hmm, that’s it, that’s that groove.

  PAUL: (in the distance) K.

  TUCKER: (whispered) Let go.

  THE DIXIE HUMMINGBIRDS: (voicing a resounding G chord) Ah-oooohhh!

  Paul hits some downstrokes on his guitar, the bass and drums kick in, and they all sing glorious praise to the Jewish boy’s solid rock of a mother, though it could be anyone’s mother, or anyone’s God—and actually it’s all of them put together and mm-hmm, that’s it, that’s that groove.

  The public fell hard for what they heard. In the United States alone There Goes Rhymin’ Simon sold more than two million copies during its first year. Released to go along with the album, the lead single, “Kodachrome,” spent months on the Hot 100, peaking at No. 2. The follow-up, “Loves Me Like a Rock,” was also a smash, and also peaked at No. 2. The album’s lighter tone did nothing to change Paul’s status as a critic’s favorite. “Testifies anew to a major talent that simply will not stop growing,” said Time; “If I were shipwrecked on a desert island, I’d be happy if I could hear just one album: Paul Simon’s … There Goes Rhymin’ Simon,” said the New York Times. And so on, in virtually every other major publication that reviewed pop records. Why would anyone want to resist such a joyous yet literate collection of pop songs? The album topped sales charts in Spain and Sweden, and scaled top tens, and sometimes top fives, in countries all around the world.

  * * *

  He had to tour. That was part of the pleasure of being a songwriter, taking your work to your fans, seeing them smile, then hearing their applause when it was over. Even if it got exhausting or boring, and he got to feeling that he didn’t want to be anywhere near a stage, it was the only way to keep the buzz going, to keep the records moving in and out of the stores. When Paul Simon’s sales ebbed at 1.5 million, he went to ask Clive Davis what had gone wrong. The executive didn’t hesitate: “You didn’t tour to support it, did you?”

  He’d had his reasons, only some of them having to do with his fear of facing an audience without Artie at his side. He’d wanted to have more solo songs to play, and to figure out the best way to present them: Just him and his guitar? Accompanied by a three- or four-piece backing band? Or with guest stars who could take a few turns in the spotlight on their own? Ultimately Paul designed a show that gave him all the above while also resolving the two most daunting questions standing between him and a solo concert tour: Would he perform “Bridge Over Troubled Water”? And if he did, how could he sing it wi
thout Artie? As the tour grew closer, Paul started to have nightmares, surrealistic horror shows where he’d walk onstage and find his microphone standing far above his head, or a glass wall separating him from an audience that couldn’t hear a note of what he was playing and singing. Typical anxiety dreams—you could unlock their symbolism with both hands cuffed behind your back while in a trunk at the bottom of the East River. But that still didn’t relieve his fears, or keep his subconscious from its troubled imaginings.

  When Paul launched the tour at the Boston Music Hall on May 6, 1973, he opened the show alone, strumming and singing “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” and “Run That Body Down” before dipping into the Simon and Garfunkel catalogue with a solo rendition of “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” Jon Landau was in the audience, seeing Paul’s nerves during his solo acoustic songs, then noticing him ease as the band joined for the Rhymin’ Simon material, a lilting “Was a Sunny Day” that segued into “Cecilia” and then a hushed “American Tune.” About fifteen songs into the set, he introduced Urabamba, a Chilean folk group Los Incas founder Jorge Milchberg had formed, to back him on “El Condor Pasa” and “Duncan,” then left the stage to let the group play two of their own songs before returning to end the set together with “The Boxer.” The structure of the second set was the same, starting with a long solo stretch, then upping the energy with the Jessy Dixon Singers, a five-piece gospel group that included drums, a bass, and Mr. Dixon himself on vocals and organ.