Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  They were still re-creating that process when the mixes that appear on the Think Too Much bootleg were captured. “Allergies” leads the first side with Artie singing the intro, then adding those spiky harmonies heard at the concerts along with a lower, descending harmony on the chorus. On “Hearts and Bones,” the story of Paul’s sometimes vexing relationship with Carrie, Artie’s voice drifts in, whispers gently, floats off, and then returns, the voices of the angels following the couple’s journey together. “Their hearts and their bones / Oh and they won’t come undone.” The singer didn’t record his plans for anything beyond the basic (and very occasional) lines for the playful “When Numbers Get Serious,” which takes the logic-versus-belief dialectic to a math class where 2 x 2 = 22 and all the other numbers collapse into the most monolithic of all: 1. “Song About the Moon,” also performed live in a harmonized arrangement, extends Dr. Gorney’s prescription to Paul for beating writer’s block (“If you want to write a song about the moon, then do it! / Write a song about the moon”) to falling in love.

  In “Train in the Distance,” Paul’s affectionate look back at Peggy, their romance, and their ongoing bond through their son, Artie imagined draping the opening line (“She was beautiful as southern skies the night he met her”) with harmonies that would “descend at the top like petals.” For “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” he added a close harmony for the second verse and a wordless voicing over the top of Philip Glass’s bleak orchestral vignette at the end. As the New York Times’s Stephen Holden implied, most of the songs describe unifications: mostly romantic but also social, as in the upbeat passages of “Johnny Ace,” and cultural, as in “Cars Are Cars.” All these threads merge in “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War.” A gossamer ballad inspired by a portrait of the Belgian painter and companions taken during World War II (Paul altered the image’s title ever so slightly), the song’s verses and chorus imagine the artist and his wife in the New York of the 1950s, discovering the new world as a sensual dreamscape. The extravagance of fashion, the elegant dinners, the gilded corridors of power—all are easily accessible, but none is as thrilling as the time they spend alone, dancing to the music of the great doo-wop singers. Time weaves them together and numbs their passion. But their love continues to throb, forever inside the lush voices of the Penguins, the Moonglows, and the Five Satins. Paul takes the lead vocal for himself, handing off to Artie for the higher reaches of the mid-song digression before resuming the solo for the final verse. The song yearns for the sound of intimacy, for singers breathing as one, the same voice emerging from two throats. Instead, the voices are miles apart, the parts overlapping but never quite touching.

  They would never bridge the distance, just as Paul’s solo version of Hearts and Bones never found its way into the world. It might not have gone over that well if it had come out as a Simon and Garfunkel record. The lyrical conceit of “Allergies” along with the herky-jerky beat and Al Di Meola’s porcupine guitar part sit uncomfortably in the ear, while the offbeat imagery scattered through the lyrics of “Song About the Moon” doesn’t make up for the song’s lack of an emotional pulse. “When Numbers Get Serious” suffers from the same absence: both have the moon-in-jejune chime of songs written on assignment.

  Like the Simon and Garfunkel reunion, Paul and Carrie’s marriage got off to a lovely public start. As well as popping up onstage for the last few Simon and Garfunkel shows after she and Paul were married, Carrie appeared with him when he hosted one of the first episodes of Lorne Michaels’s post-SNL—he left his signature program for the first half of the eighties—comedy-variety program The New Show in the early weeks of January 1984: they were in one funny skit where he played a henpecked Abraham Lincoln to her dismissive Mary Todd Lincoln. But as the glories faded back into real life, the same problems were waiting just where they had left them. It was only a few months before they broke up again, this time for real, with the help of divorce lawyers.

  Alone and bored, Paul went back on the road as a solo act in the summer of 1984. He would visit twelve cities between August 1 and 26, for a handful of dates spread around amphitheaters and auditoriums He didn’t take a band with him, either. It was just Paul, a few guitars, and a long list of old favorites, along with a few Hearts and Bones songs, if only to keep the album from vanishing without a trace. But, really, he could have played whatever he felt like playing, whenever he felt like playing it. Touring as a solo for the first time since those treasured days in England meant he only had to ask himself. And he already knew how he felt, so he really didn’t have to ask at all.

  * * *

  Earlier that spring Paul had met Heidi Berg, a musician who had played in the Saturday Night Live band before signing on to be the bandleader for The New Show. Unfortunately, The New Show failed to find an audience and was canceled by early spring. A week or two later, Michaels started meeting with the show’s now-jobless staffers at his Brill Building offices, helping them figure out what they wanted to do next. When Berg came to see Michaels to talk about music jobs on TV, he suggested, among other things, that she poke her head into the offices just up the hall. “You should talk to my friend Paul Simon.”

  Berg spent a couple of minutes chatting with some ex-colleagues in Michaels’s waiting room, and by the time she got to the outer door of the office suite Paul was waiting for her. He was smiling. He heard she was very good. He wanted to hear her songs. After she played him some tapes, he invited her to use one of his spare offices as a rehearsal space, and asked how much she’d need to live on while she got things together to record the album he wanted to produce for her.

  The daughter of Norwegian parents, Berg was raised in the heavily Scandinavian Ballard neighborhood in Seattle, where she studied classical violin and doubled on guitar, vocals, and keyboards. Growing up among Norwegians had given Berg a taste for the squeeze box, which she mastered along with her other instruments. In New York in the early 1980s, Berg was riding in a friend’s car one day when she found a tape of modern South African pop groups.* She put it into the stereo and was instantly entranced by what she heard. She loved the upbeat slap of the drums and the bopping bass and the jangle of the guitars, but she was truly hooked when the accordion took the lead. It was a kind of rhythm she knew she’d never heard, but which felt completely right the moment it danced into her ears.

  Berg started meeting with Paul in his Central Park West apartment, bringing tapes of her demos and talking about how she wanted her record to sound. By this point, she had collected a few South African pop records and was deep in the thrall of mbaqanga, a style of township dance music rooted in tribal songs. When she told Paul how much she wanted to put her own version of the music on her album, he asked her the first question he’d have asked himself if he had been in her position: why don’t you go to South Africa and record your songs with the people who made the original records? Paul had been doing that for nearly twenty years, but Berg laughed. She didn’t know anyone in South Africa; she wasn’t even sure who was playing on the tracks, so how was she going to find them? Curiosity piqued, Paul asked a question that turned out to be fateful. Could he borrow the tape? Yes, he could. Berg gave him the homemade tape marked “Accordion Jive Hits Vol. II” with one condition: he couldn’t have it for more than a week because it was her favorite; she wanted it on hand all the time. Paul nodded. No problem at all.

  It was the spring of 1984, the dawn of the supersized American superstars: Michael Jackson at his military brocaded, chimp-toting height; Madonna in her wedding gown and lace bustier; Bruce Springsteen stomping across the continents in his muscles, work boots, T-shirt, and blood-red bandanna. All three of them flying as high and bright as newborn planets while Paul Simon sat in his apartment counting his ongoing string of high-profile flops: the One-Trick Pony debacles, the collapse of the Simon and Garfunkel reunion, the commercial failure of Hearts and Bones, his exploded marriage to Carrie, and nothing on the horizon. In earlier years Paul could soldier through heartbr
eak by focusing on music; it was usually the most stable part of his life. But now his music career was in even worse shape than his romantic life. What could he possibly do next?

  For the time being he focused on a piece of property he’d bought in Montauk, the easternmost town in the Hamptons, where he had decided to build a summer home next to the spot where Lorne Michaels and his second wife, Susan Forristal, had built theirs. He hired Paul Krause, the architect Artie had introduced him to in the sixties, to design a sprawling version of a classic shingled beach house with just a few modern touches. (Krause, unlike his client, was a dedicated modernist.) Yet Paul was so intent on perfecting every aspect of the project (including the swimming pool, which was just like Michaels’s except, as Paul pointed out, six inches longer) that he made himself a regular presence, driving out from New York every few days to see how it was coming together. It was during one of his drives down the Long Island Expressway when Paul took a second look at the homemade cassette tape Berg had loaned him and fed it into his car’s sound system. Soon it was the only music he wanted to hear.

  Electric guitars, accordions, saxophones, drums, electric bass, organs, and percussion—all played fast circles through the same two or three chords. And they were always major chords. The minor scale didn’t seem to exist for these bands—they didn’t even play blue notes in the solos. This was party music, songs to make you slide, spin, and snap your fingers. Some of the tunes were instrumentals; others featured singers vocalizing in an indigenous tongue that made the lyrics sound like chant, an incantation from somewhere beyond the mist. The guitars chimed and chittered, the bass zoomed and pulsed against the tick-thump-tick-thump-tick-thump of the drums. The saxophone honked and squealed; the organ burbled. He could hear echoes of nearly everything: early rock ’n’ roll music, gospel call-and-response, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, country music, be-bop, “hey-bop-a-loo-bop-a-whap-bam-boom.” These were songs from before the dawn of man, sprung from the loam of creation.

  Paul dialed Lenny Waronker in Los Angeles. He’d found this incredible music; he’d never heard anything like it and knew next to nothing about where it came from. All he knew was that someone had written “Accordion Jive Hits Vol. II” on it, and the friend who’d loaned it to him said it was from South Africa. Did he know anything about South African music? Who could help him figure out what, and whom, he was listening to? Waronker knew exactly whom Paul needed to speak with. Just the year before, the label had struck a deal with a South African band named Juluka, a biracial Zulu pop group whose recent album, Scatterlings, had made some noise on the British charts. Waronker had worked closely with the band’s producer, Hilton Rosenthal, and the two men were friendly enough that the South African wasn’t too put out when Waronker’s call tumbled Rosenthal out of bed late one night to ask a favor. Paul Simon had flipped for a song that seemed to be from South Africa and needed to figure out who the players were.

  When he called Rosenthal, Paul could offer a few more details. The song he loved the most was called “Gumboots.” That name clicked instantly with Rosenthal: he’d heard the song and knew it was by the Boyoyo Boys, a township group whose driving brand of mbaqanga had made them a regular presence on the South African pop charts. At first Paul wanted only to buy the rights to that one song. He didn’t really know what he wanted to do with it; he just knew he could figure something out eventually. But Rosenthal had another idea. Maybe Paul should think about doing a full album of South African music? Rosenthal could pull together a bunch of records by the groups with the best players and the most distinctive sounds. If they caught Paul’s ear, Rosenthal would get in touch with the musicians and book them for a few days of studio time. Paul said fine, and a week later he had thirty albums’ worth of South African pop in his hands. He spent the next few weeks listening, and then dialed Rosenthal’s number again. Make the calls, Paul said. Book the studio. He and his engineer, Roy Halee, would be arriving in early February.

  It was that easy. This miraculous music, pressed into his palm by Heidi Berg, this pretty young guitarist Lorne had steered his way. She’d slipped the “Gumboots” cassette to Paul thinking it was the key to her debut album when in fact it had unlocked something much more significant to Paul: the next stage in his career. Berg had made him an astonishing gift. Or she would have, had she intended to give him anything more than an idea of the sound she wanted for her own record.

  From the start, she told Paul that he could have her tape for only a week, tops. If he really liked it, he could dub a copy for himself. All she wanted was for him to give it back so she could get it into her tape player again. Paul did not give it back. According to Berg, when they met at his apartment to talk music, he’d tell her he’d left it at the office. But when Berg called the Brill Building, no one there had any idea: he must have taken it home, they supposed. She didn’t see him much that summer; he was either out at Montauk or off to one of the amphitheaters or concert halls he was set to perform in during his August tour. Berg caught up to him backstage at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, where he had invited her to see the show and say hi. She asked about her “Accordion Jive” tape then, too, and though he didn’t have it on hand there, either, he had great news: he’d just bought the rights to the recording of the “Gumboots” song. Now he could plug in one of the melodies he’d been singing over the track, write his own words, and blend his own sensibility into this music from the distant, dusty South African townships. Wasn’t that great?

  Berg did not think it was great. Berg thought that Paul, her putative mentor and would-be producer, had isolated her best idea and snatched it away for himself. She still regrets what she did next, thrusting out an empty palm and asking, sharply, “Where’s my end?” That’s all it took for his corneas to ice over and for him to pivot away from her, launching a conversation with someone else a few heads away. But she also remembered what he’d said to her when she first told him about the South African music she treasured. “Why don’t you just go there?” He had been completely serious when he said it. He told the same thing to every musician with ears tuned to a faraway sound: figure out where the spirit of the thing lived and go there. Paul hadn’t even heard the music when they had that conversation. But once he did, he knew where he was going next, and he didn’t care if getting there was going to be complicated.

  * * *

  Paul knew there would be trouble. The South African government, which enforced the racist system of apartheid, had been condemned by the United Nations and most of the world’s civilized nations both for its inherently unjust national structure and for the brutality it employed to keep the country’s nonwhite majority under heel. Many nations refused to trade with or even acknowledge the authority of South Africa’s apartheid government. The U.S. government took another course, justifying its mutually profitable relationship with the racist nation by pointing out the ties between the black South Africans’ central opposition party, the African National Congress, and the Communist governments of China and the Soviet Union. That argument held no sway in Europe, though, especially in England, where the struggle against apartheid gathered force through the 1970s and the early ’80s. By the mid-’80s the antiapartheid movement had gained a solid foothold in America, where campus protesters shut down numerous colleges and universities to force administrators to rid the institutions of every stock, bond, or mutual fund with any connection to South Africa. For many activists from the 1950s and ’60s, the war against apartheid had become the next front in the civil rights movement, particularly for Harry Belafonte, the storied musician/actor/activist who for decades had stood as a pillar of inarguable moral clarity.

  Paul had known Belafonte since the 1960s, when both were friends and supporters of the family of Andy Goodman, the murdered Freedom Rider from Queens College whom Paul had come to associate with “He Was My Brother.” The two artists had stayed in touch over the years, and when Paul called to talk through his South African plans, he was at first relieved to
hear the older singer’s enthusiasm. He could already imagine how beautiful the music would be, Belafonte said, but he also knew how complicated the politics of South Africa, and especially the antiapartheid movement, could be. So if Paul wanted to make it as easy as possible for himself, he had to do one thing before he left: get in touch with the leaders at the African National Congress and other groups in the Pan Africanist Congress and tell them what he was planning to do. Pay your respects, keep the line of communication open. Paul, ever the defiant soul, wasn’t enthusiastic about checking with anyone about anything, but Belafonte said he could make it easy for him. “I can introduce you to the powers that prevail to let them know what you’re doing, [and] you can have all the necessary passes.” It would have been easy: a couple of telephone conversations, a clear statement of what he had in mind. Given Belafonte’s recommendation, Paul would have faced few, maybe no, real questions.