Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  But Paul was an artist, not a politician. He had no interest in the thoughts of governments, political activists, or opposition organizations. He wasn’t out to subvert anything or to make himself a part of anyone’s movement, and he definitely didn’t want politics to become a barrier to the struggle to make music. But when Belafonte mentioned that phrase, “the powers that prevail,” Paul’s eyes glazed over, just as they did when Quincy Jones, the other music industry activist with the moral gravitas to steer opinion, told him the same thing. Paul didn’t want to put himself, or anyone, in the sights of armed and angry insurgents. As long as no one stood a chance of getting killed, he didn’t need to know anything else. As far as Paul was concerned, the only person in the world with the power to tell him where he could make music or whom he could make music with was Paul Simon. The other musicians always had the power to say no to Paul; that went without saying. But when it came to begging a political leader’s pardon before he did his work, to have to bow down and acknowledge some other person’s authority before he could open his guitar case—well, that wasn’t going to happen. Belafonte figured that out before the end of their telephone call. “I saw right then and there that Paul resisted the idea,” he said. “[He] declared that the power of art and the voice of the artist was supreme, and … to beg for the right to passage was against his instinct.”

  They left the conversation unfinished; they weren’t talking about the same thing. Belafonte’s head was in politics, while Paul’s thinking began and ended with what he’d heard on the “Gumboots” cassette. Paul had originally told Belafonte that he’d wait for him to get in touch with his contacts at the African National Congress before he went anywhere. But the more he thought about it, the less he wanted to wait. He could have called Belafonte to tell him that. His friend was using his own name and reputation to gain Paul the trust of the organizers who could give his project the patina of righteousness. All he had to do was wait just a bit more. And Paul would not wait. He’d made his plans and now he didn’t want to put them off. “It’s like having your dad tell you not to take the car on a date you really want to go on,” he said later, with a teenager’s not-quite-apologetic smile. “You take the car anyway.”

  When news of Paul’s impending visit reached the South African musicians’ union, its leaders were instantly wary. Less than two years earlier they had stood by while Malcolm McLaren, the British impresario who had given the world the Sex Pistols in the mid-1970s, then started his own career in the ’80s, had come to South Africa to record his 1983 album, Duck Rock, with the help of mbaqanga stars, including the Boyoyo Boys, whose song “Puleng” impressed the British provocateur so much he repurposed its most memorable parts to make his hit single (No. 3 UK) “Double Dutch,” for which he claimed full authorship. The Boyoyo Boys sued for copyright infringement and got their money eventually, but only after they chased McLaren through the courts for more than a year. How could the Musicians Union know that this Paul Simon fellow wasn’t planning to steal from them, too? Rosenthal clarified the situation: Simon had committed to paying the musicians (who usually earned about fifteen dollars for a day’s work) three times the two-hundred-dollar daily scale union musicians earned in New York City. Simon had also promised to share writing credit on any song that included any original musical or lyrical contributions from the local musicians. It was the best deal any of them had ever heard of, and it got only better when they considered what would happen when the recording was over. Simon was a big star all over the world; he could introduce South Africa’s music to millions of listeners who wouldn’t otherwise know that they existed. When the leaders of the Musicians Union of South Africa asked their members if they should send Simon an official invitation to come record, the resolution passed by a large margin. Paul Simon, they decided, could turn out to be the best thing ever to happen to South African pop music.

  Paul and Roy Halee got to Johannesburg in early February. During the first week of the sessions in Ovation Studios, Paul and Halee, with Rosenthal there to bridge the gap in languages, cultures, and technical practices, worked with the mbaqanga and Township Jive bands that Paul had heard on the “Accordion Jive” tape. The Boyoyo Boys were there, along with the bands Tau ea Matsehka and Stimela, whose fleet-fingered lead guitarist, Ray Phiri, developed an especially good ear for Paul’s musical sensibilities. As in Jamaica during the “Mother and Child Reunion” sessions fifteen years earlier, the atmosphere was a bit strained at first, particularly among the musicians who didn’t speak English. They ironed out the misunderstandings soon enough,* though, and after that the mood stayed productive and sunny.

  Sometimes Paul would play guitar; other times, he’d slap at a drum or just dance around the studio, his cheeks tilted up to feel the music across his skin. During the first week, the musicians played the songs they had brought in. If Paul had an idea, they’d find ways to make it fall together. Township Jive was by definition crossover music, a blend of South African tribal chants and the speedy rhythms of the city streets; and the adaptations during Paul’s sessions weren’t just musical. When General M. D. Shirinda came in to record the basic track for the song that would become “I Know What I Know” (a variation on some of the music Paul had heard on one of Shirinda’s albums), he came with fifteen members of his family, including the two brothers who played in his band, his five wives (billed on his records as the Gaza Sisters), and a small throng of his children, some of whom were nursing from their mothers, with enough toys to keep them busy. They were still setting up when Paul arrived for the day, eyes open and wondering, aloud, what this was supposed to be. General Shirinda wore a crimson silk shirt with a metallic gray bow tie. His brothers dressed more casually, white shirts and black pants, but the wives wore matching purple, gold, and royal blue dresses with striped teal blouses and yellow, brown, and black headdresses. Paul, who just happened to show up in a crisp teal-and-white button-up, matched the band’s palette. So they all sang and played and danced, the babies and toddlers watching from the corners as the day of work became a party.

  After the first week, Paul told Rosenthal that, during the second week, he wanted to build his own backing band from the short list of players he’d enjoyed working with the most. That would be Ray Phiri on guitar, Bakithi Kumalo on bass, Vusi Khumalo on drums, and a few others. Rosenthal had also booked the Soul Brothers, an mbaqanga band centered on a thick Hammond organ sound, but a few days later their manager, Stanley Corsi, called back to tell Rosenthal that something had gone wrong. When he’d mentioned the Simon sessions to a friend from the African National Congress, the guy had stopped him cold. No one had told them that a white artist from a country that still did business with the apartheid government was recording with black musicians in Johannesburg. Without the ANC’s knowledge or acceptance, he said, the Soul Brothers, who were members of the organization, could not play. Corsi was both apologetic and chagrined. It would have been a great gig for the band; they were all looking forward to it. But they were ANC supporters, and in the spirit of the struggle, they had to line up with their leaders. Rosenthal told Corsi not to worry about it. Instead, he started to worry himself. It had seemed so obvious to Rosenthal that recording sessions were not mentioned in terms of cultural boycott. The other bands had come in, worked, and left without anyone mentioning the boycott or the ANC. Now Rosenthal knew there would be a problem. But they could worry about it later. They were making beautiful music, and they weren’t about to stop now.

  * * *

  The spell Paul fell under in Ovation Studios held through the second week of recording. Jamming over a quick shuffle beat with Ray Phiri, bassist Bakithi Kumalo, and drummer Vusi Khumalo one day, Paul was surprised to hear Phiri reach for a minor chord, a sound that didn’t exist in the South African pop vocabulary. As Phiri told Paul, he’d heard enough of Paul’s earlier songs to know how often he went to that very change, and he figured Paul might like to use it there, too. Paul found a similar connection with Lesotho-raised accordionis
t Forere Motloheloa, whose famo style of music came through the migrant laborers who worked, and sometimes died, in the diamond mines. Their tribal sounds gained the accordions and concertinas of the cities, and the combined tribal/urban sound fed into a driving chord pattern that became the central progression in “The Boy in the Bubble,” a vision of an increasingly mechanized planet. On another day, Phiri’s guitar fired off a simple one-five-four progression, one of the most basic moves in the canons of rock ’n’ roll, folk, and soul, or any form of popular music. But set to an eight-eighths rhythm, a bubbling, mbaqanga bass line, and the mid-neck chittering of another guitar, it became something else entirely—not a meeting of distant cultures as much as a family reunion, a sidewalk collision of strangers who look up to see they’re both wearing the same face.

  The common melodies and rhythms seemed profound, mystical. Even if the music was different, even if they played instruments tuned to different scales and sang in separate languages, they still shared that heartbeat rhythm, that same yearning for melodic flight and resolution. The early rock ’n’ roll twang in mbaqanga, the chukka-chukka pulsing through township jive and rockabilly, the tribesmen’s call and gospel’s response, the Zulu hunter’s whoops with the swoons of doo-wop. If you needed to talk politics, that was in the philosophical core of what Paul was doing—the same thump in every chest, the same dreams and aspirations, the irrepressible tilt toward joy. How could there be a more powerful statement against apartheid? Yet the common sounds also spoke of the centuries of European colonialism, imperialism, and slavery that had been inflicted upon the people of South Africa for more than four hundred years. Founded by Dutch traders in the mid-seventeenth century, the port now known as Cape Town served as a spillway that worked in both directions. While the European traders and colonialists came to collect South Africa’s minerals, fabrics, and crops, they also brought slaves from India, Malaya, and other regions in Africa. The cultures mixed, and all came to bear the mark of the Europeans’ society, too. The colonialists brought along their music, dances, and instruments, which were absorbed, adapted, and adopted by South Africa’s natives.

  The advent of recorded sound made just as large an impact on South African culture at the turn of the twentieth century, and by the 1910s the ragtime and jazz created by the Africans in America echoed back to Africa, where the music lit up the dance halls and house parties like nothing Reuben Caluza, a young Zulu choirmaster with an ear for popular sounds, had ever heard. Caluza had formed the Royal Blue Singers in 1910, intending to perform traditional music. But as his interest in African American spirituals, jazz, and ragtime grew, so did the size of the choir’s audience. Perhaps the greatest cultural synthesist of his day, Caluzo was beloved throughout South Africa, and as other musicians pursued the same cross-cultural weave, their shared sound developed into a style called marabi, which folded African polyphony into the three-chord structure of Western pop forms. Caluzo’s sound, along with his overwhelming success, inspired Solomon Linda, another Zulu bandleader, whose choral band, the Evening Birds, started blending traditional tribal chants with elements of Western music. When Linda combined a hunting chant he’d learned as a child with the banjo and sped-up rhythm he’d heard on American jazz records, the song he’d titled “Mbube” became a smash, selling more copies across Africa than any previous record ever had.

  Who knew that centuries of imperialism could have at least some heartening benefits? And as “Mbube” would prove, the cultural wind blew in both directions. When preeminent South African record label Gallo sent a box of records to the New York offices of Decca Records, in the hope of getting some of them released in the United States, the folk archivist/Decca executive Alan Lomax passed the Evening Birds record to the folk singer Pete Seeger, who recorded it with the Weavers under the title “Wimoweh”—he had misunderstood Linda’s pronunciation of “Mbube” on the original—and they scored the biggest hit of their careers. A dozen years after that, the Tokens found the song, by then affixed with English lyrics and retitled “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and turned the ancient Zulu chant into a million-selling No. 1 hit.

  The revolving popularity of “Mbube” wasn’t always a good thing, particularly for Solomon Linda and his often impoverished family. But it set more than a few American heads spinning, including the teenage Paul Simon’s.

  * * *

  Twenty-five years later Paul no longer had to fake his way to the exotic sounds that caught his ear. Even after the Ovation Studios sessions ended and he returned to New York, he could call back to Johannesburg and get a handful of South Africa’s most distinctive musicians to record with him in New York or London or anywhere they felt like going. Paul paid for everything and made certain they had first-class airfare, rooms in five-star hotels, meals in the best restaurants—whatever they wanted. When they gathered in the Record Plant studio, they did their best to ignore their state-of-the-art surroundings and re-create the loose energy they had all felt in Johannesburg’s Ovation Studios. Often they’d return to tracks they had started in South Africa, adding horns, a heavier drum sound, and more modern synthesizers to Phiri’s majestic three-chord riff tune, which Paul had expanded into “You Can Call Me Al.” They laid down a couple of new songs Paul had written in the thrall of his South African visit, and added horns and synthesizers to enhance some other tunes.

  A month or two after the first New York sessions ended, Paul flew to London to work with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a choral group from the Natal region in South Africa’s northeast. Paul and the group’s leader, Joseph Shabalala, had met in Johannesburg that winter. Many of the musicians who had played on the Ovation Studios sessions were well known in South Africa, but Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo were like superstars. A ten-person group built from members of two Zulu-Swazi families, LBM sang traditional-style songs with an edge that cut through to the modern era. Signed to Gallo Records in the early 1970s, the group became the label’s best-selling act due both to the resounding force of its harmonies and to leader/lead singer Shabalala’s ability to perform his music in a voice as cunning as it was melancholy. During the depths of apartheid, Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo were the people’s reigning tricksters, appearing to sing gently of remote villages and lonely migrant laborers (a job Shabalala held as a younger man) while actually addressing larger injustices. The message didn’t get through to everyone, especially not to English-speaking activists who didn’t understand the Zulu language. When Paul heard their records, he heard something else, too. “Almost like the greatest doo-wop group you could hope to sing with.”

  Gathered in Abbey Road Studios, they set out to record “Homeless,” a chant Paul had written in the group’s style. The original composition was a simple melody over two chords, its two-line verse “He homeless, her homeless / Moonlight sleeping on a moonlight bay.” Shabalala adapted the words of a Zulu wedding song for an introduction, then embroidered the rest with his own Zulu lyrics, the chorale singing the central refrain and then shifting to a call-and-response for a brooding Shabalala lyric about a storm that has torn down homes and left twisted bodies. A lyric that says nothing and everything about the reality of life under apartheid. It took a couple of days for the song to start to feel right, an unsettling process for a master chorus accustomed to nailing it almost immediately. But when Paul heard it coming together, he left the control room and skipped into the circle of singers around the microphone. The singers were astonished. They were brothers and cousins and friends who had been singing together for years. To them, singing together was an act of intimacy, a fraternal ritual. And here was Paul Simon, a white man untouched by the racist brutality they had spent their lives under, stepping among them to add his voice to their chorus. “I am thinking, Who is this guy?” Shabalala said later. “He is my brother. What is he doing in New York? I call him brother.”

  The Graceland album was released in August 1986. It made an immediate impact, compelling Paul’s favorite critics to summon new linguistic powers in or
der to declaim the record’s beauty, ingeniousness, and glorious humanity. The album marched quickly into the Top 10, reversing the ebb tide that had dragged Paul’s new records so far from the action during the first half of the 1980s. Paul debuted the music on Saturday Night Live. After a quick introduction by Robin Williams, the camera swooped over to find Paul with sixteen musicians and singers, all of them dark-skinned, some in suits, others in the electric purples and yellows of modern Africa. The band kept to the back. Paul, in a sporty blue suit with a red-blue-and-white-checked shirt buttoned to the neck, stood at the very front. The ten members of Ladysmith Black Mambazo stood in the middle, lined up in matching golden dashikis and white soft-soled shoes. They began to chant, their voices deep and sweet and spellbinding, all the more so for their dancing, feet moving, knees bending, hands rising, and falling. Paul, his hair glossy under the lights, his eyes sparkling, joined in. “She’s a rich girl, / She don’t try to hide it, / Diamonds on the soles of her shoes.”

  It was an incredible moment. The line of dancing Zulus, then the watery tumble of Phiri’s guitar, the zooming bass, the staccato horns and chattering percussion. And the gold-shirted chorale continuing their ritual dance throughout the song, waving and kicking in unison, swinging their hips. They were singing, too, voices spread across the octaves in a spine-rattling ta-na-na-na-na. And Paul in the front, moving with his black-wood guitar, riding those three chords, singing and glowing, catching an eye offstage, and nearly laughing with delight.

  “And I could say woo, woo, woo / And everybody would know what I’m talking about.”

  Talking about love, talking about music, and talking directly to Richard Milner, the classmate at Queens College Paul had taken aside twenty-five years ago to tell about his miraculous hour of singing doo-wop with the black quartet he’d encountered in the uptown subway station. He was radiant then, too, describing how they’d opened the circle to welcome him in. How they were black and he was white and from a completely different part of town, but how none of that mattered when their voices were in tune like that. Milner recognized that familiar grin on his TV screen twenty-five years later and knew exactly what had put it there.