Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Dozens of the era’s most popular and influential artists, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Kurtis Blow, and the members of Run-DMC, committed to performing on the song, but when Van Zandt sent Paul the lyrics, he refused on the spot. The lyrics he saw (an earlier draft Van Zandt later revised) called out the names of the stars who had performed at the resort, including Paul’s friend Linda Ronstadt, and there was just no way he was going to be a part of that. The next time Van Zandt recalled seeing Paul was at a birthday party for Peter Parcher, an entertainment lawyer who had worked with both of them, and when the guitarist-activist started talking about his experiences with the antiapartheid groups in South Africa, Paul dismissed them all as Communist puppets. The African National Congress, he said, was a front for the Soviet Union, while the Pan-African Congress, the anticolonial organization formed in 1919, was hand in hand with the Chinese government. “Why are you defending that Mandela guy?” both Van Zandt and the writer Dave Marsh recalled Paul saying. “He’s obviously a Communist.” He knew this because he’d been talking to a friend who knew about these things. That friend was Henry Kissinger, the controversial secretary of state to both President Richard Nixon and his successor, President Gerald Ford. For the moment, Paul seemed to have forgotten about his deep loathing of Nixon and everything his administration symbolized in the late 1960s and early ’70s. At that point, Van Zandt figured they should agree to disagree. A proud son of the working-class towns of central New Jersey, the former and future E Street Band guitarist had a distinctive way of saying this. “You and Henry Kissinger,” he said, “can go fuck yourselves.”

  The “Sun City” single was released in the fall of 1985, nearly a year before Graceland emerged, and though it barely cracked the Top 40 in Billboard, it made heads spin across Europe and on American college campuses, where the song’s frontal attack on the apartheid-friendly Reagan administration, along with anyone else amoral enough to jump into bed with the South African government, crystallized the terms of the antiapartheid movement and spurred a rise in antiapartheid activism in America. But Paul had his own statement to make. In the thrall of his rapidly deepening collaboration with Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, he had written “Under African Skies,” a cross-hemisphere vision of music as the essence of all humanity, the deepest and most profound manifestation of the human spirit. Here is the dark-skinned Shabalala walking beneath an African moon while a girl child in the Southwest American city of Tucson, Arizona, her eyes on a different horizon and ears locked on different sounds—the two a world apart but still bound together by music’s power to soothe, to inspire, to transform. With the Tucson-raised Linda Ronstadt as his duet partner, it’s clear that she is the girl Paul has described. Unsurprisingly, Ronstadt sings beautifully, her voice at the height of its power and sensitivity. Yet there’s a sour note hanging over her performance.

  Ronstadt was one of the elite Western entertainers who had played at Sun City. The booking came near Sun City’s opening in 1979, and as per the South African government ruse behind the whole thing, she was told the resort wasn’t actually in South Africa but in a native homeland/independent state called Bophuthatswana, where blacks were welcome to visit the resort and do everything the whites did. Ronstadt accepted the booking and regretted it immediately, issuing a quick apology to the ANC, which forgave her on the spot. Even so, Ronstadt’s history made her an awkward addition to the album. Even though she had never said or done anything before or since that even hinted at her being racially insensitive, her presence on the record looked provocative at best, and at worst a deliberate jab at the ANC/activists’ insistence that politics and appearances were more significant than art.

  But just as Paul refused to ask for political clearance to make music in South Africa, he wasn’t going to apologize to any political or government authority for having done so. “Authoritarian governments on the right, revolutionary governments on the left—they all fuck the artist,” he told the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau. “What gives [politicians and governments] the right to wear the cloak of morality? Their morality comes out of the barrel of a gun.” And what would happen when all those righteous guns started loading for action? What kind of morality would that create? “Let’s keep pushing to avoid the battle. Millions of blacks could get hurt.”

  Still, the struggle against apartheid wasn’t over yet. If anything, it was growing more jagged by the day. And Paul Simon’s multicontinent Graceland tour was about to start.

  * * *

  Planning to take Graceland on the road in 1987, Paul recruited Ray Phiri and the core of his Graceland studio band to be the show’s musical heart, with Ladysmith Black Mambazo on board to re-create its performances on his songs and to perform a few of its own songs without him. To give the shows even more emotional impact, he turned to two long-exiled heroes in the antiapartheid struggle, the jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela and the singer Miriam Makeba, both of whom had left their benighted homeland more than twenty-five years earlier to pursue music careers. Paul had known the pair of them for some time: Makeba was close to Harry Belafonte, Masekela had shared the Monterey Pop Festival stage in 1967, and both were sympathetic to him and to the Graceland album, even as other antiapartheid activists had condemned it. Pledging that the show would be less about him than the culture of South Africa, Paul dubbed the tour Graceland: The African Concert, and sketched a six-month itinerary that would take the group from Atlanta to Zimbabwe (formerly Ian Smith’s Rhodesia), as close to South Africa as they could get without actually playing in South Africa.

  The presence of Makeba and Masekela girded the tour’s political bona fides, but given the ongoing controversies with the ANC and so much of the rest of the antiapartheid movement, Paul went back to South Africa in early January 1987 to iron out details with the musicians and try to figure out how to keep the Graceland tour from becoming overwhelmed by politics and protests. Here he got in touch with Johnny Clegg, the co-leader of the racially integrated South African band Juluka. Indeed, if anyone knew how complex the dynamics of the African National Congress and its cultural ban could be, it was the most famous white (honorary) member of South Africa’s Zulu tribe.

  Born in Britain to an English father and a Rhodesian mother, Clegg was also Jewish—his mother’s family had immigrated to Africa from Poland. Like Paul, Clegg had wanted nothing to do with Judaism when he was growing up, even after spending an early year in Israel. Relocated to South Africa as a grade-schooler, he developed a love for Celtic music during his early adolescence, then fell just as hard for Zulu music and dance when he was fourteen. A friendly black street guitarist took the youngster under his wing, and it was only a matter of months before the South African police first arrested Clegg for consorting with the natives after curfew. Two years later, Clegg met a Zulu migrant worker/musician named Sipho Mchunu. They made themselves into a traditional Zulu duo, performing tribal songs and dances that became increasingly original, and increasingly Celtic-influenced, as Clegg and Mchunu found their unified voice.

  The different colors of the partners’ skin did not escape the attention of the local authorities, and soon the police took to crashing their shows with attack dogs and canisters of tear gas, doing their best to scatter the crowd and silence the multicultural music. Mchunu and Clegg grew accustomed to having 30 to 40 percent of their concerts either canceled or shut down in mid-performance by the authorities. For their white fans in the cities and their black ones in the townships, however, that made the music only that much more precious and the musicians more heroic. The group thrived, gaining additional racially diverse members and changing their name to Juluka.

  Clegg had always been an activist—it was impossible to run a biracial band in South Africa without being an activist. He was also an avid student of social anthropology, earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Witwatersand, then joining the faculty as a lecturer. Clegg understood the social and political dynamics of apartheid, and had bu
ilt a life and career that stood in opposition to the notion that races and cultures should be walled off from one another. Yet his lessons on the unintended effects of the African National Congress’s cultural boycott came in 1979, when Juluka scored a surprise hit in England with Clegg’s song “Scatterlings of Africa.” Showered with offers to perform on television and in London’s concert halls, Clegg, Mchunu, and the other members of Juluka went north, eager to build their audience and take their message of racial inclusion to Europe and beyond—but that was before the ANC, working with the London branch of the British Musicians’ Union, stepped in.

  The more politically progressive communities in England had boycotted exports from South Africa ever since the white government wrote apartheid into the nation’s constitution in the 1950s. Labor unions and cultural organizations joined the struggle with little prompting, and by the end of the 1970s the British Musicians’ Union enforced the principles of the ANC cultural boycott with singular determination. Given the apartheid government’s persistent attempts to present its state-sponsored arts groups and sports teams as symbols of a healthy, not-the-least-bit-monstrous society, the British union’s vigilance paid off. No matter who had invited a South African group to perform in England, for whatever reason, the show wouldn’t go on anywhere that a member of the union or its partners was working. Union members would walk off the job and return with picket signs. The ANC’s cultural boycott would be enforced to the letter.

  The problem was that the letter of the ANC’s rule didn’t always represent the spirit of the antiapartheid movement. So when Clegg and Juluka went to England in 1979 to promote “Scatterlings of Africa,” the fact that they were a racially mixed group whose existence was an affront to the apartheid government didn’t matter. They were from South Africa and thus would not be allowed to perform. Once again, Juluka’s shows were broken up. Their television appearances and concerts were all canceled. Eventually the group left England without playing a single note for anyone. As one writer said, the British ANC succeeded where South Africa’s racist government failed: it had successfully silenced Juluka.

  Sitting with Paul in his Cape Town hotel suite in early 1987 to describe the complexities of cultural boycott, Clegg launched into a detailed analysis of the antiapartheid movement’s politics, and how each chapter of the ANC had its own way of interpreting and enforcing the boycott, and how you might be welcomed heartily into one country only to be treated like a pariah in the next. The South African musician got through only a few minutes before Paul, his face gone blank, asked him to stop. “This is very complicated,” he told Clegg. “I can see that you’re talking. I can hear words coming out of your mouth. But I have no idea what you’re saying. Hang on a sec—I’ve got to smoke a doobie.” Paul jumped to his feet, went into his bedroom, came out with a joint, took a hit, and handed it to Clegg. They passed it between them until it was finished, and then Paul, looking revived, asked Clegg to continue. As Clegg remembered, “I started again, and he asked me very penetrating questions about how one navigates through this.”

  There was plenty of navigating to do. The United Nations antiapartheid committee had placed Paul on its 1987 list of South African boycott violators, putting him in league with the lowest of the racist sympathizers. Understanding how much trouble this would create for the tour, Paul sent a letter to Joseph Garba, the Nigerian ambassador who chaired the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid, and on the eve of the tour’s February 1 opening in Rotterdam, Paul stopped in London to hold a press conference. He started the session by reading the letter he’d just sent to Garba, describing himself as “an artist completely opposed to the apartheid system in South Africa” who was “working in my field toward this goal [of ending the racist system].” Clarifying that he had refused all offers to perform in South Africa and would continue to do so until apartheid had been dismantled, Paul felt he’d smoothed the waters with the UN and ANC officials enough to report that they had cleared him of whatever wrongdoing he was accused of, and thus he would be free to take the Graceland tour around the world without risking condemnation. But when a reporter noted that United Nations sources had referred to his letter as an apology, Paul bristled. “I’ve got nothing to apologize for!” he insisted. The ANC responded with its own statement, declaring that Paul’s “apology” had made it possible for them to “welcome his commitment to support the cultural boycott and total isolation of apartheid South Africa.”

  Paul’s refusal to appear even a little bit contrite, if only for miscommunicating with the leadership of the antiapartheid movement, blew back on him immediately. Amer Araim, the senior political affairs officer at the UN Centre Against Apartheid, dismissed Paul’s original letter as “cleverly worded” and described his London press conference as consisting of “funny statements” and “nonsense.” And Joseph Garba, no longer convinced that the musician’s intentions were entirely honorable, sent a letter back to Paul spelling out the official terms of the United Nations’ cultural boycott of South Africa, and informing him that until he could say that he understood and was willing to respect the rules of the code, his name would stay on the violators’ list. Paul responded in some satisfactory way: the committee removed his name from the list three days later, citing his commitment not to perform in South Africa, which he had established in his first letter, but the anger in the antiapartheid movement persisted.

  As Linda Ronstadt had discovered, all they wanted was an apology. They didn’t even care about the money the boycott violators took home with them. As long as you said you were sorry, you could keep every dime. They cared just as little about what you said to clear the books. As long as you acknowledged their authority and said you were sorry for whatever you’d done, everything else was forgiven. But Paul would not, could not, do that, no matter how righteous the cause. He would bow to no one’s authority, particularly when it came to his music—and once again there would be a price to pay.

  As plans for the first months of the Graceland tour came together, Paul and his advisers decided to make the final leg of the journey, an eight-stop swing through North America during the summer, into a series of benefit shows to raise money for a variety of African and African American causes. The tour’s promoters, along with Miriam Makeba, proposed leading off the charity shows with a free concert at the New York headquarters of the United Nations. To gain support from inside the United Nations, Paul’s tour managers recruited the United Nations African Mothers Association (UNAMA), an advocacy group created by the spouses of the UN’s African ambassadors. But while Evelyn Garba, wife of Joseph Garba, had at first been eager to participate, her enthusiasm faded when she realized how bitterly Paul had feuded with her husband. That ended UNAMA’s cooperation before it began, and prompted Joseph Garba and the rest of the Special Committee Against Apartheid, none of them happy that Paul’s representatives had seemed to attempt an end run around them, to restate their opposition to Paul and the tour. This directed even more attention to the antiapartheid demonstrators massing outside the doors of London’s Royal Albert Hall, where Paul was set to play six nights in early April. Unlike Johnny Clegg and Juluka, Paul was too well known, and the public demand for the shows too overwhelming, for the protesters to shut him down entirely. Still, their shouts and anti-Graceland pamphlets cast a shadow over the entire week.

  Paul had supporters, too, including some of the antiapartheid movement’s most influential figures. The Rev. Allan Boesak, who led Children of Apartheid, had been a prominent figure in South Africa since he founded the United Democratic Front in 1983, spent a day in New York to hail Paul and the Graceland tour’s campaign to raise world awareness of apartheid’s many abuses, particularly on the country’s black children. The archbishop Desmond Tutu felt exactly the same way, Boesak said. Asked for comment, the UN’s Amer Araim was quick to point out that the antiapartheid committee basically agreed. “But Simon should reply to the letter of the chairman of the Special Committee. If he would do that, we have no problem wit
h his tour or any of his activities.” A reply to a letter. Just that. “We think the whole episode could be closed when he has made a proper formulation … to the Special Committee,” wrote ANC secretary of culture Barbara Masekela in her part of a special issue of the American news magazine Africa Report.

  * * *

  Again, there were things Paul wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t write the letter. And though he had been generous, to a point, with songwriting credits for the African musicians, he didn’t do the same for the two American bands with whom he’d worked on two of the album’s other tracks.

  It was galling, particularly for Los Lobos, the critically beloved Los Angeles–based Mexican American group whose debut album with Warner Bros., 1984’s How Will the Wolf Survive?, had earned them a national audience and the admiration of their label mate from the Upper West Side of New York City. As saxophonist Steve Berlin recalls, he got a call from Warner Bros. president Lenny Waronker saying how big a fan of the group Paul had become, and that he really wanted to record a track with them when he was in LA in a few days, Berlin was delighted. He’d grown up in Philadelphia; he knew all about Paul’s music. The band’s other members, though, David Hidalgo, Cesar Rosas, Louie Perez, and Conrad Lozano, came from a culture defined by Mexican and Latino music. “They knew ‘Sound of Silence,’ but they really couldn’t care less,” Berlin says. Warner Bros. Records ran family-style in those days: the lobby was full of musicians and friends; everyone’s office, including those of Waronker and Mo Ostin, had an open door and a warm welcome. So if Waronker asked them to play a session for another member of the Warner Bros. family, they were there, no questions asked. So the band left it to their manager to sort out the details, and when the day came, they went to Amigo Studios in the San Fernando Valley ready to work.

  Paul was there with engineer Roy Halee, who showed them around the studio, but Paul was surprisingly chilly, giving the most perfunctory of hellos before vanishing into the control booth, where he could peer down through a window and communicate through the studio intercom, lending him an omniscient voice-from-the-skies effect as he directed the band through the day. Not that he had much in the way of specific directions to give. He launched the session by telling the group to “just play something,” leaving them to meander from one unstructured jam to the next, churning away for five or fifteen or twenty minutes at a time before the intercom would crackle. “Nope, that isn’t it,” Paul would say. “Try a six-eight. Nope, try a blues groove.” They’d spend the next ten or fifteen minutes on a twelve-bar blues piece only to hear the static and then Paul’s “Eh, no, that ain’t it, either. Try something else.” Ten minutes later and—“Nope, nope, nope. Sorta close but still not there. What else you got?” And on it went, much to the mounting anger of the band members, none of whom was the least bit interested in coming back for a second day of this kind of monkey-in-a-cage shit. How the fuck did this guy have no ideas? What the hell was this supposed to be, anyway? Let’s just get our gear and go home. Berlin made a quick call to Waronker, telling him that it wasn’t working and that now the guys were in revolt and had no intention of returning. Waronker begged Berlin to get the band back into the studio. “You’ve gotta get them back, you gotta hang in there, we gotta make this happen.” Berlin was wary, but again, family was family; he’d get the band to come back. Waronker gushed with relief. “I swear I’ll make it up to you,” Berlin recalled hearing him say.