Homeward Bound (12 page)

Of course Kooper had heard the record—and had quickly dismissed it because, as he told Paul, he couldn't stand Dylan's exaggerated prairie whine. At this, Paul waved his hand. “Don't listen to the
singing
. Listen to how he plays the guitar!” Paul dropped the needle on his copy of the album, and after a track or two Kooper knew what he was talking about. Rather than strumming the strings like nearly all the other folk guitarists, Dylan was fingerpicking in a driving, bluesy style that gave the songs a crunch forceful enough to make the Kingston Trio's sweaters unravel. Kooper went home a convert, and altered the course of his career accordingly.
*

Paul followed Dylan closely after that, and Dylan's influence on him grew even more powerful when Paul started writing his own songs. There was an intelligence to Dylan, a literary sophistication that came through not just in his performances but also in how he carried himself. He didn't waste time trying to mimic other artists' hits; he sang what he wanted to in exactly the way he wanted to and wound up winning the support of John Hammond, the Columbia Records A&R man whose discoveries included Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Billie Holiday. And Paul was still trying to pump out hit songs for Jerry Landis?

When the Queens College spring term ended in 1962, Paul packed his acoustic guitar and a few other essentials and traveled to California. He explored the cities and visited friends here and there, but he focused much of his time and attention on finding and connecting with the folk clubs and musicians. He'd go to shows and introduce himself to the players and their friends and hang out for a while. If he was lucky, he would find a sofa to sleep on, and then they'd be up all night, drinking wine, smoking dope, and talking politics, poetry, songwriting, and anything else that seemed to matter. He'd play open mics at folk clubs, and if he connected he'd approach the owner and see if he could play a full set. A few days later he'd be doing it again, in a different town—Berkeley one night, San Francisco the next, and so on. By the time he got back to New York to prepare for his next, and final, term at Queens College, he had found a new voice and the stirrings of a new identity.

*   *   *

Many of those late-night talks in California during the summer of 1962 touched on the civil rights movement and the stand-off between the Kennedy administration and the state of Mississippi over African American student James Meredith's right to attend the publicly funded University of Mississippi. The constitutional arguments for integrating the school seemed obvious, but some hearts beat a crooked rhythm in a nation built on slave labor, so Mississippi governor Ross Barnett planted himself in the doorway and swore and swore. For so many of the students and folkies Paul met that summer, just as for the friends he would soon see again at Queens College, the civil rights movement had become the central battle in the war between the nation's past and its future. When the news came on, they'd sit together and watch Barnett and his fellow racists blocking the doorway at UMiss, another reminder of the ugliness of institutionalized prejudice—which, as Paul knew, was also practiced by the national leaders of his own beloved Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity.

It was right there in the fraternity's charter, and they'd all lived with it ever since: the fraternity would not open its doors to black men. But wasn't AEPi supposed to be the house for intellectually enlightened Jewish men? Paul had kept his distance from the fist-in-the-air types, but now he saw something he could do, a significant change he could make within an institution by maneuvering its parliamentary process. With a national meeting of the AEPi chapters scheduled for the end of the summer in Buffalo, Paul launched a nationwide effort to strip the offending rule from the organization's charter. Tapping a few Queens College brothers to help him work the phones and tally votes, he and his friends pushed their issue to the threshold of victory—the frat's active members voted to pass the measure—until a cabal of alumni, known as “grandmasters,” only just managed to tilt the balance toward the “no” votes.

At that point Paul and his brothers could have escalated the fight. They could have organized a walk-out from the convention or gone even further and recruited like-minded chapters into a full-scale revolt, tearing up their AEPi charters and forming their own fraternity, one that stood for equal rights and equal admissions for qualified pledges no matter their racial or religious background. But no one joins a fraternity because they're itching to tear down institutional structures. These were organization men, adherents to Robert's Rules, willing to wait until the times tilted in the right direction.

When James Meredith was finally allowed through the door of the University of Mississippi that fall, Paul performed in Queens College's celebratory folk hootenanny, playing guitar and harmonizing with fraternity brothers Brian Schwartz and Larry Mandelker and an African American student, Pat Dagler, in an ensemble the
Phoenix
called the Freedom Criers. Although the show was set to take place in the campus's central quad, a rainstorm chased it into the cafeteria, where the tidy group—Schwartz wore a three-piece suit, Mandelker buttoned a clean white shirt beneath a blazer, Dagler chose a skirt and blouse, and Paul wore a less formal V-neck sweater and T-shirt—sang impassioned versions of Pete Seeger's “If I Had a Hammer,” “We Shall Overcome,” and all the songs of hope and deliverance a guitar player could sing with his chest out, his mouth wide, and his eyes raised to the light in the sky. Everyone sang along, and cheered for James Meredith, and for President Kennedy and the men in his federal brigade, and also for the movement as a whole, the arc of justice, and the strength of their own voices and convictions.

Some of them were already working for justice and some were about to start. Student body president Ron Pollack invited the civil rights movement's leading activists to use the college as a central organizing spot for the Bus Project, an effort to send sympathetic college students from the northern states to join the effort in the most racist corners of the Deep South. Paul's AEPi brother Mark Levy, past president of the Queens College student body, traveled to Mississippi to help prepare the students' organizational and survival tactics. Classmate and AEPi brother Michael Schwerner signed on to ride, and so did Paul's friend June Tauber, who bused to Prince Edward County, Virginia, for the summer of 1963 to build schools and register voters. When she got back, Tauber spoke at churches and college campuses to recruit more Riders. After one presentation at Queens College, a younger student named Andy Goodman came up to ask her what the experience had felt like. Tauber knew him already: he was a theater student, a sweet-faced young man who was more artistic than political, a soft-spoken outsider who couldn't stand bullies or unfairness of any kind. Face flushed with the overwhelming sense of purpose the work had given her, Tauber gazed into Goodman's eyes and put it as clearly as she could.

“It's the most alive you'll ever feel in your life.”

It was the last time she saw him alive.

 

CHAPTER 7

WHAT ARE YOU SEARCHING FOR, CARLOS DOMINGUEZ

Originally scheduled to graduate with his class in the spring of 1962, Paul opted to stay for another semester. He spent part of the time boning up on the subjects he'd need to get a quick start in law school, the destiny he had predicted for himself since he'd started talking about what his future might hold. When he wasn't at school that fall, he was writing and recording an upbeat novelty called “The Lone Teen Ranger,” a silly song based on the popular
Lone Ranger
TV Western. The tune begins with pistol shots and then a doo-wop-style
Brrrrr-bop-bop-bop-Brrrrrrr-bop-bippy-bippy-bop
vocal to set up a galloping Jerry Landis plaint about the masked TV cowboy who has stolen his girl's affections. “She even kissed the TV set / Oh, it's a crying shame!” It's hard to hear the Wallace Stevens influence here, but a catchy novelty tune could go a long way in those days, so the industry trade journals gave the song a thumbs-up. “Teen Ranger” earned pick-hit status from
Billboard
,
Cash Box
,
Variety
, and a dozen other publications and radio tip sheets. Once again, though, Paul's best efforts couldn't carry him past the lower rungs on the Top 100. “The Lone Teen Ranger” climbed to No. 97 on
Billboard
's Hot 100 in the early weeks of January 1963 and then faded to nothing.

Paul finished his bachelor's degree in January 1963 and then turned his attention to starting law school in the fall. It was an easy call to make, a natural fit for an ambitious young man with the intelligence and work ethic he'd always shown in school. It was also a future he knew Louis and Belle wanted him to pursue. A serious career in a profession that could take a hardworking young man nearly anywhere he might want to go.

Paul certainly overflowed with aptitude for the practice of law. He was fast on the uptake, a poised communicator, seethingly competitive, and naturally argumentative. The only necessary thing he lacked was any real interest in being an attorney. Yet how could he ignore his parents' wishes without at least giving it a try? So he'd long since accepted the law as his destiny: he wrote “Law” in the space beneath his graduation headshot in the Forest Hills High School yearbook where you're supposed to describe your future, and told the admissions office at Queens College that he planned to be a prelaw student. Then the towering marks he received on the law boards clicked the lock once and for all. When Brooklyn Law School accepted his application for the fall of 1963, his future was set—for the time being anyway.

With eight months left before he had to return to the lecture halls, he went back to producing demo recordings, many for the large and enduring Edward B. Marks Music Company. Most were the same bland pop tunes he'd always worked on, but with increasingly recognizable flair. He recorded the folky tunes with a single voice and guitar accompaniment, dressed up others with Latin percussion, still others with an airy bossa nova treatment, and sang one updated Latin traditional, called “Coplas,” entirely in Spanish.

Without thinking about it, Paul had started constructing a bridge between the English major and pop songwriter holed up in the opposing hemispheres of his brain. Forget the lovesick teens, sock hop dance songs, and TV cowboys; forget the billowing strings, guitars, and tinkly pianos. Now he was dreaming songs carved from a voice or two and acoustic guitar, with plainspoken lyrics about the world and the internal riddles of the soul. The first of these songs he took to Midtown was “Carlos Dominguez,” a Spanish-style ballad of an “unhappy man” who wanders the world in search of truth and comes home empty-handed. The gently fingered “The Side of a Hill” draws a wartime parable from the imagined land of Somewhere, where a single cloud weeps upon the grave of a child killed in a battle over something no one can remember.

The more intriguing “Bleecker Street” describes the seamier side of Greenwich Village, the seat of New York City's folk renaissance, in strikingly biblical terms (“it's a long road to Canaan on Bleecker Street”) and with a melodic grace that points to much of what would follow. But the real knockout was the most direct of them all, a protest song so in tune with the times that the event it describes wouldn't happen for another year. So much lay ahead. But in the spring of 1963, “He Was My Brother” stood out only as Paul's best attempt at writing in the journo-poetic tradition renewed by Bob Dylan. And what a great distance it was from the black-and-white TV frontier of “The Lone Teen Ranger” to the crimson dirt of America's Deep South. A reckoning was coming somewhere, but for Paul in Kew Gardens Hills, the most significant collision that year came in the form of Artie Garfunkel.

It was late spring, somewhere in the midst of Paul's transformation into a modern folk singer-songwriter. He has described it again and again—how he was out for a walk in the neighborhood, crossing a bridge over a pond, and looked up to see blond curls and a familiar smile. Oh wow, Artie. Had it been a while? Was it in fact the first time the old friends had shaken hands since they swiveled their tassels and walked out of Forest Hills High School for the last time? That's how they both recall it, and it is a pleasingly romantic vision. The boyhood besties who made it big, fell out, and then by
kairos
were brought together again. Crossing a bridge from opposite directions, lingering for a little while against the railing, ducks adrift below their feet, and then walking off together, back to their brotherhood and to the creative union they were born to serve.

Then again, maybe it didn't happen exactly like that. Maybe they had been in touch throughout their college years, not seeing each other nearly as much as before, but still seeing each other. And maybe they still worked together, too, earning good money for playing pop hits, dance numbers, and a few of their own songs as Tom and Jerry. They definitely performed for some very impressed campers at Camp Washington Lodge where Paul worked in the summer of 1958. They also played the La Salle Junior High School's GO! dance in the fall of 1962. Both were well-received performances, still recalled by the kids who were there, most of whom left with memories of fast-moving shows that seemed quite well rehearsed.

Or maybe it really had been five years, and maybe Paul was both surprised and delighted to hear that Artie had also fallen for folk music, getting heavily into Dylan and the disarmingly beautiful California priestess Joan Baez, whose songs were far more political, and whose voice was so much stronger, than those of Greenwich Village's footloose idol. When Paul pulled out his guitar to play his new songs, Artie tapped his foot to each one. Yet “He Was My Brother” was the one that made his eyes gleam. Inspired by the growing violence directed against civil rights workers in the South, the song tells an imagined story of a Freedom Rider's death at the hands of racists. As personal as it is political, “Brother” packs a punch other protest songs often lack, particularly during the tune's final moments, when Paul's lyrics transform the notion of brotherhood to include all humanity: “He was my brother / And he died so his brothers could be free…”