Homeward Bound (18 page)

*   *   *

In June, Paul reported to Levy's recording studio on Bond Street, where CBS staff producers Reginald Warburton and Stanley West oversaw the recording of his first solo album. The sessions couldn't have been simpler: Paul played guitar and sang, and if it seemed necessary he'd tap his foot for percussion. On the EP, only “The Sound of Silence” and “He Was My Brother” repeat from
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
. The rest of the songs had emerged during his months in England. And if the bare-bones production seems flat compared to the rerecordings that would come, it's fascinating to realize that beyond the pair of civil rights tunes and the unfunny takedown of Bob Dylan that Paul called “A Simple Desultory Philippic,” all
Songbook
's narrators and characters either confront or symbolize the meaninglessness of individual existence.

The suicide at the center of “A Most Peculiar Man” makes such little impression on the world that his neighbors have next to no idea he was even alive. The heartbroken narrator of “I Am a Rock” has chosen to be just as isolated, and the narrator of “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall” not only can't tell the difference between truth and illusion, but can't recognize his own image in the mirror. “Patterns” compares the singer's life to a rat stuck in a maze: “And the pattern never alters / Until the rat dies.” The antiwar song “The Side of a Hill” describes the accidental killing of a child in a bullet-pocked land, while “April Come She Will” and “Leaves That Are Green” portray the crumbling of love and life as being as inescapable as the changing of the seasons. Still, none is quite as cutting as “Kathy's Song,” the most obviously autobiographical song on the album. Here Paul speaks directly to Kathy Chitty, the sole source of truth in his life. Without her presence, his intelligence, his talent as a musician and songwriter, his knowledge, his thoughts, and his beliefs fall to nothing. Alone, he peers into the void of a rainy night, notices the water dripping across the windowpane, and sees himself. “I know that I am like the rain,” he sings. “There but for the grace of you go I.”

So sad, and yet so afire with energy, ambition, and self-assurance. A regular in the Soho clubs, particularly at the just-opened Les Cousins, a basement club beneath a restaurant on Greek Street that became a rallying point for musicians, Paul continued honing his image, which drew even more attention to his songs and performances. “He was creating a package,” recalled fellow musician Harvey Andrews. “The little man with the chip on his shoulder, who was lonely, lost, and in need of mothering. And he was going to be immensely successful.” Paul had always imagined he'd be the reigning champion of something, but the more songs he wrote, the more his
Five to Ten
success swept through the increasingly packed clubs he played, the more confident he became. When Brentwood Folk Club co-manager David Rugg booked him to open a theater concert in Chelmsford for the popular American folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie, Paul took the gig happily, but showed up that afternoon beneath an angry little cloud that he took straight to Rugg. Now Paul insisted that he be the headliner; he had constructed an entire argument about it. Obviously, Sainte-Marie was an out-of-towner. He, on the other hand, was the local hero with a loyal fan base. Clearly, Sainte-Marie should open for
him.
Rugg could only stare. Sainte-Marie was an international star; the club had sold out the four-hundred-capacity Shire Hall on the strength of her name. So no. Of course not. Paul didn't push the point much further, but the moment resonated. “He was very friendly, and an outgoing sort of person,” Rugg says. “But he had these ideas about where he was going and how important he was.” And if you didn't pick up on that by yourself, Paul wasn't shy about telling you all about it. “If I'm not a millionaire by the time I turn thirty,” he told suburban Liverpool folk club manager Geoff Speed, among many others, “I shall be very disappointed.”

Paul didn't like to be disappointed. If someone in an audience was talking too loudly while he was playing, he'd stop midverse and deliver a scolding. If someone had the gall to heckle him, he'd shout him or her down with arctic efficiency. When he got to a scheduled gig at Soho's Les Cousins club only to discover that the blues singer Long John Baldry had also been booked for his slot, both musicians went after each other, their ensuing argument was so loud and bitter that people still talk about it. When manager Graham Wood managed to book Paul to play “I Am a Rock” on the hit pop music TV show
Ready, Steady, Go!
a few months later, Paul responded to the producer's last-minute instruction to play only half the song—the live show was running long—by stubbornly performing the entire tune, thus forcing headliner P. J. Proby to cram an abbreviated version of his current smash, “Let the Water Run Down,” over the show's closing credits.

Among a set of musicians whose shared ethic valued humility and understatement, Paul's audacity amused some and infuriated others. Bert Jansch, perhaps the most influential British guitarist of the mid-1960s, shared stages with Paul on many occasions and had more than a few opportunities to hear him predict the glories of his own future. “Very American! He used to say stuff like ‘Oh I'm gonna be really big one day and make lots of money, I'll invite you all over to America!' He did of course make it very big, but never asked us over,” he said. Some musicians found nothing to like about Paul, as guitarist Ralph McTell recalled. “He had a reputation as a miserable little man and was not popular among the other musicians.” Things would get only more strained as Paul's fortunes rose due to the help of a generous friend whose grasp of business wasn't nearly as sharp as Paul's—but that was still a year or two off in the distance.

Still, Paul could also be remarkably generous, as both an informal guitar tutor and a songwriter with a deep understanding of musical and lyrical structure. If another musician needed help getting to a show, Paul would volunteer his car and his own chauffeur services. And when he started earning headliner's wages, he would end a long night of performing and jamming at Les Cousins or the Troubadour by gathering up every musician in sight and leading them to the Golden Egg diner, where he would treat everyone to an early breakfast. He spent a third of his ninety-pound advance for his solo album from CBS-UK to produce an album for Piepe flatmate and fellow American songwriter Jackson C. Frank, who Paul thought deserved a much larger audience than he'd been attracting. The sessions weren't easy. Frank, who had nearly died in a school fire when he was a child, was so terrified of the recording studio that he would play only behind a barrier that blocked the control room window's view of him at the microphone. Paul took the time to ease him through the sessions, paid cash to sign the songwriter to a publishing deal with Eclectic Songs, and then made sure the record got released in England. Frank's record didn't find an audience, but Paul's generosity continued through the decades, especially after his friend's emotional troubles became debilitating. Paul didn't show that side of himself to everyone. And sometimes the side he did show made it seem impossible for such kindness and compassion to exist within the consciousness of the same man.

*   *   *

Committed to staying in England through the summer, Paul was on hand for the release of CBS-UK's four-song distillation of
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
tracks in June, and also for the release of his first solo album,
The Paul Simon Songbook
, when it emerged a few weeks later. The album was fronted with a photo of Paul and Kathy sitting on a cobblestone street next to the Thames, both playing with children's toys. The picture could be interpreted in several ways, either as a romantic portrait of young love or as a reference to the famous shot of Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo on the cover of
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.
It might also have been a parody of Dylan's cover, or just an image Paul dreamed up thinking it would look cool in a record store. The liner notes on the back open with a self-lacerating essay by Paul that leads with the admission that “I start with the knowledge that everything I write will turn and laugh at me.” That thought introduces a brutal conversation between Paul's creative and critical voices, both answering to the same name, with the more vulnerable voice in boldface.

PAUL:
(Reading notes of LP)
Who wrote this junk?

PAUL:
You know very well who did it.

PAUL:
(In mock astonishment)
Don't tell me it was you.

More self-directed criticism follows. Paul calls himself a phony; he dismisses the older songs as juvenilia (“I don't believe in them as I once did”), then concocts another fantasy dialogue, this one between himself and a poppy seller. Next comes a song-by-song analysis by Piepe, who shares none of Paul's stated antipathy toward his work. Most of the mainstream British music publications ignored the
The Paul Simon Songbook
altogether, though
Melody Maker
's critic took the time to dismiss “I Am a Rock” as reheated Dylan (“Sorry, this guy is trying to take off Bob Dylan in every way”). Still, the British folk publications covered the album, most of them in generous terms. Those reviews helped attract more folkies to Paul's club shows, while his manager, Graham Wood, tried to interest the mainstream music magazines by emphasizing Simon's connections to Dylan and the Greenwich Village scene in New York. Wood's work paid off, and a few reporters started to pay attention. The
New Musical Express
's Keith Altham went to Paul (“A small, dark, intense man from Greenwich Village”) to ask about Dylan and Joan Baez and then quoted him extensively in the resulting story. Unsurprisingly, Paul had more praise for Baez, who he said had succeeded “naturally,” while Dylan had been borne up by a tidal wave of publicity. And when good old Ewan MacColl lashed out at Dylan in September, Paul played both sides of the fight, agreeing that his fellow American's lyrics were lousy (“rehashed Ginsberg”), while also arguing that Dylan had “written some very good songs.”

Paul's attitude toward publicity was simple. If he had an opportunity to promote his work or himself, he took it. It got tricky only when he needed to explain to others how he'd somehow become a party to such naked displays of self-promotion. Performing at the Red Cow in Cambridge soon after his
Ready, Steady, Go!
appearance, Paul turned his TV spot into a joke, a comedy of errors whose central benefit was that it gave him an opportunity to call cohost Cathy McGowan a “nit” on the air. He had done no such thing, of course—his rebellion had been stealing airtime from the hapless P. J. Proby—but the club audience howled like mad at the story, then redoubled when Paul fretted that he would no longer be able to play “I Am a Rock” now that it had been corrupted by its appearance on a mainstream pop music television show.

When Artie came to spend a few weeks that summer, he moved into Piepe's flat, too, and he and Paul set to crafting duo arrangements for his new songs, working out a solid set of tunes they could perform together in the London clubs. Feeling penned in the apartment, they took to rehearsing at the launderette down the street. The first time, they came with their laundry and played around while their shirts and pants and socks spun behind the glass. But when they heard the ringing acoustics in the tile-and-steel-filled storefront, they went back the next afternoon with nothing but Paul's guitar. When the neighborhood ladies started applauding, they made it a daily ritual, spreading the word among their friends, telling everyone that even if they knew Paul's songs and had heard him play, they really needed to hear him play with Artie at the launderette; it was a completely different experience. Friends started to show up, and it wasn't long before they were telling more people about what they came to call the “launderette sessions.” They ran like open rehearsals, with Paul and Artie playing through a few songs the crowd already knew, then working on something new for a while, then performing the new arrangement. Most days, they went on for two or three hours, with customers and friends cycling in and out. Most of the customers came to adore the boys, even if some of Paul's friends thought it was a bit, you know,
too much
. “Typical brash Americans, I thought initially,” says Hans Fried, a fixture on the London folk scene. “Even though I was sort of bohemian I still had a certain amount of that English reserve in me.”

Paul started bringing Artie to shows he'd booked as a solo act, sometimes demanding that the club pay a premium for having the duo rather than a solo performer. The two always did well, and it wasn't long before audiences began to show up expecting Artie to be at Paul's side. One night near the end of Artie's stay in September 1965, Paul started gabbing about the new pop hybrid that people called folk-rock music. “So you have the Byrds doing Bob Dylan, Manfred Mann doing Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan doing Bob Dylan.” The crowd tittered, and Paul kept on because, wouldn't you know it, their own producer, Tom Wilson, also the producer of Dylan and so many others, turned out to be the guy who was behind the whole thing. He had even proposed that Simon and Garfunkel do some folk-rock, and they had agreed to give the new genre a try. They weren't selling any folk records, right? So, Paul continued, they had taken the lyrics of the song “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” and “we put it into a beat thing. So we'll give you a taste of that.” He played a few descending minor chords, and together he and Artie sang the familiar lyric, only now with a bluesy edge that made the once guilt-racked lover seem thoroughly unrepentant. He wasn't mourning anything—just gathering the loot and getting out of town before the cops showed up.

A few people laughed after the first line or two, and more giggles struck when Artie's voice cracked, purposely it seemed, on his high notes. So they were making fun of folk-rock? Maybe so. And maybe that was why Paul strummed a few bars of “Twist and Shout” afterward, then proclaimed “Lahhhk a Rollun' Stone” in his best dull-witted Dylan voice. A few people laughed at that, too. But none of this is as significant, or as surprising, as the one thing the audience did, with no hesitation: they applauded the song as if it weren't a joke after all, as if blending a folk sensibility with rock 'n' roll urgency actually sounded pretty good, as if Tom Wilson might be on to something after all.