Homeward Bound (21 page)

Dressed up in folk-rock's Beatles-sharp threads, the songs sparkle here and snarl there, at times leaping in unexpected directions and then veering back to Dylan-worn paths. A few songs (“Kathy's Song,” “April Come She Will,” and “Anji”) are left in purely acoustic form, but given Paul's years of studio experience, it's not surprising to hear how winningly the other songs incorporate the new sounds. Perhaps the most glaring exception is the jangling harpsichord that overwhelms the sweet melancholy of “Leaves That Are Green.” “Blessed,” by contrast, profits enormously from the electric guitars that wail and chime in the space between the circular drum pattern and the singers' fierce harmonies. The contemplative “A Most Peculiar Man” makes do quite nicely with light percussion, a mostly unheard electric guitar played well beneath the chords held on a quietly seething organ. The guitars, organ, bass, and drums give “I Am a Rock” a reined-in variation on Dylan's “Positively 4th Street” sound, while the snapping snare, organ riffs, and a growing bass riff add a sooty funk to “Richard Cory.”

Thematically, the album covers the sweep of Paul's previously established subjects. “Blessed” contrasts the blessings Jesus bestowed upon the powerless and impoverished with images of the deprivation and decadence so common in London's Soho district, while “Kathy's Song” identifies the singer's lover, rather than God, as the sole source of grace in his life. But even love is something less than pure. The larcenous narrator in “Somewhere They Can't Find Me” seems quite comfortable trading his girlfriend for the spoils of a liquor store heist. “Somewhere” conveys a sense of wicked fun, what with all that creeping down the alley and flying down the highway and leaving the cops scratching their heads, but it's still of a piece with the bleak lives described in “A Most Peculiar Man” and “Richard Cory,” both of which read like case studies in the existentialist's handbook. The nameless suicide at the center of “Peculiar” takes form only by dint of his self-destruction. And while the high-flying heir Mr. Cory (whose tale is borrowed from a poem of the same name by Edwin Arlington Robinson) is renowned for his wealth, looks, and elegant manners, the only thing that truly humanizes him is the bullet he shoots through his head.

“I Am a Rock” portrays the same internal despondency as the repurposed “Sound of Silence,” and together the collection of songs creates a loosely interlocking narrative that bonds the writer's personal angst with the overarching social and philosophical concerns of the moment. To the children of the Cold War, now coming of age in a decade that still seemed so full of possibility, the desperate love at the core of “Kathy's Song” took on the gravitas of philosophy, while the sociological abstractions in “Blessed” felt as brokenhearted as a tale of lost love. It was as if Paul's most intimate sorrows, fears, and hopes had come to express the feelings of an entire generation.

*   *   *

Released on January 17, 1966,
*
Sounds of Silence
(the plural underscoring that it's an album of songs) jumped immediately onto the
Billboard
album charts, peaking at No. 21. Not quite a chartbuster, but still light-years beyond
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM.
And in an industry still defined by singles, it was far more significant that “Homeward Bound,” released just two days after
Sounds of Silence
(though it wasn't included on the album), catapulted its way up
Billboard
's Hot 100, hitting No. 5 on April 2, before falling back to make room for “I Am a Rock,” which jumped into the top three. The back-to-back-to-back hits quickly established Simon and Garfunkel as incisive social commentators, yearning romantics, and prophets of alienation and disillusionment. They were, in the words of their official Columbia Records bio, “rather intense, though hardly solemn, young men with literary interests that ranged from Joyce to ‘kids who write on subway walls.' … They are both twenty-three, direct, witty and very hip.”

The full-page ads Columbia put into the trade magazines to promote
Sounds of Silence
and “Homeward Bound” were dominated by a shot of the duo huddled together in matching pea coats and striped scarfs, peering down at the lens with cigarettes smoldering between their fingers. Artie's blond curls and soft eyes give him a poetic air, while Paul's hooded eyes and the debonair pose he strikes with his cigarette suggest a louche Austrian count, a young man with a castle and personal problems. None of Columbia's bios or press releases hint at their Tom and Jerry days, or at the quantity of songs Paul wrote, produced, and released under different names. Speaking to the
San Francisco Chronicle
's Ralph J. Gleason, the first American music critic at a major newspaper to write seriously about rock 'n' roll, Paul told a version of the breakthrough story of “The Sound of Silence” that made it seem that he was completely unaware of the single's existence until he stumbled upon a copy of
Cash Box
in Copenhagen and discovered that his song was in the Top 10. “How could this happen?” he said, adopting the gee-whiz voice of an artist-naif. “It was quite an experience.” Gleason was impressed. “These two young men are excellent songwriters and fascinating performers,” he wrote. “They ring changes on almost all the top people in the ‘New Sounds' and ‘Top 40' field.”

Touring as much as Artie's class schedule would allow, the two worked their way through the college field houses and concert halls, and also drew crowds to theaters and clubs in major cities coast to coast. Reviewing Simon and Garfunkel's first nonclub appearance in New York, an afternoon show at Columbia University's McMillan Hall on May 1, 1966, the
Times
's music critic Robert Shelton (the same fellow who had accompanied Dylan to the notorious Gerde's Folk City show two years earlier) began his rave review by noting how the duo seemed to speak “to, and perhaps for, their student audiences.” Back in the Bay Area a few weeks later, they played a May 28 show at the Berkeley Community Theatre, where the already enthusiastic Ralph J. Gleason noted the “almost biblical morality” of Paul's songs, with “their concern for the fundamentals of love and justice and beauty and salvation in the midst of corruption, [which] reflects the attitude of much of the New Generation.”

Simon and Garfunkel came on like musicians-artists-statesmen, two young men in dark suits and ties, singing from an austere stage whose two microphones, two glasses of water, and single stool underscored the stark heart of their songs. Onstage, they took their music and themselves seriously, both lasering into the heart of each note and syllable. They brooked no interruptions or shouted requests. Offenders suffered the lash of one or the other's furious tongue, then were gang-stomped by the crowd's laughter and applause. You idiot. You're supposed to pay attention; these songs are broadsides from the heart of the youth movement. The action on the streets, the life of the mind, the writing on the motherfucking wall. “Pop music is catching up with film as the leading medium in which to make some comment about the world for a large audience, just as film caught up with literature,” Paul told the
New York Times
's Shelton. “Pop music is the most vibrant force in music today,” Artie told
Time
magazine. “It's like dope—so heady and alive.”

They could be funny onstage, and even self-effacing, but as the
New Musical Express
proclaimed to British fans, Simon and Garfunkel were rock 'n' roll's first intellectual sophisticates. “Their intellectual prowess and less-than-consuming interest in music separate them from the ‘normal' performer,” wrote Tracy Thomas, who went on to (mis)identify Artie as an architecture student, which only used to be true, and Paul as a writer who only sort of dabbled in music. “No matter how successful we are,” Paul told her, “I'll quit in a couple of years.”

It would be harder to quit than Paul thought. Riding high on the charts, higher still on reams of critical acclaim, and from the
right
critics, and traveling on jets and in limos to sing truth to power, he would have to figure out where to store the sacks of money people kept hurling their way. Back in London in the spring, Paul couldn't help talking about the absurd numbers he kept seeing on the checks they got each night, even giving the
New Musical Express
's Keith Altham a specific figure. “Do you know how much we earned last night in a concert in America? $4,300!” And that was just one hour-long show. “Art might turn to me after a couple of concerts and say, ‘We earned $13,000 this weekend.' I kinda shrug and say, ‘That's a good two days' work!'” But then he'd shrug and roll his eyes, because what difference did it really make? Nothing meaningful. “I just can't grasp it—it means nothing to us.”

*   *   *

In the early fall of 1965, when Artie was studying mathematics in New York and Paul was an up-and-coming folksinger in England, Paul went to the London Palladium to meet the Seekers, a pop-folk vocal group that had relocated to England after making several hits in their native Australia. Paul had heard from the group's publicist, Allan MacDougall, that the group was looking for material. With the electric “Sound of Silence” still weeks away from being released (or even entering his awareness), Paul was happy to pitch a song or two to a group riding high on three straight hit records. The Seekers' Bruce Woodley, tall, bespectacled, and as authoritative as a successful young musician of the mid-1960s could be, handed Paul his guitar and said, “Sing!” Paul did just that,
la-la
-ing a song that bounded genially through some interesting chord changes. Woodley and his bandmates were impressed. Come back with some lyrics, he said, and that's something we can work with. Three weeks later Paul returned with a song now called “Someday, One Day,” and the Seekers recorded it as their next single.

The song took the Seekers to No. 11 on the UK pop charts, but Woodley, who also wrote songs for the group, didn't wait that long to ask Paul to collaborate on another tune or two. Their first attempt, a yearning love song called “I Wish You Could Be Here,” also got tapped as a single for the group. Next Woodley pulled out an upbeat, pop-smart number that lacked only a set of lyrics, and Paul said he'd be glad to scratch something out. He composed lyrics for a song that came to be called “Red Rubber Ball,” a cheerfully bitter sendoff to a lover who was never all that into him in the first place. “The roller coaster ride we took is nearly at an end,” he proclaims. “I bought my ticket with my tears, / It's all I'm gonna spend.” When the dawn lights the horizon, the rising sun is as bright and carefree as a child's playground ball. Another swing, another home run. That's how it struck Woodley, who figured he had just heard another Seekers single. When Paul offered to publish the song through his own company, Woodley shrugged and said sure. They'd share the writers' royalties fifty-fifty either way. They went to a studio to record a demo, and Paul sent it to Eclectic Music's office in Barry Kornfeld's living room on Waverly Street in Greenwich Village.

“The Sound of Silence” pulled Paul home after that, but Woodley came to New York in early January 1966, and Paul met him at Kornfeld's place. After a bit of mood-enhancing conviviality, they got to work. Woodley presented a simple riff with a melody built on an inverted C chord, and when Paul started playing and
la-la
-ing a melody, he repeated the word
cloudy … cloudy
. In search of a good third chord, he fingered a diminished F-sharp, which jolted the tune into a new, if similarly relaxed progression through a misty northern California afternoon. The smoke in the air put them in a trippy mood, a tableau of finger-painted smiles, mind-bending sun breaks, and low-hanging puffs whispering
why
? When it was done, they both blinked and nodded and were quite happy. Another good song! Who knew where it was all going to lead? “Paul Simon is getting in our groove now,” Woodley told a
Melody Maker
reporter a week or two later.

The Seekers weren't the only performers drawn to Paul and Woodley's new songs. When Kornfeld brought the “Red Rubber Ball” demo to the Cyrkle (an American group whose members included the same Tom Dawes who had accompanied Paul and Artie, along with Kornfeld and the drummer from AEPi, on their first ten-thousand-dollar weekend) they grabbed it. Originally named the Rhondells, Dawes's group had recently been signed as clients by Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who changed their name
*
to the Cyrkle. The tune clicked for Dawes and his bandmates, and they made it the title track for their first album. Released as their first single, the record detonated on impact, taking the group to No. 2 on the
Billboard
list, and ultimately selling more than a million copies.

Even in the midst of Simon and Garfunkel's first run of hits, it was a huge deal. Another entry for Paul's hot streak and, it went without saying, a new gusher of royalties, money he would split evenly with Woodley, according to their handshake deal. But there was a catch. Instead of registering “Red Rubber Ball” to Eclectic Music in the United States, Paul had assigned the rights to his self-owned British publisher, Pattern Music Ltd., which, as per long-standing music publishing tradition, automatically took 50 percent of every song it published—meaning that Woodley's 50 percent share in the song actually added up to only 25 percent of its proceeds. The other 75 percent went to cowriter/publisher Paul Simon.

Who knew the song would become such a huge hit? Or how Paul's casual proposal that they publish it with his company would so drastically alter how the profits were calculated? When Woodley got his first royalty check, he assumed there'd been a mistake. Paul had never mentioned that his British publishing company would siphon off such a huge chunk of money from their joint composition; surely he intended to respect the spirit of the fifty-fifty split they had agreed upon. But he didn't.