Homeward Bound (23 page)

Released on October 10, 1966, the album they called
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
came in a cover that portrayed the artists in a flowered garden. Artie is sprawled in jeans and a royal blue sweater, while Paul rises just behind, the modern poet-troubadour clad in cambric and shadow, the both of them elite practitioners of a new pop art form that, as described in a back cover essay by Ralph J. Gleason, projects “the prevailing philosophical current of the New Youth which is that of creativity AGAINST the machine and, thus, FOR humanity.” Poets. Visionaries. Sages. “The songs in this album are songs for all time,” Gleason concludes, and the New Generation agreed. Rising quickly to
Billboard
's top five,
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
became Simon and Garfunkel's first smash hit album, selling strongly enough to stay on
Billboard
's charts until the end of the decade. It ratcheted their fame to a new level, and solidified their reputation as artists and celebrities, while also touching off another unthinkable geyser of cash

“People say I'm a dollar millionaire. I don't know. It could be,” Paul said to
Disc
's Penny Valentine a few months later. “All I know is I'm a lonelier person than I ever was at the beginning. It's a lonely life being part of this business. People watching you, looking at the things you do. It's been bad lately.”

 

CHAPTER 11

SOME DREAM OF WHAT I MIGHT BE

When Louis Simon set up his first classroom at La Salle Junior High School in the fall of 1961, he brought his double bass and set it on its stand in a corner near the chalkboard at the front of the room. Mostly the thing stood alone, a symbol of a life his students' English teacher had lived before he found his way to the front of their class. They were an elite group, part of the first batch of fourteen-year-olds to join the Special Progress Enrichment Program, an experimental advanced study project housed within a Hell's Kitchen junior high. Louis was a soft-spoken instructor whose gentle ways cushioned his strict standards. The program's designers had taken care to recruit some of the district's most sophisticated educators to work with the special students. Louis's advanced training—he was close to earning his master's degree in education from New York University and was working for a PhD in special education—made him an easy hire.

He did not disappoint. He helped edit the school's literary magazine and encouraged the students to read widely and think deeply about what each author had to say and how he or she was saying it. “He had this ease of getting across things that could have been complicated, but weren't,” recalls Daphne Maxwell Reid, who would eventually become a successful stage and television actress in New York City. “And you didn't see him fly off the handle. He was such a patient and serene person.” Louis didn't talk much about his past or his family, but when the students started planning an all-school dance in the fall of 1962, he mentioned that his son Paul and Paul's friend Artie were experienced pop musicians who were always eager to play school dances. The boys were famous, too: they were the Tom and Jerry who'd had a pretty big hit song just a few years ago. The dance planners liked the sound of that, so Paul and Artie, one a college graduate and the other in his final term, played the best of their Tom and Jerry songs, along with the hits of the day and a few duo renditions of Paul's better Jerry Landis tunes. The kids had a great time, dancing like crazy, and Mr. Simon was there for the whole thing, standing by himself in the corner, gazing up at his son with a proud smile.

Five years later, with his PhD under his belt and a new job as a lecturer at the City College of New York's Graduate School of Education, Louis was much less supportive of Paul's career in music. Interestingly, Louis's disapproval grew all the more pointed as his son became more successful. Even after Paul had earned millions of dollars and been celebrated as a poet and generational spokesman, his father continued to shake his finger. All the boy saw were the lights, the cheering throngs, and the adulation from the teenyboppers. “Is this all you want?” he'd ask, “to be a rock star?” Paul barely knew what to say to that. “I said, ‘Yeah! Why not? What am I supposed to be?'” Louis always had the same answer: a teacher. But Paul loved making music, and people loved the music he made. What could be wrong with that?

Plenty, the grumbles in his own gut insisted. It had all come so easily to him, the playing and the singing and the songwriting. Paul felt wonderful when he did it, that he was in the right place at the right time doing precisely the right thing. But later the voice of his father would echo through the silence. If it was that easy for him, how could it be valuable? Important things should never come easily.

Then again, Louis had never achieved what Paul had. Not even close. The Lee Simms Orchestra did well enough for a local dance band, but they were never going to make a real impact by playing other bands' songs. Louis logged countless hours trying to write original material, but almost never came up with something that fit his own standards. He kept trying, but the one record he did manage to get released, the “Blue Mud/Simmer Down” single that Sid Prosen put out as part of the contract with Paul and Artie for “Hey, Schoolgirl,” had flopped. So maybe he was jealous, and maybe contempt was the only way to assert his superiority over his brilliant son. Paul's songs might be at the top of the charts, his name celebrated by leading critics around the world, but it didn't mean much, Louis said. Not compared to what really mattered in the world.

“Teach! Teach!” Louis insisted. “That's the
only
important thing!”

*   *   *

As work on
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
continued through the summer of 1966, Paul called Bruce Woodley in London. As Woodley recalled, a few months had passed since they spent that long winter night writing songs in Barry Kornfeld's bedroom, and now Paul was thinking about “Cloudy,” the bittersweet tune they had set around a hitchhiker's meanderings in northern California. He'd played it for Artie, and now they were both thinking it'd be a great addition to their new album. And wasn't that great news for Woodley? Paul knew it was. Simon and Garfunkel had become one of the hottest acts in pop music. Having a copyright on their new album, even half a copyright, would create a burbling income stream even if the song never made it as a single. There was just one hitch. If “Cloudy” was going to be on a Simon and Garfunkel album, Paul needed it to be credited to Paul Simon alone. Woodley's name would stay on the copyright, and he'd get all the royalties due to a cowriter, just not the spotlight. So would that be cool? Well, no, of course it wouldn't be
cool
, Woodley recalled. In fact, it was an insult. But once he calculated the value of the copyright, which could have been in the tens of thousands of dollars, he sighed, and agreed.

At least Woodley got something out of the deal. Martin Carthy, whose arrangement for “Scarborough Fair” was so crucial to Simon and Garfunkel's version of the song, received nothing for his contribution. Worse, the composer's credit on
Parsley, Sage
didn't even acknowledge that “Scarborough” was a standard folk song. Instead, it credited Paul and Artie as coauthors, as if the centuries-old tune had emerged entirely from their imaginations. And while Artie deserved credit for composing the “Canticle” melody, the British guitarist couldn't get beyond the sight of Paul's name where “Traditional” should have been, and where the credit for the arrangement should have been at least partly his. Carthy couldn't resist grumbling about it, but even if he hadn't, all the other British folkies knew what he had contributed to the song. Like Paul, many had gone directly to Carthy to learn how to play it themselves. Word that Paul had taken the credit, and all the money, for himself cemented the sour impression many of them had been left with since the American appeared in their midst.

What none of them knew, Carthy included, was that Paul
was
sending royalties to the guitarist. At least, he thought he was. For, as it turned out, the guitarist's publishing company, Sparta Florida, had already filed a copyright for Carthy's arrangement of “Scarborough Fair.” Lawyers representing the company contacted Columbia Records soon after the release of
Parsley, Sage
to demand payment. Charing Cross Music, the company Paul set up after he folded Eclectic Music, had been sending royalty checks ever since. Only, none of the money ever got to Carthy. Like so many young artists, he had been less than canny about negotiating, or even taking a close look at, the contracts he'd signed over the years, including the one that relinquished all his financial claims to “Scarborough Fair.” Oh, it's just a court thing, he recalls being told. “It's not important.” Carthy had been steeped in folk culture for most of his life, and believed strongly that the public domain was less an archive of precious artifacts than an open warehouse for do-it-yourselfers. Step inside and you could hear the voice of the ages singing into your ear. Listen, sing along, or take it apart and put it back together to fit the world around you and leave it for the folks still waiting to be born.

*   *   *

As Paul would soon learn, there's a difference between engaging in folk culture and making yourself a part of it. Once you work your way into the spotlight, you become a part of the public domain, too—not just your work or your ideas, but your life: where you grew up, what your house was like, what your parents did for a living, whom you might be screwing, what you're smoking, and why you keep answering those questions with one breath and then using the next to insist that you're a very private person who can't bear talking about your private life—once you become part of the public domain, you no longer have control. Whatever you've carved off for the marketplace is set loose in other people's imaginations to represent this and symbolize that. And by the time you realize what's happening, it's too late to do anything about it except kick yourself and wonder what you were thinking when you said so much to that reporter and why you already know you'll blurt out just as much to the next one who comes knocking.

Now Paul faced the many demands and pressures running through his days: to turn his deepest feelings into hit songs, to both woo and face down the press, to serve his fans' appetites, to be the best version of himself every time, all the time. Eventually it all ran into a blur. “They're not yelling at me,” he told the
New Musical Express.
“They're screaming for what they think I am—some dream of what I might be.” Paul would hear himself singing on the radio and have no idea what he was singing about, even though he had not only composed the song but written it about his own life and the people who mattered most to him. Asked about “Homeward Bound” in 1967, he raised his palms to the ceiling. “I don't know how I wrote that,” he said. “It's not even me.” Even the praise began to get under his skin. He scorned the critics who called him a poet. “The people who call you a poet are people who never read poetry. Like poetry was something defined by Bob Dylan,” he said, tossing his rival into the fire for good measure. Had none of these people read Wallace Stevens? Did they have the slightest idea what real literature was?

He'd see pictures of himself with Artie, examine their public smiles and sulks, see how they draped their scarves around their necks; or, worse, he'd catch up with what they had been saying about themselves to reporters. It was like seeing a movie about himself written by someone he'd never met and starring an actor who had never turned an ear to his music. “Simon and Garfunkel are fictitious characters,” Paul insisted. “How can anyone have a joint identity with anyone else? And there's a big difference between me and the Simon of Simon and Garfunkel. He's a songwriter and performer and so am I, but otherwise he's a fictitious character.” And the only thing that aggravated him more than praise was his suspicion that anyone who glanced at a picture of the duo would automatically assume that the guy with the sparkling blue eyes and halo of blond curls had to be the one who'd written all those delicately constructed songs. He was the one with the angelic voice, wasn't he? “He
should
have been the one who wrote the songs,” Paul said in the mid-1980s, still steaming twenty years later “That body
should
have contained the talent.”

Then someone would call Artie a sex symbol, and Paul would go wild. For fuck's sake! He'd known Artie since they were eleven years old: Artie with braces, Artie with zits, Artie with a yarmulke on his head surrounded by all the bearded old Jews hoisting the Torah around the synagogue in Queens. Talk about absurdist
fiction
. “Can you imagine girls all over the country writing love letters to someone called Garfunkel? Or chicks spending the cold winter nights up in New England towns stitching ‘Garfunkel' on a pillow?” Paul would break up, his cackle a ratcheting crow's caw. “Man, the whole idea of people accepting Garfunkel as a sex symbol. Can't you picture it? Someone in Hollywood saying, ‘Get me a new sex symbol like Garfunkel!'” Paul snorted just as derisively to think there could actually be a folk-poet act called Simon and Garfunkel. “It's like the greatest put-on. Some music publisher or agent gets on the phone and says, ‘Bring me something for Simon and Garfunkel!' Man, it's funny.”

For all
Parsley, Sage
's success, the singles from the album, and the ones that followed, failed to make a real connection with the New Generation of record buyers. “The Dangling Conversation” stalled at No. 25, “A Hazy Shade of Winter” did a bit better at No. 13, and “At the Zoo” got as high as No. 16, but “Fakin' It” could manage only No. 23. After more than a year without a visit to the Top 10, you might begin to wonder if your public folk tale was coming to an end. And if that happened, if the world stopped paying attention to Paul Simon and Simon and Garfunkel, where did that leave you?