Homeward Bound (24 page)

Paul didn't want to quit anything. All that talk about quitting music to be a novelist was just another layer to add to the Paul Simon mystique. The cooler version of himself, the one who really was a step ahead and several sizes larger than the dumpy critter he recognized in the bathroom mirror every morning. If you were going to be any Paul Simon, he was really the one to be.

Except that guy was a songwriter, and now Paul was lost in the grim latitudes of writer's block, just when he needed to write more and better. Yet it wouldn't come. All that music in his heart, all the thoughts rattling across his brainpan, all of it stacking up and waiting for release—and still nothing. It was a classic case of creative block, a toxic confusion of desire, pleasure, and shame. As if artistic expression were reprehensible. As if the catharsis it spurred were a mortal sin. As if the artist's need to reveal himself in his art, and the pleasure he took in his creation, were an embarrassment. And wasn't that what Louis Simon couldn't resist pointing out? “Okay, you made all this money, you gave it to everyone in the family and everyone loves you,” he'd tell his son. “But that's not the purpose.” Paul traced his father's words in the air and felt their bite. “My father,” he said many years later, “is the person who most influenced my thinking and my life.”

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Not long after Paul wrote “Sparrow,” his avian variation on Thomas Hobbes's bleak vision of life, he started introducing the tune with a story about, as he put it, one of “my many neuroses.” That always got a laugh, and the rest of the tale went on in that vein. He'd caught himself checking out his reflection in a mirror and decided that digging yourself, as he put it, was a terrible vice, and he vowed never to do it again. “I'm like shaving with my eyes closed, you know,” he said. The kick went on for months until he was walking past a drugstore at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan and caught a glimpse of his face in a blacked-out window. It had been a year since he'd seen himself, so he stopped to take a look. “I was digging myself for about forty-five seconds, an intense dig.” And he would have kept right on digging if it hadn't been for the sparrow perched on a wire above his head, which, the moment before taking his leave, uncorked a bomb of his own devising that landed atop the crown of the self-digging fop below. Splat. “All I can think of is, ‘There goes a happy bird,'” Paul said, waiting for the chorus of laughs and applause to boil down to toss out the capper: “Don't dig yourself. Relative to nothing, this is a song called ‘Sparrow.'”

It was all related, his alienation from himself and his grim sense of the world, people, and the forces that shove them together and yank them apart. On tour, Simon and Garfunkel could fill concert halls across the United States, and were even more beloved on the stages in England and Europe. While so much of the pop music scene was dominated by the Doors, the Who, and all the other decibel-banging bands pushing the line between cacophony and chaos, Simon and Garfunkel presented each note with care, even if the emotional landscape in Paul's songs was nothing if not chaotic. But you had to listen closely to absorb the nuances, where all the tumult of the age could ring just as clearly in a hushed portrayal of a broken love affair. Not everyone got it, and some critics dismissed the duo out of hand, much like the widely admired jazz and pop critic Nat Hentoff, who called the neatly tucked S&G “a cul de sac” in popular culture. “Rock 'n' roll for people who don't like rock 'n' roll,” added Robert Christgau. Future
Rolling Stone
founder Jann Wenner, then a music columnist for the University of California–Berkeley's student newspaper, raised his generationally savvy snout, too. Simon, he wrote, “is neither a poet nor even an accurate observer of the current youth scene.”

Most critics, along with the other leading musicians of the midsixties, disagreed, including Mamas and Papas leader John Phillips and producer/record label owner Lou Adler, who in early 1967 came to Paul to help them put together the first festival for rock 'n' roll, and for the New Generation, which they hoped to mount that June on an outdoor stage at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in northern California.

*   *   *

When Phillips and Adler started planning the Monterey Pop Festival they made one of their first calls to Paul, who quickly agreed to put up fifty thousand dollars seed money. Though they had conceived it originally as a business venture the two founders soon opted to make their event a nonprofit benefit for musical education programs around the country. Paul soon agreed to sign on to their board of directors, joining an all-star line-up that included Mick Jagger and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles' Paul McCartney, the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, and Smokey Robinson, among others. Simon and Garfunkel agreed to headline the first of what was to be a three-day festival, anointing themselves in the first blossoms of the psychedelic moment.

Organizing the festival was a long and occasionally bumpy road. Some musicians, including Chuck Berry, refused to donate their services, as all the artists were asked to do.
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Dylan manager Albert Grossman wouldn't allow his other hot act, Mike Bloomfield's blues freak-out group the Electric Flag, to play unless the festival also booked his completely unknown group the Paupers. Similar quid pro quo deals popped up among other headliners.
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As a board member, Paul's most important mission turned out to be brokering peace between the festival's contingent of industry-savvy Los Angeles artists and the underground freaks from San Francisco. With Phillips, Adler, and their top aide, Derek Taylor (most famous for his long association with the Beatles), deep into the LA fabric, they sent the New York–based Paul as an emissary to the epicenter of San Francisco's music scene, the Grateful Dead House at 710 Ashbury Street. The trip was a success: Paul helped resolve the tension, and by the end of the evening the members of the Dead had invited Paul to partake in an LSD ritual to make the rest of the evening really special. Paul begged off, but scooped up a handful of the tabs to take back to New York, where he could freak out by himself in the comfort of his high-rise apartment.

The festival didn't disappoint for sweetness, surprise, or sheer oddity. While hippies and some celebrities drifted through a lysergic fog, the hotel lobbies and backstage passages choked with lawyers, managers, and A&R men, many of them negotiating rich deals for unknowns, including Janis Joplin (Columbia Records), the Grateful Dead (Warner Brothers), and the Steve Miller Blues Band (Capitol). Columbia president Goddard Lieberson (now elevated to CBS Inc. group leader) came along, too, and when Paul and Artie invited him to get high with them in their hotel room, he accepted enthusiastically, an aficionado of the evil wog hemp since he'd started hanging out with New York blues and jazz artists in the 1920s. Paul, meanwhile, sought out the reality-bending guitarist Jimi Hendrix, with whom he played a little acoustic blues before the festival-opening Friday night show began.

The first night's performances began curiously with the sleek LA vocal group the Association (“Here Comes Windy,” etc.), who led off with a robotic narration describing each group member, all standing and moving with mechanized herky-jerking, as if they were widgets in a musical machine, which either commented directly on their industry-friendly style or was just a weird bit of shtick someone thought would be cool. Albert Grossman's Paupers played a surprisingly raucous bit of rock 'n' roll, setting the stage for the Neil Young–less Buffalo Springfield, whose remaining members elected to fill in their sound with the guitar and harmony singing by the Byrds' David Crosby, marking the first time he would perform with the group's co-lead guitarist Stephen Stills. The Grateful Dead played a short version of their acid blues freak-out, followed by the epochal American debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, blazing Stratocaster and all. Singer-songwriter Laura Nyro came next, belting a surprisingly soulful set of rhythm and blues–inflected songs. The singer Lou Rawls, still neck deep in Chicago blues, stirred things up again, followed by the patience-testing pop singer Johnny Rivers. Then, finally, came the night's headliners, the collegiate folk duo from New York City.

John Phillips, tall, hip, and in control, a fur cap perched on top of his head, made the introduction at 1 a.m. on Saturday morning: “We'd like to introduce to you at this time, two very, very good friends of mine and two people who in the music business are respected by everyone, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.” They came out in turtleneck shirts, Artie's a golden yellow, Paul's cream with thin horizontal red stripes. Standing close enough for their elbows to touch, they opened with “Homeward Bound,” then sang “At the Zoo,” a particularly high-spirited “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy),” made extra giggly by the light director's decision to bathe the stage in red lights, a bit like an old-fashioned house of ill repute, a comparison Paul couldn't resist making at the start of the song. “Ah, you dig the red lights … associated in my mind with, uh, for another good time.” The crowd laughed, picking up immediately on the naughty reference. “Very Pavlovian.” Their “Sound of Silence” sounded a gentler warning in the soft California night, and “Benedictus,” introduced by Paul as “a blessing for you,” did seem to elevate the day's activities into the spiritual ether, as if they all were blessed by their own company, as if all the forbidden smoke and sex and lightning bolts to the brain were a passage to a higher consciousness.

When the ovation died down, Paul played the opening riff for “I Am a Rock,” thought better of it and switched to the as-yet-unheard “Punky's Dilemma,” capping the evening with its hip stoner's menagerie of self-aware cornflakes and stumblebum hippies. Another ovation and a hail of excellent vibes followed them offstage, and then to the limo park, where Paul recognized the British music journalist Keith Altham, a friend from his UK days, preparing to jump into a car with Jimi Hendrix's entourage. “Keith!” Paul shouted. “Make sure to tell 'em what's going on here when you get to England!”

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The Graduate
began as a lightly salacious satirical novel by Charles Webb, a recent graduate of Williams College. Its tale of an affair between a listless college graduate and a bored friend of his parents rattled some Updike-ish chimes upon its publication in 1963. As reenvisioned by Mike Nichols, whose ascendance as a stage and screen director followed a decade-long career as half of the gently subversive comedy team he'd formed with Elaine May during the 1950s, the story became an arch critique of both the older generation and upper-class American values: the moralizing, the hypocrisy, the primacy of appearances in the absence of actual thought or feeling. After a three-hit streak as a director on the Broadway stage and then a smash Hollywood debut as the director of the acclaimed and hugely popular film adaptation of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Nichols came to
The Graduate
with the ambition and industrial juice to do whatever he pleased.

Nichols took chances from the start, commissioning a script from an untested screenwriter named Buck Henry (née Henry Zimmerman), then steering away from familiar movie actors to cast New York theater actors. Most daringly, Nichols decided to cast as the film's central character, described in the book as a golden-haired WASP, the short, dark-featured, and distinctly Jewish stage actor Dustin Hoffman. The actor was shocked to be considered, but Nichols was adamant. Even if Benjamin Braddock came from WASP stock, surely he could be “Jewish
inside
.” At that point Hoffman relented, and Nichols's vision, one that was rooted deeply in the Jewish immigrant experience, was locked in place.

Nichols was born in Berlin to Russian-Jewish parents. (His birth name was Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky.) His father, a successful doctor, changed the name upon the family's settling in the United States in 1939, escaping the Nazis days before they stopped all departures. Still, it wasn't long before their luck ran out. Dr. Nichols died of leukemia in 1942, and his widow tilted into bitter eccentricity. Being a fatherless foreigner would have been trouble enough, but Mike had also suffered a severe reaction to a whooping cough inoculation that destroyed his ability to grow hair on his head. He wore wigs throughout his life, and the childhood humiliation of being a heavily accented foreigner who also happened to be as hairless as a seal never left him.

Nichols's realization that Ben's alienation from his parents' world of privilege was similar to the immigrant Jewish experience in America girded the film's generational commentary in feelings that had nothing to do with youth and old age. Presented in the midst of unprecedented social upheaval,
The Graduate
turned on its head Hollywood's long-established tradition of de-ethnicizing characters, turning author Webb's WASP character into the unmistakably Jewish Dustin Hoffman without raising a ripple. Indeed, when the
New Yorker
published a ten-thousand-word analysis of the film the summer after it was released, the wide-ranging essay didn't mention it at all, even though
The Graduate
's soundtrack, widely acknowledged as being every bit as innovative and daring as the narrative and visual aspects of the film, had also emerged from the Jewish perspective of two other New York–raised artists.

The director's fixation on Simon and Garfunkel began about midway through production, when his younger brother sent him a copy of
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
Struck immediately by the delicately rendered songs of social and romantic isolation, Nichols recognized a connection between the introspective folk-rockers and the internal monologue of his movie's disillusioned protagonist. No traditional dramatic picture had ever been scored with rock 'n' roll music,
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but that made the idea only more appealing.