Homeward Bound (27 page)

There it is again, that same sense of desolation, the emptiness within, the bleakness without, the nauseating understanding that your entire existence amounts to little more than a cloud of dust and static cling. “Voices of Old People” is an audio vérité montage of elderly folks talking about their lives, the shattered stretch that leads to the end of the road. More interesting in concept than in execution, the Artie-curated snippets go on for two minutes and twelve seconds that would have been better spent on nearly anything else. There are grimmer revelations to come: the spiritually withered heir in “Fakin' It,” the young codger shivering through “A Hazy Shade of Winter,” and the couple in the surgically precise description of a terminal love affair in “Overs” (“We're just a habit, like saccharine”). The desolation becomes most vivid in the mini-suite of the title track and in “Old Friends,” both of which at least
sound
like they could be about good times and sweet memories. But of course not.

“Old Friends” opens with acoustic guitar and distant strings that grow steadily more elaborate before gaining horns and percussion to fill a lengthy instrumental break that veers from melodrama to
Metropolis
-like horrors before fading into the background. The intensity in the orchestral arrangement (by conductor/arranger Jimmie Haskell) is drawn from the lyrics, which describe a pair of septuagenarians sitting together in a city park. Given no sense of their lives, we know the men only by their desolate appearance. Paul's lyrics are dense with subtext. The old men don't notice the newspaper scuttling through the grass. The shouts and honks of their inheritors float by unheard. The men wear old-timey shoes and overcoats like funeral shrouds. “Winter companions … waiting for the sunset.” Remember the lonely drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike? Here they are again, too old to do anything of an afternoon but share their silent dread of the approaching darkness. Paul turns the feeling outward as “Old Friends” ends and the “Bookends Theme” rises. Singing in close word-for-word harmony, Paul and Artie mourn a sweeter moment, “a time of innocence, a time of confidences,” that describes the start of their own friendship, a love affair, or something much larger than that. Are they using “confidences” to describe secrets once shared between friends, or the assurance of a society still basking in its hard-won triumph in World War II? Ultimately it doesn't matter: as the old friends can attest, everything that matters to you will soon vanish. “Preserve your memories / They're all that's left you.”

But the zenith of Paul's infatuation with nothingness comes in “Save the Life of My Child,” the small epic that opens
Bookends
' first side. As befitting their sonic backdrop, the lyrics begin in a recognizable urban scene and end in surrealism. A boy on a rooftop has threatened to jump. A mob gathers beneath, and the scene is soon bristling with police, firemen, and predatory tabloid reporters. We've seen this before. The barricades and orbiting red-and-blues, the electrified crowd, the wails of the panicked mother. Someone passes out and is carried away. The crowd blames drugs, cops blame the kids these days, and there we are again, poised on the threshold of a nightmare and unable to do anything except argue about whose fault it is. “Oh, what's becoming of the children, people asking each other.”

Go back a decade, read Philip Roth's short story “The Conversion of the Jews”: the same rooftop, the frantic child, the mob, the cops, the hook-and-ladder, firefighters, and lifesaving nets. But while “Save the Life of My Child” focuses on contemporary social problems, Roth's vision traces the boy's crisis to God and the irreconcilable contradictions of religion. The story focuses on Ozzie, a bar mitzvah student who wants the rabbi to explain why God would be capable of creating heaven, earth, and light—Ozzie is particularly hung up on light—in six days and yet not be able to impregnate a mortal woman with His son? And if so, how can we say Jesus couldn't possibly be the son of God? Unable to answer Ozzie's question, the rabbi, the boy's mother, and other authority figures lash out physically and emotionally, until the boy bolts from class and finds refuge on the roof of the synagogue. Cue the crowd, the cops et al., and when Ozzie realizes how desperate they are to keep him alive, he orders the rabbi, his mother, and the entire crowd to fall to their knees and declare their belief in Jesus Christ. Transformed into a prophet, Ozzie leaps into the night, falling securely into the bright yellow safety net the firemen have been holding up to spare his life.

Published originally in the
New Yorker
(and then as the second story in Roth's first collection,
Goodbye, Columbus
), “The Conversion of the Jews” was greeted by many observant Jews as apostasy, a work troubling enough to require debates, public forums, and repeated denunciations. Yet, as signaled by Ozzie's infatuation with light, the story celebrates even its most hidebound Jewish characters as true people of God. Given the choice between the strictures of their faith and God's creation, they choose the boy, an act of mercy that affirms God's presence even as it reveals the flaws in the conventions of His followers.

The nameless boy in “Save the Life of My Child,” cut loose from religious symbolism to become a symbol of generational conflict, performs the same leap with far less affirming results. Cut loose from gravity, he simply soars off into the night, his departure as mysterious as his initial motivations for self-destruction. There's no meaning to his flight, other than as a surreal way to resolve a story of social alienation. While Ozzie lands safely in the embrace of his community, Paul's miracle child has become just another celebrity, borne up on spotlights until he vanishes in the night, an airborne wraith with nowhere to land.

*   *   *

In early 1968, David Oppenheim, once an influential documentarian at CBS-TV but now at the helm of the
Public Broadcast Laboratory
, a live Sunday evening program from what was then called National Educational Television (later the Public Broadcasting System), worked with Paul and Artie to put on and film a college concert at the University of Moscow in the USSR. The hope was to create cultural understanding between the two rival nations by exposing the Soviet students to the United States' most sophisticated, and popular, pop acts. “They are both college boys, very intelligent and sensitive,” Oppenheim wrote to Boris Sedov, a counselor
*
at the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. “The idea of going to the Soviet Union reflects a real interest in your country.” Oppenheim sent copies of
Sounds of Silence
and
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
, along with a set of lyrics translated into Russian, but for whatever reason the project fell apart.

Simon and Garfunkel drew increasingly large and adoring fans back at home. Critics described wild crowds, endless cries for encores, and “two of the finest singers of the age, prophets and balladeers at one and the same time.” Were they really prophets? How about generational spokesmen? “Nobody is talking for this generation. Nobody says, ‘If you want to know what I think talk to Simon and Garfunkel,'” Paul told a reporter from
Time
for a cover story titled “Rock! What a Gas!” “Everybody has got his own ideas. I don't consider myself a poet. I'm a songwriter”—one, nevertheless, with a serious purpose. “Why is it I feel compelled to write about this pain I see? I could split and be free and do whatever I want. I said to myself, well, why don't I? Because I'm here, that's why.”

Performing to a sold-out Hollywood Bowl on August 23, 1968, Paul and Artie were greeted like heroes, and beloved all the more for their cheery, down-to-earth response to their fans' adoration. Playing without a backing band, they led off with a spirited “Mrs. Robinson,” went back a few years for “Homeward Bound,” and then stopped everything when they noticed a metal lunchbox sitting by itself on the symphony-size stage. Artie grabbed the thing and brought it into the spotlight with them.

“It looks like somebody's lunch,” he reported. Clicking open the latch, he looked within and reported his findings. “It
is
somebody's lunch!”

Now peering into the box too, Paul turned back to his microphone.

“Did anybody lose a tuna fish sandwich?”

Without missing a beat, Artie continued the thought. “On white?”

At that, Paul started laughing. “Did you just … On
white
!”

Just a couple of old friends with the same sense of humor, a shared career, and shared fame.

They sang beautifully that night, their amplified voices rising into the soft summer air above the Hollywood Hills. Their repartee stayed light even when the songs got heavy, and as they moved toward the last few songs, Paul set up Artie's most popular solo with another joke.

“There's been a change of identity, or roles, in our group,” Paul said, sounding only slightly put out as he described how their media image had changed in recent months. “In our new capacity I am now the heavy of the group. I make nasty comments and, uh, kick kids, and uh, do things like that.”

He paused to let the laughs boil down.

“And Art has now become our sex symbol in this group.”

A swell of female cheers interrupted him, and then he got to the punch line.

“One newspaper referred to him as a frightened gazelle. At this juncture, the frightened gazelle will sing ‘For Emily, Whenever I Find Her.'”

 

CHAPTER 13

SO LONG ALREADY, ARTIE

Mike Nichols had a great idea. Sketching out his follow-up to
The Graduate
, a film adaptation of Joseph Heller's satirical war novel
Catch-22
, he thought again about Simon and Garfunkel, and how perfectly their sensibility fit into his new film's vision. He began to think of them as part of
Catch-22
's expansive cast, and when he got in touch with Paul and Artie both of them were delighted. Now they could stretch themselves in a completely different direction, and who knew where it could lead? Of course they'd do it; just say when and where.

A few months later, Nichols called Paul with less happy news. His working script had expanded beyond all reason. He'd had to cut it, and unfortunately Paul's character had fallen out of the movie. So that was the end of Artie's role, too, right? Recalling the incident for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, Paul said he set Nichols straight immediately. He and Artie didn't have to do
everything
together, and Paul knew how eager Artie was to dip his toe into acting. The shooting schedule required Artie to be in Mexico for only a couple of months, so of course Artie should be in the movie.

Paul had plenty of other things to keep him busy during Artie's absence. The best one was his new girlfriend, Peggy Harper, whom he'd met in late 1965 when he and Artie first met with Mort Lewis in his apartment. Mort, to whom Peggy was married at the time, was thirteen years her senior; they met when she was the twenty-year-old girlfriend of Brothers Four member John Payne, whom she'd met when the group gave a concert on Atlantic City's Steel Pier. The daughter of a troubled, very religious family in the rural village of Bybee, Tennessee, Peggy had come north as a teenager, eager to start a life as far from her parents as possible. Young, tall, and beautiful, she was drawn to the suave older man, and she married Lewis in 1961.

For a time, it was perfect. Lewis was sweet and funny, and though Peggy had a lot to learn about the city and the rest of the world, she was smart and independent enough to pursue her own career, first as a model, then as an editor in a film production house, and then in a graphic arts studio. But the more she became a part of her husband's packed social life, the less she enjoyed it. He liked going out and having a big time; she really didn't. She often balked when he wanted to invite friends home for dinner or cocktails. “I liked people, and she didn't,” Lewis says. Their marriage was drifting by the time Paul came into their lives, and though Lewis knew his client was smitten with his wife, he says he had no reason to think Paul was making a play for her. But when Lewis and Harper divorced in 1967, Simon and Harper quickly came together. It was a little awkward from time to time. Some friends and colleagues averted their eyes or whispered urgently, asking what the hell was going on between Paul and Mort's wife. Drummer Hal Blaine, who had recorded with Simon and Garfunkel for several years before joining their touring band in 1969, went straight to Lewis, who gave a breezy shrug. “We're divorced,” he explained.

Just as Kathy had helped stabilize his moods five years earlier, Peggy gave Paul a sense of security. Two and a half years older and instilled with the discipline common to adults raised in chaotic families, she made certain, as their relationship grew, that Paul didn't let his fame, wealth, or power distance him from the real world. When he drifted too far into the weird vapors of the bohemian artist, Peggy would strongly suggest he take out the garbage, walk the dog, or do
anything
that would get his ass off the sofa, for crying out loud. That was good; that was the same advice he'd grown up hearing from his father. Success was fine, but it wasn't the point. And if you weren't doing something that would be useful to others, what
were
you doing? And why?

*   *   *

Finally, Paul's muse thawed. After so many months of struggling to wrench out new songs like a dentist going after a molar, he started feeling the melodies drift to him again. Words, phrases, and stories fell into his head, then tumbled onto whatever scrap of paper he had to write on. On a flight to a concert in Portland, he borrowed a pen and scribbled on the pages of the in-flight magazine. He started with a few phrases. “Little and poor.” “Rock with easy motion and sing a humble song.” “My quests are such men daughters and sons I'd like to know.” “Here for workman's wages, down the long aisle of the ages.” He was reading the Bible then; his phrases felt earthier, from some other time. Settled into the Benson Hotel in downtown Portland, he added more lines and started stringing them into verses. “I am but a poor song / Crying”—the rest is crossed out—“In the company of strangers / In the quiet of the evening / I will sing to you.” A page later, he had a better idea: “I am just a poor boy though my story is untold / How I squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles.”