Homeward Bound (33 page)

As the final act on the bill, Paul and Artie walked out to a standing ovation and, after waiting for the applause to fade, launched into the opening chords of “Mrs. Robinson.” Back in their traditional two-voices-and-a-guitar form, their harmonies rang as clear and effortless as ever, particularly in the second song, a close harmony arrangement of “El Condor Pasa.” They seemed relaxed, joking to the crowd—Paul got a particular kick when someone requested “Voices of Old People,” the
Bookends
montage of Artie's interviews with the aged. They sang the third verse of “The Boxer” (“After changes upon changes we are more or less the same…”), which they had edited out in favor of Artie's countermelody, then made a chugging ska arrangement of “Cecilia” into a medley with a harmonized “Mother and Child Reunion” and, a bit more awkward in its new Jamaican getup, “Bye Bye Love.” More familiar renditions of “Scarborough Fair” and “The 59th Street Bridge Song” and a particularly resonant “America” came next.

When they started rehearsing for the show, Paul told Artie he wanted to try something different for the inevitable closer, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” They wouldn't have a pianist for the show, just Paul doing what he could to replicate Larry Knechtel's performance on his six-string guitar. Rather than having Artie sing the song alone, Paul proposed that they sing it together, Artie on the first verse, Paul on the second, and both harmonizing on the third verse and the climactic final chorus. At first Artie didn't know how to respond. Did Paul really think it would sound better, or had he just found another way to shove him aside? “Cut me open and look at all my contradictory reactions,” Artie said a few months later. “Do I think that's a good idea? Do I trust? Do I sense his ego trying to subtract from my ego?” No matter. Artie decided to do it Paul's way, just as he had decided to help raise money for a candidate he didn't like very much. After two years away, he was eager to step back onto the concert stage, in sold-out Madison Square Garden, no less, with friends and heroes on the bill. And as they stood onstage, weaving their voices together in public for the first time in two years, they were heroes, too.

Both their faces tilting to the silver microphones, they looked out at the arena, filled for the evening by a small city of thoughtful liberal urbanites, a gathering of the tribe. “Come home, America,” McGovern trumpeted that year. Shed your fears and unbolt your doors; hold out your hand to your friends, your neighbors, total strangers, your rivals, and your enemies, too. They played for half an hour, the crowd with them the whole time, clapping to the rhythmic songs, singing along to “The 59th Street Bridge Song”; then “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” that modern hymn to unity, to connection, to the old-fashioned notion that united hearts, hands, and voices can build anything. Remember when people really believed that? It could happen again, and here were Simon and Garfunkel back together, the sound of their voices leading us all home. “We've all come to look for America.”

Just a few weeks later,
Rolling Stone
published Paul's interview with Jon Landau. Paul was pictured on the magazine's cover, a mid-distance portrait showing him, head to foot, walking toward the camera palms raised, a cap pulled down close to his eyes—but not close enough to cover the annoyance creasing his brow and, seemingly, erupting from his half-open mouth. He had a lot to say in the article: about how he'd always carried the vast bulk of Simon and Garfunkel's creative burden. All those stories they had told about Artie arranging the songs, or even
helping
to arrange them, were nonsense. “Anybody who knows anything would know that that was a fabrication. How can one guy write the songs and let the other guy do the arranging?”—an odd argument, considering how often songwriters work with arrangers, and there were many accounts of Artie doing exactly that. Yet maybe Paul was venting something else entirely.

“At a certain point it became very hard to take criticism from each other … I felt that if I had to go through these kind of personality abrasions I didn't want to continue to do it.” Meanwhile, Artie had abandoned him so he could become a movie star. At that point, they just naturally went their separate ways. “I went to do my album by myself. We didn't say that's the end … but it became apparent by the time the movie was out and by the time my album was out that it was over.”

“As I stand right now I have no partnership with Artie,” Paul said. “I find it a relief.”

 

CHAPTER 15

THAT'S IT, THAT'S THAT GROOVE

When he told the Supreme Court of New York County where his career stood circa late 1972, Paul sounded gloomy. His solo album had, in comparison to
Bridge Over Troubled Water
, been a flop. In the first months of the 1970s, he had set out to make himself into an entirely different performer. “And in effect begin a new career—as Paul Simon,” he declared. “No longer can I rely on the great popularity of Simon and Garfunkel but rather must prove to the public and to CBS that the popularity and international acclaim I now possess can be sustained in this new phase of my career.” The professional future of the new recording artist Paul Simon, he continued, would be decided by the fate of his second album, which would be released just before he set out to reintroduce himself to concert audiences all around the world.

He was bullshitting, mostly.
Bridge
's popularity had been so far off the charts of anyone's experience, it would take thirteen years and Michael Jackson to outdo it.
Paul Simon
had been a win by every conceivable measure, and so on and so forth, which was one of the reasons he had to sic his lawyers on the Edward B. Marks Music Corporation. Now that he had become a star in his own right, his former employer and, briefly, publisher had done a deep crawl through its archives in search of the songs Paul had sold them a decade earlier. Having exhumed not only lead sheets but also, in some cases, demo recordings of “Carlos Dominguez,” “He Was My Brother,” “The Side of a Hill,” “Bleecker Street,” and the Simon-Garfunkel arrangement of “Benedictus,” they recognized the potential of a belated return on their investment and mapped out an
Early Songs of Paul Simon
songbook and an album of Paul's recordings of the songs. And instead of crediting them to Jerry Landis or to Paul Kane, as he'd preferred in those days, they were opting for his real name and therein lay his predictable ire.

Paul won an injunction against Marks, then made a settlement with the company. Then it was back to smooth sailing for Paul's business organization, the daily operations of which he'd entrusted to Mike Tannen, the young associate from Orenstein, Arrow who had made himself an expert on the Simon and Garfunkel account and then a member of Paul's inner circle of friends. It was easy to see why they hit it off so well. Tannen was another physically compact, hotly ambitious Jewish kid with a professional music man for a father, the well-known country music publisher Nat Tannen, who had died unexpectedly when Mike was in college. Nat and Harold Orenstein, whose firm specialized in entertainment law, had been close, and when Mike graduated from New York University Law School in 1965, he had a job waiting for him.

Tannen thrived, and in 1969 Orenstein sent him to Los Angeles to open a West Coast office for the firm. Paul wasn't happy to see him go, but made a point of driving him and Mary to the airport, where he told them not to worry about getting a cab when they got to LA; he'd have a car waiting for them. The limo Tannen had expected turned out to be a new Porsche, a gift Paul intended as a symbol of his confidence in his friend's future prospects. “I think you're the best,” Paul told Tannen when his flabbergasted friend called to say thanks. “I wanted you to think you're as good as or better than anyone out there.” It was easy for them to keep in touch, given the amount of time Paul spent working in the Hollywood recording studios, and when he started gearing up for a solo career in 1971, just as Tannen had decided to move back to New York, Paul asked the lawyer to help steer the business end of his ventures.

Tannen took the job happily, moving back to New York and setting up shop in a town house on East Sixty-First Street, between Fifth and Madison. Along with the offices for Paul's central enterprises, Tannen also set up a suite for Paul's publishing company, Charing Cross, which had first operated in a space beneath the Orenstein, Arrow offices in Los Angeles. That office was managed by Ian Hoblyn, a former airline steward who worked with a few secretaries to administer the rights to the songs Paul had written.

Already known among insiders for his business savvy—Bob Dylan came to him for advice before he started renegotiating his publishing and recording deals—Paul had built an impressive fortune by his thirtieth birthday. But while he knew it made financial sense to invest his money in real estate or some industry or another, he had little interest in ordinary businesses. He wanted his money to reflect his artistic sensibility and his lifelong involvement with music. Tannen suggested he follow the example of the great songwriter Frank Loesser, who eventually made more money as the publisher of other songwriters than he did as the author of “Heart and Soul,” “Baby, It's Cold Outside,” and so many other hit songs. Paul liked that idea, so they started DeShufflin Inc., a company they could use to both support emerging artists' careers and get a piece of the hit songs they wrote.

The company's first clients were Maggie and Terre Roche, the suburban New Jersey singing/songwriting duo Paul had welcomed into his NYU class during the winter of 1970. Two years later, the sisters had come from out of the blue, calling his office every day for a week until Paul called back to hear Maggie tell him about all the new songs they'd written since the end of class. Paul sent them to Tannen, who invited them to his family's apartment to play a few tunes. When they were done, he made an offer on the spot, laying out terms that were surprisingly generous. He and Paul would not only give them a cash advance to live on while they readied themselves to record, but also rent them an apartment, get them top instructors to improve their guitar and piano technique, pay all their recording expenses, and then, with Tannen serving as their manager, help them land a deal with a record company. After they settled into a place in Greenwich Village, Paul took Maggie and Terre on a buying spree to Colony Records so they would have cool music to listen to while they prepared to start their careers in the big time. He had them sing on one of the songs for his next solo album, and when it came out months later, they were astonished to find their pictures on its inner cover, a deliberate move to create an instant buzz around the unknown duo. In the wake of some tough childhood experiences, Terre Roche wrote in her self-published memoir,
Blabbermouth
, that the career boost couldn't have come at a more crucial time. “Paul Simon and Michael Tannen gave us a new lease on life.”

*   *   *

Although he was happily settled with Peggy, Paul still struggled with depression, though he found some relief when he'd read enough political philosophy to conclude that his gloom was actually the made-up pain of the middle-class intellectual. It was, he said, “a student's fantasy, not the pain of poverty, war or even the tremendous emotional pain that people endure daily.” Peggy's interest in feminist theory led Paul to the work of Kate Millett, whose controversial 1970 book,
Sexual Politics
, made him believe that his insecurities and hostility had, in the midst of a male-defined social and political construct, pushed him to the edge of violence. “The whole white male myth makes it imperative that the hero, the winner, be the Great Dane,” he explained. “That's why I'm right there with the feminists, because I think the whole thing is debasing. Remember, there was rape long before capitalism.”

Peggy learned she was pregnant during the winter of 1972, and when their son, Harper, was born on September 7, 1972, fatherhood grounded Paul all the more. Had he ever felt so relaxed and happy so much of the time? Picking up a nylon-string classical guitar one day, his fingers found a set of sweet, jazzy chords to suit the first unalloyed love ballad he'd ever written, a simply stated declaration to the woman who had inspired it. Singing at first in the voice of a restless traveler, Paul gave the song the title “Let Me Live in Your City.” Realizing that he'd already been home for quite a while, he changed it to “Something So Right,” in which his customary darkness plays as comic effect. “It's such an unusual sight,” he sings of his odd sense of joy. “I can't get used to something so right.”

The new songs were upbeat, flooded with the light of gospel praise and the kinetic energy of modern rhythm and blues—faith and frolic, grace and gratitude, all playing out in a highly imperfect world. Listening to the laid-back funk of the Staple Singers' “I'll Take You There” on the radio one day, he heard the church-meets-roadhouse sound he was after. The Staple Singers always worked with a backing group, though, so to figure out who had played what, Paul got in touch with Al Bell at the Memphis-based label Stax Records to see if the black guys who played with the Staples might be available to work with a white artist. Bell laughed: they were certainly available, but they weren't black. The band on the Staples' record, the Swampers, was the house band at the Muscle Shoals recording studio in northern Alabama, and they were all, to a man, white. A bunch of farm boys who had spent years at FAME Studios playing on so many hits (by Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Etta James, and others) that they were, without a doubt, the definitive soul band of the era. And all Paul had to do to get their sound on his record was call them up and book some time in their studio.

When Tannen got through to the Swampers, they were between sessions, playing cards in the lounge/office area of the squat industrial building they had made into their studio. Guitarist Jimmy Johnson took the call, holding his hand over the receiver to consult with his partners. Not entirely sure they were speaking to someone who actually did represent such a preeminent rock star, they made their demands increasingly rich, up to the point where they said they would need a producer's credit, and the royalties that went along with it, if Paul
really
wanted to play with them. To their surprise, Tannen, having consulted with Paul, said that would be fine. When Tannen's letter of agreement arrived a few days later, written on Paul Simon's corporate stationery, the musicians got excited. As the appointed week grew closer, one of them brought in cassettes of Paul's first solo album and
Bridge Over Troubled Water
so everyone could take a close listen. Without a cassette player in the studio, they all came out to the parking lot so they could pile into a car, crank up the volume, and really get a sense of how the guy made records. He was
real
good, they decided—but so were they, and if he wanted to throw a challenge their way, they were going to catch it and throw it right back.