Homeward Bound (35 page)

He'd had his reasons, only some of them having to do with his fear of facing an audience without Artie at his side. He'd wanted to have more solo songs to play, and to figure out the best way to present them: Just him and his guitar? Accompanied by a three- or four-piece backing band? Or with guest stars who could take a few turns in the spotlight on their own? Ultimately Paul designed a show that gave him all the above while also resolving the two most daunting questions standing between him and a solo concert tour: Would he perform “Bridge Over Troubled Water”? And if he did, how could he sing it without Artie? As the tour grew closer, Paul started to have nightmares, surrealistic horror shows where he'd walk onstage and find his microphone standing far above his head, or a glass wall separating him from an audience that couldn't hear a note of what he was playing and singing. Typical anxiety dreams—you could unlock their symbolism with both hands cuffed behind your back while in a trunk at the bottom of the East River. But that still didn't relieve his fears, or keep his subconscious from its troubled imaginings.

When Paul launched the tour at the Boston Music Hall on May 6, 1973, he opened the show alone, strumming and singing “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” and “Run That Body Down” before dipping into the Simon and Garfunkel catalogue with a solo rendition of “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy).” Jon Landau was in the audience, seeing Paul's nerves during his solo acoustic songs, then noticing him ease as the band joined for the
Rhymin' Simon
material, a lilting “Was a Sunny Day” that segued into “Cecilia” and then a hushed “American Tune.” About fifteen songs into the set, he introduced Urabamba, a Chilean folk group Los Incas founder Jorge Milchberg had formed, to back him on “El Condor Pasa” and “Duncan,” then left the stage to let the group play two of their own songs before returning to end the set together with “The Boxer.” The structure of the second set was the same, starting with a long solo stretch, then upping the energy with the Jessy Dixon Singers, a five-piece gospel group that included drums, a bass, and Mr. Dixon himself on vocals and organ.

As Landau wrote in his review for the
Boston Phoenix
, this was where the show turned magical. (“Imagine an American gospel group singing backup to a white folksinger's reggae tune,” he wrote. “Even more difficult, imagine Simon pulling the thing off as if he was born to do it.”) Starting with “Mother and Child Reunion,” they moved into a six-voice arrangement of “The Sound of Silence,” the group laying their rich harmonies behind Paul's lead. Paul left the stage so the group could perform two of their own songs, then returned for the evening's climax, an arrangement of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” reminiscent of the gospel version Aretha Franklin recorded in 1971, which sounded fiery enough to be a completely different song. Built around Dixon's church organ and Paul's guitar, with the Dixon group's bass and drums playing softly behind, the arrangement is slower than the original, the choir stepping in and out to echo some lines and joining in unison to emphasize others. The group plays in full force for the final verse, then softens into the start of a coda featuring Paul and one of the women repeating variations of “I will ease your mind.” Harmonizing here, echoing one another there, spurring Paul to a few shouted repetitions, his voice rising before melting back into the other singers' arms for a round of “I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe I will ease your mind,” then “I believe, I believe, I really do believe,” and then drifting into one final unadorned “I believe, I believe I really do believe, I will ease your mind.” It was, Landau wrote, “a rare, privileged moment, a musical experience of the type I had forgotten takes place on the stages of rock concerts.”

Landau concluded his review by noting how different Paul's voice sounded when in the company of the gospel singers on “Bridge.” No longer hemmed in by his own seriousness and the restrictions of two-voice close harmony, he'd become a new singer. Free of inhibition, liberated from the complexities of his own mind, so lost in feeling that thinking was beside the point. “Perhaps sometime in the future he will elect to do more with it.”

Separated into monthlong (give or take) legs, the
Rhymin'
tour continued for a year, starting with a few weeks in American concert halls in May and then heading to London for a handful of shows at the Royal Albert Hall, then returning to New York in early June for a one-nighter on a larger bill at Long Island's Nassau Coliseum. A set of American college dates ran through the fall, followed in April by Paul's first performances in Japan.

*   *   *

Even from the start, Paul and Peggy made an unlikely match: the New York City–raised artist/celebrity and the church-raised girl from Bybee, Tennessee. Paul's life in Manhattan, including the professional artist part, flowed naturally from his childhood, while Peggy, even after fifteen years of being among (and married to) show business professionals, continued to feel like an outsider in the nightclubs, dressing rooms, and penthouse apartments. As Paul grew more comfortable in his fame, and more familiar with the movie stars he'd met through Mike Nichols in New York and during his own long stays in Los Angeles, the couple's bond grew strained. Paul was always an attentive father. His job required him to be away from home—Peggy had always known that—but when he was home he treasured his time with toddler Harper. Yet there was a basic incompatibility between husband and wife. The runaway child of the chaotic southern family craved structure, and the dutiful son of the aspiring immigrant family was dying to cut loose.

The split was nearly as amiable as a divorce could be. Paul got Mike Tannen to represent his side in the settlement, and also asked him to help Peggy hire a good lawyer to make her case. It sounds more manipulative than it turned out to be, given that Tannen hired Gertrude Mainzer, a Holocaust survivor known for being a fierce advocate in the courtroom. Paul moved into the Stanhope Hotel for a few months before buying a Central Park West apartment, a close walk from the family's town house on Ninety-Fourth Street, making it easy for them to share custody of Harper. The arrangement also made it easy for Paul to expand his social life, moving into a nighttime circuit of actors, musicians, and writers that ran through spotlit premieres, celebrity-rich after-parties, and Elaine's, the exclusive dining room on Second Avenue on the Upper East Side. On wilder nights he might find himself on the shiny dance floors and shadowed nooks of Studio 54, fast on its way to becoming the hottest discotheque in the world. Soon Paul's well-known face was spotted in the company of starlets and other enchanting women, including the rising bistro singer/actress Bette Midler, movie actress Shelley Duvall,
Saturday Night Live
performer Gilda Radner, and the celebrity portraitist Edie Baskin, who would lead him into the center of another set of tastemakers. Paul became accustomed to riding in a chauffeured Cadillac limousine, a luxury that made him feel like a character in a film about high society. “You pull up in front of a place, just like in the movies, and when you get out the driver is there waiting for you. It's the New York dream come true.”

Many nights, Paul preferred to stay in his apartment, reading and playing with Harper or, if the energy was going his way, discovering the form of a new song. When Paul's grasp on his music slipped, so did he, spinning into days of free-associating gloom, fretting over whatever consumed him at the moment. Maybe it was all a cover for the hot bolts he'd been feeling inside his left index finger, the captain among the five digits that coaxed music from the neck of his guitar. He'd had to take regular cortisone shots to dull the bite during the
Rhymin
' tour, and when he took it to his doctor, the news wasn't good. He'd developed calcium deposits, which not only hurt but also made his finger stiff and clumsy. Back home after the tour ended in mid-1974, he found that the only treatment his doctor could offer was rest, and lots of it. And it wasn't working.

How could he lead a life that didn't have a guitar at its center? For twenty years the instrument had been his dreamcatcher, his coal mine, his pot of gold. Virtually everything that mattered to him came through the mouth of his guitar. In a life built around change, it was the most crucial constant. Yet Paul was surprisingly sanguine. He took singing lessons. He boned up on orchestration. Most significantly, he studied music theory and composition. He had always drawn from a broader palette than the other rock/folk songwriters—being raised in a house filled with jazz and the great symphonies had given him a taste for structural complexity and hepcat intervals that most folk, rock, and blues-inspired writers wouldn't imagine. And that only made Paul keenly aware of everything he
didn't
know about music, particularly when his pen got stuck mid-song and he had no idea where to jump next.

Paul called Phil Ramone, the producer who had been so integral to
There Goes Rhymin' Simon
, asking if he knew an educated musician who could help open some new doors in Paul's songwriting ability. The tiny world being what it is, Ramone put Paul in touch with Chuck Israels, the music camp instructor whom Paul met during his summer in Stockbridge in 1967. Israels was already a schooled musician back then, but his skill and reputation had grown over the years, and Paul was happy to submit to his tutelage. They started meeting regularly at Paul's apartment on Central Park West, Paul paying a hundred dollars a session (a fantastic sum for an hour-long lesson in those days) for Israels to detail the essentials of music composition—repetition, sequence, inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion, augmentation, diminishment, and so on—to ease his way when his pen got stuck during a writing session. Not that Paul hadn't already incorporated those techniques into his songs; he'd just done it intuitively—which was great until his muse sputtered, reducing him to something like a blind man groping his way through a maze.

Reading music or being able to write in notation still held next to no interest for him. He was after some new writing techniques and a more strategic approach that would help him understand what he already had, recognize its melodic patterns, and let them reveal the way into new sections that grew naturally from themes that had been established in the song's earliest bars. Israels had other tricks, such as knowing when it was best to skip a troublesome section in order to write the end, thereby allowing Paul to return to the tough spot already knowing where it was headed. Appearing on Dick Cavett's late-night talk show in the midst of his studies, Paul took up his guitar to play the start of a song that was so lightly sketched it didn't even have a name. All he had, Paul demonstrated, were two verses about meeting an old girlfriend on the street, going out for a beer, and then going home to reflect on his inability to change. Both verses ended with the same line: “Still crazy after all these years.” And while he had no idea where the story would go next, he said, he already knew what his musical choices were, and why they made sense. And he looked really happy about it.

Paul was so delighted with what Israels had taught him, he began to incorporate the bassist/composer into other parts of his life. Invited to a party at Paul's apartment, Israels found himself standing between Shelley Duvall, Mike Nichols, the actor Peter Boyle (then costarring in the smash comedy
Young Frankenstein
), and the British actor/writer Eric Idle, whose innovative troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus was rewriting the rules of comedy on both sides of the ocean. They all seemed nice and welcoming—Israels was Paul's guest; it was clear to them that he belonged—but the speed and complexity of their repartee left him speechless. Israels's parents were important musicians and teachers, too; his kid brother's godfather was Paul Robeson. He came home one afternoon to find Lead Belly sitting at the family's kitchen table, feasting on a chocolate cake that he washed down with glasses of Muscatel. Israels had also been an early protégé of eventual Simon and Garfunkel producer Tom Wilson, who had the college-age bassist play on sessions with Art Blakey, Hank Mobley, and other leading jazz players of the era. It was not a slow-moving crowd. But among Paul's friends that night, it was all Israels could do to keep a handle on his wineglass. “I know I'm smart, I know I'm educated,” he says. “Generally I can hold my own. But around those people I'm a blithering idiot.”

If Paul noticed, he didn't care. As he continued to write songs for the new album, he turned to Israels repeatedly for help, coming to him with songs that were half-written, maybe just in chunks, using his teacher to analyze what he had and to suggest where he might go next. When the recording started, he'd have Israels come to the studio, and once Ramone got to know him better, the producer grew fond of him, too. They asked Israels to write an arrangement for one of the songs, and though Israels didn't hit the mark, Paul and Ramone kept inviting him to sessions, introducing him to other musicians and producers, and telling them what a great musician and writer he was. It occurred to Israels how eager Paul was to get him hooked into his circuit of successful musicians and producers, to put him in a position where he could work at the top of his game and make the kind of money top-caliber musicians deserve to make. When the album was nearly finished, Paul asked Israels if he wanted cowrite status on any of the songs he had helped Paul write. Israels demurred: he hadn't written anything, he'd only shown Paul some options. But the gesture was just as meaningful as it was unexpected.

Most often, Paul's recording process moved at a glacial pace. He'd fill the studio with a handful of New York's best rock and jazz players and do his usual thing of showing them the outlines of the day's song, then describing how he wanted the tune to feel. The players would figure out the rest for themselves, digging into their own sack of riffs to fill the groove Paul yearned to hear. It was never an efficient process, but as long as the ideas flowed Paul was delighted to spend the day hearing his music being shaped by such graceful hands. The musicians were delighted, too; Paul paid far more than union rates, and even if he didn't end up using their work simply having a Paul Simon session on your résumé was a prized accomplishment. Everyone knew that Paul Simon worked only with the best, most distinctive players.