Homeward Bound (44 page)

If Artie felt weird about singing his parts on the songs Paul had snatched away from Simon and Garfunkel, he didn't let it slip onstage. What came across most clearly was how thrilled Paul was to be liberated from one partner and officially bonded to another. While they performed in Vancouver, British Columbia, on August 22, the shiny ring on Paul's left hand set the tone for his somersaulting mood. He danced and beamed through the show, and cracked up completely when he and Artie both forgot when to start singing during the intro of “Think Too Much.” “We both did it this time!” he shouted just after they'd found their way to the third line. He did it again during his introduction to “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)” during the encores. “Here's a song I wrote in 1966, one day when I was in a good mood,” he said, pausing for a beat. “And today here again,” he continued, already laughing. “Two good moods! Two decades!” A rare moment, indeed.

The collapse of Simon and Garfunkel's
Think Too Much
came to light on October 8. News that the same material would soon appear as a Paul Simon album called
Hearts and Bones
was, to put it mildly, disappointing. The lead-off single, “Allergies”/“Think Too Much” (the slow version) emerged in early November to very little interest, peaking at No. 44. The follow-up single “Think Too Much”/“Song About the Moon” (the fast version) didn't sell enough copies to make the charts at all. When
Hearts and Bones
emerged in early November, some critics dished up their usual plaudits while others heard nothing beyond self-pitying naval gazing, and most record buyers opted not to get involved at all.
Hearts and Bones
stalled at No. 35 on the American charts, and climbed only one step higher in England. It barely nicked the Top 100 (No. 99) in Australia, where Paul and Artie had played to hundreds of thousands of fans just a few months earlier. Even the Japanese fans looked the other way. Scandinavian fans, particularly in Norway where
Hearts and Bones
climbed to No. 2, showed a bit more interest. But everywhere else it was a washout.

Maybe the global disinterest in Paul's record had nothing to do with music. Maybe it was the video-fuzzy cover shot of Paul, standing alone in front of a newsstand display of magazines, that didn't read right. Maybe it was the empty space to his right, where Artie had so recently been standing. Yes, the cover picture, along with the inside shot of Paul sitting alone on a train station bench, had come from the same photo session originally commissioned to make a cover for the Simon and Garfunkel album, the once-and-again partners welcoming us to a new adventure.

Instead, the much-anticipated Simon and Garfunkel reunion album just sort of vanished, leaving the familiar solo Paul and a series of explanations that didn't add up. Artie had had trouble with his voice? For a little while, sure, but he'd just spent two years singing beautifully on stages all around the world. Paul's songs were too personal to be sung by anyone else? It certainly didn't sound that way when they were singing them together onstage. Everything about the last two years of Simon and Garfunkel activity, that great traveling show of personal and artistic reconciliation, had been leading to the real symbol of reunion, return, revivification: the first Simon and Garfunkel album in thirteen years. And now we're hearing that that was just an illusion, a bait-and-switch? Well, fine. Just don't expect your audience to care that much.

And the thing is, Artie had already recorded parts for most of the songs. The piercing harmonies on “Allergies,” a shared lead and towering backgrounds for “Cars Are Cars,” close harmony support for the more boisterous version of “Think Too Much,” and others. What's more, Artie had returned from his walk with detailed notes describing exactly what he still intended to add to eight of the ten songs that were bound for
Think Too Much
only to wind up on
Hearts and Bones
. As ever, he had turned his thoughts into a graph, his precise lettering laying out step-by-step instructions for what he planned to sing in each song, with each entry codified further by bubbles indicating whether the change was absolutely necessary or still being considered. To read along while listening to
Hearts and Bones
and the version of
Think Too Much
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circulating among collectors is to glimpse an alternate version of musical history.

Just as the songs on
Bridge Over Troubled Water
projected the often-conflicting feelings contributing to Simon and Garfunkel's fracture in 1970, the songs on
Think Too Much/Hearts and Bones
capture the tangled impulses surrounding their reunion. Paul had spent most of his career describing and attempting to resolve conflicts: the primitive authority of rock 'n' roll versus the intellectual nuances of pop and jazz; the internal debate between thought and feeling, between whop-bop-a-loo-bop and the words of the prophets. These conflicts played out in the persistent weaving of musical styles, too, rockabilly with mariachi, the lush “woohs” of doo-wop with the chill atonality of modern classical. To the
New York Times
's Stephen Holden, the musical and lyrical complexities in
Hearts and Bones
proved the vigor in the artist's pursuit of “a nobler idea” in popular music. The album was “the most convincing case for using rock 'n' roll as the basis of mature artistic expression,” he wrote. On a traditional Simon and Garfunkel record the contrasting thoughts would also be heard in the sound of the singers: the lower, darker voice and its lighter, dreamier companion both contrasting and supporting each other.

They were still re-creating that process when the mixes that appear on the
Think Too Much
bootleg were captured. “Allergies” leads the first side with Artie singing the intro, then adding those spiky harmonies heard at the concerts along with a lower, descending harmony on the chorus. On “Hearts and Bones,” the story of Paul's sometimes vexing relationship with Carrie, Artie's voice drifts in, whispers gently, floats off, and then returns, the voices of the angels following the couple's journey together. “Their hearts and their bones / Oh and they won't come undone.” The singer didn't record his plans for anything beyond the basic (and very occasional) lines for the playful “When Numbers Get Serious,” which takes the logic-versus-belief dialectic to a math class where 2 x 2 = 22 and all the other numbers collapse into the most monolithic of all: 1. “Song About the Moon,” also performed live in a harmonized arrangement, extends Dr. Gorney's prescription to Paul for beating writer's block (“If you want to write a song about the moon, then do it! / Write a song about the moon”) to falling in love.

In “Train in the Distance,” Paul's affectionate look back at Peggy, their romance, and their ongoing bond through their son, Artie imagined draping the opening line (“She was beautiful as southern skies the night he met her”) with harmonies that would “descend at the top like petals.” For “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” he added a close harmony for the second verse and a wordless voicing over the top of Philip Glass's bleak orchestral vignette at the end. As the
New York Times
's Stephen Holden implied, most of the songs describe unifications: mostly romantic but also social, as in the upbeat passages of “Johnny Ace,” and cultural, as in “Cars Are Cars.” All these threads merge in “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War.” A gossamer ballad inspired by a portrait of the Belgian painter and companions taken during World War II (Paul altered the image's title ever so slightly), the song's verses and chorus imagine the artist and his wife in the New York of the 1950s, discovering the new world as a sensual dreamscape. The extravagance of fashion, the elegant dinners, the gilded corridors of power—all are easily accessible, but none is as thrilling as the time they spend alone, dancing to the music of the great doo-wop singers. Time weaves them together and numbs their passion. But their love continues to throb, forever inside the lush voices of the Penguins, the Moonglows, and the Five Satins. Paul takes the lead vocal for himself, handing off to Artie for the higher reaches of the mid-song digression before resuming the solo for the final verse. The song yearns for the sound of intimacy, for singers breathing as one, the same voice emerging from two throats. Instead, the voices are miles apart, the parts overlapping but never quite touching.

They would never bridge the distance, just as Paul's solo version of
Hearts and Bones
never found its way into the world. It might not have gone over that well if it had come out as a Simon and Garfunkel record. The lyrical conceit of “Allergies” along with the herky-jerky beat and Al Di Meola's porcupine guitar part sit uncomfortably in the ear, while the offbeat imagery scattered through the lyrics of “Song About the Moon” doesn't make up for the song's lack of an emotional pulse. “When Numbers Get Serious” suffers from the same absence: both have the moon-in-jejune chime of songs written on assignment.

Like the Simon and Garfunkel reunion, Paul and Carrie's marriage got off to a lovely public start. As well as popping up onstage for the last few Simon and Garfunkel shows after she and Paul were married, Carrie appeared with him when he hosted one of the first episodes of Lorne Michaels's post-
SNL—
he left his signature program for the first half of the eighties—comedy-variety program
The New Show
in the early weeks of January 1984: they were in one funny skit where he played a henpecked Abraham Lincoln to her dismissive Mary Todd Lincoln. But as the glories faded back into real life, the same problems were waiting just where they had left them. It was only a few months before they broke up again, this time for real, with the help of divorce lawyers.

Alone and bored, Paul went back on the road as a solo act in the summer of 1984. He would visit twelve cities between August 1 and 26, for a handful of dates spread around amphitheaters and auditoriums He didn't take a band with him, either. It was just Paul, a few guitars, and a long list of old favorites, along with a few
Hearts and Bones
songs, if only to keep the album from vanishing without a trace. But, really, he could have played whatever he felt like playing, whenever he felt like playing it. Touring as a solo for the first time since those treasured days in England meant he only had to ask himself. And he already knew how he felt, so he really didn't have to ask at all.

*   *   *

Earlier that spring Paul had met Heidi Berg, a musician who had played in the
Saturday Night Live
band before signing on to be the bandleader for
The New Show
. Unfortunately,
The New Show
failed to find an audience and was canceled by early spring. A week or two later, Michaels started meeting with the show's now-jobless staffers at his Brill Building offices, helping them figure out what they wanted to do next. When Berg came to see Michaels to talk about music jobs on TV, he suggested, among other things, that she poke her head into the offices just up the hall. “You should talk to my friend Paul Simon.”

Berg spent a couple of minutes chatting with some ex-colleagues in Michaels's waiting room, and by the time she got to the outer door of the office suite Paul was waiting for her. He was smiling. He heard she was very good. He wanted to hear her songs. After she played him some tapes, he invited her to use one of his spare offices as a rehearsal space, and asked how much she'd need to live on while she got things together to record the album he wanted to produce for her.

The daughter of Norwegian parents, Berg was raised in the heavily Scandinavian Ballard neighborhood in Seattle, where she studied classical violin and doubled on guitar, vocals, and keyboards. Growing up among Norwegians had given Berg a taste for the squeeze box, which she mastered along with her other instruments. In New York in the early 1980s, Berg was riding in a friend's car one day when she found a tape of modern South African pop groups.
*
She put it into the stereo and was instantly entranced by what she heard. She loved the upbeat slap of the drums and the bopping bass and the jangle of the guitars, but she was truly hooked when the accordion took the lead. It was a kind of rhythm she knew she'd never heard, but which felt completely right the moment it danced into her ears.

Berg started meeting with Paul in his Central Park West apartment, bringing tapes of her demos and talking about how she wanted her record to sound. By this point, she had collected a few South African pop records and was deep in the thrall of mbaqanga, a style of township dance music rooted in tribal songs. When she told Paul how much she wanted to put her own version of the music on her album, he asked her the first question he'd have asked himself if he had been in her position: why don't you go to South Africa and record your songs with the people who made the original records? Paul had been doing that for nearly twenty years, but Berg laughed. She didn't know anyone in South Africa; she wasn't even sure who was playing on the tracks, so how was she going to find them? Curiosity piqued, Paul asked a question that turned out to be fateful. Could he borrow the tape? Yes, he could. Berg gave him the homemade tape marked “Accordion Jive Hits Vol. II” with one condition: he couldn't have it for more than a week because it was her favorite; she wanted it on hand all the time. Paul nodded. No problem at all.

It was the spring of 1984, the dawn of the supersized American superstars: Michael Jackson at his military brocaded, chimp-toting height; Madonna in her wedding gown and lace bustier; Bruce Springsteen stomping across the continents in his muscles, work boots, T-shirt, and blood-red bandanna. All three of them flying as high and bright as newborn planets while Paul Simon sat in his apartment counting his ongoing string of high-profile flops: the
One-Trick Pony
debacles, the collapse of the Simon and Garfunkel reunion, the commercial failure of
Hearts and Bones
, his exploded marriage to Carrie, and nothing on the horizon. In earlier years Paul could soldier through heartbreak by focusing on music; it was usually the most stable part of his life. But now his music career was in even worse shape than his romantic life. What could he possibly do next?