Homeward Bound (49 page)

Sitting with Paul in his Cape Town hotel suite in early 1987 to describe the complexities of cultural boycott, Clegg launched into a detailed analysis of the antiapartheid movement's politics, and how each chapter of the ANC had its own way of interpreting and enforcing the boycott, and how you might be welcomed heartily into one country only to be treated like a pariah in the next. The South African musician got through only a few minutes before Paul, his face gone blank, asked him to stop. “This is very complicated,” he told Clegg. “I can see that you're talking. I can hear words coming out of your mouth. But I have no idea what you're saying. Hang on a sec—I've got to smoke a doobie.” Paul jumped to his feet, went into his bedroom, came out with a joint, took a hit, and handed it to Clegg. They passed it between them until it was finished, and then Paul, looking revived, asked Clegg to continue. As Clegg remembered, “I started again, and he asked me very penetrating questions about how one navigates through this.”

There was plenty of navigating to do. The United Nations antiapartheid committee had placed Paul on its 1987 list of South African boycott violators, putting him in league with the lowest of the racist sympathizers. Understanding how much trouble this would create for the tour, Paul sent a letter to Joseph Garba, the Nigerian ambassador who chaired the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid, and on the eve of the tour's February 1 opening in Rotterdam, Paul stopped in London to hold a press conference. He started the session by reading the letter he'd just sent to Garba, describing himself as “an artist completely opposed to the apartheid system in South Africa” who was “working in my field toward this goal [of ending the racist system].” Clarifying that he had refused all offers to perform in South Africa and would continue to do so until apartheid had been dismantled, Paul felt he'd smoothed the waters with the UN and ANC officials enough to report that they had cleared him of whatever wrongdoing he was accused of, and thus he would be free to take the Graceland tour around the world without risking condemnation. But when a reporter noted that United Nations sources had referred to his letter as an apology, Paul bristled. “I've got nothing to apologize for!” he insisted. The ANC responded with its own statement, declaring that Paul's “apology” had made it possible for them to “welcome his commitment to support the cultural boycott and total isolation of apartheid South Africa.”

Paul's refusal to appear even a little bit contrite, if only for miscommunicating with the leadership of the antiapartheid movement, blew back on him immediately. Amer Araim, the senior political affairs officer at the UN Centre Against Apartheid, dismissed Paul's original letter as “cleverly worded” and described his London press conference as consisting of “funny statements” and “nonsense.” And Joseph Garba, no longer convinced that the musician's intentions were entirely honorable, sent a letter back to Paul spelling out the official terms of the United Nations' cultural boycott of South Africa, and informing him that until he could say that he understood and was willing to respect the rules of the code, his name would stay on the violators' list. Paul responded in some satisfactory way: the committee removed his name from the list three days later, citing his commitment not to perform in South Africa, which he had established in his first letter, but the anger in the antiapartheid movement persisted.

As Linda Ronstadt had discovered, all they wanted was an apology. They didn't even care about the money the boycott violators took home with them. As long as you said you were sorry, you could keep every dime. They cared just as little about what you said to clear the books. As long as you acknowledged their authority and said you were sorry for whatever you'd done, everything else was forgiven. But Paul would not, could not, do that, no matter how righteous the cause. He would bow to no one's authority, particularly when it came to his music—and once again there would be a price to pay.

As plans for the first months of the Graceland tour came together, Paul and his advisers decided to make the final leg of the journey, an eight-stop swing through North America during the summer, into a series of benefit shows to raise money for a variety of African and African American causes. The tour's promoters, along with Miriam Makeba, proposed leading off the charity shows with a free concert at the New York headquarters of the United Nations. To gain support from inside the United Nations, Paul's tour managers recruited the United Nations African Mothers Association (UNAMA), an advocacy group created by the spouses of the UN's African ambassadors. But while Evelyn Garba, wife of Joseph Garba, had at first been eager to participate, her enthusiasm faded when she realized how bitterly Paul had feuded with her husband. That ended UNAMA's cooperation before it began, and prompted Joseph Garba and the rest of the Special Committee Against Apartheid, none of them happy that Paul's representatives had seemed to attempt an end run around them, to restate their opposition to Paul and the tour. This directed even more attention to the antiapartheid demonstrators massing outside the doors of London's Royal Albert Hall, where Paul was set to play six nights in early April. Unlike Johnny Clegg and Juluka, Paul was too well known, and the public demand for the shows too overwhelming, for the protesters to shut him down entirely. Still, their shouts and anti-
Graceland
pamphlets cast a shadow over the entire week.

Paul had supporters, too, including some of the antiapartheid movement's most influential figures. The Rev. Allan Boesak, who led Children of Apartheid, had been a prominent figure in South Africa since he founded the United Democratic Front in 1983, spent a day in New York to hail Paul and the Graceland tour's campaign to raise world awareness of apartheid's many abuses, particularly on the country's black children. The archbishop Desmond Tutu felt exactly the same way, Boesak said. Asked for comment, the UN's Amer Araim was quick to point out that the antiapartheid committee basically agreed. “But Simon should reply to the letter of the chairman of the Special Committee. If he would do that, we have no problem with his tour or any of his activities.” A reply to a letter. Just that. “We think the whole episode could be closed when he has made a proper formulation … to the Special Committee,” wrote ANC secretary of culture Barbara Masekela in her part of a special issue of the American news magazine
Africa Report
.

*   *   *

Again, there were things Paul wouldn't do. He wouldn't write the letter. And though he had been generous, to a point, with songwriting credits for the African musicians, he didn't do the same for the two American bands with whom he'd worked on two of the album's other tracks.

It was galling, particularly for Los Lobos, the critically beloved Los Angeles–based Mexican American group whose debut album with Warner Bros., 1984's
How Will the Wolf Survive?,
had earned them a national audience and the admiration of their label mate from the Upper West Side of New York City. As saxophonist Steve Berlin recalls, he got a call from Warner Bros. president Lenny Waronker saying how big a fan of the group Paul had become, and that he really wanted to record a track with them when he was in LA in a few days, Berlin was delighted. He'd grown up in Philadelphia; he knew all about Paul's music. The band's other members, though, David Hidalgo, Cesar Rosas, Louie Perez, and Conrad Lozano, came from a culture defined by Mexican and Latino music. “They knew ‘Sound of Silence,' but they really couldn't care less,” Berlin says. Warner Bros. Records ran family-style in those days: the lobby was full of musicians and friends; everyone's office, including those of Waronker and Mo Ostin, had an open door and a warm welcome. So if Waronker asked them to play a session for another member of the Warner Bros. family, they were there, no questions asked. So the band left it to their manager to sort out the details, and when the day came, they went to Amigo Studios in the San Fernando Valley ready to work.

Paul was there with engineer Roy Halee, who showed them around the studio, but Paul was surprisingly chilly, giving the most perfunctory of hellos before vanishing into the control booth, where he could peer down through a window and communicate through the studio intercom, lending him an omniscient voice-from-the-skies effect as he directed the band through the day. Not that he had much in the way of specific directions to give. He launched the session by telling the group to “just play something,” leaving them to meander from one unstructured jam to the next, churning away for five or fifteen or twenty minutes at a time before the intercom would crackle. “Nope, that isn't it,” Paul would say. “Try a six-eight. Nope, try a blues groove.” They'd spend the next ten or fifteen minutes on a twelve-bar blues piece only to hear the static and then Paul's “Eh, no, that ain't it, either. Try something else.” Ten minutes later and—“Nope, nope, nope. Sorta close but still not there. What else you got?” And on it went, much to the mounting anger of the band members, none of whom was the least bit interested in coming back for a second day of this kind of monkey-in-a-cage shit. How the
fuck
did this guy have no ideas? What the hell was this supposed to be, anyway? Let's just get our gear and go home. Berlin made a quick call to Waronker, telling him that it wasn't working and that now the guys were in revolt and had no intention of returning. Waronker begged Berlin to get the band back into the studio. “You've gotta get them back, you gotta hang in there, we gotta make this happen.” Berlin was wary, but again, family was family; he'd get the band to come back. Waronker gushed with relief. “I swear I'll make it up to you,” Berlin recalled hearing him say.

As Berlin recalled, when he relayed all of this to Hidalgo, Rosas, Perez, and Lozano, they finally threw up their hands and said sure, fine, whatever, let's just get this fuckin' thing over with already. They all showed up the next day, took up their instruments, and heard the voice from the ceiling telling them to play something, whatever they had. They spent another futile hour or two achieving nothing, until Hidalgo started playing some chords the other guys recognized from recent band rehearsals and jumped in after him, playing a driving two-chord progression that jumped into a simple but catchy chorus with contrasting rock and Mexican-style guitars, a nice accordion riff, and Berlin's saxophone adding texture to the lower registers. They had already put some time into it; everything about the tune came straight from the same well that had sprung the title track of their first album. So of course that was the point where everything turned around.

“Wait, what's that? What are you playing there?”

Now the voice from the ceiling was intrigued. Hidalgo looked up to say it was something they'd been working on.

“Okay, how's it go?”

Hidalgo led the rest of the group through the tune, all of them so relieved to glimpse a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Paul was sold. “Let's work on that,” he said, and two or three takes later, he declared himself happy, and the Los Lobos guys were out the door, then back in their cars headed for home. Paul wrote some lyrics to go with the tune and called Hidalgo and Perez in to sing it with him. And that was the last they heard from him until
Graceland
came out and “All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints” was credited as a solo Paul Simon composition.
*
At first the LA band was sure the printer had made a mistake, that they'd get a call from Paul's office offering profuse apologies and the next printings would be more accurate.

But that didn't happen, and no wonder: Paul disputes the Los Lobos musicians' entire account of their collaboration, claiming that he'd just been after a “generic Los Lobos dikka-de-dikka guitar sound,” and that he had helped shape the music they recorded.

But a similar story seems to lie beneath the album's other non–South African track, recorded with the New Orleans zydeco band Rockin' Dopsie and the Twisters. “That Was Your Mother,” as Paul titled the tune, is a light-footed zydeco shuffle that boasts another great lyric, a tongue-in-cheek lecture to a child about how much better his dad's life was before he was born. The track is great, too, a hippity-hop zydeco shuffle built around an ear-grabbing accordion riff, with a great sax solo that takes the tune to another level. Seven years earlier, a strikingly similar set of chords and central accordion riff were part of a Dopsie song called “My Baby, She's Gone,” which was credited entirely to Alton Rubin Sr., Rockin' Dopsie's legal name. Granted, Dopsie's original has a bluesier melody and a slightly crooked beat, and the sax solo is different from Paul's version. But the heart of the tune bears a distinct resemblance to the 1979 recording. And yet
Graceland
credits only one writer for the song: Paul Simon.

Maybe Dopsie figured that was a small price to pay for the global exposure and additional work he and his New Orleans party band would undoubtedly receive for being on an album with one of the music industry's biggest stars. But Los Lobos weren't quite as hungry for the Paul Simon bump.
How Will the Wolf Survive?
had sold far better than they imagined it would; their label was behind them and they were sifting through a pile of offers, including the one that would net them a No. 1 single in the theme song to the Ritchie Valens biopic
La Bamba
. But they also knew that they made themselves vulnerable. The group's manager, a dedicated, hardworking young woman named Linda Clark, had been an assistant publicist at Slash Records when they met. She signed on to be the group's manager and the arrangement worked perfectly when they were a regional band touring clubs and making records for independent labels. But when they launched themselves into the big time the terms of Clark's job changed dramatically. But Clark had little experience in the rough-and-tumble of big money entertainment and, like her clients, had gone into the Paul Simon session figuring that they would all work on a handshake and trust the fraternal feeling between Warner's artists. As a result they had made no presession agreements beyond the understanding that they would earn double the union's hourly scale for playing the sessions. Writing credits and royalty splits never came up, and in the end he took them all for himself. The members of Los Lobos were understandably outraged, but once again Paul felt he had nothing to apologize for.