Homeward Bound (57 page)

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Louis Simon found his resting place in January 1995 at ninety years old. The end had been coming for some time. He'd lived his life, done his work with care, and raised two fine boys, both of whom had followed his steps into the music business. Younger brother Eddie was the first to take up the guitar, and became the better player of the two boys, then continued Louis's path into education by starting and running the Guitar Center, a place for lessons and theory he founded in 1972 with an investment by Artie Garfunkel. Louis had a more difficult time coming to terms with his elder son, the one whose musical talents outstripped his own by many factors, and whose earliest wave of success was profound enough to fulfill the dreams of a hundred immigrant families. Sometimes it seemed that Louis would never abide the life Paul had chosen for himself. He'd listen to the records and come out for a show, but the lights and the noise and the cheering still put him off. Such ostentation, and for what? Paul had accrued so much knowledge over the years; he could find a classroom somewhere and make a real difference in some students' lives.

It had nothing to do with love or lack thereof. Louis loved both his sons as all good fathers must, beyond reason, beyond measure. Yet he still couldn't be satisfied with Paul. Success, money, and fame were easy. So everyone loves you, he said. Who cares? Lou had left the music business for teaching and quickly concluded that that was the purpose of life. “Teach!
That's
the purpose.” He was near the end of his life before he found the words to tell his son that he had always been proud of him, that he knew he had achieved rare and mighty things. Paul took it to heart, but it's the things your dad tells you when you're five or fifteen or twenty-five that shape your internal geography, not the addendum that comes when you're in your fifties.

In the fall of 1997, when there was still cautious optimism around the production offices of
The Capeman
, Paul confided to the
New York Times Magazine
's Stephen Dubner that his father's thoughts on the transcendent value of being an educator had given him a new sense of what the purpose of his elaborate musical truly was. “I'm starting to think, without getting maudlin and psychological, that this whole ‘Capeman' thing is about teaching.”

As his struggle over
The Capeman
became all-consuming, Paul swore that his recording and performing days were over. He'd already moved on; he had found deeper, more satisfying things to do with his life. Of course, he said that sort of thing a lot, going as far back as the days of Tom and Jerry, when he and Artie both told reporters that pop stardom was just a goof on their way to college and graduate school. Paul had repeated it multiple times during the height of the Simon and Garfunkel era (fiction writing was his first love, etc.), reaffirmed his pledge when he went solo in 1971, and again at the end of his tours in 1973, 1975, and 1980. He'd seemed committed to the idea when he was promoting his new Broadway career during the mid-90s. “I'm thinking of ‘The Capeman' as a very big ending,” he said, going on to say that he was done making records, too. It sounded pretty definitive, even if he did end up carving himself just a bit of wiggle room (“That's sort of my thinking at the moment…”). By the time the play closed in late March, he had decided that he was done with Broadway shows, too.

He was leaving, he was leaving. Best friend Lorne Michaels had stopped taking it seriously years earlier. “Since I met Paul, he's been saying that he's getting out of show business.” It was a tactic, a defensive mechanism, a way to say, I'm above all this anyway, so why should I care if you like what I do? He'd pretend to go, linger by the door for a while, then pop right back in with a big smile and a brand-new record, a brand-new tour, a brand-new Paul.

Paul stuck with his retirement vow for slightly more than a year. An offer to co-headline a concert tour with Bob Dylan, Paul's perpetual influence, rival, friend, and enemy, in the summer of 1999 proved irresistible. The two musicians convened in New York for a few days to work through some ideas for duets. Dylan was hoping to do “The Only Living Boy in New York” and “The Boy in the Bubble,” and Paul talked about trying out “To Ramona” and “Forever Young.” Ads and posters for the tour, built around a painting of two locomotives thundering down two parallel tracks, alluded to the separate paths the two singer-songwriters had followed through the world. The dream of the onstage collaboration was prettier than the real thing. Barnstorming arenas and amphitheaters, the two folk-rock icons took turns opening and closing the shows, with one end intricately prepared and exuberantly played and the other rough-edged and blazing. Critics noted that the artists' mutual admiration didn't necessarily equal onstage chemistry. As much as Dylan got into singing with Paul on “The Sound of Silence,” his inability to master the lyrics or sing the same combination of notes in the same way from night to night made their harmony something less than silky. Knowing all attempts at reining in his fellow bard would be pointless, Paul stood back and reveled in the moment. In the wake of a particularly shaggy go at “Helllooo darkness mah ol' freee-yennnnnn / I come to talllk to yewwwwagai-yennn” near the end of the tour, Dylan leaned across the microphone and shouted into his fellow icon's ear, “On a scale of one to ten how do I compare to Artie?”

Paul was so convulsed with laughter that it was a wonder he didn't fall down.

A similar tour with Brian Wilson in 2001 dispensed with the duets, even though Paul's beautifully deconstructed guitar-and-voice cover of “Surfer Girl” had been one of the high points of a Wilson tribute at Radio City Music Hall a few months earlier. Wilson and his band opened the shows with ninety minutes of his greatest songs (from “Surfin' USA” to “Good Vibrations” to “Love and Mercy”), one finely cut gem after another. Then Paul would come with his band and “The Sound of Silence,” “Kodachrome,” and “You Can Call Me Al,” and the party would get even wilder. Fifteen years later the
Graceland
songs had ascended into the pantheon of pop music, the sounds hard-wired into the synaptic receptors for joy and comfort.

Paul played plenty of his familiar songs, but he couldn't imagine spending this new phase in his career as an oldies act. Bits of new songs started to come to him in 1998, and though the pace was closer to a seep than a flood, he managed to get a handful of instrumental tracks recorded before breaking for the Dylan tour in 1999. By mid-2000 he'd produced enough music to fill an album of deceptively tranquil love ballads, narrative story-songs, and explorations of the end of life and the start of what might come next. Working with the core of his globally sourced band (drummer Steve Gadd, bassist Bakithi Kumalo, guitarist Vincent Nguini, percussionist Jamey Haddad, and the many-handed guitarist Mark Stewart, who doubles on every other stringed instrument plus horns and vocals), Paul crafted tracks that incorporated nearly all the sounds that had entranced him over the years: the restless percussion and tinsel-stringed guitars of South America, the bouncy beats of South Africa, the banjos and Dobros of American folk and blues, the processed sounds and drones of the modern avant-garde. Throughout the album, he sings with an actor's grasp of character, speaking some lines and singing others in a voice that bends from sweet to sarcastic to hushed with the enormity of life and the finality of death. He called the record
You're the One
and released it in the early fall of 2000, less than a year and a half after
The Capeman
's collapse.

Nearly sixty years old, Paul had achieved a kind of domestic tranquility that seemed like a scene from someone else's life. Married in 1992, he and Edie started their family as soon as the fertility gods allowed, welcoming a son named Adrian in 1992, a girl named Lulu in 1995, and their youngest, Gabriel, in 1998. It was a fresh start that seemed charmed. They moved to a large but homey house in exurban New Canaan, Connecticut, and basked in the same wonder that puts so many parents in mind of life's great pleasures and terrors. “This is near enough to bliss,” Paul sings in “Look at This,” before acknowledging the other end of the parental bargain: “If you're looking for worries, you got 'em.”

Harper, the son he had with Peggy in 1972, had given Paul plenty of worries over the years. He suffered the usual adolescent struggles, compounded by all the temptations of children of the rich and famous and, worse, his own bouts of depression. Even as a young teenager, Harper became a regular at CBGB, downtown, drinking heavily and fooling around with weed and LSD. Paul and Peggy weren't naïve; once your son starts getting kicked out of schools, the situation becomes clear. Raised in part by Carrie, who had come into his life when he was five, Harper asked to live with her in Los Angeles, but by the time he turned twenty-one he was out of control, using heroin, Demerol, speed, and morphine until, as he recalled, the mixed-up powder was tumbling out of his pockets and nose. “Like Rainbow Brite in a nasty mood.” He eventually got the help he needed and family order was restored.

You're the One
takes on love and contentment with a realist's eye for the meteor plunging from the clear blue sky. “Darling Lorraine” follows a long marriage from romance to separation to reconciliation and death, while “Quiet” anticipates a senescence peaceful enough for the singer to “lie down on my blanket / And release my fists at last.” “The Teacher” sinks deepest to its creator's bone. Equal parts awed and bitter, the song describes a life spent in the shadow of a great and wise man, a philosopher-king of sorts, who leads a tattered group of immigrants over raw hills to a paradise he can describe but never quite reach. Still, they follow because “it's easier to learn than unlearn / Because we've passed the point of no return.” The teacher grows older and stronger; his appetites strip the hills and drain the rivers. His words come inscribed upon tablets, and though his acolytes know his flaws, they can't resist his authority, or the memory of being carried away from danger in his arms. “Carry me home, my teacher / Carry me home.”

Released in September 2000,
You're the One
lacked the energy that defined virtually all Paul's previous records, but its rise to No. 19 on the
Billboard
list (twenty-three slots higher than
Songs of the Capeman
had reached three years earlier), along with a chorus of encouraging reviews, was a step in the right direction. The album earned Paul his sixth nomination for the Album of the Year Grammy, and though he eventually lost to Steely Dan's reunion album,
Two Against Nature
, simply being included felt like a welcome-back hug from his many friends, colleagues, and admirers in the music industry.

Another new album came in 2006, this one a jaunt into the electronic textures of Brian Eno, the British producer who had helped the likes of the Talking Heads, David Bowie, and Robert Fripp create some of their best-known albums. With Eno's metallic whooshes and clicks as a sonic landscape (as described in the album credits), Paul worked with small combos of mostly rock players to craft a steelier set of songs for the post-9/11 America of the Bush-Cheney years: songs about conflict, about desperation, about love, prayers, and escape. Called
Surprise
, the album veered from modern pop to the deliberately obscure to the sweet and delicate (“Father and Daughter”). The last was actually a bit of a retread, a slightly enhanced version of a song Paul had written about his daughter, Lulu, then contributed to the soundtrack of the animated movie
The Wild Thornberrys
. Built around a tumbling guitar riff reminiscent of “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” the song resonated deeply enough to score an Academy Award nomination for Best Song, and a nod in the same category at the Golden Globes.
Surprise
sold better than its predecessor, debuting at
Billboard
's No. 14 slot before dropping out of sight.

Paul's music had been one of the defining cultural forces during the last thirty-five years of the twentieth century. But the dawn of the twenty-first century launched a fifth era in his recording career, the point where his storied achievements both gilded and deflated his new work. He'd spend two to four years producing a set of songs and then present it to the world in a downpour of excellent reviews.
His best in a decade! His best in twenty years! His best since
Graceland
!
He'd play a couple of the new tracks on
Saturday Night Live
and sit for some interviews, talk about the new songs, the good old days, and, with varying degrees of patience and crankiness, the bad old controversies. His fans would run to the local record store or hit the Buy button on Amazon or pick it up at the Starbucks counter along with their grande macchiato and slip it into the car's CD changer to listen to on the way home.
It's actually really good
, they'd tell their friends at a Saturday night dinner party.
Well, it's no
Graceland
, but it sounds just like him.

As Paul knew, the modern pop mainstream had no room for a legacy artist in his sixties, a man old enough to be the average pop radio listener's grandfather. It didn't bother him, he said. He would have been shocked if the kids of the day paid attention to what he had to say. So he would say what he felt, make it sound good to his own ears, and get it out there for whoever wanted to hear it. He'd sell a decent number, enough to put him in the Top 20 for a week or two, but it was a different game now. When his contract with Warner Bros. ended with
Surprise
in 2006, he became a free agent. It didn't bother him that much. The morning after the deal expired was the first day he hadn't been subject to a recording contract since the fall of 1963, when he was twenty-two years old.