Homeward Bound (59 page)

They joked with each other—scripted jokes mostly, but still—and resisted the subtle little digs they'd thrown at each other at previous reunions. Artie was clearly more interested in recording a new album than Paul was (Paul: “I think this is more about what we
were
”), but the possibility—well, who could rule anything out now?

The tour ran for nearly a year, climaxing with an enormous crowd at the Colosseum in Rome, but the friendliness persisted through the rest of the decade. Artie sang a beautiful “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at the ceremony for Paul's Gershwin Prize in 2007, and they sang a handful of songs together at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's twenty-fifth-anniversary concert in October 2009. By then they were already in the midst of a planned two-year world tour that had begun with a month of stadiums and arenas across Australia, New Zealand, and Japan earlier that summer. The shows, which included separate-but-equal sets for each of them to perform his solo work without the other, went as smoothly and played to the same acclaim as the 2003/2004 shows had. The tour was to continue through North America and Europe in 2010, and to start the season off with a bang they accepted a headlining spot on the second day of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. And this was where the recent years of happy collaboration came to an end.

For months Artie had been aware of a stiffness in his vocal cords, a physical block of some sort that had made his rich voice go ragged. He'd aim for notes well within his range and miss by a mile, his voice ricocheting away in a thin, sad squeak. The problem was intermittent at first, and he went to New Orleans expecting to soldier his way through, then find a way to nurture it to health in time for the start of the tour a few weeks later. Instead, he found himself standing in front of a vast crowd, completely unable to perform. Paul picked up on his partner's distress quickly and did what he could to shore him up, making sure the crowd knew Artie wasn't feeling well, bringing them onto his side, checking in from song to song, asking if he was up for “My Little Town,” cheering him on when he pulled off a song without too much trouble. When they finally got to “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Paul reached over to rub Artie's back while they sang together, then led the cheers for Artie's brave, if ultimately disastrous, attempt at the climactic verse. When it was done, Paul stepped back to applaud, then stepped up to throw his arms around his partner's shoulders, wrapping him in a long hug that ended with both of them laughing, then clasping their hands together over their heads like prizefighters.

When Artie was diagnosed a few weeks later with vocal cord paresis, a temporary paralysis in his vocal cords, they had to cancel the tour, promising to reschedule the dates when he was cleared to sing. When the paresis proved more stubborn than expected, Paul continued work on a new solo album, then scheduled a solo tour to promote its release in 2011. A brief tour marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of
Graceland
followed in 2012, but as Artie reported in October of that year, Paul made it clear he was ready to resume Simon and Garfunkel business whenever Artie felt strong enough to get going. “He called me a few weeks ago and said, ‘When you're ready I'm very happy to bring the guitar around the house and let's try “The Boxer.” Let's warm up, let's see where we're at.' So he's definitely rooting seriously for me … It shows you the core of Simon and Garfunkel is a thing of beauty.”

More time passed. Artie's vocal cords remained frozen, and then the tone got frosty again. Artie took to sniping at Paul in the media, complaining that he'd never received his due credit for the Simon and Garfunkel years, that it was his voice that had made Paul's songs into hits. Paul didn't respond directly, but when the prospect of another reunion came up in 2013, he responded coolly. “It's a very complicated relationship. And at the moment, we're not in contact.” In another conversation that year, Paul expanded on the thought. “We are currently in one of our breakup phases,” he said. “But that could change at any moment. Possibly at one of our funerals.”

*   *   *

So Beautiful or So What
, Paul's first original album in six years, came out in the early spring of 2011. The album's liner notes, composed by Elvis Costello, got straight to the point: “I believe that this remarkable, thoughtful, often joyful record deserves to be recognized as among Paul Simon's finest achievements.” That was quite a thing to say about a nearly seventy-year-old artist more than fifty years into such an ambitious and busy career. But Elvis wasn't that far off the mark. The album is an audiophile's candy store, each note of every song tweaked for maximum textural intrigue. No longer satisfied by the sound of a naked instruments, Paul had taken to embroidering one sound with the ghost of another. The sound of a wildebeest cry infiltrates a guitar note here. The ghost of a bell shores up the retard of these other notes. Samples from a 1941 homily by the minister J. M. Gates, along with the shouts of his congregation, underscore the rhythm of one track; another begins in an electronic haze created by Chris Bear from the outré Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear.

The songs, as probing and barbed as anything he's ever written, confront life and death with the snap of a high schooler facing down the fearsome principal. In “The Afterlife,” a dead man wakes up in a heaven that runs like the DMV, with lines to stand in and forms to fill out and pretty girls to flirt with, until he finally lands at the foot of his creator, only to discover that the secret of existence is Gene Vincent's “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” When God and Jesus reappear on earth in “Love and Hard Times,” God can take only a few minutes of it before ditching for less befouled terrain. But the dark comedy pivots to reveal what God leaves in his stead: the love that keeps spirits alive even through a scourge of pain. It's an album about life and death, angels and Jay-Z, fate and self-determination—with lyrics that are dense with thought and reckless with passion.

The critics agreed with Elvis Costello's evaluation of
So Beautiful or So What
, and though it's hard to call it a comeback, precisely, the album jumped into
Billboard
's Top 5, Paul's highest chart placement since
The Rhythm of the Saints
made the No. 2 slot twenty years earlier. Six months' worth of American and European concert dates ran from mid-April through the end of 2011, a chain of ninety-minute sets that displayed Paul's strengths as a live musician, singer, and performer. Given a guitar and a stage full of musicians, he moved easily and happily, his entire being vibrating to the pulse of the music filling the air around him.

 

CHAPTER 24

SEE WHAT'S BECOME OF ME

Without a guitar in his hands, Paul wears his legend like a heavy cloak: a ceremonial garment embroidered with his many achievements, but woven from a darker fabric of his sorrows and his wounds. It's so difficult for him to write. When he records his songs, he's like a molecular physicist, stripping the chemical bonds from each sonic atom, altering their charges and then painstakingly stringing them together into intricate patterns few human ears could ever detect—and it takes so long, and nobody
understands.

“I've only completed two songs in the last three and a half years,” he told the faculty, students, and other rapt observers who filled a church hall at Emory University in September 2013. “People ask quite often, ‘What took you so long?' as if it were a pizza delivery. The answer is I was trying to write the whole time.”

Paul was at Emory to present a series of talks as the university's prestigious semiregular 2013 Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. The lecture series' previous celebrants include Seamus Heaney, Mario Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco, and Salman Rushdie—not a pop star in sight until the series extended an invitation to Paul, whose acceptance triggered complex systems of mutual exaltation. Dubbing Paul a legitimate genius, English professor/lecture series director Joseph Skibell pointed out that he had enough “literary gravitas” to qualify for this lecture series that “gives the writer a chance to make a major statement.”

I got to the three-day lecture series at the start of the second day, in time to see Paul's “public conversation” with Billy Collins, the popular poet who was President George W. Bush's poet laureate. Sitting in matched armchairs on the stage of Emory's Glenn Memorial Auditorium, the two writers bantered about themselves and the burdens of professional creativity in the self-deprecating-yet-self-aggrandizing tone that I hear myself using when someone asks more than one question about what I do. The stage and the stakes were much larger that afternoon, and it was interesting to see Collins, whose poetic voice is so very tuned to the common person's frequency, hit the stage with such laureated swagger. The poet was very quick to point out that he and Paul are not only friends and peers, but also, he said, stars who, o irony, don't really know where they're going.
*
Paul's expression flickered a little when Collins pronounced himself a straight-up peer, but they are indeed friends in real life, and the musician was just as focused on staking his claim to Collins's, and his hosts', academic exceptionalism. He complained about contemporary music, particularly how the kids these days are so happy “settling for vulgarity and unsophistication as easily as the loss of privacy.” The line drew an ovation from his largely middle-aged audience, which Paul seemed to anticipate. And it didn't seem like a coincidence that he was essentially sampling the lectures about rock 'n' roll his father had tormented him with in the mid-1950s. But Paul had a larger point to make that afternoon at Emory, which was how certain he is that the next generation of truly important musicians will be highly educated music students who, he predicted, will go back to the great masters because they're bored with commercialized, “crappy” music. Once again the middle-aged audience, consisting largely of highly educated academics who have devoted their lives to creating the next generation of highly educated academics, cried out their approval while Paul nodded beatifically, perfectly at home in a place he'd never been.

*   *   *

Just a few months later, Paul found himself in another place he'd never been, only this time he was standing with Edie in front of a judge in Norwalk Superior Court, near their home in Connecticut, trying to explain why the disagreement they'd had a couple of nights earlier had ended in a scuffle so loud and seemingly violent that one of them—Paul, it turned out—had dialed 911. The police arrived to find a low-bore domestic confrontation: the couple was in the guesthouse they used as a recording studio, where, Edie told the police, Paul had done something to “break [her] heart.” She had had a few drinks, and things went south from there: some pushing and slapping (her hand, his cheek), and so on. It all ended up on the public record, which meant that it also played in the newspapers, along with paparazzi shots of the couple strolling to court where they hoped to convince the judge that they truly did not need or want a protective order keeping each safe from the other. The judge couldn't find a reason to doubt them and they walked off together holding hands, heading to their youngest son's Little League baseball game. Another sunny day in upscale suburban America.

Even the younger kids in Paul's family with Edie are mostly grown up now. The couple's eldest son, Adrian, a singer, guitarist, and keyboardist, released a record with his band, the Ivy League, when they were still in high school. Graduated from college in 2015, Adrian is just a couple of years ahead of middle child, Lulu, who has shared the stage with her father at benefits and other special shows in recent years. Gabriel, the youngest child, still lives at home. Paul and Peggy's son, Harper, now in his forties, fell in with a circle of avant-pop performers based mostly in Los Angeles, a group that includes the talented offspring of some of the more famous musicians of the sixties, seventies, and beyond, including the children of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Lowell George, Kate McGarrigle, and Loudon Wainwright III. He also formed a group with stepmother Edie called the Heavy Circles, which released its first, and so far only, CD in 2008.

Edie and Paul keep their family life to themselves, though simply existing around New York City puts all well-known faces within range of paparazzi cameras and the lenses of any of twenty million cell phones being wielded every minute of every day: Paul and Adrian sitting courtside at a Knicks game; Paul and the kids standing on a street corner; Paul and the kids walking into a movie theater. Even when caught by surprise, Paul usually wears a proud smile, like any other dad thrilled to be spending another day watching his children in the act of walking, thinking, joking, singing, living.

On the verge of his seventy-fifth birthday Paul still moves gracefully. He has made peace with his hair, which he now keeps close-cropped and white, with just a bit more on top than he revealed on the cover of the
New York Times Magazine
in 1997. He exercises daily, keeping his chest and arms fully loaded and his gut under control. He's partial to fedoras, T-shirts, jeans, and blazers, which puts him somewhere between a domesticated rock star and a stylishly hip literature professor, which seems exactly right. The sounds he explores now are the ones he can find or invent in his home studio, where he produced the bulk of his latest album,
Stranger to Stranger
, released in the spring of 2016. The first song to surface from the album was “Wristband,” a conga-slapping acoustic funk number that starts as a wry story of a musician locked out of his own gig, trying to convince a skeptical security guard to let him back in. What starts as a funny backstage confusion (even the star can't get into his own dressing room without the right pass) eventually transforms into something larger and more sobering, a symbol of outrage for the millions of the underprivileged “whose anger is a shorthand / For you'll never get a wristband.” It is an archetypical Paul Simon move: bridging the personal and the social, the silly with the serious, the frivolous and the absolutely essential.