Homeward Bound (6 page)

Paul's insecurities were every bit as clear to Artie as their shared impulse to outdo each other whenever the opportunity arose. And when Paul started bragging about his stickball heroics or the pretty girl who had all but asked him to ask her out, Artie knew exactly where Paul's fault lines lay, and how much of a tremor it would take to knock him off balance. Still, their friendship ran deeper than their rivalry, and when they were in the public eye, Artie made a point of standing slightly behind Paul, or even hunching a little to make their height disparity less obvious. Artie didn't say anything about it, but Paul was well aware of what his friend was doing—which made Paul that much more dependent on Artie, and then his cheeks reddened and he wondered again why a guy as smart, talented, and popular, goddammit, as he was should need anyone to do anything for him.

Yet who else was he going to hang out with? Who else could see the hilarity of an imaginary Fattest Girl in the School contest, then roll on the floor laughing half an hour later when Paul leaped to his feet to greet a visiting rotund girl by shouting, to the confusion of everyone except Artie, “You're the winner!” They both got sent to detention for that one, but it was worth it. Artie was still laughing about it fifteen years later, recalling that absurdist goofball humor they shared, a juvenile punch-and-kick comedy fueled by the adolescent reality of high expectations, harsh judgments, and the terror of being anything less than entirely perfect.

Taking jobs at different camps for the summer of 1957, Paul and Artie traded letters describing remarkably similar weeks of shaving cream fights, busted curfews, midnight raids, and serial romances with the female staffers. To Artie, who had never been to a camp of any sort, the experience was a revelation. He was learning how to play tennis, he had met at least two great friends, and he'd fallen in love at least three times already. So many of the girls were really “pretty and built,” and out of the twenty-five at least five or six were really nice—“and that's a damn good average.” That any of them was even interested in him was easy to figure: “I've been doing a lot of entertaining, and it has made me pretty popular.” Paul had been up to the same thing. “You can imagine what a crazy guitar-thumpin' kid can do to these kids.” When he wasn't wowing 'em with his guitar, he could do it with a racquet and a fuzzy white ball. (“I'm afraid you've had it, Garf, I'm slightly great in tennis.”) After hours, he'd jump into a car with the black kitchen staffers and ride for hours, driving from town to town and cranking the radio dial between rhythm and blues stations. On a couple of occasions, he and another guy sneaked back to New York to catch Alan Freed's rock 'n' roll revues at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn, finding their way back to camp just in time to serve breakfast to the unsuspecting campers. And that wasn't the half of it. Paul had also gone steady with three different girls so far, and was “workin' on” another so intently it was biting into his tennis time. It's hard to imagine a better way for a highly pressured independence-starved city kid to spend his sixteenth summer, so how to account for the anger that erupts in his looping cursive script. The former pro who had been teaching Paul and another friend how to play tennis each day turned out to be “a fuck, though. I hate his guts.” Turning his attention to a girl he'd met just before leaving Queens for the summer, Paul reprinted a few choice phrases from a letter she'd sent, the better to ridicule her imprecise description of a baseball game she'd seen. The girl, he concluded, was “so pitifully stupid its [
sic
] pathetic … Incidentally I really liked her.”

Paul was becoming a seething young man, a slave to the invidious comparison, acutely attuned to the pleasure of dealing a truly nasty bolt of humiliation. Yet flash-forward a year, and he was back in camp, this time as a counselor to a cabin full of seven-year-olds. They were the youngest campers, not all of them entirely happy to be away from their parents, their dogs, the stabilizing comforts of home. Paul kept an eye on the quiet ones, reading the sorrow at the corners of their mouths, including them in all the cabin hijinks, keeping the jokers and bullies from making sport of the smaller and weaker. When one homesick camper peed in his bed in the middle of the night, Paul got the weeping boy cleaned up and tucked him into his own dry bed before tossing a blanket over the boy's wet mattress and spending the rest of the night sleeping there. The boy had the same accident a few nights later, and Paul responded in exactly the same way, then made certain to change the subject quickly when another camper asked why the two kept switching bunks.

Paul the counselor was warm and inclusive. He composed and sang funny songs about camp at meals and around the campfire, and reveled in the corny jokes and sing-alongs that left the kids giggling and humming at the same time. When Artie paid a visit late in the summer, Paul arranged for them to sing a set of songs for all the campers, wowing them with their tight harmonies and all-around professionalism. It was a highlight in the kids' scrapbooks, many of which included at least one snapshot of Paul, that cool counselor with the guitar. A lot of them never forgot him, even the ones who weren't music fans enough to realize, until many years later, that their former counselor had written his guitar into very different circumstances. A former camper, Helen Strassner, saw Paul and Artie perform ten or so years later and gathered with the fans and autograph seekers near the stage door after the show. When the door swung open Helen went straight to Paul and reintroduced herself. She had been at Camp Washington Lodge, he had been her brother's counselor one year, they were
so
happy for his success, so proud to have known him back when …

Paul shrugged. He looked through her. A summer camp? He didn't know what she was talking about. “I never went to camp.” He turned away. But she had a snapshot; she'd taken it herself: of her little brother's counselor playing guitar outside their cabin, beaming into the Brownie lens, a Brylcreemed teenager having a ball on a gorgeous summer afternoon. Yet a decade had passed, and things had changed. Different times, different values, a different Paul.

 

CHAPTER 4

NOWHERE TO GO BUT UP!

Together in the basement they spent hours sitting nose to nose. Paul strumming his guitar and the both of them singing, each matching the other's notes and timing until both could focus on the micro-elements of vocalizing. Artie stared into his partner's mouth to see where Paul's tongue moved when he formed his consonants. Mimicking the shape his lips formed when he was singing “ooh.” They'd set up a record player and listen to how the Bronx rhythm and blues duo Robert and Johnny traded parts mid-song, switching the melody between the higher and lower voices. They listened to hit records until they could isolate the discrete vocal, melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic pieces. Once they had that worked out, they'd put them back together in slightly different ways, crafting their own words and melody until they had a fresh song that sounded like something you'd hear on that week's hit parade.

Songs about dancing, about school, and about feeling like an idiot; goofy songs about girls; hushed songs about falling in love, about being in love, about breaking up and then falling for someone else—it didn't seem hard. There were only so many chords and notes in the scale, and you didn't even need to be in love to sing about it. Just figure out what everyone's already saying and say it again, only with a catchy opening riff or a funny twist to the lyric. They slapped songs together like jigsaw puzzles—the bright blue skies up here, the reds over there, the squiggly lines where the lake is. Two hours later it'd be done and they'd upend another box and start again. If one song seemed a cut above the others, they'd get Louis to write it down in musical notation, drop seven bucks to get it copyrighted, and then spend an afternoon or two shopping it around in Midtown Manhattan. The first few times they went out more or less blind, like kids who thought they were in a movie about teenagers who stumble into stardom by accident. Since they weren't in a movie, though, and had the rejections to prove it, they decided to bring their newest tunes to Charlie Merenstein so he could give them a listen.

Charlie, who rarely uttered a discouraging word in Paul's company, didn't disappoint. Yes, he
could
imagine hearing a few of those tunes on the radio. Better still, he knew a few guys in town who would give them a listen, too. So go see Sol Rabinowitz at Baton Records. If he didn't like any of them, try Ben Kaslin at Hull. No go? Well, Charlie could call Morty Craft over at Melba Records. He was a good friend, so he'd give them a fair hearing. Charlie accompanied the boys to Craft's office and stood by as they played and sang. When they were done, Craft nodded. He wasn't sure if he'd heard the right song yet, but he did think they probably had it in them, so he offered them a contract—more of a holding deal, but don't worry about that, he said. Just keep working. Whenever you've got a few new songs, come on in and we'll see if we have a single. They signed happily and then got back to writing, but they couldn't come up with anything that lit a fire in Craft's eyes. Nine months later they were out of the deal with nothing to show for it.

Then they wrote “Hey, Schoolgirl.” It was the start of their senior year at Forest Hills High School, just a few weeks away from their sixteenth birthdays. The song's theme was harmless at best—charmingly devilish classroom chatter from a boy who wants a cute girl to ditch class with him. At first she fends him off. She's too young to date. She can't skip school and, besides, she's got too much homework to do that afternoon. But he keeps at it, and she thinks again. By the last verse, she's got “that gleam” in her eye. When the period ends, they're out the door and down the street, class and homework forgotten, romance in the air, and teenage fun already in motion. The song took an hour to write, they said. It was a quick-stepping tune built from tight guitar strums, tambourine slaps, and a jumping acoustic bass line. The opening vocal riff, a quickly repeated “Ooh-bop-a-lucha-bop, you're mine!” is straight out of Little Richard (see “Tutti Frutti”'s “a-whop-bobba-lu-bop-a-whop-bam-boom”), but the harmonized lead vocals, along with the hop-skip-jump turnaround between verse lines, are pure Everly Brothers. The short instrumental break pairs the rhythm guitar with the bass, and once the final verse propels the young couple out of school and down the street, the “Ooh-bop-a-lucha-bop”s send them into the sunset.

The song had the spark. When they sang it for Charlie, he clapped and said he could imagine putting it out. Louis transcribed the music for the Library of Congress forms, and with all that in hand they trooped back to Midtown Manhattan to knuckle the doors, launch into their tune, and hope the skeptical-to-visibly-impatient man on the other side of the desk would let them get through at least a verse and a chorus before barking them back into the hallway. They shopped it around for days, and no one bit. Artie was too sensitive to let the humiliation roll off his back, but no amount of disinterest could dissuade Paul. He knew they had a good song. They owed it to themselves to give it all they had. In that spirit, they put together the money required to record a proper demo of “Hey, Schoolgirl.” With studio time booked at Sanders Recording Studio, on the corner of West Forty-Eighth and Seventh Avenue, they went back to Midtown on the afternoon of October 4. In the studio, they paired off at the microphone. Paul had his guitar on and miked, and when the red light ignited, they knocked off “Schoolgirl.” Then they stepped through the control booth to the lounge where others awaited their turn in the studio. That group was chaperoned by a balding fellow who introduced himself as Sid Prosen. “I wanna talk to you guys when you're through,” he said. Called back into the studio to take a quick run at “Dancin' Wild,” which they figured as the B-side to “Schoolgirl,” Paul and Artie then returned to the lounge and found Prosen waiting.

They were terrific, he brayed. The greatest thing since the Everly Brothers. He knew that; they knew that. Now they needed to let the rest of the world know it, and that's what he wanted to do for them. Prosen owned a label called Big Records and a publishing company named Village Music. He could also produce, promote—the whole deal. He knew a hit when he heard one, and when they were singing “Hey, Schoolgirl,” that's exactly what he heard: a
hit
, and maybe a smash. He could make them into stars, just like Phil and Don Everly, just like Elvis, too. He knew how to do it, and he also knew that starting with a sizzling tune like “Hey, Schoolgirl” would make it a sure thing. The boys looked at each other, then back at Prosen. They'd just been through all this over at Melba Records. It was one thing to get signed, but would he actually
release
the song? Yes, that was the whole point! He'd even write it into the contract: if he didn't release “Hey, Schoolgirl” within thirty days, that would be the end of the deal. Not that he needed a contract to tell him to do that—he knew “Schoolgirl” would be a hit. And once they were high on the charts, anything was possible: TV shows, movies, everything. Now the boys were getting excited. This sure didn't sound anything like the Melba Records deal. But they weren't old enough to sign anything on their own; Prosen would have to clear it with their parents first.

A few nights later, Prosen turned up at the Pierre Hotel ballroom, where the Lee Simms Orchestra was performing, and when the band took a break he introduced himself to Louis and showed him the contracts he had written up for his talented son and his friend Arthur. Louis was delighted, and even more so when Prosen asked if he had a recording deal for his own terrific orchestra. No? Well, how about recording some sides for Big Records? Rock 'n' roll was fine for the kids, but someone still had to make music for the grown-ups, right? So let's toss in a deal for you, too. They shook hands on that, then read over the as yet unsigned agreement committing Paul and Artie's services to Prosen as both recording artists and songwriters. As promised, Prosen would record a new master of “Hey, Schoolgirl” and release it with a freshly recorded B-side within thirty days. His song publishing company, Village Music Inc., would retain the rights to publish the boys' original songs. In exchange for this, Prosen would pay a small advance on the eventual royalties for all copies sold. And make no mistake, copies
would
be sold. It was a terrific little tune, for one thing. And he knew what went into getting a record played on the radio, particularly when it came to winning friends and influencing certain disc jockeys. Louis took the papers home, Prosen cleared the deal with the senior Garfunkels, and on October 18 they all signed the contracts.