Homeward Bound (60 page)

When he's not making it look easy, he's nearly buckling under the burden. In the early twenty-first century, Paul suffered another creative block, this one finding form in a blustery internal voice that wouldn't stop condemning him for misusing his talent and, worse, for perpetually gathering up God's gifts to sell at the marketplace. Paul got past it eventually, and there has always been somewhere else to go, some other frontier to travel, some new song he can put under the microscope, pick apart, and put back together in a new and uncanny way. Whether his labors will resonate with anyone other than himself and a handful of his smarter, cooler friends doesn't seem to matter to him—or he says it doesn't matter, anyway. Look,
So Beautiful or So What
popped into
Billboard
's No. 4 slot the week it was released in 2011. When his next album emerged five years later, it was preceded by a multiplatform publicity campaign, including online previews, comic video appearances, a concert tour, and high-profile interviews. The full-bore assault pushed
Stranger to Stranger
to a No. 3 debut on
Billboard
's album chart, making it his highest charting album since
Rhythm of the Saints
.

Paul's bizarre public relationship with Artie Garfunkel, by turns his oldest and best friend and a guy he can barely stand to be near, remains one of the most essential fables of the sixties generation. The boyhood chums turning themselves first into harmonizing teen idols and then a folk duo, then rock stars, then cultural oracles, all the while remaining best friends, only to fall into a decade-long feud, then back into harmony, then back into another decade of feuding, only to resume again, only to fall apart again, only to come back together and collapse again, each time their harmonies sounding just as luminously perfect as they ever did. Six decades later an observer might wonder if the never-ending Simon and Garfunkel saga is the longest-running installation in the history of conceptual art or perhaps the most successful inside joke they ever concocted.
And the winner of the Fattest Girl in the School Contest turns out to be … the whole world!
Whatever, it's definitely a deeply symbolic story about youth and maturity, innocence and experience, the importance of leaving home and the even greater importance of coming back and finding your old neighborhood just as it was, all your friends and your younger self waiting to resume the life you left behind.

Assuming you can stand the idea that you had an old life.

*   *   *

I got to Emory University's Glenn Auditorium early Monday afternoon and found a place about halfway back in the pews—the building is a restored church—and settled in. After digging a notebook and pen from my bag, I saw that Paul was already sitting quietly in his chair on the stage alone, waiting for things to get started. We hadn't met, but as I knew he knew, I was already working on this book.

When I looked up from my notebook and pens, I had just enough time to think,
Oh look, there's Paul Simon sitting by himself on the stage
, before his eyes seemed to fix on my face. There was no one else near me, and he was looking really hard, in that unblinking, stare-you-down way. Or that's how it seemed to me. I had contacted Joseph Skibell to see if I could attend the lectures, and he had been most helpful in clearing my way, and I supposed he might have told Paul I was going to be lurking around the campus. Like most published writers, I'm easy to find on the Internet. Maybe he'd taken a glance so he'd be prepared in case I came marching up to confront him?

What could I do? I looked back at him, and he kept looking back at me. Were we having a staring contest? Was he engaging with me or was he seething at me? Was I imagining the whole thing? I doubt this went on longer than fifteen seconds, but as it turns out that's a lot of time to think when the subject of your new book is giving you the once-, twice-, and thrice-over in a church in Atlanta. He hadn't authorized my book. He had no enthusiasm for biographies, I learned. But since I was enthusiastic enough for the both of us I got to work anyway. I heard from his co-manager brother Eddie a few times, and received a phone call from Jeff Kramer, the other co-manager, who made it clear that the prospect of my book was causing some anxiety around certain Brill Building offices. I've worked closely with other subjects, less closely with others, and was happy to talk about my approach and address their concerns, but they weren't interested in that.

He didn't look angry. Stern, maybe. Impassive, definitely. Eventually, he raised his hand and turned away. Not just sort of away, but forty-five degrees away, like,
I'm not looking at you anymore. I'm looking this totally different way now and so we're done
.

Just above face level, his palm flat and perpendicular to the floor, like a stereotyped movie Native American going “How!” Or a traffic cop saying, “Stop!” Or maybe a guy signaling his uninvited biographer to keep his distance—which is understandable on a human level, but less so in the wake of fifty-plus years of public life. All that self-revelation in his music—in the hundreds of thousands of words of interviews he's given, talking about his wives; his lovers; his astonishingly screwed-up relationship with the friend/musical partner he will sometimes insist had no real impact on him at all, and then turn around and say that their lives have always been woven together; and his father; his creative blocks; his anxieties; his therapists; and more.

Still:
Don't look at me.

Or not, at least, at what I don't want you to see.

Don't notice that Paul really was Jerry Landis, just as he was also True Taylor and Paul Kane, even if his early folk songs were a little overblown.
One-Trick Pony
's Jonah Levin was a mash-up of all three, given his own Paul Kane folk song (“Soft Parachutes”) and Jerry Landis's one-hit track record. Levin also shared Jerry Landis's initials, as per the Jewish tradition of giving a newborn a name with the same initials as a deceased relative. But the film is full of hints about Paul and the undergirding of his most essential self.

The most telling sequence in the
One-Trick Pony
script didn't make it into the completed movie but was significant enough for Paul to use it as the final scene in a draft of the script dated 1979: the moment when Jonah takes his son in his arms and tells him all the reasons for the things he's done, going a step further than the absentee father described in “Slip Slidin' Away,” who can only kiss his sleeping child before vanishing back into the darkness.

The scene begins as Jonah and his all-but-ex-wife, Marion, discover that their late-night arguing has woken their young son, Matty. The boy asks his dad for a bedtime story, so Jonah carries Matty back to bed and starts telling him a story about a boy exactly his age, a dedicated Yankees fan who could also make up magic songs that made other people so happy when they heard them that they needed to sing along. Paul's own life, divided into three faces and retold as a hero's journey.

The story begins at Yankee Stadium, in the bottom of the ninth inning, when the hometown club can either win big or lose it all. Key slugger Reggie Jackson is at the plate with the bases loaded and with two strikes already against him. As Jonah tells his sleepy son, the struggling hero may finally be meeting his match. But when he slaps a foul ball into the boy's grasp, the boy sings his magic song to the ball then tosses it to Reggie, who hears the music and sends it back to the mound. The pitcher winds up and speeds it back to home. Jackson's mighty swing makes contact, sending the ball entirely around the planet before finally landing at the feet of the road-worn Jonah, who picks it up on his way to the stage in a Cleveland nightclub. He hears the song just in time for his son to appear next to him. Jonah and his son perform the song together, lulling the crowd, along with the father and son sharing the stage, into an ecstatic slumber.

Unification.

The sweet boy with the inexplicable talent; the big-time hero slugger standing tall at the plate in Yankee Stadium, taking his biggest swing ever just as he is on the threshold of his darkest moment; and also the isolated traveling musician whose dedication to his son is rivaled only by his yearning for a new song. And back to the son, who is, in this story at least, finally able to satisfy his father so much that they can put down their instruments and fall asleep in each other's arms. The camera pulls back to show Marion sitting on the floor, watching Jonah with the sleeping Matty in his arms. The anger in her eyes replaced with love, she reaches out to her husband, her fingertips about to reach him when the image freezes on the screen and the opening notes of his “Late in the Evening” play.

And it was late in the evening

And all the music seeping through.

 

NOTES

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

1  
■
  REAL AND ASSUMED

“I enjoy singing and rock and roll”: Tracy Thomas,
New Musical Express
, April 8, 1966.

2  
■
  THE TAILOR

“I never saw the point”: Josh Greenfeld, “For Simon & Garfunkel All Is Groovy,”
New York Times Magazine
, October 13, 1968.

“Lou,” he said, “was really quiet”: Author interview with Al Caiola, April 8, 2014.

“I would add Lee Simms”: “Inside Stuff—Music,”
Variety
, September 30, 1959.

“I felt there was enough suffering”: Quoted, minus attribution, Joe Morella and Patricia Barey,
Simon and Garfunkel: Old Friends
(Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane Press, 1991), p. 8.

3  
■
  OUR SONG

“the most famous singer”: Simon and Garfunkel joint interview,
USA Today
, September 14, 2003.

“You've got a nice voice”: Timothy White, “Public Pitches and Stolen Moments with Pinin' Simon,”
Crawdaddy
, February 1976.

“God, that's
awful
”:
60 Minutes
, CBS-TV, January 6, 1991.

“I just sat back”: Ibid.

“Because it's really
dumb
”: Ibid.

“I would sit and examine”: Paul Zollo,
Songwriters on Songwriting
(Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Digest Books, 1991).

“I'm sure Paul's father”: Author interview with Jerry Garfunkel, April 2013.

“You keep it the same”: Rehearsal tape for Art Garfunkel's bar mitzvah service. Queens, NY, 1954.

“He was a very good ballplayer”: Author interview with Ron Merenstein, November 2014.

“slovenly in dress”: From
Jewish Messenger
, quoted in Irving Howe,
World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made
(New York: Touchstone Books, 1990), p. 230.

“You're the winner”: Ben Fong-Torres, “Arthur Garfunkel: The
Rolling Stone
Interview,”
Rolling Stone
, October 11, 1973.

“pretty and built”: Art Garfunkel letter to Paul Simon, summer 1957, in the possession of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's library.

“You can imagine”: Paul Simon letter to Art Garfunkel, summer 1957, in the possession of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's library.

“a fuck, though”: Ibid.

“so pitifully stupid”: Ibid.

“I never went to camp”: Author interview with Norman Strassner, May 11, 2015.

4  
■
  NOWHERE TO GO BUT UP!

“I wanna talk”: Fong-Torres, “Arthur Garfunkel: The
Rolling Stone
Interview.”

“
Who are
those
jerks
?”: Ibid.

“I'm from Macon, Georgia”: The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, Emory University, September 25, 2013.

“But that's what it was”: Paul Simon interview with Craig Inciardi, Paul Simon: Words & Music, exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's library, October 30, 2014.

“Man, they sound exactly”: Author interview with Robert Lieberman, June 2014.

“Since we couldn't agree”: Victoria Lee,
New York World-Telegram and Sun
, February 1958.

“want to crack-up [
sic
]?”: Letter from Paul Simon to Art Garfunkel, New Jersey, August 9, 1957.

“He was a little fella”: Author interview with Chester Gusick, June 6, 2014.

5  
■
  TWO TEENAGERS

“Best Men on Campus”: Alpha Epsilon Pi, fraternity advertisement, Queens College
Rampart
, 1958–62.

“You gotta hear this!”: Author interview with Brian Schwartz, January 12, 2015.

“We're gonna get this right, okay?”: Author interview with Ron Pollack, 2015.

“Huge Harold, a hostess”: Ibid.

Jerry Landis is going places
: Gloria Stavers, “Jerry Landis Is Going Places!”
16 Magazine
, February 1960.

they formed the Cosines: Author interview with Marv Kalfin, April 26, 2015.

he signed with Wemar: Paul Simon, affidavit in Paul Simon and Arthur Garfunkel v. Big Records, Inc., Sidney Prosen, Keel Manufacturing Corp. and Pickwick International, Inc., Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, 1967.

something fewer than one hundred copies: Ibid.

“out of the common groove”: “Reviews of this week's singles,”
Billboard
, October 10, 1960.

One detail Pizzarelli doesn't recall: Author interview with Bucky Pizzarelli, March 31, 2014.