Homeward Bound (7 page)

From that moment things happened with velocity. On October 29, Paul and Artie, with Louis and his bass in tow, met Prosen and a session drummer at another recording studio and recorded finished versions of “Schoolgirl,” “Dancin' Wild,” and a new tune they called “Our Song.” At the same time, they set to coming up with a stage name for themselves. That made it feel even more real: this was the stuff of professional showbiz; they weren't just playing the neighborhood anymore. They would need to choose a name that would make them flashy and, at the same time, beyond the reach of the disc jockeys and record salesmen determined to keep ethnic voices away from the tender ears of middle America. Prosen had already given the matter some thought. Did they know the
Tom and Jerry
cartoons, the ones with the battling cat and mouse? The show was on television every day; everyone had heard of them. Sure, Paul and Artie said. So Tom and Jerry it was. Charged with coming up with faux last names, Paul chose “Landis,” after his then-current girlfriend Sue Landis, while Artie played off his mathematical whiz kid reputation with “Graph.” With that settled, it took exactly a week for thousands of copies of the single, with a slight title alteration, “Hey, Schoolgirl (in the Second Row)”/“Dancin' Wild” to be pressed and shipped to record stores and radio stations across the country.

When the first box of “Hey, Schoolgirl” singles got to the Big Records office in Midtown, Sid Prosen tucked a few copies into a manila envelope, added two hundred dollars in cash, and took it to the WABC-AM offices of star disc jockey Alan Freed. Just like Martin Block with his
Make Believe Ballroom
, the big band radio show that drew Paul's attention to the Crows' “Gee” in 1953, the rock 'n' roll–crazy Freed
*
ruled the scene like a Mercury of the airwaves, a speed-rapping potentate made from equal measures of faith, flimflam, cigarettes, and whiskey. Getting his start in Cleveland during the early 1950s, Freed followed his taste for high-velocity jazz and jump blues to rock 'n' roll, and as the music got louder and more popular, so did Freed. Launched into the New York City airwaves in 1954, the disc jockey was an instant hit. He soon went national, and by 1957 he had become the go-to radio man for any artist, manager, or record company owner hoping for a hit and willing to slip a little legal tender into a deejay's back pocket. Once Prosen provided the wax and the dough, Freed jumped on “Hey, Schoolgirl” like a cheerleader, not just adding the tune to his influential playlist but also talking up its cheery rock 'n' roll sound.

It worked. The national trade magazine
Cash Box
made “Schoolgirl” its Sleeper of the Week for its November 16 issue. Radio stations in New York, Philadelphia, Albany, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh added the song to their playlists soon after, and
Variety
made the song a “Best Bet” in its November 27 edition. “Schoolgirl” hit playlists in the Deep South (New Orleans, Memphis, Oklahoma), the industrial Midwest (Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit), the Southwest (Dallas, Denver), and the West Coast (San Francisco), and other regions. Prosen hired an agent for the act, while Paul and Artie asked Charlie Merenstein to be their manager. Soon the boys' weeklong Thanksgiving vacation was filled with bookings for sock hops, record store appearances, and TV dance shows in Hartford and Waterbury, Connecticut, and in Cleveland, Ohio. Most thrilling of all, Paul and Artie got a slot on the biggest TV dance show of all, Dick Clark's
American Bandstand
.

Can you imagine? Just six weeks earlier, Paul and Artie were one more rejection away from giving it all up. If that last-ditch demo session hadn't led to anything, they would have been through. Now they were going to be stars—or rather, Tom and Jerry were going to be stars—so to help prepare the boys for their turn in the spotlight, Belle Simon escorted them to the Ivy League Shop around the corner from Forest Hills High School to find the flashy threads pop idols were supposed to wear. Attended by their classmate Norman Basner, who happened to be clerking when they came in, the boys bickered over colors and fabrics for only a little while before settling on fire truck red blazers made from a pleasantly nubby material, with white button-up shirts and black bow ties, black slacks, and white buck shoes. Prosen sent Freed another two hundred dollars for the next week of airplay and hired a more traditional publicist for his now very much up-and-coming duo—and when their Thanksgiving vacation started in late November, he bought train tickets and sent the boys off to conquer the pop music world.

Then they were riding to Philadelphia to perform their song on
American Bandstand
—where the Everly Brothers had played, where Buddy Holly had stood, where Chuck Berry had duck-walked while still ripping those jet-powered double-stop solos from his gleaming Gibson ES-350 T, where they would stand together, singing their song into cameras that reached into every teenager's home in the United States. They just looked at each other and laughed.
Howled
, more like it—until they got to Studio B in the WFIL-TV headquarters in downtown Philadelphia, from which
American Bandstand
originated every afternoon, where their giggles fluttered back into their stomachs. Ushered into the artists' dressing room, they first noticed a tall, knobby guy channeling his cascades of blond hair into a high-and-tight DA. Was that really … yes, of course it was Jerry Lee Lewis. He was on the show, too. Should they say hi? Of course they should. He was a huge star (“Great Balls of Fire” and others), and now here they were, about to appear on the same show with him, based in the same dressing room. But, wait: wasn't Jerry Lee a brawler? Didn't people call him “the Killer”? On second thought, they kept their distance. When Artie went to the bathroom, he found himself peeing next to two of the show's regular dancer/cast members just as one was asking the other about the day's musical guests.
Tom and Jerry? Who are
those
jerks
?

The boys felt far more welcome when Dick Clark called them out to lip-sync their song while the show's cast of teenagers danced and snapped their fingers along to the rhythm. The two got a big hand when it was over, and the members of the three-kid jury all agreed that “Schoolgirl” was both catchy and danceable and thus deserved a top-drawer rating of 95. When Clark stepped up to ask the still-trembling singers where they were from, Artie talked about Queens and Forest Hills High School. Bedazzled by the microphone and the cameras pointed in his direction, Paul could only think about the hometown of Little Richard, the flashiest singer of them all. “I'm from Macon, Georgia!” he piped. Artie shot him a curious look, but Clark, who had also worked under the named Dick Clay, nodded and smiled. As per union rules, Paul and Artie both earned $176 for their national TV performance, but before the show's producer gave the boys their checks, he explained that the show's policy required all guests to endorse the checks and then hand them back over to Dick Clark, who would keep the money for himself. The boys were crestfallen; they had already decided which clothes and shoes they were going to buy with their earnings. “But that's what it was, the world of payola,” Paul said in 2014. “That was early rock 'n' roll.”

By the time Paul and Artie got back to Kew Gardens Hills, they were both neighborhood celebrities. Kids and parents who used to walk by them without raising an eyebrow now waved and called out their names. The two made a special headlining appearance at their school, running through a few numbers, then climaxing with “Hey, Schoolgirl,” much to their schoolmates' delight. Yet the thought that ordinary schoolkids could actually be on the radio struck their classmate Robert Lieberman as so far beyond the realm of possibility that he nudged a friend to tell him what a great job Paul and Artie were doing on the school stage. “Man, they sound exactly like Tom and Jerry!” Lieberman's pal could only shake his head and smirk. “Schmuck! They
are
Tom and Jerry!”

Meanwhile, “Schoolgirl” had danced its way into New York's pop music Top 10, selling well enough in the Northeast cities to lift it to No. 49 on
Billboard
's national pop chart. That level of success (50,000 copies sold within forty-eight hours of its release, and 250,000 sold during its first month, according to the fanciful statistics released by Prosen) attracted a flock of reporters and photographers from the New York newspapers. Thoroughly briefed by Prosen's publicist, the reporters arrived with a hard focus on the boys' high-flying academic records. The
Long Island Star-Journal
's two-page feature came with the headline
WHIZ KIDS ROCK 'N' ROLL
and, in tabloid style, a smaller subhead noting approvingly,
BUT THEY STILL TUTOR CLASSMATES
. Posed photographs captured the boys playing driveway basketball, studying in Artie's room, joyously tossing records into the air, and sipping ice-cream sodas at Addy Vallens's drugstore. The stories detailed the pair's after-school jobs, tutoring skills, and plans for college: Princeton for Tom and Harvard for Jerry.

Sometimes it got even more personal than that. Anthony Adams in the
New-York Tribune
revealed the boys' real names (along with the names of their parents), and Victoria Lee of the
New York World-Telegram and Sun
made herself the first of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of reporters to ask after the tensions that might exist in the duo's relationship. Jerry, “the guitar-playing member of the team,” said that their occasional fights were easily resolved, as on a recent afternoon when they went to a clothing store to buy matching sweaters for their newly booked performances. When they got to the store, they couldn't decide which sweater to buy. After a brief argument, they simply threw their hands up. “Since we couldn't agree,” Paul/Jerry said, “we ended up not buying anything.” It made for a good laugh in the newspapers; ordinary adolescent boys being ordinary adolescent boys. Yet they had been friends “and collaborators,” according to Paul, since they were in the fourth grade. They had already achieved so much together, and were so thrilled with what they'd done. Everything was ahead of them.

*   *   *

Just a few weeks before his son wrote his first hit song, Louis Simon, whose postgraduate studies still hadn't ended all of his music ambitions, came up with a new tune of his own, a novelty number titled “Water in My Ear.” Soon after, he played the song with the Lee Simms Orchestra on the
Ted Steele Show
, a daytime entertainment show broadcast on New York's WOR-TV, and was so happy with how it came out that he made a recording of the performance into a demo he could shop around to the record companies and song publishers in Midtown. Then he thought again and decided to wait until Paul came home from his summer job and get him involved in the project. The boy's voice was getting stronger. And even if Paul's dedication to pop music gave Louis pause, he knew his son had professional-grade talent. As Belle reminded him, Paul was bringing home stellar report cards, so why keep him away from something he loved? Louis saw the logic in this especially given that his and his son's ambitions currently matched: having Paul's boyish voice on the demo, Louis felt, would make it easier for record companies to hear the hit potential of “Water in My Ear.”

Paul passed the news to Artie in a letter to the summer camp in New Jersey where he was also working as a counselor. “You want to crack-up [
sic
]?” he wrote, and then described the “real weirdy” of a tune his dad had just written. “The kind only my father could think of.” The news got even more embarrassing, Paul wrote with gleeful horror: Louis wanted
him
to be the face of the project. “He'll bring it up to some big [record] company. He's dead serious about it, too. No! That's bad!” Though Paul made fun of the old man, he couldn't resist reporting Louis's latest burst of praise for him (“According to my father my voice has improved”) or remarking that it was kind of cool that his father was putting his song on hold until Paul was available to participate in it. As close as he was to Artie, and as much as they had invested in their work together, Paul saw that the world was full of opportunities. He didn't write this, but maybe because it was only too obvious. If you didn't reach for what you wanted when it was available, you had only yourself to blame for not getting it.

So Paul reached. During the Tom and Jerry contract negotiations in October 1957 the Simons pitched Prosen on adding another artist to the Big Records lineup: Paul Simon, solo artist. Paul would stick with his Jerry Landis pseudonym for his own record; after all, the guitar-thumpin' half of Tom and Jerry might have a following after “Schoolgirl.” As he assured Prosen, he didn't have any plans of breaking up the duo, but he had his own ambitions, and as great as Paul and Artie were together, there were things Paul could do alone that the duo couldn't do together. Artie preferred ballads and harmony, but Paul was a rocker at heart; he could tap into that harder, Elvis-like sound and really put Big Records on the rock 'n' roll map. Prosen, who had already shaken hands with Louis to release records by the Lee Simms Orchestra, agreed to add this side contract, launching Paul's solo career even before he and Artie had sung a note on their first professionally produced record.

Somehow, in all the excitement of “Hey, Schoolgirl,” Paul forgot to mention this side deal to Artie. There was a lot to distract him. Every day brought a new surprise; the excitement was dizzying. For Paul's solo record, maybe as another of Louis's weird ideas, the elder Simon took the lead on the project, not just booking the studio time but also writing the lead sheets for the session and hiring a drummer and lead guitarist to accompany his bass and Paul's rhythm guitar. Louis also composed the single's A-side, a rockabilly shuffle called “True or False.” Why Paul didn't write the A-side of his own debut record—he ended up with the B-side—is unclear. Also, whatever mortification he might have felt about singing a song that his father had written didn't keep Paul from throwing himself entirely into what is without a doubt the goofiest performance he ever committed to record.