Fire and Rain (6 page)

By late 1969, Simon's musical sojourns continued pressing onward. In the same way gospel had inspired “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a love for South American music drew him to “El Condor Pasa,” a gently floating ballad he'd heard performed in Paris by the Peruvian band Los Incas. Another day on Blue Jay Way, his younger brother Eddie—an equally skilled guitarist as well as the eerily spitting image of Paul, down to their
identical fresh-from-the-Army-barber haircuts of the mid '60s—began banging a rhythm on a piano bench. Simon and Garfunkel soon joined in, and Simon taped it for fun. It wasn't much beyond a clanky, bustling rhythm track, but Simon kept returning to it, drawn in by its mesmerizing polyrhythmic pull. Eventually he pulled out a guitar and began playing along, and out came a new, rollicking song, “Cecilia.”

Simon's fastidiousness and musical-explorer tendencies weren't the only reason for the delay in completing
Bridge Over Troubled Water
. Just as the sessions were getting underway, Mike Nichols reentered their lives. After
The Graduate
, Nichols had decided to adapt Joseph Heller's absurdist World War II novel
Catch-22
to the screen. Since filming would take place in Mexico and Rome, Paramount gave Nichols a sizable budget of $15 million. Having grown friendly with both men, especially Garfunkel, Nichols offered Garfunkel a role as the naïve, idealistic Captain Nately.

From the start, Garfunkel's participation in the film was a sensitive issue. Lewis tried to talk him out of it; he and Simon both felt it would take Garfunkel out of action on the album for too long. But Nichols convinced Garfunkel, and Garfunkel himself thought the timing—a threemonth shoot—would work out: While he would be filming, Simon could be working on new material. In January 1969, Garfunkel, who was paid $75,000 for the role, departed for Guaymas, a town in northwest Mexico so remote that it could only be reached from Mexico City by way of a thirty-hour train ride.

Catch-22
, which entailed a fully operative airfield, freshly constructed roads, and working B-52 bombers, didn't promise to be an even remotely trouble-free production. Cast and crew were stranded in Mexico for almost five months. In order to rehearse their new songs, Simon had no choice but to fly down to Mexico himself at least once. Sequestered in Garfunkel's hotel room, the two worked on their harmonies and arrangement of “The Boxer” into the night, keeping at least one cast member, a
young New York-based actor named Bob Balaban (later to find wider fame appearing in most of Christopher Guest's satirical, improvised films), awake in his room next door. Filming of
Catch-22
continued in Los Angeles in June, followed by scenes in Rome in the fall.

Returning to Los Angeles, Simon was now on his own. His central collaborator would now be Halee, a stocky, patient, and equally fastidious studio technician several years older than Simon. (His short, partedon-the-side haircut and shirts and ties worn in the studio made his age even more aparent.) Simon began to grumble to some of his studio musicians about Garfunkel's absence or, other times, that Garfunkel was holding him back creatively. During film breaks, Garfunkel popped in when he could, Simon presenting him with new songs he thought his partner should sing or with largely completed tracks. An early point of contention became “Cuba Sí, Nixon No.” Reflecting his ongoing love of early rock and roll, Simon had written a mocking song about the thennew president, set to a frisky stomp that recalled Chuck Berry's “Roll Over Beethoven.” The song's recording became a barometer of each man's diverging musical tastes. During one early rehearsal, Simon, reveling in a groove and rhythm unlike anything the two had done on their first four albums, sang and played the half-finished song with a smile. Leaning in to harmonize, Garfunkel struggled to find the right vocal blend to match the song's tone.

When a near-complete take was ready, they and Halee gathered in the Columbia control room for a playback. As the song boomed out of the speakers, Simon was animated, playing air guitar and bouncing on his heels. Garfunkel, hands tucked into pockets, stood silently, nodding ever so slightly. As much as Simon loved it, Garfunkel wasn't feeling it, and later they argued over whether or not it fit in with the rest of the album. The song was ultimately dropped.

Although the album should have been wrapped up by fall, other commitments intruded. In October, Simon and Garfunkel went on the road for the first time in over a year, playing ten concerts between New York and Los Angeles. To beef up their sound onstage, they brought along a band—Knechtel, Blaine, Osborn, and Carter—who joined them for several songs each night. Also along for a good portion of the tour was a two-man film crew.

With an incomplete album hanging over their heads and Columbia growing more impatient with each week—a Christmas release was now out of the question—the last thing Simon and Garfunkel needed was an additional project. But earlier in the year, they'd committed to a television special sponsored by AT&T, a company so desperate to appear hip that it doled out over $600,000 for the rights to the show. Hired to oversee the project was Robert Drew, a former
Life
magazine correspondent who'd produced well-regarded documentaries (or “candid films,” as he called them) on JFK, firefighters, farmhands, and heroin addicts.

On the set of
Catch-22
, Garfunkel had befriended Charles Grodin, a thirty-four-year-old Pittsburgh-born actor with a slew of TV and Broadway credits to his name. Grodin had blandly handsome features that disguised a subversive side and a dry, off-kilter sense of humor (and his Orthodox Jewish background as well). Before long, Grodin began joining Garfunkel on visits to Simon's Blue Jay Way house. After Simon had had unsatisfying meetings with potential directors for the film, he asked Grodin, who had some stage directorial experience on his résumé. Grodin helped Simon flesh out the framework for the special and agreed to direct and work with Drew.

Shortly before the scheduled airdate of November 30, 1969, executives from AT&T gathered in a screening room at Drew's Fifth Avenue offices to watch the finished product,
Songs of America,
for the first time. They expected to see a music special and did—half the time, anyway. Cameras caught Simon and Garfunkel onstage and in hotel rooms, arriving
at airports, and rehearsing for their tour. The concert footage made it clear that all they needed was Simon's resonant, agile guitar chords as accompaniment; despite the caliber of their musicianship, the rock band behind them often felt intrusive. The AT&T types watched as one hit after another—“America,” “Homeward Bound,” “The Boxer”—tumbled out. As always, Garfunkel stood rigidly as he sang, as if preparing to read a term paper in front of a class, while Simon had a tendency to casually gyrate in time with the rhythm.

During the first half of the hour-long special, though, the phone executives began shifting in their seats. In preliminary meetings, Simon told Drew he wanted to make “a home movie about where he thought the nation was,” as Drew recalled. In Simon's mind, the country was split in two and unraveling at every turn. (He'd broken down in tears the night Nixon had been elected.) To the discomfort of the AT&T executives, half of the hour-long special adhered unwaveringly to Simon's vision. As their music played in the background, the phone company reps watched footage of decaying housing projects, burning buildings, and bloodied antiwar protesters hurling rocks at police. A montage of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy was set to the just-finished but still-unreleased “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which never sounded more mournful. “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” accompanied a pastiche of Vietnam soldiers and hand-holding hippies. “Punky's Dilemma,” a slice of subtly anxious draft-dodger whimsy from
Bookends,
was heard over footage of congressional hearings and Lyndon Johnson. Both Simon and Garfunkel were seen questioning the country's role in Vietnam (“It's . . .
crap,
” said Garfunkel, disgustedly). In one outtake, the duo sang a birthday song to the country, on the verge of its bicentennial, then broke into an imitation of an exploding atomic bomb.

The AT&T men watched in silence and left. Later, an executive from its ad agency called Grodin and yelled at him: “You're using
our
money to sell
your
ideology,” he barked. Someone else from AT&T told Drew
they'd never air it. At the very least, the company demanded that Coretta Scott King's speech during footage of a civil rights rally be lowered in volume. “This is not what we contracted for,” an AT&T executive told
Advertising Age
. “We bought an entertainment show, and they delivered their own personal social and political views.” The
Washington Post
devoted an op-ed to the controversy, but AT&T wasn't swayed: The company dumped the special, selling the rights to Alberto-Culver, maker of hair products like VO5 and Noxzema, for $50,000 and taking a considerable financial loss in the process.

When the show eventually aired on CBS, it was massacred in the ratings by its competition, a Peggy Fleming dancing-on-ice special. By then, it hardly mattered to its two stars. Taken aback by AT&T's qualms, Simon and Garfunkel wound up spending most of their earnings on lawyers who fought to keep the show on the air. Little about the partnership felt effortless anymore.

Arriving at Columbia's studio on East 52nd Street in early January, Clive Davis was both elated and curious. After a year of waiting, he was finally going to hear a new Simon and Garfunkel album. Davis, who'd taken the reins at Columbia in 1967 after rising from a job in the label's legal department, was both old and new school. With his thinning head of hair and omnipresent suits and ties, Davis looked his thirty-seven years. Yet his fan-boy enthusiasm for pop—even the corporate-psychedelic patterns of his suits—set him apart from previous label heads. With his ingratiating manner (if not his own formidable ego), Davis knew how to relate to bands like Santana and Big Brother and the Holding Company, both of whom he'd signed to Columbia early in his tenure.

Simon and Garfunkel were another matter, and Davis knew it. By the time he became head of Columbia, they were already stars unafraid to
demonstrate their clout—by, among other things, negotiating a higher royalty rate (an inordinately high fifty cents an album and two cents per side on singles) and demanding an extension of their contract. He also realized they were complicated men: When Davis wanted to price
Bookends
higher than their previous albums, they resisted, not wanting to gouge fans.

Yet Davis knew how to work with and flatter his acts. He knew that bohemians like Janis Joplin would claim not to care about sales figures, then call him after-hours to ask how their records were doing. Simon initially nixed the idea of using their music on a soundtrack album for
The Graduate,
thinking it would be asking fans too much to buy a collection recycling older material—until Davis went to a screening of the film, heard the judicious use of their music in it, and called Simon directly. He told Simon he'd make their name smaller on the cover to avoid any whiff of exploitation, and Simon eventually agreed

Davis' power of persuasion came in handy when he arrived at the studio, where Simon and Garfunkel had been joined by members of their families. When the album playback finished, Davis announced that he loved what he'd heard, and the duo asked him to pick the album's all-important first single. They were expecting him to say “Cecilia,” but instead he told them it had to be “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Simon and Garfunkel balked—a nearly five-minute ballad wouldn't have a chance on the radio, they argued. Yet Davis pressed his case: “You can't play everything according to the book,” he told them. The fans who'd heard a preview of it onstage during their fall tour—and often gave it a standing ovation—were also a reliable gauge. After much discussion, they agreed.