Homeward Bound (15 page)

The recording sessions began at the Columbia Records studio on March 10, with Paul on guitar, Kornfeld on guitar and banjo, and jazz bassist Bill Lee, a favorite for many folk musicians, on an acoustic stand-up. Given the simplicity of the arrangements and the extent of Paul and Artie's preparation, the work went quickly. “Bleecker Street,” “The Sound of Silence,” and a cover of Dylan's “The Times They Are A-Changin'” were finished by the end of the first day. The group reconvened a week later to nail down “He Was My Brother,” “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” and covers of Ed McCurdy's “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” and the British songwriter Ian Campbell's “The Sun Is Burning.” Gathering for a final time on March 31, they finished the album with versions of “Sparrow” and “Benedictus,” and covers of Bob Camp and Bob Gibson's gospel thumper “You Can Tell the World”; the standard “Go Tell It on the Mountain”; and the tragic British love ballad “Peggy-O.”

Released more than six months later, the album, which they titled
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
, was both prim and impassioned, a product of its fading era and a signpost to the one about to start. The album's cover illustrates the moment vividly: Paul and Artie together on an empty subway platform considering the lens as a silver train bullets past. The station is gritty,
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redolent with the exhaustion of the endless night. Still, the duo look daisy fresh, their charcoal suits pressed and ties knotted tight. Both lean against a black girder, but Artie stands taller, his face open and confident. Paul keeps his back against the steel, a guitar around his neck, gloom tugging at his boyish features. The songs inside project the same contradictions. Opening with the exuberant neo-gospel “You Can Tell the World,” they make like glimmer-eyed Christians (“He brought joy, joy, joy into my heart!”), but snap the mood immediately with the faux-naïveté of “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” and its fantasy world in which war has been outlawed. The instrumentation stays constant: Lee's stand-up bass holds down the rhythm while Paul's and Kornfeld's guitars twinkle and strum with tasteful reserve. If the duo's cover of “The Times They Are A-Changin'” is fairly rote, the five Simon originals and the Simon-Garfunkel arrangement of “Benedictus” veer into far more distinctive terrain.

“Bleecker Street” sounds just as tidy as the other tunes, but the lyric tells a more complex story. Fog hanging over the streets becomes a shroud dividing a shepherd from his sheep. The people are shadows, their verse crooked and their love furtive. Apartments rent for thirty dollars a month, pace the thirty pieces of silver Judas earned by betraying Jesus. Once a paradise of art and ideals, Greenwich Village has become a moral desert. It's a dire portrait but, strikingly, no villains emerge. The blight is existential, a function of humanity's innate flaws. Church bells signal hope, but the ringing is faint, righteousness still on the far side of the desert.

The bleakness continues on “Sparrow,” the wintry parable about a bird dying from the forces of greed, vanity, and indifference, then takes a turn for the self-pitying on the title track, whose narrator must abandon his lover due to an impulsive decision to rob a liquor store. “My life seems unreal, my crime an illusion / A scene badly written in which I must play,” he observes, in the style of a poet who needs to learn a bit more about the psychology of crime.

The heart of the album, and the best indicator of all that would follow, starts with “The Sound of Silence” at the end of the first side and continues through “He Was My Brother,” which leads the flip side. At twenty-two, Paul had discovered the essence of his mature voice. Both songs are free of artifice. Rather than hiding behind the new idiom, he absorbs it deeply enough to use it as an expression of his troubled soul, his own experience, the fragile balance of perception, passion, dread, and joy that would fill his art and consciousness for the rest of his life.

*   *   *

The night before the final recording session, Paul and Artie played at Gerde's Folk City, sharing a three-way bill with Chicago blueswoman Tracy Nelson and the Even Dozen Jug Band. It was their first major appearance since they started recording for Columbia, and to stir up excitement, Tom Wilson rallied some of his hipper friends and colleagues to the show. The producer was there, of course, as were Kornfeld and some of his living room regulars. Yet the real prize was Bob Dylan himself. He came a little late, perching at the bar next to the
New York Times
music critic Robert Shelton. They'd had a few drinks; maybe they'd blown a little grass. Whatever, Dylan was laughing, hand in front of his mouth, head down, shoulders heaving—“Haw-haw-haw, oh my god”—and you could hear it. Paul and Artie played in a hush: one guitar, two voices, and delicate strands of melody and harmony. The power was as much between the notes as in the notes themselves, and it begged close listening. And everyone knew that beaky high plains honk.

“Haw-haw!”

In a career whose every twitch and twang has been anatomized for personal, literary, political, and biblical magnitude, the meaning of that Dylan guffaw remains unfathomed. Shelton went to his grave insisting that the laughter—he was giggling, too, only more quietly—had nothing to do with what was happening onstage, that whatever had spurred the laugh riot was completely detached from Paul and Artie's performance. It was just bad timing that whatever he and Dylan were talking about that evening—and Shelton never identified what it was—had popped their corks just then.

There was more to Shelton's story, though. Dylan and Paul had met for the first time only days earlier, and the encounter had gone badly. Despite having so much in common, including extended visits with the same folk musicians in London, the two couldn't find anything to say to each other. So they traded the smallest of small talk. Neither pretended to be delighted, or even all that interested, in meeting the other.

Oh yeah, how's it going? You're Kornfeld's friend, right? So, yeah. Hi. Okay.

Then back to their separate corners, separate friends, and separate visions of the world and their rightful place within it. Maybe it was the same place, and maybe there was room for only one of them in it. This may be why Shelton described that night at Gerde's as “an encounter typical of New York's paranoia and instant rivalries,” which makes his claims of innocent snickering seem a wee bit less convincing.

Dylan wasn't the only Village folkie rolling his eyes at Paul and Artie that night. “Their ethereal harmonies,” Shelton wrote, “sounded out of place at Gerde's, home of weather-beaten ethnic songs.” Indeed, the folk ethic in Greenwich Village, and throughout the revivalist scene, was governed by a traditionalist notion that defined a musician's authenticity by the dust in his guitar, the sweat on her banjo, and the songs of chains and ropes, hammers, shovels, and pickaxes; of rounders and ramblers; of hard luck and midnight trains; of the blues and the bottle; of deceit, death, and the glory of God. It was the homegrown, yet exotic, sound you heard then from cowboy singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott or the modern scalawag Dave Van Ronk or, of course, from Dylan, who had blown into New York like a folktale in boots, telling tales of a childhood spent on Indian reservations, in a traveling carnival, and among the hobos riding freight trains and holing up in the ghost towns of the windblown Southwest.

Compare those real-world vagabonds to the soft-cheeked boys from middle-class Queens, with their Windsor knots, college degrees, and bourgeois
agonistes
. No wonder their songs sounded so self-important and so very melodramatic. “Hello darkness, my old friend”? For a time that spring, you could march from apartment to apartment on Macdougal Street and get a laugh in all of them by summoning your inner stentor and reciting the opening phrase of “The Sound of Silence.”
Hello, darkness
 … To the beatniks and the leaflet distributors, the purists and the deeper-in-the-gutter-than-thou, it was easy to see how phony these boys were: rich kids pretending to be the real folks.

Oh, but the crazy irony of it all! Because self-styled rodeo rider, steer-driving, country-wandering Ramblin' Jack Elliott was actually raised as Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a well-to-do doctor in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. And you know who thought that was truly and deeply hilarious? Bob Dylan, of course, who was sitting with Kornfeld, Paul Stookey (Paul from Peter, Paul, and Mary), and a few others at Le Figaro coffeehouse when Kornfeld told the tale. The hilarity stayed with the folksinger for the rest of the evening, so whenever Kornfeld leaned in and whispered, “Adnopoz,” Dylan would lose it all over again. Soon he'd be laughing out of the other side of his guitar, because the
Little Sandy Review
, a small folkie magazine published by strict constructionists in Minneapolis, would pull the rug out from beneath his own vagabond tales, revealing that the part-Cherokee carny hobo with the name of a poet was actually Robert Zimmerman, a nice Jewish boy whose father owned a successful electronics store in Hibbing, Minnesota. And those wild tales about Dylan's family and his drifter's childhood? He'd lifted all of it from Woody Guthrie, adopting the legend's fantastical past for his own.

None of it mattered, though, not for Dylan and not for Ramblin' Jack, either, just as it hadn't mattered for Gershwin, Berlin, Lee Simms, Tommy Graph, Jerry Landis, or any other showbiz-savvy performer who knew how to shake off the limitations of family and religious history. So what names would Paul and Artie choose to be their sophisticated-but-folky alter egos? When Paul sold “Carlos Dominguez” and “He Was My Brother” to Edward B. Marks, he was still using the Landis imprimatur. But when he published the first of his folk songs, he felt that it was time for a change. He credited the songs to a new alter ego he named Paul Kane, and when Tribute Records released the tracks as a single in August 1963, the (solo) performances were credited to an imaginary group that was called either the Voices of Paul Kane (the credit in
Billboard
) or the Paul Kane Voices (per
Variety
), as if the bare-bones guitar-and-voice arrangements were performed by a folksy chorale. When Paul and Artie started playing their folk material that fall, they called themselves Kane and Garr. Then Paul's success under his real name in England convinced him to continue using it at home. So they were Simon and Garr through the winter and spring of 1964. Then Artie got tired of Garr and said he wanted to use his real name, too. Paul shook that off. For all that Simon was a Jewish name, it was also short and easy to say. But
Garfunkel
? No, no, no—too long and too clumsy. People would assume they were comedians, or tailors, even. So how about Garfield instead? They kicked that around for a while. Artie didn't like it, but he knew how show business operated; he'd never worked or recorded under his real name. Eventually he gave in. Simon and Garfield it was.

Except Tom Wilson didn't like it. He'd bitten his tongue whenever Paul and Artie debated names and pseudonyms or when the Columbia executives who consulted on the names of acts and records called to talk about the name of the company's new folk duo. The execs didn't like the duo's real names, either—Simon and Garfunkel just didn't sound like a name that could catch on with anyone. At first the execs thought they could sidestep the problem by calling them Paul and Artie, but then someone remembered that just a few years earlier they had released an album by another pair of young folksingers who went by Art and Paul.
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So they considered other young protest types and proposed another approach: how about the Catchers in the Rye? Paul and Artie just laughed at that one. Paul, now with Artie's support, went back to Simon and Garfield, and that was when Wilson put his foot down. He'd loved “The Sound of Silence” the moment he heard it, but it was “He Was My Brother,” the impassioned civil rights anthem, that had convinced him to invest in their future. Paul wrote so powerfully about civil rights and justice; they both sang the songs with a righteous fury that was really stirring, particularly for Wilson, a black man who had lived with racism his entire life. So how was it that they were so gutless about their own ethnicity? Were they really going to let the bigots tell them that there was something wrong with having a Jewish name, just so they could sell more
records
? Well, they'd done that before, so, yes, that's exactly what they were going to do.

The publicity guys at Columbia felt the same way, all of them telling the same story: the duo's real names would be off-putting to the anti-Semites behind the radio dial, along with all the average folks who just felt more—how can I put this?—
comfortable
around less ethnic types. But the world was changing, Wilson protested. There were hardly any anti-Semites left! That last argument was more aspirational than factual, unfortunately, but when Wilson and the other executives laid out the dispute to Columbia executive vice president Norman Adler, he let out an exasperated sigh. “Gentlemen, it's 1964,” he snapped. “They're Simon and Garfunkel. Next record?”

*   *   *

With the Columbia recording sessions finished and the release date still months in the future, Paul returned to London to resume his career there and his love affair with Kathy Chitty. This time he got his own place, in Hampstead, a bottom-floor studio apartment in a house three doors down Haverstock Hill Road from the Belsize Park tube stop. Folk guitarist Martin Carthy had lived there for months but was moving at precisely the right time. Paul figured he'd stay there through the spring and summer. Starting with shows back at the Railway Inn in Brentwood, and at many of the other clubs he had played earlier in the winter, he threw himself into the serious business of building his reputation in London and beyond. Not the least bit shy about publicizing himself and his work, he launched a one-man campaign of telephone calls and neatly typed letters, all noting his previous appearances at the London clubs, the upcoming American album to be released by Columbia Records (Dylan's label, of course), and his new asking price of seven pounds per show.