Homeward Bound (20 page)

“Yep.”

Was it really them? That the electrified record sounded nothing like the tune they recorded made it feel even less real. Back in London, Paul couldn't bring himself to cancel his remaining shows, pack up his life, and fly back to New York until he picked up a telephone and dialed a familiar number he hadn't called in months. It was dinnertime in Queens, and all the Merensteins were at the table when the ringing phone pulled Charlie's wife, Harriet, to her feet. She handed the receiver to her husband, and there was the prodigal surrogate son Paul, looking for a little more career advice. He explained what was happening, how he'd been minding his own business overseas and now everyone at Columbia was yelling that “The Sound of Silence” was going to be huge, that he had to abandon his life in London to come back home. It all sounded great, but there was so much bullshit in the music business. Now Paul needed an honest answer from the only music guy he could really trust. Was “The Sound of Silence” really that big a hit? Yes, it was, Charlie said. “You've really got a hit record.”

Paul responded immediately. “Okay. I'm coming back. I'll call you the moment I get home.”

He left London in a rush, packing up his clothes and shoes, finding a place to leave his car and everything else he couldn't carry on the airplane. Promising everyone that he'd be gone for just a few months, he canceled only a few shows, rescheduling others for a visit he was already planning to make in February. Talking to friends and fans, he shrugged off his American star turn as a brief distraction he'd get out of the way by the spring. He'd stay only as long as it took to make the money he'd need to live in London for a year or two without having to hustle for gigs. Then he'd be right back to the folk clubs to play music that really mattered.

But for the time being, there were so many other important things to do in America, so many decisions to make, so many problems to fix. Not long ago Paul would have handed it all off to Charlie without a second thought, but back in New York, he came to realize that things were different now. “The Sound of Silence” was on track to sell a million copies.
A million copies
. A huge number, and with it came huge opportunities that presented questions and potential problems of equal magnitude. The Columbia executives were already demanding a new album, one that sounded more like the electric “Sound of Silence” than the buttoned-down acoustic
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
. Tom Wilson, who had left Columbia to take a bigger job at MGM Records, was no longer available for guidance, and Paul and Artie had no idea who their next producer would be. Was Charlie really equipped to navigate the hazard-pocked terrain just ahead?

Apollo Records had struggled throughout Charlie Merenstein's tenure as its chief. He'd had his successes, but he'd also made some crucial mistakes, particularly when it came to enforcing his contracts. Charlie was a quirky guy. When he made deals with an artist, he was also making a friend, starting a personal relationship that was as much about trust and loyalty as it was about whatever deal they signed. Charlie knew he'd live up to his end, and he expected his artists, his friends, to do the same. But it hardly ever worked out that way in the music business, particularly when an Apollo act scored a moderate hit record or two. That's when the guys from the major labels would come swooping down from the tall buildings, beaks ruffling with bigger, richer contracts. And that, far more often than not, was the end of that up-and-comer's days at Apollo. Because even if a musician was already signed to Apollo for another two or five or ten records, Charlie could never bring himself to hold an artist back. Because: if they don't wanna do business with me, I don't wanna do business with them. He'd rather have let the big companies work out a small settlement, or maybe he wouldn't even take it that far. If he had a friend who turned out to be a rat, why spend any more time thinking about him? Fuck 'em. Move on.

Only, you can't run a record company, or any kind of company, like that, and when Bess Berman finally lost her patience with her brother in 1959, he left the company and, after a few years of living off the settlement Bess gave him, bought a route as a pretzel distributor in New York, dragging his still-athletic body out of bed before dawn six days a week to drive his pretzels. He kept a hand in the business, usually managing and producing an artist or act somewhere, but that was a part-time pursuit, and sometimes much less than that. As he told his sons, the product he sold in his new business was so much easier than what he dealt with in the music industry. Pretzels, he explained, don't talk back. Paul never called. Charlie wouldn't hear his young friend's voice again for more than twenty years.

*   *   *

Whether Paul had ever intended to reinstall Merenstein as his manager isn't entirely clear. Charlie was Jerry Landis's guy, a good navigator through the Midtown pop factories. Now Paul was an artist of musical, poetic, and social sophistication, and also the creator of a million-selling No. 1 hit single. Whatever happened before this moment no longer mattered. In fact, it mattered so little that it probably hadn't happened at all.

Paul and Artie had hired a new manager not long after they signed with Columbia in early 1964. Producer Tom Wilson had recommended Marvin Lagunoff, who also managed the Pilgrims, the African American group Wilson had hoped to equip with “The Sound of Silence” when Paul first played it for him. Lagunoff's real specialty was in movies and television—one of his first ideas for the
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
–era Paul and Artie was to make them hosts of a
Hootenanny
-style folk music TV show. Nothing came of it, or from anything Lagunoff might have done to promote the release of
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
. He wasn't involved with the overdubbed/hit version of “The Sound of Silence,” either, so it had been easy to forget about him, or at least expect that he was as through with them as they were with him.

Having reported to Columbia's offices in Midtown to meet with the label's chief of promotion, Gene Weiss, Paul and Artie were on their way out the door when label president Goddard Lieberson stopped them and congratulated them on their success. They must be on top of the world, Lieberson proclaimed. The whole nation was talking about them! It was nice to hear, but they didn't feel like they were on top of anything, given that the only show their booking agent at William Morris had been able to set up for them was a two-night, four-show gig at the Coconut Grove nightclub in Miami, for which they would be paid the not-terribly-grand sum of a thousand dollars. Obviously they needed help, a new manager, pronto. Lieberson couldn't recommend anyone in particular, since whoever they hired would be the guy he'd be dealing with when they had disagreements. But since they obviously needed to focus on younger fans, Lieberson advised, they'd be smart to talk to a couple of managers who had the college circuit down cold. The first was Albert Grossman, who handled Peter, Paul, and Mary and Bob Dylan, among others. The second was Mort Lewis, who had the Brothers Four, the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, and a few more. Paul, who was well aware of Grossman's tight bond with Dylan, had one question: “What's the name of that second guy again?”

Born and raised in Minneapolis, Mort Lewis was a jazz fanatic who had found his way into the industry when he got back from World War II and started managing artists in the early 1950s. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was smart and hardworking, and also a ladies' man, with a freewheeling panache that earned him friends ranging from Duke Ellington to Lenny Bruce.

When Paul called, Lewis invited the two musicians to meet him at his east Midtown apartment that evening. After shaking hands and handing off his coat, Paul noticed the copy of Bruce's latest album propped up against Lewis's hi-fi. The comedian had just sent it over with an inscription on the cover—“To Morty, I hope you like it! Lenny”—and the sight made Paul's eyes pop. “Wow! You know Lenny Bruce?” Lewis nodded, and Paul looked over at Artie.
Cool
.

They sat down to talk about Paul and Artie's new set of problems and opportunities, and Paul brought up one particularly maddening thing: when they walked onstage at some venues, they'd find only one microphone, which they would have to share. It was a pain in the neck, literally, given their differences in height. Their vocal blend suffered, too, but somehow there was nothing anyone could seem to do about it. Lewis shrugged. Just write it into the contracts. If someone wanted to book them, there was always an agreement about how long they should play and how much they'd get paid, right? Just add a clause that says the contractor must supply two microphones, state-of-the-art, preferably.

“It's that easy?” Paul asked.

Lewis nodded. “If you know what you're doing.”

They continued the conversation over corned beef sandwiches at the Hole in the Wall deli, near Lewis's apartment. When the waitress brought the coffee, the manager sketched the terms for a two-year management contract on the back of a paper napkin. The next day, the three of them met with their lawyer, Harold Orenstein, and Lewis predicted that Simon and Garfunkel should and could be earning as much as ten thousand dollars a week. Orenstein, who also knew what he was doing, proposed adding a clause that fixed the number into the deal. If they
weren't
earning ten grand a week after six months, then Paul and Artie could call off the contract. Lewis agreed, and the deal was done. Back in his office, Lewis quickly pulled together some college shows for the next weekend. Paul called Barry Kornfeld, a young bassist named Tom Dawes, an old frat brother who could play the drums, and a few others to serve as a backup band. They met up that Friday afternoon and hit the road. When they rolled back into the city on Monday morning, they had earned slightly more than ten thousand dollars.
*

*   *   *

From the start, they performed mostly on weekends, a restriction set by Artie's postgrad classes at Columbia University. Taking a break, or dropping out entirely, might have made more sense if the military draft and the Vietnam War hadn't been waiting to claim him should he have lost his college deferment. Paul had nothing to worry about from the U.S. Army—he had been diagnosed with a slight heart murmur that barred him from any kind of military service. The university's Christmas break freed them up to work on their second album, a hurry-up project pushed into immediate production by Columbia Records executives made ravenous by the unexpected success of the “Silence” single. Rereleasing the acoustic
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
wasn't going to cut it. Simon and Garfunkel were folk-rock artists now, so that's the kind of music they needed to deliver. A dozen tracks that ran deep but also rocked hard—and that could be finished within, say, three weeks or less. A lunatic demand, really, particularly for a group with a solitary songwriter who was not known for working quickly.

But first they had to record a follow-up single, and immediately. If they wanted to capitalize on the success of “The Sound of Silence” they'd need to get the new song out while the old one was still on the charts. Just after Paul got home from England, he met Artie in their old workshop in the Garfunkel family basement to strategize. The new single, they felt, had to be as strong as “The Sound of Silence,” but in a different way. “To show people [that] it wasn't a fluke,” Artie said. “And show that we could make an interesting record in a whole other vein.” They settled on “Homeward Bound,” a road song Paul had written and performed during his most recent residency in England. It was a pretty simple song, an acoustic tune with just bass, drums, and piano accompaniment. But they took care with the recording, tossing out a first attempt that didn't sound quite right for a second take they cut with local musicians in Nashville. Indeed, “Homeward Bound” had a very different sound from “The Sound of Silence,” but connected as solidly as they hoped when it was released in January, rising to No. 5 on the
Billboard
charts. But they still had a whole new record to make.

Fortunately, Paul had a backlog of songs, most of which he'd been polishing on the English folk circuit for the last year. He and Artie had worked out harmonies during those launderette sessions the previous summer, so all they needed to get going was a producer who could take over for the departed Wilson. Columbia assigned them Bob Johnston, who had also taken over for Wilson in Bob Dylan's recording sessions. Unlike his predecessor, who defined sophisticated cool, Johnston had a little crazy in his eyes. A Texas-born shouter and arm waver, he had a wild admiration for the headstrong artists he worked with (including Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Aretha Franklin), and made a point of deferring to their inspirations and whims. “Dylan or somebody would come up to me and ask what they ought to do,” Johnston told me a year before his death in 2015, “and I'd say, ‘Fuck you!
You're
the genius!
You
tell me what you want, and I'll make it happen!'” What Paul and Artie wanted was to make the best-sounding record possible, the fewer limitations the better. Message received, Johnston urged them to look for good musicians in other cities, pointing them first to Nashville, then cleared the way for them to head to Los Angeles to work with the studio players there who would be known eventually as the Wrecking Crew. Of the eleven songs on the new record, five were revised versions of songs first heard on the UK-only
Paul Simon Songbook
, while “The Sound of Silence” appeared on both that album and
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
. “Somewhere They Can't Find Me” and “We've Got a Groovey Thing Goin'” came from the first folk-rock session with Wilson in April, leaving only “Richard Cory,” “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall,” “Blessed,” and Paul's solo cover of his favorite guitar piece, Davy Graham's “Anji,” as new songs.