Homeward Bound (28 page)

“The Boxer” fell together quickly, so they decided to record it before Artie took off for Mexico, thinking it might make a good single for the spring. The music was fairly simple, a basic folk progression played on acoustic guitars supporting close harmonies. But the staunch voice of the “poor boy” at its center, the battered young man who won't stop fighting for himself, seemed to require something more than a light acoustic treatment, a sound that would fit the biblical language that informed Paul's writing. A thunderous noise, even: skies opening, a tempest unleashed upon the streets, thunder and sheets of black rain, and their voices above it all, ringing through the clamor.

When Artie left for his two months of
Catch-22
filming at the end of 1968, they had already settled on how the next year would unfold. Paul would write songs and record some basic tracks with Halee until Artie got back in late winter, at which point they would work together as usual to produce the next Simon and Garfunkel album while also playing concerts around the country. Even though he'd been passed over, Paul wasn't unhappy about Artie taking his shot at the movies. For the first time, Artie had a high-profile gig he could do on his own. That could only be good for his friend: maybe Artie could burn off some creative steam doing something that had nothing to do with the guy he had depended on for so long.

Then the two months passed and Artie didn't come home—maybe for a short break or two, but the filming was taking much longer than Nichols had expected, so Artie had to go back to the remote Mexican village where they had been filming. And did he mention what a ball he'd been having down there? He was meeting all kinds of cool people, actors and writers and others; and when they weren't working, they hung out at the pool or explored the hills, smoked dope, had a great time. And his acting was going great! Nichols kept telling him he could be a leading man if he really wanted to pursue it. Amazing, right?

Well, sure. How could Paul begrudge his partner's success as an actor? Pretty easily, as it turned out. After years of dictating the wheres, whens, and whys of their relationship, Paul now had to compete for Artie's attention. And now that he had new songs, they needed to record—and they
did
have an album to get out, after all—he didn't want to hear Artie saying he wasn't available. And in such a deliberately wounding way! It was as if Artie had been planning it all along, taking all his advantages over Paul (his looks, his height, his charm) and running off in a direction Paul had been barred from going. Worse, Artie's absence meant that Paul couldn't do
his
work. They were Simon
and Garfunkel
. Paul couldn't make an entire album without Artie's voice and ideas. He was the only guy, with the exception of Roy Halee, who could listen to one of Paul's songs and know what Paul was hearing in his head, and how to help make it real. And now Artie had something better to do? Well, fuck him.

The resentment would flare up from time to time, particularly when Paul found himself alone in the studio trying to anticipate what Artie might think of this or that approach, or when he came up with a harmony arrangement that clashed with the guitar part he'd just recorded. Other times, he just missed his friend, his partner, the only other person on earth who knew how it felt to be a member of Simon and Garfunkel. He wrote letters telling Artie everything he and Roy had been up to, and how eager they were to have him back. Feeling lonely one day, Paul started writing “The Only Living Boy in New York,” a loving ballad addressing Artie as Tom, his name from way back in their Tom and Jerry days, when they sang in the basement and took their dates for sodas at Addy Vallens's candy store. He describes his loneliness, admits to the sorrow of being the one left behind. But the point of the song is reassurance, a farewell hug and a benediction. Then the anger would well up again, and there were no words, let alone melodies, to express that.

It had always been part of their friendship, even when they were thirteen, comparing grades and pop song expertise while walking home from school, each of them angling for some measure of dominance, some point where they could prove, for the moment at least, which one was truly in charge. They'd spent the next four years sharing everything, staring so deeply into each other's mouths that Paul had memorized the topography of Artie's teeth, gums, and soft palate. Yet the fractures caused by Paul's backroom deal with Sid Prosen hadn't really healed, even when they went back to singing together. Strangely, the underlying tension had become part of their public mystique. The first promotional biography Columbia Records issued for them in January 1966 made the teenage breakup
*
a central part of their narrative, quoting them in unison calling it a “dig-yourself competition” that ended when they “got over it and got back together.” Whatever the Columbia publicity office's reason for including the story in publicity, it only added tension to their comfortable harmonic identity: a hint of coming danger, a reminder that beauty never lasts, that the sound could always fade back to silence.

You didn't have to look too far beneath the partners' bonhomie to glimpse the agitation between them. Paul's British friends could feel it crackling between them when Artie was with Paul in London. If Artie was in a mood, he turned haughty and insulting. Paul told some friends that he couldn't wait to regain the independence he had as a solo act. It shouldn't have been a shock. The most successful partnerships are often built between two people whose respective strengths and flaws act as counterbalances. So just as Paul's songs were enhanced by Artie's voice, Paul's determination was offset by his partner's more ethereal sensibility, sometimes to the point where Paul couldn't stand it. During one tightly booked tour, Artie turned down a ride on the airplane Mort Lewis had chartered to take them from New York to Boston because he felt like spending the day hitchhiking. It took hours for someone to pick him up in New York City, and he arrived at Symphony Hall with only minutes to spare. Another time, Artie overslept and missed the flight he and Paul were supposed to take to a sold-out show at the Royal Albert Hall in London. By the time he finally roused himself, the only way he could get there in time was to spend ten thousand dollars to book a private plane for the journey. “We had to postpone the concert, return all the money, compensate the promoter,” Lewis says. “Paul almost smashed his guitar against the concrete wall at the airport, he was so mad.”

Artie the movie star. Mike Nichols telling everyone what a great, natural actor he was. So much presence. So much feeling in his dialogue. And so, so handsome. Movie star looks, they kept saying. And Paul? The shortness, the chubby face that made him look chunky even when he was muscle bound and, increasingly, trim—and just when he thought it couldn't get worse, he started losing his hair. His friends in England could already see it when he was twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Paul became skilled with his comb, developing new and increasingly convoluted patterns to cover the pink top of his otherwise bushy head. No young guy ever wants to lose his hair, but it was worse than ever in the late 1960s, when the length of a man's hair projected everything you needed to know about where he stood on the counterculture–civil rights–Vietnam War–Richard M. Nixon–Generation Gap spectrum.

Teaming up with Artie had relieved some of Paul's anxieties about his looks and his voice; it never hurt to have a sweet-singing heartthrob in your group—right until it hurt you more than you even knew how to express.

*   *   *

By the time Artie got back from Mexico in the spring of 1969, Paul had finished backing tracks for a handful of new songs. Before he started work on their fifth album, Paul's first impulse had been to record it in Memphis, with Booker T. and the M.G.'s as their backing band. He even went down to Memphis to check out the Stax label's studio and talk things over with Booker T. In the end, though, they couldn't make it work, so Paul, Artie, and Roy returned to their usual pattern of dividing the session between Manhattan and Los Angeles, where the musicians they had worked with most often (bandleader/drummer Hal Blaine, pianist Larry Knechtel, guitarist Fred Carter Jr., and bassist Joe Osborn) lived. Setting up for a productive summer in LA, Paul and Artie rented a house in the Hollywood Hills just a few miles from the recording studio. The house on Blue Jay Way, the same place George Harrison made famous with his song “Blue Jay Way,” got to feel like a Southern California version of the ambassador's house during the Stockbridge summer, the two of them at the center of a loop of girlfriends, friends, musicians, and occasional celebrity guests. Paul's close friend, and the duo's lawyer, Mike Tannen had relocated to Los Angeles to open a new office for his law firm, so he and Mary were around a lot. Tommy Smothers, of the counterculture-influenced comedy team the Smothers Brothers, came around to smoke pot and flirt with Peggy and Mary, while the actor Charles Grodin, who had befriended Artie on the
Catch-22
set, also became a regular.

There was still plenty of music to record. Near the start of their LA visit, Artie noticed a Frank Lloyd Wright–designed house on a street nearby, and recalling his collegiate fascination for the architect, he suggested Paul write a song about him. Surprisingly, Paul did exactly that, though he took the tune in an unexpected direction. When inspiration struck in the midst of a late-night party, they used their home reel-to-reel to record a rhythm track built from thigh-slapping, dampened-string guitar strums, and piano bench slamming, and that became the basis for another new song. Paul introduced Artie to the Paris-based Peruvian folk group Los Incas's recording of the South American traditional “El Condor Pasa.” Paul had fallen in love with the song when he heard the group perform it during his brief visit to Paris during the summer of 1963, and assigned Mort Lewis the task of securing the rights to use the original recording as a backdrop for new lyrics he had written for it. He also had another song he wanted Artie to sing. It was kind of his “Yesterday,” Paul said. And he wasn't joking.

When Al Kooper had played Paul an album by the gospel vocal group the Swan Silvertones, Paul begged to borrow it, if only to relish the hauntingly sweet falsetto of the group's lead singer, Claude Jeter. Kooper let him take it home, and while spinning the disc one evening, Paul connected with a line Jeter calls out in a hail of devotional cries in “O Mary Don't You Weep”: “I'll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name.” Something about that phrase walloped Paul across the forehead. Was it the most powerful assertion of unconditional love he'd ever heard? Still feeling Jeter's words in his chest, he reached for his guitar and, as he described it later, felt his fingers hit some gospel changes, which he repeated while a melody fell into his ears, sweet and restrained at first, then taking flight as if it had set its own course independent of Paul's musical imaginings.

“Like a bridge over troubled waters I will lay me down.”

The first time Paul heard what he was singing, when it registered in his conscious mind, tears came into his eyes. The song felt more channeled
through
him than written
by
him, as if Jeter's voice had unlocked a door containing the best melody Paul had ever written. He worked on the tune until 4:00 a.m., which was when the telephone in Kooper's apartment rang. Remember that Swan Silvertones album? It had just inspired a new song, and now Paul needed Kooper to come over and hear it. Right now. Figuring it might be his only chance to get his Swan Silvertones album back, Kooper took a cab from his place in the West Village to Paul's Upper East Side apartment building, walking through his door just as the sun pinkened the distant eastern horizon. The only light in the house came from a couple of candles. Paul started to play and sing. “I was the first person other than him to hear ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,'” Kooper says. When Paul got to the chorus, the other musician nodded and smiled. “I instantly knew where he got the line from.” What Paul knew, every bit as instantly, was that the only voice with enough range, power, and feeling to do the song justice belonged to Artie Garfunkel.

When Paul played Artie his homemade demo of the song, Artie liked it immediately—and one thing he really liked about it was how Paul's voice sounded on it. In order to hit the high notes, he had climbed into his falsetto range, finding a rich, flutelike tone he'd never used in public, which Artie thought was a shame. You should sing it, he urged his partner. Artie was trying to be generous: “It
is
a great song. You wrote it, you sing beautifully, you deserve to do it.” In the heat of that tense summer, Paul heard this as an insult. “It's my best song and it's not good enough for Artie to want to do it?” It took only a few minutes for Artie to change his mind, but that moment of hesitation—what struck Paul as rejection—took root right alongside everything else Paul had recently come to resent about his partner.

Paul had thought of “Bridge” as a brief, restrained ballad, but the more Artie and Halee thought about the song, the more they were convinced that it had to be enormous: a full production with strings, booming drums, and a cathedral-size ending. They couldn't get all that into a two-verse tune, so now Paul had to write a third verse, hopefully sooner rather than later. Paul scratched out the “silver girl” lines in one sitting, and from there Artie and Halee took over the production. To make sure they'd have an authentic gospel piano sound, Paul got in touch with Marshall Chess, the son of Leonard Chess, cofounder (with his brother Phil) of Chicago's Chess Records,
*
and asked him to send over a dozen or so gospel records. From there, Artie focused most intently on how Larry Knechtel would play the piano part. The relatively simple chord changes Paul had written on his guitar didn't come close to southern gospel piano style, with its jumping left hand, ever-changing passing chords, and elaborate turnarounds, so Artie pulled a stool next to the piano and spent days bent over the instrument with Knechtel. Paul didn't abandon the song to them—when he heard Artie leaving out the octave leap in the first verse, he marched in and ordered him to sing it as written. “You can't take the writer's notes and just
dispense
with them!” he cried. “
I
wrote that note. I'm the writer and that's what
I
wrote!” Artie agreed to sing it to Paul's specifications, and everyone cooled down, for the moment.