Homeward Bound (29 page)

*   *   *

And then the sun would rise on another day, and they'd be back in perfect synch. In footage shot during the summer and fall of 1969, Paul and Artie function more or less cheerfully in recording sessions, in tour rehearsals, and in the cars, airplanes, hotel rooms, and crowded hallways leading from here to there and then somewhere else altogether. They talk and joke in one voice, completing each other's sentences, pulling a gag with one breath, serving as straight man in the next. Riding together in a car in the fall of 1969, Artie finished a detailed trashing of a current pop song by ridiculing the far-too-obvious intervals in its vocal arrangement. “When you're in the harmony game,” he declared, “you learn to scorn harmonies like that.”

Paul nodded, but a small smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. Speaking in a neutral tone, he echoed the most absurd thing his partner had just said. “The harmony game.”

Artie let that pass, and a moment later Paul started in on another harmony-based offense, this one performed by Ludwig van Beethoven, when he violated a stricture of his time that forbade musicians from using parallel fifth harmonies in their compositions. Confronted by the inevitable institutional backlash, the peevish German composer, and his twentieth-century interlocutor, were having none of it, and Paul's voice jumped into his dramatic range to really lay it down: “So Beethoven says,
I
say that you can!
I'm
writing in parallel fifths. I say that you
can
.”

Artie shrugged, thoroughly unimpressed. “He was a fool, Beethoven.”

With that the conversation was over, the both of them peering through the windshield, eyes twinkling.

The crowning moment of S&G silliness came in May of that year, a day after their meeting Frank Zappa at a Mothers of Invention show in New York. When Zappa, who recalled “Hey, Schoolgirl” from his own adolescence, realized that they were the very same duo as Tom and Jerry, they hatched a plan. They'd accompany the Mothers upstate to their next show in Buffalo and be their opening act—not as Simon and Garfunkel, of course, but as an older and sadder Tom and Jerry, still in their 1950s suits and pomaded hair, somehow oblivious to the passage of time. Unrecognized, they ran through a deliberately rough set of oldies, mixing “Hey, Schoolgirl,” “Dancin' Wild,” and one or two other T&J songs with a few Everly Brothers covers and a particularly sloppy attempt at the Penguins' “Earth Angel” before limping offstage. Zappa's group did its set next, but when it was time for the encore Zappa brought back the openers for one last, not necessarily welcome, song—which turned out to be “The Sound of Silence,” sung as a cheerful doo-wop romp ornamented with plenty of
bop-bop-bop
s and
ooh-lah-shooby-doo
s and a slightly revised chorus that suggested, in typical doo-wop steaminess, “Oh baby, let's do it once in silence.” The crowd caught on at that point, just in time to see modern superstars Simon and Garfunkel—it really
was
them!—walk offstage without another word.

*   *   *

When Paul and Artie met with filmmaker Robert Drew to talk about the prime-time special that CBS-TV had just commissioned them to make about their upcoming new album, the celebrated documentarian listened, made a few suggestions, and agreed to coproduce the film. He knew it could be a great documentary, he said a few weeks before his death in July 2014, because it would be about so much more than the making of a pop music album. “They were friends, they were getting along fine, but something was wrong,” Drew said. “I got a sense that Paul and Artie were breaking up. It was really a film about Simon and Garfunkel's last stand.”

The stars had other ideas for the show. If a major television network was going to give them an hour of prime time to do essentially anything they wanted to do, Paul and Artie figured they'd use CBS's megaphone to project their generation's antiwar, anti-establishment politics into the tens of millions of living rooms that would be tuning them in.

Drew didn't want to direct the film himself—he could tell that Paul would be making all the creative decisions no matter who ended up being the titular director. Drew felt more comfortable serving as the project's executive producer, and given his accomplishments as a documentarian—his raw, unnarrated 1960 documentary about the presidential primary battle between U.S. senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia had launched documentary vérité, an entirely new genre of journalistic storytelling—they were happy to accept his counteroffer. After looking at a few other candidates, they ultimately installed Charles Grodin, the actor Artie had befriended on the
Catch-22
set, to serve as director. Grodin had never directed anything—he was a comic actor who played mostly supporting roles—but he had a similar political sensibility, and he made no secret of his admiration for the duo, so off they went.

Whether the CBS television network and primary sponsor AT&T knew exactly what Paul and Artie had planned seems doubtful. Maybe they should have thought about it a little more deeply. Simon and Garfunkel had always had a political consciousness, and the influence of the late sixties counterculture had become all the more pronounced as awareness of the terrors of 1968 took deeper root in the first half of 1969. When they played college shows, Paul and Artie would sometimes invite the audience to gather round the stage after the concert so they could all rap about current events: civil rights, Vietnam, the draft, Johnson, Nixon, drugs, and revolution. Nothing was off-limits. Paul and Artie made a point of listening more than they spoke, as if they were just another couple of guys around the dorm room trying to make sense of the world. They had different plans for the TV show, however. For while Paul definitely loved hearing his music played over sweeping shots of wheat fields, hills, and mountains, he and Artie were most eager to make their own statement about the ugliness of their country—the pollution, the racism, the riots, the assassinations, and the war in Vietnam. So anyone tuning to CBS to hear Simon and Garfunkel music during that hour would be confronted by unsettling footage of filth, violence, and poverty. Yes, there would be poignant shots of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr., and innocence-lost images of childhood heroes Flash Gordon, the Lone Ranger, and good old Howdy Doody. But gloom, cast over everything else, dominated the piece.

When Grodin presented a near-final cut to executives from the network and AT&T, their first reaction was shock, followed by confusion, and then something like outrage. These were old-school American corporations led by old-school American corporate executives, Nixon men, the What's good for Dow Chemical is good for America crowd. According to Grodin, one executive accused them of using AT&T's money to preach “the humanistic approach,” a phrase he spat like snake venom. And why were all the political heroes on the screen liberals? Because they had all been assassinated, Grodin explained. No matter. The executives demanded they remove the politics from the film. When Paul, Artie, and Grodin refused, AT&T's executives chose to remove themselves entirely, demanding CBS return the reported six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand dollars they had invested. CBS agreed, scrambling quickly to convince Alberto-Culver, the maker of VO5 and other women's beauty products, to buy the rights for a fraction of what AT&T had paid.

And what did Alberto-Culver buy? A show so off-putting that once it reached its first commercial break, an estimated million viewers turned it off. Starting with a vaguely cautionary statement by spokesman/actor Robert Ryan—“We think you'll find the next hour to be both entertaining and stimulating”—the fifty-two-minute film veered from those stirring airborne scenery shots set to music to intimate sequences of Paul and Artie moving at top speed between hotels, recording studios, and rehearsals. Paul ran through a Chuck Berry–style political rocker, “Cuba Si, Nixon No,” about an airplane hijacker; then the scene shifted to a band rehearsal in the living room at Hal Blaine's house, where Artie ran through the Frank Lloyd Wright song. Scenes of impoverished children outside crumbled shacks played to Coretta Scott King's assertion that the mere existence of hungry children and impoverished families in modern America was just a different form of the violence taking place on the battlefields of Vietnam. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” played on the airwaves for the first time, heard over footage of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; then to scenes of citizens crying and saluting their funeral processions.

It's brutal stuff, a deliberate shock to force viewers into recognizing the distance between America's ideals and reality, a message Simon and Garfunkel had up to that point managed to make clear in the delicate terms of their songs. But the biggest surprise in Grodin's documentary is how detached and even incomprehensible it makes Paul and Artie's political statements seem. Artie: “The chaos of what the hell is the whole thing is a violent screaming reaction to the confusion of what
is
this thing?” And when Paul attempts to describe the depth of his frustration with the world, he comes off like Little Lord Fauntleroy on a junk food jag: “We're staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel,” he declares, describing how the building's elevators display the front pages of the day's major newspapers. And every day it's the same buzzkill: “I see the headlines and I think, why am I going to make this album? What's the point in making this album? The world is crumbling.” Yet Paul seems anything but committed to finding a way to heal the world's problems. Asked if he'd like to try his hand at being the nation's president, he turns instantly silly, predicting that he would take a few months to fix up all the problems, then get back to his career in music. Then again, maybe he wouldn't have the time for even that much distraction.

ARTIE:
He wants to develop himself as an artist, Chuck.

GRODIN:
You have no time to be president?

PAUL, RECONSIDERING:
I feel I'd make the time.

Then Paul's thoughtfulness melts, and he breaks down laughing. Quick cut to “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy),” and the viewer begins to sympathize with the AT&T executives. Even in the aftermath of all that shock-and-awful footage of fallen heroes, starving children, and battlefield body bags, Paul, with Grodin's help, plays his own apparent disinterest as a joke. Given that the documentary was intended to serve as a serious statement about the state of the nation at the end of what began as one of the most idealistic decades in history,
Songs of America
stands as the worst product of the Simon and Garfunkel collaboration, an attempt at political advocacy so bungled it actually diminished the people and causes it intended to celebrate.

*   *   *

They had assumed the record would be finished with plenty of time for its scheduled release in the fall of 1969, but as the writing and recording dragged into October, the plan to have it in the record stores in time for the Christmas shopping season faded. Paul, Artie, and their four-piece band played several weeks of shows featuring new songs from an album their audiences had yet to hear. The average Simon and Garfunkel crowd was geared toward quiet, respectful listening, but the anticipation in the air was palpable as Artie introduced Paul's most recent song, the just-recorded “Song for the Asking,” which they sang as a duet, Artie's voice turning neat pirouettes around Paul's melody. Some audiences chuckled at Paul's “Architects may come and architects may go” line in “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” while “Why Don't You Write Me” registered enthusiastic, if not overwhelming, applause. But the highlight of the show, night after night, was “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

The song always came as a surprise. At Wichita State University in Kansas; at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; at Carnegie Hall in New York City, it would happen the same way. Larry Knechtel would start the piano intro, and Artie, or sometimes Paul, would say, simply, “This is another new song. It's called ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water.'” Then Paul would leave the stage, leaving Artie alone in the spotlight. As Knechtel got to the opening's turnaround, Artie would start singing, and the silence would magnify, all eyes and ears locked on his performance. Artie kept his voice sweet and airy in the first verse, then gathered force with the second verse and the pianistic glories behind the first full chorus. It descended for a few bars in the third verse, and then finally he unleashed all his vocal power on the climactic chorus, holding that one crowning note for three full bars before falling gently back into the gale of applause and cheers erupting around him in the hall. And of course Paul would give him that moment, lingering offstage as his partner absorbed the cheers. From where Paul stood, in the wings with a cigarette smoldering between his fingers, feeling the same envy that burned into him during the fourth-grade assembly. Artie alone in the spotlight taking the crowd for his own. Only now
he'd
written the song, now it was
he
, and not Artie, who deserved to be cheered. Because while Paul could definitely sing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Artie would never have been able to write it. And Paul had had just about enough of the world's not understanding that.

They were both tired. Paul was tired of having Artie and Halee insist on making his songs so pretty: all those string sections and the layers of echo putting a shimmer on tunes he thought would sound better with a little mud on their shoes. Artie was sick of working within the boundaries of Paul's desires and needs. When Paul came in with “Cuba Si, Nixon No,” Artie tried to pitch in some harmonies but then threw his hands up. The song didn't measure up to all the other songs, he said, and he wanted nothing to do with it. Paul didn't want to hear that, but he felt just as unhappy with the “Benedictus”-like Bach piece Artie wanted to put on the album. So there they were, finally, at absolute loggerheads, each determined to wrestle his own song into the one space they had left. Unable to sing either song in one voice, they resolved the conflict by doing neither song. Unable to sing together, they settled for silence.