Homeward Bound (36 page)

The day's recording sessions were often just the start of the gig. Paul grew close to the people he worked with, and when the sessions ended he and Ramone would sweep up a few folks and take them to dinner at the House of Chan, a cloth napkin Chinese restaurant that had been an institution in Midtown for decades, and which happened to be on the same corner of Seventh Avenue where Ramone's A&R Studios were. They'd stay late, hanging with whatever friends or celebrities happened to drop by, all of them eager to talk in depth about the pursuit of the elusive perfect drum sound, or which studio had truly capable tech guys available at 3:00 a.m., which publicists could get a story on the cover of
Rolling Stone
, and how much Fleetwood Mac really got in that new contract from Warner Bros. And Paul was the center of it all, the most valuable player, the home run king circling the bases with that spark in his eye.

Oh, to be young and rich and famous and admired by Casey Kasem and Leonard Bernstein, Neil Sedaka and Isaac Stern,
People
magazine and E. L. Doctorow. There was nobody else to be, no other city that was better, no better street in a better neighborhood, no speedier private elevator to a better-appointed duplex with a better view of Central Park. Nor a sleeker art deco piano or more tasteful selection of modern art and minimalist, yet comfortable furniture. No cuter son or friendlier ex situated more conveniently, no better recording studios just a short hop, skip, and limousine ride away. And yet, and yet, and yet.

 

CHAPTER 16

THROUGH NO FAULT OF MY OWN

The possibility always dangled between them. Whenever they had dinner or trooped together past the photographers outside a premiere or a party, they decided to go to together. It was never just Paul and Artie having a night out. Because look, everyone, it's Simon and Garfunkel! Passersby would stop and point, they'd go away to tell their friends what they had just seen:
I thought those guys hated each other, but I just saw them together outside the Ziegfeld, and it sure looked like they were having a great time
 … Even when they were alone, hanging around in one or the other's apartment, they'd get in a mood and sing a few tunes, something by the Everlys, Sam Cooke, whatever—and there it was again, that sound they could only make together.

The half decade of independence had eased the friction between them. Paul and Artie had kept in touch for most of the time; it would have been difficult to avoid each other even if they had wanted to, given the many friends and colleagues they had in common. They orbited the same professional loop, too, since they were both still recording for Columbia Records. When Artie performed at a Columbia sales conference at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles while promoting his first solo record in 1973, Paul, who was there to prime the pump for
There Goes Rhymin' Simon
, chased him down just after his set to tell Artie that he needed to work on his between-song patter. “Paul always gives you a critical rundown,” Artie said a few months later.

When Paul had digested Artie's solo work, he fixed immediately on what bothered him the most: the songs were nowhere near as smart as the Artie he knew. Garfunkel had fallen in with pop songwriters and producers who smoothed everything down to a chromium sheen. So pretty, and so empty. What he needed, Paul was sure, was a new song that was just as dark and complex as Artie was. So he set himself to writing just that song.

Actually, Paul had been working on “My Little Town” for months, intending to put it on his own new album. When it seemed the tune wouldn't fit with the rest of the album's tunes, he took it to Artie, who had already heard Paul play it in an earlier form. At first it seemed like Paul wanted to hand off the song and be done with it—do with this whatever you like. But when he was teaching it to Artie, they started to sing it together, slipping into their usual blend, harmonies and all. And when Artie's suspicion that Paul would end up wanting the song back turned out to be right, they started thinking about how they might pull it off together as an old-fashioned Simon and Garfunkel song. Would Paul produce it with Phil Ramone, or would he coproduce with Artie? And if they did that, should they bring in Roy Halee, who had worked on every other song they had recorded? And if they had a finished Simon and Garfunkel song, they'd have to figure out how to release it. Just on Artie's new album, or on Paul's? Should they put it on both their albums, or make it a stand-alone Simon and Garfunkel single? Or maybe it should be part of something else altogether.

Eventually they decided to put the song on both their albums, and to release the records on the same day, so they'd both get the same lift from the inevitable uproar that came from the reunion. That settled, they went with Phil Ramone to three-way-produce recording sessions with the gang in Muscle Shoals. The session went quickly, and almost everyone agreed that it came out sounding exactly as you'd expect Simon and Garfunkel to sound in the mid-1970s: bittersweet, thoughtful, and just a few ticks punchier than the tracks that had made up
Bridge Over Troubled Water
. Released along with their albums in early October with the B-side split between “You're Kind” and Artie's new cover of the Four Seasons' “Rag Doll,” the song was an instant add for radio stations across three or four formats and quickly become the latest of the duo's many Top 10 hits. They'd hinted at what was to come by surprising audiences at each other's concerts in recent months, the pair of them stepping out to end the evening with a mini-set of Simon and Garfunkel classics, performed together as easily and cheerfully as ever.

*   *   *

Oh, the life of a wealthy, high-brow pop star in mid-1970s New York City. The parties and the premieres, the ripple that ran through a room whenever he stepped inside. The starlets so pretty and so ripe for the picking. Some days, he glided the streets in limousines; other days, he walked the sidewalks, a white sailor's hat pulled low, the brim shielding his eyes. He went to ball games and scampered through the playgrounds of Central Park with Harper. He supported high-minded civic causes and fit easily among the politically and socially powerful. The whole Richard Cory package, from the common touch to the power, the grace and the style. But no gun. When the gloom came for him, he'd throw himself into his music, diving in as deep as he could get.

Recorded mostly in the last months of 1974 through the summer of 1975, the album Paul called
Still Crazy After All These Years
reveals the artist in songs that are darkly comic, songs that are tentatively hopeful, songs that are down but not quite out, and songs that all but vanish into the gloom. Most of the lyrics are lightly sketched, alluding to things that are never fully explained, then ending while the characters are still in motion, their destinations and fates unknown. The real story comes through the thrum of the chords, the flight of the melody across the rungs of the clef, rising, falling, then somersaulting in the least-expected direction; looking beyond the end of this song to see into the next; recognizing the themes and textures of each tune and then creating a dialogue between them in order to construct the larger narrative. There is so much you can't control in life, but thanks to Chuck Israels's lessons Paul could steer his music lessons, with more precision and delicacy than ever before.

That fragment of a tune he'd previewed on
The Dick Cavett Show
became “Still Crazy After All These Years,” the lead song and title track of his new album. The song's title phrase had come to him when he was standing in the shower one day, contemplating his life as a divorced father in his midthirties, moving from one romance to another, still searching for a relationship that could withstand his moods, his schedule, his full-body immersion in his work. The way his life was now, he realized, was the way it had been ten years earlier and, it seemed, the way it would be in ten or twenty or thirty years. He'd nearly burst into tears. But as his pain bent into art, the creative process gave him focus, and his new compositional skills an increased sense of control, which in turn gave the songs a paradoxical nature: tales of emotional chaos written with extraordinary discipline.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the title song, which sets the album in what first seems to be a jazz-rock terrain: the Muscle Shoals guys lay back as the singer's tale unfolds. Meeting his ex on the sidewalk, having a couple of drinks, going home alone. The bridge leaps up the scale, but the singer sinks more deeply into his malaise: life is miserable, and then you die. Star saxophonist David Sanborn gets sixteen bars to elevate the mood and sets up the dark climactic joke: the singer could start killing people without having to fear prison. He'd end up in a mental hospital. Still crazy after all these years.

Turn to the cover of the album to glimpse the misanthrope in the flesh, and he seems to be overstating things. Snapped by then-girlfriend Edie Baskin, the photograph has Paul on a fire escape three floors above Crosby Street in Manhattan, bending his mustache cheerily from beneath a Stetson that looks far more urbane in SoHo than it would on horseback. His jeans are stylish and snug across his slightly cocked hip, his white linen button-up shirt open to reveal a thick tuft of chest hair. For this moment at least, he's riding high. But when the party's over, the winner's smile fades and the sorrows of the past rise.

As the next track begins, the electric keyboard is replaced by an acoustic piano playing in its lower register. An acoustic guitar and funereal drum arrive, then Artie Garfunkel's tenor rises, Paul joins with a lower harmony, and we're back in time. The excitement of having a new song by the reunited Simon and Garfunkel, the first since
Bridge Over Troubled Water
, deepens the meaning of “My Little Town” and its place in the album's narrative. Their restored harmony is soothing, but also alludes to the tension between them: the swells of jealousy and anger, the knives in the back, the bitter currents in the headwaters of their art, their ambition, their thorny love for each other.

A song titled “My Little Town” could be mistaken as a work of nostalgia, but here it's a horror show, a portrait of a childhood spent in a small town defined by a vengeful God. Rainbows paint the sky black. The weight of the past smothers the future and sends the narrator into the world “twitching like a finger on the trigger of a gun.”
*
The song ends in a fury, both singers calling out to the dead and dying as horns blare and walls crumble, and childhood's end becomes the Battle of Jericho, the slaves' eternal pursuit of liberation.

When the scene returns to the present tense, the colors return in garish shades. Introduced by a piercing clarinet, a slurry guitar, and a persistent bell, “I Do It for Your Love” sifts the wreckage of his broken marriage, recalling a rainy day civil ceremony defined by paperwork and a world that can't stop protesting the union. Colors reverse (“The sky was yellow and the grass was gray…”), the besotted lovers continually infect each other with a cold. When the narrator buys a rug for their new home, the rains blow in to ruin it before he gets home. An accordion leads a Parisian vignette that is both graceful and sinister, like an approaching street mime. “Love emerges and it disappears,” he realizes, and at this point it feels like a mercy.

When the mood turns wicked, “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” tucks adultery into a martial rhythm, then struts shamelessly through the ABCs of abandonment: “Make a new plan, Stan / You don't need to be coy, Roy.” A roguish fantasy for listeners, but not far from the truth of Paul's final months with Peggy. And for this moment at least he's happy to shrug it off. Who's to say it was entirely his doing, anyway? But the rush is fleeting, and as the perspective shifts to interior matters, the breeze chills and the lights go out.

The album bounces from mood to mood, from the louche resignation of “Have a Good Time” to the philosophical self-pity of “Some Folks' Lives Roll Easy” to the gospel ecstasies of “Gone at Last,” made all the more majestic by Phoebe Snow's wild co-lead vocal. The cold calculation played for laughs in “Fifty Ways” returns in “You're Kind,” in which a gleefully detached fellow inventories his lover's virtues only to rub in how arbitrary his decision to leave her truly is. “I like to sleep with the window open / And you keep the window closed, / So goodbye,” he says, already halfway out of the door.

The slinky “Have a Good Time” plays the same way, a footloose man's blues dressed in silky resignation. But the admission that ends the first verse (“I should be depressed / My life's a mess”) hints at the darker truth.

The despair defines the funereal tone of “Night Game,” which begins with a baseball game at the peak of excitement. It's the bottom half of the eighth inning, the score tied, two outs, and all the world's glory hanging in the balance. But before anyone can cheer for anything, the pitcher collapses and the mound becomes his grave, marked only by his tattered uniform and empty spikes. Winter blows in, the stars become bones, the stadium may collapse. By the end, every form of hope has been extinguished: the third batter strikes out, the season ends ingloriously, the tarpaulin rolls over frozen grass.

Given Paul's devotion to the New York Yankees and to the restorative rituals of baseball, “Night Game” feels that much more mournful, as if he'd come to doubt the central pillars of his consciousness. Things had grown so chaotic by then that even the euphoric “Gone at Last” comes with a troubled backstory, stemming from Paul's initial thought of making the song a duet with then-girlfriend Bette Midler. But their romance was short-lived, and ran aground completely during their attempt to record the song together. The collapse of the collaboration, and the relationship, grew so toxic Paul had to invent three different stories to explain why their duet hadn't worked. “The record companies couldn't agree on the details. That was the only problem,” he told
Rolling Stone
just after the record came out. Actually, the problem was the Latin-style arrangement he was trying,
Crawdaddy
was informed a few months later. Or perhaps, as he told the BBC a few years later, Midler's sing-the-hell-out-of-it-and-move-on recording style clashed with his furrowed-brow sensibility. Paul restored order by bringing in the powerful, if less established, singer Phoebe Snow as his co-singer, and when he heard a playback of their joint performance his faith was restored. As Snow recalled the moment to
Crawdaddy
's Timothy White in 1976, Paul was exulting even before the track was over. “Isn't it nice to win?” he shouted, and she agreed, absolutely: “It really is, for a change.” But soon there would be other battles to fight, including the one he was already embroiled in with the actor/director/writer/producer Warren Beatty.