Homeward Bound (41 page)

Realizing that the Soviets weren't aware of the Freudian principles of psychoanalysis, Gorney helped the pianist uncover a chain of subconscious associations that reached back to when she was nine years old and unexpectedly discovered the tactile pleasure of holding, then swallowing, a gooey raw egg. She had felt ashamed afterward, and got the same feeling at fourteen when her mother gave her a bottle of hand cream as a present. That time, her shame rose almost instantly, and she spent the next fifteen minutes pacing the house with her hands extended away from her body. The primal association, she eventually admitted, stemmed from the pleasure and guilt of masturbation. The egg and the lotion and then the slippery smoothness of the ivory piano keys, the primal joy of creation and the ecstatic release of the music and then the applause, the cheers, the glow in the faces arrayed at her feet—a moment's ecstasy, but always wrapped around that kernel of humiliation; the shame of emptying herself onstage and not just loving her creation but
needing
it. So she, or something in her, shut it down.

Now Paul, for reasons very much his own, had done the same thing.

At the end of the first session, Gorney asked Paul to write at least a few lines of a song about his problems. When he demurred, saying he hadn't brought a guitar with him, Gorney loaned his patient his. Paul couldn't bring himself to touch the instrument on the first night, but the more he unspooled his problems, focusing eventually on his suspicion that his work had no real value to anyone, let alone to society as a whole, the psychiatrist held up his hand. What I'm telling you, he said, is that the way for you to contribute is through your songs. And it's not for you to judge their merits. It's for you to write the songs. “For me that was brilliant. And liberating,” Paul said a few years later. When he got back to the hotel that evening, he picked up Gorney's guitar, played two or three jagged chords, and found a melody to skitter across a fistful of words.

My hands can't touch a guitar string,

My fingers just burn and ache

My head intercedes with my bodily needs

And my heart won't give it a break.

It was the start of “Allergies,” a song that, just as Gorney had suggested, transfigured Paul's anxieties into music. They continued the intensive therapy for a little longer, but once the doctor helped him kick open his creative logjam, Paul went on a songwriting jag that carried him through the year and into the start of a new album. In the mood to shake things up, he asked Russ Titelman and Lenny Waronker, Warner Bros. staffers who had together and separately produced some of the best albums of the previous two decades, to work on the record. They got started in Los Angeles, and had a few basic tracks recorded when Paul got a telephone call from New York concert promoter Ron Delsener. The promoter had just been on the phone with the city's parks commissioner, who told him about the launch of the Central Park Conservancy, a private nonprofit group that some of the city's wealthiest residents had formed to return the park to something like the clean, well-tended public space it had been before
urban
became best known as a modifier for
blight
. Now the group wanted to launch its campaign with a high-profile event that would draw citizens back to the park while also focusing attention on the new organization. Its leaders had come to Delsener with a special request: could he ask his friend Paul Simon to play a free concert in the park? Paul agreed instantly. He lived across the street from Central Park, and his apartment had an unrivaled view of the place. They talked a bit longer, then Paul rang off and started pondering the best way to pull it off. And that's when he got worried.

*   *   *

Paul had wanted to give a reunion with Artie a chance back in 1975. Writing “My Little Town” for him, then recording it together had been in large part an experiment. Could they work together again? Would they be able to find a new creative balance that would give Paul the control he needed while not shoving Artie completely out of the picture? When they recorded that song, they billed it as they always had, Paul and Artie coproducing, this time with Phil Ramone replacing Roy Halee as the third leg of the stool. But as Artie recalled in the early 1990s, Paul had no intention of allowing his former partner to have any real control over how the track would sound. Artie was welcome to be in the studio and even toss in a thought or two, but mostly his job was to stay out of the way until Paul said it was time for him to sing. Artie, who had hit songs on the charts for much of the seventies, whose 1973 debut solo album,
Angel Clare
, jumped to No. 5 on the album charts, and whose second, the 1975 release
Breakaway
, notched No. 9, had become used to having near-complete control over his solo records, so he chafed against the new arrangement. He did make a few suggestions here and there but kept most of his thoughts to himself. Even that had been too much for Paul, though, as Artie learned when the song was finished and they were flying back to New York. So did you like that balance of authority, Artie asked. Paul shrugged. “Nah. I thought you spoke up too much.”

Still, Artie had been happy to join in for the
Saturday Night
reunion, and when
Melody Maker
asked if the success of “My Little Town” might lead to a new Simon and Garfunkel album, Artie didn't disagree. “Yes, it would seem to indicate that,” he said. “There is a chance that we might get together to record an album, but I really can't say any more because there is no more answer. [But] it was good to work with him again because I like him and I think he's talented.” There was always something off when they talked about each other in public—the faint praise, the patronizing observation, the elbow in the gut, the constant switchback between their brotherly bond and the urge for escape. The burst of cooperation in 1975 ended by early December, and by mid-1977 they could barely look at each other when they sang “Old Friends” on a British music awards show. When a technical screwup made it necessary for them to repeat their three-minute performance, the tension between them eased only because both could turn their ire onto Bunny Freidus, the Columbia Records publicist who had urged them to do the show.

They weren't done with each other, though, not even close. Paul joined James Taylor as a guest on Artie's slowed-down remake of Sam Cooke's “(What a) Wonderful World.” The record hit the top of
Billboard
's adult contemporary charts, though it peaked at only No. 17 on the Hot 100, and Artie appeared in Paul's TV special at the end of 1977, singing a much more cordial version of “Old Friends” and playing in a sketch that ended with Paul alone with an overbearing director (played by Charles Grodin), who takes the opportunity to set him straight. “You know, the sound of you and Artie singing together is
so much better
than the sound of either one of you singing alone that whatever petty differences you have had in the past, I strongly urge that you take a long, hard look at them.” Paul, who had written the sketch, thought it was hilarious. But he also knew how much more beloved Simon and Garfunkel was than either of their solo work, even given his own trail of hit singles and albums. Though it was entirely coincidental that Artie's latest movie,
Bad Timing (A Sensual Obsession)
, had been released in the fall of 1980—and Nicolas Roeg's dark psychosexual thriller had nothing in common with
One-Trick Pony
—some theaters booked the films as a double feature, figuring that billing the show as an evening with Simon and Garfunkel would attract larger audiences.

The whole point of the Central Park show was to attract a large audience. Being at the center of an event that size was part of what made it so irresistible to Paul. He could do something public-spirited while also scrubbing the sour taste of
One-Trick Pony
off his and the audience's tongues. He could play his biggest songs, and the people could remember why they had loved him in the first place. But that would happen only if the show turned out to be as grand an event as he hoped it might be. If anything went wrong, if the show went badly—or, worse, if New Yorkers just weren't interested enough to come out of their apartments for a free Paul Simon concert—that could be fatal. Just imagine the next day's headlines:
THE SOUND OF SNORING: SIXTIES IDOL BOMBS IN THE EIGHTIES.
The dressing room lecture Paul had written for Charles Grodin in his 1977 TV special didn't seem quite so hilarious anymore.

It didn't take long for Paul to realize that Garfunkel—actually Simon and Garfunkel—had to be in the show somewhere, but how would that work? Paul had little doubt that Artie would be happy to do it—he'd been having a tough go of it over the last few years, too, due in part to the commercial and critical drubbing
Bad Timing
had received. But Artie had been most devastated by the 1979 suicide of the actress Laurie Bird, who had been his live-in girlfriend for several years. He'd been working on the film when she died, and returned to an apartment filled only with absence and grief. It was almost beside the point that his latest album,
Fate for Breakfast
, released a few months before Bird's death, was his first to miss
Billboard
's Top 40 (though it did hit No. 2 in the United Kingdom). Artie could use a professional triumph even more than Paul, and when Paul called he signed on without reservation. They still needed to work out the specifics, and agreed to work together to make the reunion as smooth as possible.

Paul's first thought was to structure the show chronologically, starting with a set of Simon and Garfunkel tunes, then coming back to do the second half by himself. But as he talked it through with Lorne Michaels, he realized that wouldn't make any showbiz sense—the crowd's excitement would peak during the first set, and Paul's solo set would be an anticlimax. Yet flipping the sets would mean that Paul Simon would be the opening act for Simon and Garfunkel, and Paul couldn't imagine doing that. Then Michaels proposed something else: why didn't he make the whole concert a Simon and Garfunkel reunion? It would be their first full-length performance since the final
Bridge Over Troubled Water
show at Forest Hills Stadium in 1970, guaranteeing the show's monumental status as a full-fledged cultural event. Michaels's production company could capture the whole thing on video, and do an audio recording, too. Maybe they'd get a broadcast deal out of it, and if the show turned out well, they could always release a live album.

Then it was settled. The concert promoter Ron Delsener was delighted, and the parks commissioner and the leaders of the Central Park Conservancy were beside themselves. They set September 19 as the date, and all pledged to keep it a secret until closer, maybe much closer, to the show. Paul and Artie got together to talk through how it should all go, and that's when the disagreements started.

Artie wanted to pick up where they'd left off in Forest Hills, two voices and one guitar, with a pianist to accompany him on “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Paul, noting his advancing years (both were just shy of their fortieth birthdays) and the calcium deposits that had nearly ended his guitar playing days in the early 1970s, said there was no way his hands could withstand two hours of solo guitar playing. Also, so many of the songs, particularly the more recent songs he wanted to do on his own or with Artie, were written with a band in mind; he couldn't imagine trying to play them by himself. Then they disagreed about who should be in the band. Paul wanted to use the funky combo he'd played with on the
One-Trick Pony
album and tour. Steve Gadd, Tony Levin, Richard Tee, and Eric Gale were some of the best players in the business, and he knew they could handle anything he tossed their way. But Artie had his own circle of musicians, and what was wrong with them? There were more fights about which songs to play, particularly when it came to the solo material. Paul had already slated in half a dozen songs from his post-S&G years, but there certainly wasn't time for Artie to play six of his solo songs. They argued about whether Artie, whose forehead had started ascending into regions once filled with curls, should wear a hairpiece. Artie refused at first, but ultimately relented to Paul's insistence. If you went into their trailer between rehearsals, you might have found the four of them together: Paul and Artie in their chairs bracketed by wardrobe busts, one wearing Paul's dark crown and the other Artie's wooly coronet.

When they were done bickering about the band and the set list, they started arguing about the songs' arrangements, disagreements that grew more heated as they began rehearsals at the Beacon Theater during the late summer. But as September 19 came closer and a full-page ad for the show appeared in the September 11 edition of the
New York Times
, there was too much momentum, and too little time, to fight through everything. The week before the show, the action shifted to the park's Great Lawn, where a stage was set up and a small skyline of sound and video towers was ratcheting into the air. A wave of interest, then increasing excitement, swept from the city into the greater Northeast, and then out across the country. The day after the announcement, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation estimated that as many as three hundred thousand people might attend the show. Five days later they upped it to five hundred thousand. “We're back from the boulevard of broken duos!” Paul told the
New York Times
a day before the show. It wasn't meant to be a permanent reunion, he added, but who knew? “Fun is the key to this whole thing. If this concert in Central Park turns out to be enjoyable, for us and for the people who are there in the audience, then maybe we can plan to do a few more.”

September 19 dawned cloudy and cool, one of those end-of-summer days that could tilt back to the sun or fall forward into autumn chill. The determined fans came with the first light, hauling their coolers, their coffin-size portable radio-tape players, their kites and Frisbees, hidden bottles and secret stashes, through the stone walls for a long day of rock 'n' roll communion. The clouds hung low through the afternoon, but the brigades kept coming, New Generation veterans now in their thirties and the younger ones who had missed the original moment and were eager to catch up. By midafternoon the sidewalks near the park overflowed with concertgoers, shutting out the cars, taxis, and buses from the streets within a quarter mile radius of the park. People streamed over the walls and through the trees, a procession of denim jackets, flannel shirts, vintage leather hats, foam rubber trucker caps, sandals, Converse high-tops, down vests, and work shirts. Preppies, corner boys, lawyers, construction workers, brokers, unreconstructed hippies, and concert promoter Ron Delsener, too—all marching into the park, hearts aflutter and hopes high.