Homeward Bound (42 page)

The clouds started to fray in the late afternoon, then scattered with the twilight. When the sky went luminous, it seemed like a sign. The day had indeed tilted back toward summer; now the evening would go back even further. Back to when your friends were all you needed, when the radio sang of a sweeter world and a more naïve time. And what had happened since then? Just walk around the corner to West Seventy-Second Street, where the sallow fat boy murdered John Lennon nearly ten months earlier. Some things were gone for good. But maybe something could be restored: a friendship, a partnership, the shimmer of Simon and Garfunkel harmony.
This
could happen, and at least one thing would be set right. Home wasn't really gone. It was right there; all you had to do was find the door.

At around 7:00 p.m. the lights ignited on a stage built to resemble a classic New York rooftop, with a water tower, spinning ventilation pipes, and a tall chimney. After a quick introduction by Mayor Ed Koch, the spotlights locked on a green rooftop door, which swung open to reveal Artie, both fists raised to acknowledge the crowd, with the guitar-strapped Paul on his heels, a huge grin on his face. Paul wore a black suit coat and pants over a white T-shirt; Artie, a white button-down shirt set off by a black vest and a broken-in pair of denim pants. Arriving at their microphones at center stage, they shook hands, and with that Paul looked over to the bandstand, already strumming the opening to “Mrs. Robinson.” Artie's microphone was a bit faint at first, but they righted the mix by the end of the song, and once the cheers died down enough to move into the next, Paul picked out the unmistakable guitar intro to “Homeward Bound,” their voices blossoming into harmony, and the evening swelled into something else.

“Well, it's great to do a neighborhood concert!” Paul shouted to the crowd, launching the usual thanks-to-the-mayor-and-commissioner spiel, which he cheekily upended by adding even more enthusiastic thanks to the “people that never get recognized for doing good deeds for the city. The guys sellin' loose joints are giving the city half tonight.” Big cheers for that, because who said that growing up had to make you a square? Then a passionate “America” and a chipper duet on “Me and Julio.” Then came Artie's turn to banter: “What a
night!
” A reverent “Scarborough Fair” with added bass, a little flute, and then cathedral bells chiming from Richard Tee's keyboards. And you could see that they were ecstatic, the both of them together, moving to the music and trading excited smiles and off-mic jokes that kept them laughing between songs, and sometimes during them. Artie's voice still so honeyed, his performance a potent blend of innocence, romantic yearning, and just a hint of a wicked grin. The eleven-piece band they had assembled tread lightly, though you might wonder why keyboardist Richard Tee had to use that squishy underwater effect on his electric piano so constantly, especially on the folk tunes. Paul took center stage for “Still Crazy After All These Years,” but Artie was still right there, perched on a stool in the back corner, slapping his thighs to the beat and cheering Paul on. Back at his mic a few minutes later Artie looked deeply into the rumbling darkness ahead and let out a moan. “I'm so in the mood.” Paul, taking a page from the Lee Simms Orchestra, barked out “‘In the Mood'!” and snapped his fingers like he expected to hear Glenn Miller's tune right
now
.

Instead, he picked the opening notes to “American Tune,” letting Artie sing the verse as if it had been written for him, which, as Paul had admitted, it should have been, before adding his voice to a tightly woven duet that deepened the song's sorrows and gave new life to its fragile dreaminess. The evening continued just like that, a carousel of memories and new possibilities, right up until the unexpected happened, something so unsettling and so out of synch with the moment that, once it was over, it was easy to imagine that it hadn't happened at all. So the show kept right on moving, through a seamless medley of “Kodachrome” and Chuck Berry's “Maybelline,” and then Artie's stunning reprisal of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” with Paul perched just past his shoulder, his face slack. Then came the great parade of the Era Definers, the songs of a generation. “I am just a poor boy” … “A newspaper blown through the grass” … “Slow down, you move too fast” … “Ten thousand people, maybe more”—one after another after another, all perfectly sung and ecstatically received. Then, when the crowd made clear that they would absolutely, positively not leave without one more song, came “Late in the Evening.” Then the band left the stage, and Paul and Artie came out for their final bows, faces glowing, arms around each other, faces alight, joking and laughing. They'd spun their spangled thread, and half a million human beings
*
were made to feel joy on a September evening, all of it so heartfelt and so exactly right that you could forget all about the heartbreaks along the way, you could even convince yourself that the clouds had parted for good and all that darkness really was in the past.

But the darkness had been there, too. It had come fluttering into view near the end of the main set, after Artie finished with “A Heart in New York” and Paul came back with his acoustic guitar to play “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” a song he hadn't yet recorded or performed. It started with Paul describing himself as a thirteen-year-old rock 'n' roll fan with the radio on, hearing that the early rock 'n' roll singer Johnny Ace had just shot himself to death. The first verse is intentionally askew, the tune's key isn't established until the second verse, which covers Paul's happy months in London in 1964. Just months after President Kennedy's assassination, at the early heights of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and his own career in music. “And the music was flowing, amazing and blowing my way,” he sang. The third verse jumped ahead to the New York of just a few months earlier, in the early Christmas season of 1980. The gloomy chords return while Paul described where he was on the frigid evening of December 8, walking alone when a stranger tapped him on the shoulder to tell him that Lennon had been murdered outside his apartment building just blocks away. He and the stranger went together to a bar to commiserate, and it was just at that point in Paul's performance—“and we stayed to close the place”—when a young man vaulted onto the stage and sprinted at him, shouting frantically as he came.

“Paul! Paul!”

For an instant, Paul didn't see him. He was focused on his singing, bearing down on a convoluted stretch of melody. Then his eyes widened. His voice wavered, and his jaw fell open. It was a kid: eighteen, maybe in his early twenties; handsome, dressed in dark jeans, a bottle-green zip-up sweater, and clean white running shoes.

“I gotta talk to you! I gotta talk to you!”

He seemed frantic, pursued by ill spirits. Eyes wide, Paul slid to his left, at the same time pivoting to keep his attacker in front of him. He kept strumming for a moment and then trailed off, watching a soda machine-size security guard wrap the guy up from behind and carry him off like a toddler, feet kicking as he struggled. A bolt of feedback snarled through the speakers, and Paul stepped back to the microphone to sing the final lines of the song. The entire event caused a two-bar lag before the final line of “Johnny Ace.” Moments later, the rollicking intro to “Kodachrome” pulled Paul back into the music, and the segue into “Maybelline,” one of his and Artie's shared faves, put a smile back on his face. The rest of the show was nothing but harmony, flowers, and joy, but just off to the side of the stage lurked a wraith: the anguish beneath the love, the stranger with an autograph pen in one pocket and a gun in the other. They spoke its name at the end of the evening, two voices, one guitar, and half a million perfectly hushed fans and neighbors. Artie introduced it by mimicking the distant voices calling from out of the night.

“Soouund of Siii-lence! Sooound of Siii-lence!”

*   *   *

After they took their last bows and walked back through the rooftop door to their trailer, Paul caught Artie's eye. How did he think it went? Artie made a face.
Nightmare!
He didn't like the way he'd sounded; he didn't like how the both of them had sounded. Paul agreed at first. Sure, they could have done better. They had no idea how many people were standing beyond the small section of fans just in front of the stage, or whether they had been applauding or cheering or walking out when the music got going. Most of the preshow buildup had passed them by, too; they'd been working too hard that last week to keep up with the news. It wasn't until the next morning, when Paul saw the headlines on the front of Sunday's
New York Times
, that he got a sense of what had actually happened. Half a million people in Central Park? The newspapers were comparing it to Woodstock: it had been a cultural moment, the reawakening of the sixties generation. Once Paul absorbed that, he dialed Artie at his apartment and they exulted together. All the tension and feuding that had made the rehearsals so fraught vanished from their minds. Maybe the concert hadn't been such a nightmare after all. It was definitely the biggest success either of them had had in the last few years. So what was there to feel bad about? And, for that matter, why stop now?

Not long afterward, Mort Lewis, now mostly retired from the music business and living in an eighteenth-century house in suburban Connecticut, answered his phone and heard Paul's voice. They had spoken just a few days earlier, when Paul called to invite him to Central Park for the show, telling Mort he could sit with Paul's parents and the Garfunkels and it'd be just like the old days. Lewis said thanks but no thanks. He didn't want to drive all the way to New York to get stuck with fifty thousand people in the middle of Central Park. So, have fun, you'll be great, tell me about it when it's over. When Paul called back that Sunday, he had a much bigger idea to pitch. The show had gone so well that they wanted to turn it into a concert tour. And since Simon and Garfunkel had never officially broken up, and Lewis had never officially stopped being their manager, they wanted him to get back to work for them. So come into town and let's have dinner and talk about booking a concert tour. To sweeten the deal, Paul promised that neither of them would have to pay for the meal: “We'll stick Artie with the check.” Lewis agreed to make the drive, and by dessert they had sketched the outlines of a two-year world tour that Lewis suggested they launch in Japan. Why there? Easy: they had always sold a lot of records in Japan but had never played a concert there. “They won't hear the mistakes,” Lewis said. Paul nodded. “That,” he said, “is a great idea.”

The life of the Central Park concert went on. The video Lorne Michaels shot would become a concert film directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, whose films included the Beatles'
Let It Be
along with scores of shorter promotional films commissioned by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the post-Beatles Paul McCartney. The recording of the show overseen by Phil Ramone and Roy Halee would become a fully produced live album, released by Warner Bros. in America and, because Artie was still signed to Columbia Records, by CBS overseas.
*
And that wasn't the only new Simon and Garfunkel record they had planned. As then-coproducer and music industry executive Lenny Waronker remembers, Paul had come into his 1981 recording sessions with a sense that his new songs might work just as well as Simon and Garfunkel tunes. He said the same thing to
Rolling Stone
's Chris Connelly just after the Central Park show. “The songs are more like stories now,” he said. “They're like Simon and Garfunkel songs, but I think they're more sophisticated lyrically.” When Artie came in one day to add his voice to one song—just a guest appearance—Waronker, a sensitive soul if there ever was one, was so moved by its beauty that he could barely pull the words out of his mouth to say so. Paul and Artie smiled, and Paul shrugged. “What did you expect?”

The world tour launched in Osaka, Japan, with a pair of stadium shows on May 7–8, 1982, then moved to Tokyo for three nights at the Korakuen. The tour band had evolved from the relatively staid group they'd used in Central Park. Only Richard Tee remained from the
One-Trick Pony
band. The addition of guitarists Arlen Roth and Sid McGinnis sharpened the edges, while drummer Dave Weckl, a protégé of Steve Gadd, came with a bank of synth drums that cooed and blurped in a distinctively early 1980s way.
*
Percussionist Airto Moreira, on the other hand, used a junk shop of homemade instruments, including Josephina, a life-size, anatomically correct, if impressionistic, model of a woman that he had constructed from cymbals. They grafted a couple of verses of “Cecilia” at the front of the “Mrs. Robinson” opener, and added “My Little Town,” “El Condor Pasa,” and a few others. Synthesizers swooped through some tunes. The Simon and Garfunkel–starved crowds swooned and roared, and after a couple of weeks back in New York, the gang reconvened in Madrid, toured Europe for a month, then took the rest of the summer off before playing an enormous stadium show next to the sea in Nice, France, on September 18. The crowds were huge and reliably bowled over; media coverage and reviews were the same. The tension that had vanished in the wake of the Central Park show resumed when they got started on the new projects, but they slipped into that just as easily as they had their old vocal parts, and the prospects ahead were far too exciting to let that get into the way—not at first.

When they weren't on the road, they worked to make a Simon and Garfunkel album out of Paul's new batch of songs. Paul had already made basic tracks for many of the tunes with coproducers Titelman and Waronker, so when the joint sessions started in 1982, they set a release date for the spring of 1983, just in time for the launch of their American tour in the summer of 1983. As Paul had made clear from the start, he didn't want Artie to coproduce the sessions. He already had Titelman and Waronker (though the latter had to leave the sessions when he was appointed president of Warner Bros. Records), and he didn't want to destabilize the chemistry by introducing a new set of ideas and priorities into the mix. Artie hadn't wanted to hear that, of course. But what else could he do? The chance to make a new Simon and Garfunkel album, and resume the successful partnership, was too irresistible to pass up. So, okay, he could work like that. Still, in exchange, Artie had his own demand: he wanted to write and arrange his harmonies by himself. Paul wasn't sure about that, but in the interest of partnership and collaboration he agreed to give it a try.