Homeward Bound (47 page)

“The niggas were letting him sing again!”

 

CHAPTER 20

I'VE GOT NOTHING TO APOLOGIZE FOR

At first the fellows at Warner Bros. didn't know what to think. When they got the first few tracks Paul sent to them in 1985, Waronker, Titelman, and the other top executives ran to the nearest sound system, slammed the door, and hit the Play button. And there it was: the herky-jump beat, the bleating bass, the choral chants, weird-strung guitars, and everything else. Then they smiled and nodded and agreed that, yeah, this was pretty fuckin' cool, Paul was really into something here, it really was like nothing they'd ever heard before, and wow, wow, wow. But then they tried to imagine how they could get it into the marketplace. Whose radio station was going to play Paul Simon's version of South African dance music? Where would the record stores display it? After all, it wasn't rock 'n' roll, it wasn't folk, and Paul Simon wasn't a world beat artist. Small questions in the grand scheme of art, but Paul knew as well as anyone that commerce mattered, too. The more they heard over the next few months, the more they realized they had only two courses of action. They could release it quietly and hope that Paul's core audience would pick up on it and start a word-of-mouth tidal wave, or else they could dig deep and put together a massive publicity campaign that would, if nothing else, ensure that every sensate human in the United States knew that Paul Simon's new album represented a major turning point in Western popular culture. They opted for the second approach.

Graceland
lived up to the hype. It's not a flawless record, given the pair of non-African tracks Paul slapped onto the end, the remnants of an early notion that the album would be an around-the-world-with-Paul-Simon record. “That Was Your Mother,” recorded with Rockin' Dopsie and the Twisters, and “All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints,” with the rising Cali-Mex band Los Lobos, are both wonderful tunes, both powered by great bands and by Paul's probing, imaginative lyrics. But it's the joyous spirit of the South Africans that elevates the album into something more than a collection of catchy world music.

The record opens with the accordion of Forere Motloheloa, squeezing out the first chords of the Sotho folk tune that had grown into “The Boy in the Bubble,” a portrait of a global society laced together by technology as miraculous as it is terrifying. “These are the days of lasers in the jungle,” Paul sings. “Staccato signals of constant information, / A loose affiliation of millionaires, billionaires, and baby…” The lyrics are elliptical, drifting from vision to vision: a terrorist attack, nuclear fallout, an entire orbit of cameras surveilling everything, all the time. But there are also wondrous things: medical miracles, the next great hero perpetually one jump shot away from changing the world again. A gripping start—and from there the party begins. “I Know What I Know,” the bouncing, slapping General M. D. Shirinda tune with the female chorus chanting something Paul first heard as a caustic “I know what I know, I know what I know,” and so that's how he'd written the lyric, a high New York love affair built on status, money, sex, and the toe-tingling rumble of the next uptown express. Paul's version of the Boyoyo Boys' rim-slapping “Gumboots,” the siren song for this whole journey, is an urban slapstick of neurotic friends, romantic come-ons, and wise-ass comebacks. “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” rises from the earthy rumble of Ladysmith Black Mambazo to the glittery tumble of joy that made Paul laugh with delight on
Saturday Night Live
.

Unleashed by the jiving beat, Paul spins crazily through New York's uptown society, the empty hiss of the private elevator, and the bespoke blues of the empty Central Park West triplex. When the narrator in “Crazy Love Vol. II” sulks about his divorce, he floats down on a pillow of keyboards and angel's harp guitars. He's fat, sad, and crumpled, but what the hell. “She says the joke is on me, / I say the joke is on her … Well, we'll just have to wait and confer.” He's on the move from song to song, one foot in disaster the other bound for glory, and every tune unfolding a new surrealist tableau. “You Can Call Me Al” teems with dogs, cows, changelings, scatterlings, angels, crimes, and misdemeanors set to Ray Phiri's towering riff, fast-slapping congas, a bubbling bass, click-boom drums, synthetic twangs and whooshes, all of them merging into a sound that brings heaven down to the dung-scattered boulevard and drapes our man in an ecstasy. “Spinning in infinity / He says Amen! and Hallelujah!”

The feeling is amplified by the title track, in which the scene shifts to the southern United States, a car ride to Elvis Presley's Graceland estate, the ceremonial seat of rock 'n' roll, the spiritual mecca for every kid who turned on the radio and heard the sound of an unimagined world. The song is a classic American vision set to the clickity-clack of an express train, just like Elvis's cover of Junior Parker's “Mystery Train,” one of the most hallowed songs in Paul's sonic pantheon. It has what seems like a straight rockabilly beat, but this one flows from tribal drum slaps. Bassist Bakithi Kumalo bounces around the scale, and pedal steel player Demola Adepoju twists notes into animal calls. The Everly Brothers glide in, and now this train is coming from every direction, from north and south and distant shores. The Graceland they're approaching is no longer in Memphis, no longer a palace built for the man in the pink Cadillac: “Maybe I've a reason to believe / We all will be received in Graceland.”

And that's everything, right there, the point—what Louis Simon would call
the purpose
—of not just this astonishing, troublesome record, but also Paul's career, his life, even. The train to heaven running on music, with everyone on board and every heart singing in divine, syncretic harmony. And in this vision Paul is exalted. And his record is a triumph. And it soars around the world, a multimillion-selling mega-hit, the biggest solo album he'd ever made. And what a pure and beautiful thing it would be, were the artist not so fragile, so battered, so hardened, or so beset by such raw and stubborn needs. But he is, so it was also an international incident, the cause for demonstrations, official denunciations, a terrorist bombing, and Paul's spot at the top of at least one radical antiapartheid group's hit list.

*   *   *

The first hint of trouble came on August 24, 1986, the day before
Graceland
was released. Dozens of stories about the album came out that Sunday, many based on interviews Paul had granted to reporters from magazines and newspapers all around the country. Most of the pieces focused on the extraordinary idea of the collaboration itself: the sophisticated urbanite Paul Simon taking on African music. They also said it was the best thing he'd done in years. But a few of the stories dug into the muttering coming from just behind the music: about apartheid, about recording in one of the most repressive nations on the planet, about the morality of a white American celebrity finding inspiration among the victims of one of the world's most vicious governments.

Tough questions, but Paul had his answers. He'd been working with the South African producer Hilton Rosenthal, who had collaborated with the black musicians for years. All the artists playing on the album had been there willingly. And how about that official invitation from South Africa's black musicians' union? And his pre-visit discussions with Quincy Jones and Harry Belafonte, the latter of whom, Paul noted, worked closely with the South African music community? “They both encouraged me to make the trip,” he said, neglecting to mention that Belafonte had also requested that Paul not go anywhere until he had alerted the African National Congress, advice Paul had deliberately ignored, and that Belafonte hadn't spoken to him since.

Paul explained how much he had paid the South African musicians, how he handed out writing credits and royalties to every musician who contributed to the songs. And, yes, he knew all about the cultural boycott enforced by the African National Congress and the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid. He noted that its dictum keeping entertainers and athletes away from performing for the segregated audiences of South Africa said nothing about recording
with
black musicians. “I wasn't going there to take money out of the country,” he'd say. “I wasn't being paid for playing to a white audience. I was recording with black groups and paying them and sharing my royalties with them.” And he had treated his black collaborators as equals: they had shared music, food, drink, and friendship. Now he was projecting their music to the vast audiences that apartheid had kept them from reaching. At first Paul's explanations seemed to work. The music mostly drowned out the politics through the end of the year, but as the worldwide
Graceland
tour moved closer to its January 1987 launch, the political static grew louder. When Paul flew to Washington, DC, a week after the New Year to talk it all over in a public forum, the controversy burst into flame.

It would have been Elvis Presley's fifty-second birthday: January 8, 1987; icy blue skies over Manhattan as Paul flew to Washington, DC, where he was set to meet with students at the historically black Howard University. Shadowed by a handful of journalists, he had come prepared to face criticism, which made it both exhilarating and strange for him to learn, via a telephone call from his office a few minutes before his talk, that
Graceland
had been nominated for four Grammy awards, including Album of the Year. The album had officially passed a million in sales a few weeks earlier, and was selling just as well in Europe and, of course, South Africa, where it was in the midst of its residency at the top rungs of the national sales charts. But while they greeted their guest politely, the forty students who met with him in the school's Gallery Hall were not in a congratulatory mood. First Paul spoke about his time in South Africa, hitting his usual notes about the musicians' union and so on, but when he asked if anyone had any questions, the choler in the room erupted. A student in an orange sweatshirt leaped to his feet.

“How could you go over there and take their music? It's nothing but stealing!”

He was Mark Batson, a sophomore who came out of a housing project in the blighted Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Batson, a music major studying piano, had a solid grasp on the injustices in American cultural history. He'd learned it all, he'd heard all about it, and now he was done listening.

“How can you justify taking over this music?” he demanded. “For too long, artists have stolen African music. It happened with jazz! You're telling me the Gershwin story of Africa!”

Batson shouted about cultural diffusion, about the generations of white musicians who absorbed the sounds and feelings of black music and took it over so thoroughly that the black hands and hearts that actually invented it vanished from sight. Did Batson know it was Elvis's birthday? He surely knew that the so-called King had made his fame perched on the backs of black songwriters and performers whose work he had adapted for his own purposes. And it was infuriating, even more so for a young musician who knew how hard it was for a black man in a white man's world. Batson kept going, unleashing gouts of fury that got wilder as he lost himself to his anger. Paul couldn't have been to South Africa, not to the real country—he wouldn't be alive if he had been. And there was no way Paul could understand the music he'd been playing at. He didn't understand the musicians; he just paid them off, plain and simple.

Paul shot back, angrily at first, but then calming himself, trying to find his balance in a room tilting steeply toward anger. Attempting to regain control, he asked Batson a question: “You don't think it's possible to collaborate?”

Batson shook his head. “Between you and them? No.”

Batson sat down, but even if the other Howard students were less visibly enraged, most had strong opinions about their famous guest's cultural, political, and artistic trespasses. They felt that he had violated not just the ANC's boycott, but also the United Nations' strict policy of isolating South Africa, and that he had created another everything's-cool-here ruse for the South African government and also provided it with a distraction from the violence taking place every day in the country.

As the event lurched to a finish, Paul seemed dazed. “Well, it has been an education,” he said.

The
Graceland
wars were only just beginning.

How could he have made nearly an entire album with South African musicians, recorded largely in South Africa, without including a single song about apartheid? Was he wicked or just that naïve? How had he fooled Stimela, the Boyoyo Boys, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and all the other musicians into surrendering their music to him? And what showbiz hex had he cast to make them all seem so happy about it? These questions led to others: Why had his most significant works of the 1980s become tangled in anger and bitterness? How could he be so beloved and also so loathed? Why didn't Ray Phiri get any composer credits for the songs he so obviously cowrote? Why were the guys in Los Lobos, the band Paul used for “All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints,” so very furious? Why had Paul refused to sing on Steve Van Zandt/Artists United Against Apartheid's protest song “Sun City”? Why was the most famous guest vocalist on
Graceland
one of the first artists to perform at the moral void of a casino that had inspired the song? And had Paul really called Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned spiritual leader of all black South Africans, a Commie? And would you be surprised by that if you'd seen what he said about the leader of the racist nation of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) back in 1966?

*   *   *

Paul never cared that much about politics. You could count on one hand the times he'd taken a public stand about anything beyond love, literature, moral quandaries, and the entertainment industry—with a finger or two to spare. Even at the height of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, he limited his thoughts to his songs, except for the one time he led the effort to integrate the nationwide Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. He played his first post–Simon and Garfunkel solo show for a peace concert in 1970, then staged the first Simon and Garfunkel reunion to benefit George McGovern's presidential campaign in 1972, but that had less to do with McGovern's brand of liberalism than Paul's deep loathing of the shifty, anti-intellectual president, Richard Nixon. By the time Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency on a staunchly conservative platform in 1980, Paul wished him good luck, even if he didn't share Reagan's militarism or his nostalgia for the apple-cheeked America of pre-1960s America. “Reagan has my best wishes,” he said. “I just hope he gets it right.”