Homeward Bound (48 page)

The bulk of Paul's explicitly political songwriting was finished after
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
.
*
He rarely faced political questions or made statements beyond the most generic antiwar and antiracism proclamations. On the rare occasions when he did talk about current events in the first three decades of his career, he was significantly less radical, or even liberal, than virtually all the other musicians of the era. In perhaps his most explicitly political interview, with the unnamed writer of
Melody Maker
's Pop Think-In column in 1966, Paul refuted the then-popular money-is-the-root-of-all-evil philosophy (“Money should be the road to freedom … it's neither good nor bad”) and disapproved of Muhammad Ali's (still called Cassius Clay) branch of black Muslimism (“I don't buy racial supremacy, black … or white”). And when asked about the racist governments of South Africa and Rhodesia, which had recently declared its independence from the United Kingdom due to the British government's insistence that the country allow its black citizens to vote, Paul took a most unexpected position for a hip young musician.

Certainly, he said, the apartheid government in South Africa was “an anachronism,” but he shared little of the outrage that the similarly governed Rhodesia's rebellion had spurred in Britain. To justify its existence, Rhodesia's white minority government and its sympathizers warned of its opponents' violent tendencies, and the possibility that a radicalized majority government could allow the nation to become an African foothold for the Soviet Union or the Chinese. “Rhodesia,” Paul said, “causes a lot of emotion but not a lot of thinking.” Ian Smith, the leader of the country's racist white government, “was sincere and I don't think he had any choice” but to abandon the British empire. Yet it would be a tragedy, he continued, for the new country to “develop into a situation like South Africa … I certainly think the African in Rhodesia should have a voice in Government”—but, it seemed, not immediately. He never said why exactly, or if he did, his thoughts didn't make it into
Melody Maker.
Still, even after his strong support of the American civil rights movement, something about the black resistance to white-run governments in Africa put him on edge.

He felt the same way twenty years later, when Steven Van Zandt, then on hiatus from his role as guitarist/consigliere for Bruce Springsteen, asked Paul to contribute a vocal part to an antiapartheid anthem “Sun City.” Van Zandt had visited South Africa in 1984 to experience the place for himself, and his time among the activists and radicals in the black townships had been catalytic. Back home, he teamed with the writer and activist Danny Schechter to start an organization called Artists United Against Apartheid, and wrote “Sun City” in the mold of fund-raising choir-of-superstars singles like Band Aid's “Do They Know It's Christmas?” and USA for Africa's “We Are the World,” both of which were intended to raise money to help victims of the drought-created famine. But while those songs were feel-good affirmations about making a brand-new day and feeding the world, Van Zandt's “Sun City” made plain the horrors of apartheid, called out the villains, and demanded immediate action, particularly from the entertainers who had taken the loot to sing and dance on that shiny stage in Bophuthatswana. As the chorus made explicitly: “I, I, I, I, I ain't gonna play Sun City!”

Dozens of the era's most popular and influential artists, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Kurtis Blow, and the members of Run-DMC, committed to performing on the song, but when Van Zandt sent Paul the lyrics, he refused on the spot. The lyrics he saw (an earlier draft Van Zandt later revised) called out the names of the stars who had performed at the resort, including Paul's friend Linda Ronstadt, and there was just no way he was going to be a part of that. The next time Van Zandt recalled seeing Paul was at a birthday party for Peter Parcher, an entertainment lawyer who had worked with both of them, and when the guitarist-activist started talking about his experiences with the antiapartheid groups in South Africa, Paul dismissed them all as Communist puppets. The African National Congress, he said, was a front for the Soviet Union, while the Pan-African Congress, the anticolonial organization formed in 1919, was hand in hand with the Chinese government. “Why are you defending that Mandela guy?” both Van Zandt and the writer Dave Marsh recalled Paul saying. “He's obviously a Communist.” He knew this because he'd been talking to a friend who knew about these things. That friend was Henry Kissinger, the controversial secretary of state to both President Richard Nixon and his successor, President Gerald Ford. For the moment, Paul seemed to have forgotten about his deep loathing of Nixon and everything his administration symbolized in the late 1960s and early '70s. At that point, Van Zandt figured they should agree to disagree. A proud son of the working-class towns of central New Jersey, the former and future E Street Band guitarist had a distinctive way of saying this. “You and Henry Kissinger,” he said, “can go fuck yourselves.
”

The “Sun City” single was released in the fall of 1985, nearly a year before
Graceland
emerged, and though it barely cracked the Top 40 in
Billboard
, it made heads spin across Europe and on American college campuses, where the song's frontal attack on the apartheid-friendly Reagan administration, along with anyone else amoral enough to jump into bed with the South African government, crystallized the terms of the antiapartheid movement and spurred a rise in antiapartheid activism in America. But Paul had his own statement to make. In the thrall of his rapidly deepening collaboration with Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, he had written “Under African Skies,” a cross-hemisphere vision of music as the essence of all humanity, the deepest and most profound manifestation of the human spirit. Here is the dark-skinned Shabalala walking beneath an African moon while a girl child in the Southwest American city of Tucson, Arizona, her eyes on a different horizon and ears locked on different sounds—the two a world apart but still bound together by music's power to soothe, to inspire, to transform. With the Tucson-raised Linda Ronstadt as his duet partner, it's clear that she is the girl Paul has described. Unsurprisingly, Ronstadt sings beautifully, her voice at the height of its power and sensitivity. Yet there's a sour note hanging over her performance.

Ronstadt was one of the elite Western entertainers who had played at Sun City. The booking came near Sun City's opening in 1979, and as per the South African government ruse behind the whole thing, she was told the resort wasn't actually in South Africa but in a native homeland/independent state called Bophuthatswana, where blacks were welcome to visit the resort and do everything the whites did. Ronstadt accepted the booking and regretted it immediately, issuing a quick apology to the ANC, which forgave her on the spot. Even so, Ronstadt's history made her an awkward addition to the album. Even though she had never said or done anything before or since that even hinted at her being racially insensitive, her presence on the record looked provocative at best, and at worst a deliberate jab at the ANC/activists' insistence that politics and appearances were more significant than art.

But just as Paul refused to ask for political clearance to make music in South Africa, he wasn't going to apologize to any political or government authority for having done so. “Authoritarian governments on the right, revolutionary governments on the left—they all fuck the artist,” he told the
Village Voice
's Robert Christgau. “What gives [politicians and governments] the right to wear the cloak of morality? Their morality comes out of the barrel of a gun.” And what would happen when all those righteous guns started loading for action? What kind of morality would that create? “Let's keep pushing to avoid the battle. Millions of blacks could get hurt.”

Still, the struggle against apartheid wasn't over yet. If anything, it was growing more jagged by the day. And Paul Simon's multicontinent
Graceland
tour was about to start.

*   *   *

Planning to take
Graceland
on the road in 1987, Paul recruited Ray Phiri and the core of his
Graceland
studio band to be the show's musical heart, with Ladysmith Black Mambazo on board to re-create its performances on his songs and to perform a few of its own songs without him. To give the shows even more emotional impact, he turned to two long-exiled heroes in the antiapartheid struggle, the jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela and the singer Miriam Makeba, both of whom had left their benighted homeland more than twenty-five years earlier to pursue music careers. Paul had known the pair of them for some time: Makeba was close to Harry Belafonte, Masekela had shared the Monterey Pop Festival stage in 1967, and both were sympathetic to him and to the
Graceland
album, even as other antiapartheid activists had condemned it. Pledging that the show would be less about him than the culture of South Africa, Paul dubbed the tour Graceland: The African Concert, and sketched a six-month itinerary that would take the group from Atlanta to Zimbabwe (formerly Ian Smith's Rhodesia), as close to South Africa as they could get without actually playing in South Africa.

The presence of Makeba and Masekela girded the tour's political bona fides, but given the ongoing controversies with the ANC and so much of the rest of the antiapartheid movement, Paul went back to South Africa in early January 1987 to iron out details with the musicians and try to figure out how to keep the Graceland tour from becoming overwhelmed by politics and protests. Here he got in touch with Johnny Clegg, the co-leader of the racially integrated South African band Juluka. Indeed, if anyone knew how complex the dynamics of the African National Congress and its cultural ban could be, it was the most famous white (honorary) member of South Africa's Zulu tribe.

Born in Britain to an English father and a Rhodesian mother, Clegg was also Jewish—his mother's family had immigrated to Africa from Poland. Like Paul, Clegg had wanted nothing to do with Judaism when he was growing up, even after spending an early year in Israel. Relocated to South Africa as a grade-schooler, he developed a love for Celtic music during his early adolescence, then fell just as hard for Zulu music and dance when he was fourteen. A friendly black street guitarist took the youngster under his wing, and it was only a matter of months before the South African police first arrested Clegg for consorting with the natives after curfew. Two years later, Clegg met a Zulu migrant worker/musician named Sipho Mchunu. They made themselves into a traditional Zulu duo, performing tribal songs and dances that became increasingly original, and increasingly Celtic-influenced, as Clegg and Mchunu found their unified voice.

The different colors of the partners' skin did not escape the attention of the local authorities, and soon the police took to crashing their shows with attack dogs and canisters of tear gas, doing their best to scatter the crowd and silence the multicultural music. Mchunu and Clegg grew accustomed to having 30 to 40 percent of their concerts either canceled or shut down in mid-performance by the authorities. For their white fans in the cities and their black ones in the townships, however, that made the music only that much more precious and the musicians more heroic. The group thrived, gaining additional racially diverse members and changing their name to Juluka.

Clegg had always been an activist—it was impossible to run a biracial band in South Africa without being an activist. He was also an avid student of social anthropology, earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Witwatersand, then joining the faculty as a lecturer. Clegg understood the social and political dynamics of apartheid, and had built a life and career that stood in opposition to the notion that races and cultures should be walled off from one another. Yet his lessons on the unintended effects of the African National Congress's cultural boycott came in 1979, when Juluka scored a surprise hit in England with Clegg's song “Scatterlings of Africa.” Showered with offers to perform on television and in London's concert halls, Clegg, Mchunu, and the other members of Juluka went north, eager to build their audience and take their message of racial inclusion to Europe and beyond—but that was before the ANC, working with the London branch of the British Musicians' Union, stepped in.

The more politically progressive communities in England had boycotted exports from South Africa ever since the white government wrote apartheid into the nation's constitution in the 1950s. Labor unions and cultural organizations joined the struggle with little prompting, and by the end of the 1970s the British Musicians' Union enforced the principles of the ANC cultural boycott with singular determination. Given the apartheid government's persistent attempts to present its state-sponsored arts groups and sports teams as symbols of a healthy, not-the-least-bit-monstrous society, the British union's vigilance paid off. No matter who had invited a South African group to perform in England, for whatever reason, the show wouldn't go on anywhere that a member of the union or its partners was working. Union members would walk off the job and return with picket signs. The ANC's cultural boycott would be enforced to the letter.

The problem was that the letter of the ANC's rule didn't always represent the spirit of the antiapartheid movement. So when Clegg and Juluka went to England in 1979 to promote “Scatterlings of Africa,” the fact that they were a racially mixed group whose existence was an affront to the apartheid government didn't matter. They were from South Africa and thus would not be allowed to perform. Once again, Juluka's shows were broken up. Their television appearances and concerts were all canceled. Eventually the group left England without playing a single note for anyone. As one writer said, the British ANC succeeded where South Africa's racist government failed: it had successfully silenced Juluka.