Homeward Bound (52 page)

The Born at the Right Time tour would continue to the end of 1991, but the climax of the year, and of the
Graceland–The Rhythm of the Saints
era, came on August 15, 1991, on a cloudy day in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, not far from Paul's living room windows on Central Park West. It had been ten years since Simon and Garfunkel's reunion spectacular in 1981, and a decade later Paul no longer worried about being able to draw citizens out of their apartments on his own power. Because it wasn't just him; it was
Graceland
and it was
The Rhythm of the Saints
, the hearts and hoofbeats of half a dozen cultures all twirled into one massive, irrepressible sound, with Paul's melodies and words draped over the top. They bowled over crowds, shook the stands, and detached roofs from arenas night for night for night, sending the patrons back into the street three hours later with feverish cheeks and tingling feet. So a summer night in Central Park? This show was built for that.

Offstage, Paul became wound tighter as the day drew nearer. Most artists get edgy before playing New York and Los Angeles, the big industry towns where the crowds are so much more jaded and easily bored. Toss in the homecoming stakes and the back-in-his-own-footsteps and the many pitfalls of playing an outdoor show in the middle of a big city, and it could all seem overwhelming. When Chris Botti, a late addition to the band on trumpet, asked Paul how he could bear the pressure of such a massive event, Paul projected the entire affair into the ballpark. Playing on a smaller or more remote stage, he explained, he'd come onstage hoping to nail a single or a double. But when you're a born slugger and you work your way to Yankee Stadium with everything at stake, there's only one thing you know how to do: swing for the fences.

In New York, the dawn came in humid murk. Early forecasts declared that the bad weather would hold through the day, then take a turn for the worse with the sunset. Rain for nearly certain, possibly lightning and thunder. Still, the stage had been built, the video screens and sound towers standing as high as the trees. To account for the sound lag in the back, they'd engineered a digital delay long enough to fill two stadiums with crystalline sound. Once again, the people flooded into the park from every direction. The skies lightened with the afternoon, then broke apart into a puffy blue ether. Streets crowded and choked; the coolers and blankets spread from Seventy-Second Street into the Nineties. When the show began, Paul came out at a jog, guitar in hand, skipping down the stairs to his microphone three steps from the bottom. The Olodum drummers, flown in specially from Salvador, Brazil, stretched across the top row at the back, and with Paul's signal they fired off the first drum beats of the evening, launching “The Obvious Child” into Sheep Meadow, over the reservoir, through the trees, and beyond—everywhere there were ears, 750,000 sets of them, according to the city's crowd estimators.

There were no stage rushers, no demonstrators, no denouncements from the United Nations or any other governing body—just a delirious crowd, a stage peopled by South Africans, Brazilians, Cameroonians, white Americans, black Americans, Latinos, rock musicians, soul musicians, jazz players, the classically trained, and Third Worlders whose first instrument was a rock and a stick; a montage of color and sound and not an angry ex-partner among them. Halfway through the set, Paul raised a hand in the middle of “Proof,” snapping the band into an abrupt silence. “Proof!” he shouted. “The sun came out, it was a cloudy day, they thought there was gonna be a rainstorm, and it's a perfect night. In New York City!”

*   *   *

Artie could have seen and heard the whole thing from his living room sofa if he'd been home that night, but he wasn't. He'd left his house, and the city, for the weekend specifically because he didn't want to have to deal with the commotion outside his Fifth Avenue windows. “I'd rather wish Paul well from afar,” he said. Actually, Paul's good luck was the last thing on his mind because Artie was furious. How could Paul return to the site of their most triumphant night a decade later and not ask him to come out for a few of their songs? “I'm not good enough to be invited,” he grumbled in a
New York Times
interview published the day before the 1991 show. “My guess is that it would hurt his sense of his stature.” Note the expert design of those two sentences, a master class in passive-aggression presented in nineteen words. Artie had more to say, particularly about how HBO was promoting its simulcast of the concert with clips of Simon and Garfunkel's 1981 concert, as if promising that Artie would be at the new show, too. But Paul wasn't in a sharing mood, so that was that, and off Artie went, not to return until all remnants of the show had been swept away.

So, fine. Paul was used to Artie. It was easy to let his public complaints go without comment or even a public eye roll. Other issues were more disturbing. When the
New Musical Express
writer Gavin Martin came to talk about
The Rhythm of the Saints
in the fall of 1990, he posed a few questions about how Paul had distributed writing credits and royalties to the musicians on the album. And though Paul seemed thoroughly unflapped and happy to detail it all in a tone of voice that was every bit as chummy as when they started talking, he cut off the magazine's hour-long photo session after just three minutes, leaving the photographer with a furious record company publicist, who said that Paul was so upset about Martin's interview that he had decided to cancel the two television appearances they had scheduled for the next day. Someone from the record company called later to say that it had all been a misunderstanding, but as Martin knew, nothing else he'd said could have been even remotely upsetting to Paul.

Soon there would be more for Paul to freak out about. The freeing of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the steady crumbling of apartheid inspired Oliver Tambo and the other leaders of the African National Congress to cancel the cultural boycott at the end of 1991, clearing the way for anyone and everyone who wanted to tour South Africa to feel free to do so. And who would be a more appropriate first booking than Paul Simon and his multinational, South African–inspired band? South African concert promoter Attie van Wyk booked the Born at the Right Time tour for five shows, and off they went for what Paul figured would be a victory tour for everyone in the band, the antiapartheid movement, and all of South Africa. What he didn't anticipate was that the country was still in the final throes of white rule, with power very much up for grabs and the opposition fractured into a dozen separate organizations, each with its own constituencies and leaders. The Azanian People's Organisation (AZAPO), formed in 1978 from three different black consciousness groups, had pursued a more militant path through the years, with a military wing that most definitely didn't make peaceful resistance a priority. So while the ANC embraced Paul and the tour, AZAPO did not, and neither did the Pan African Congress. Both groups talked about mounting demonstrations at the concerts, but the members of AZAPO's youth-focused subgroup, AZAYO, one of its more military-minded branches, decided to get their message across in a more vivid way.

Paul and the rest of the touring party got to South Africa a few days into January, making his first public appearance in the country at a tour-launching cocktail party whose guests included future president Nelson Mandela. It was a big affair, in one of Johannesburg's swankier hotels. Paul came in a black suit and a royal blue button-up, doing all the right chatting and hand shaking, and then posing for photos with Mandela, their hands held high, black and white fingers knotted in a symbol of brotherhood. And it was such a lovely affair and a beautiful celebration, and everyone went home, and Paul back to his hotel room, with nothing but fond memories and buoyant hopes for the future. Right up until three hand grenades were hurled into the offices of tour promoter Attie van Wyk, blasting the place into a fiery ruin. Greetings from AZAYO.

It happened just before 2:00 a.m., so no one was injured, but what did it portend? Soon van Wyk and the rest of the tour managers gathered in Paul's suite, where they found him in a panic, walking circles in the room and talking about pulling the plug on the whole thing before someone got killed. Van Wyk, who had called in security expert Rory Steyn, tried to talk Paul down. They knew who was who in the radical movements; AZAYO comprised mostly big talkers—“Three guys and a fax machine,” van Wyk said. Even a few hand grenades through a window was beyond their usual capabilities. And the group had already made clear it was happy to negotiate a settlement. The government was prepared to step up its security efforts. So the smartest thing to do was to stick with the tour and, if possible, smooth things with AZAYO. Working through back channels, they set a closed-door meeting between Paul and AZAYO leader Thami Mcerwa, at which Paul agreed to donate some money to the group and include it in a press conference where, along with AZAPO, it could state its views, including its decision to join the ANC in welcoming the tour to South Africa.

The deal eased Paul's mind considerably, at least until the press conference on January 9, where Mcerwa informed the press that neither he nor anyone in AZAYO had any intention of welcoming the tour after all. “We have always pointed out that should his show go on, there is the potential for violence,” Mcerwa said, to Paul's obvious unhappiness. Yet the tour would go on, and though ticket sales fell through the floor and though demonstrators did stalk the band—many carrying signs with AZAYO's slogan that Paul would end up with blood on the soles of his shoes—the five shows came off without a bomb hurled, a shot fired, or even a politically inspired punch thrown. The only real victim turned out to be van Wyk, who had added extra shows based on early demand, only to have sales fall off a cliff after the hand grenades landed.

They ended the African swing with one night in Botswana, which also marked the end of the Born at the Right Time tour and the
Graceland–The Rhythm of the Saints
era, save for two stadium shows in Miami that fall and a one-off stadium concert in Uruguay in December. Along with giving worldwide exposure to the music of Brazil and the African diaspora countries, the
Saints
project changed the course of Olodum, whose struggles to pay the rent on their offices ended when Paul bought the building and donated it to the organization for keeps. He also changed the life of the tour's trumpet player Chris Botti, whose playing and writing he admired enough to sign him to a publishing deal with a $250,000 advance—enough money for the musician to form a band and launch his career as a jazz interpreter and songwriter. Botti stayed a part of Paul's touring band for the next nine years, along with guitarist-arranger Vincent Nguini, who also became one of Paul's closer friends. Marco Mazzola, the producer Paul first contacted to prepare for the project, also became a lasting friend. “I think he showed his true self through his music,” Mazzola says. “By working with him, I realized he is exactly what he shows. What you hear is what you get.”

 

CHAPTER 22

PHANTOM FIGURES IN THE DUST

For more than a decade Paul and Ian Hoblyn, his closest and most trusted assistant, had been inseparable. Hoblyn did everything for him, from directing Paul's house staff and keeping his social calendar to planning and managing the day-to-day details of his international concert tours. Charismatic, erudite, with a passion for visual art as profound as his employer, Hoblyn soon became one of Paul's best friends—in his 1984 interview with
Playboy
Paul listed him as one of his two closest male friends, second only to Lorne Michaels. When Paul went on vacation Hoblyn went with him, and not just as his helpmate, but as another one of the friends who were there to eat, drink, and hang out. If Hoblyn wanted to bring a friend that was usually okay, too, though it didn't stop Paul from abruptly directing his assistant to leave the circle and run an errand. Hoblyn would do what he was told, but not before putting on one of his long-suffering smiles and, perhaps, making on affectionate eye roll for the benefit of the others.

Their social circles started to blend. Paul got to know some of Hoblyn's better friends, and welcomed his boyfriends as he did any of his non-professional friends' spouses. He'd invite one or another to join the rest of his gang to go on his latest adventure, and when AIDS cut a brutal swath through Hoblyn's circle of friends Paul did what he could to be supportive, attending memorial services, including one that he organized and paid for.

It was all a pleasure for the first ten or so years. But then Hoblyn, who had become a sophisticated connoisseur of the finer things during his tenure with Paul, had gotten accustomed to living like a man with extraordinary means. Paul paid very well and had no problem if they got to the end of a long tour and Hoblyn wanted to hole up in some luxe hotel to unwind with a friend or two for a few days. But Hoblyn took to stretching his privileges a bit, then a bit more than that, and it was never a problem because Paul trusted him too much to question his expenditures. But then things started to add up. A newly hired accountant showed Paul a tally of Hoblyn's expenses, and when another inventory revealed that several of his paintings (Paul's collection was far too large for all of his pieces to be on display, even given his three homes) had gone missing, and it turned out that Hoblyn had borrowed them to decorate his apartment, Paul blew up. More than fired, Hoblyn was exiled from his life. No more calls, no more long talks, not a single word. Hoblyn, his friends say, was never the same after that, particularly given his guilt over his own lapses of judgment. When he learned he had terminal cancer a few years later Hoblyn hoped his old employer and friend might reach out to him before he died. He didn't.

*   *   *

When Paul happened to visit Lorne Michaels at a broadcast of
Saturday Night Live
in October 1988, he was bedazzled on the spot by Edie Brickell, the lead singer for the Texas neo-hippie band the New Bohemians, whose single “What I Am” was high on the charts. Tall, slim, and shy, Brickell beguiled Paul so thoroughly that he stood just offstage during the group's first performance and started waving his hands to catch the singer's attention. At this, he succeeded so well that viewers could see and hear Brickell waver, muffing a word or two before snapping back into focus. “We can show the kids the tape and say, ‘Look, that's when we first laid eyes on each other,'” she said later.