Homeward Bound (53 page)

The daughter of a professional bowler and a receptionist who were divorced when she was three years old, Edie grew up in a chain of apartments around Dallas, Texas, moving to whichever working-class neighborhood was closest to her mother's latest job. Drawn to music and art as a child, she picked at a guitar for a while, pursued an interest in songwriting, studied art at Southern Methodist University for a year and a half, then dropped out to focus on her music and songs. Although painfully shy, she fell in with a Grateful Dead–inspired band called the New Bohemians. Three years after she joined, she was performing with them on
Saturday Night Live
while an oddly familiar-looking man waved at her from the side of the stage.

Paul Simon's season of glory had begun even before
The Rhythm of the Saints
landed in the fall of 1990. In late 1989, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM,
Simon and Garfunkel became eligible to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones before them, Paul and Artie were granted the honor the moment they were eligible. And so began the traditional pre-induction ceremony parlor game. Could the estranged partners bear to stand on the same stage? Would they sing together? Could they step back into the shoes of the sweet, melancholy oracles they had been a quarter century ago?

Of course they could. There was no way those Alan Freed disciples, their lives built upon the twin towers of Elvis and the Everlys, could resist their turn in the spotlight that had shone on so many of their greatest heroes. When the evening of January 18, 1990, arrived and the most elite of elite musicians and their many helpmates from the corner offices gathered in the grand ballroom of New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Paul and Artie stood to get their due. It was a big year for the Hall of Fame, with entrants including Louis Armstrong, the Who, the Platters, the Kinks, the Four Tops, and two of the most influential songwriting teams of anyone's era: Motown's Holland-Dozier-Holland and the Brill Building's Carole King and Gerry Goffin. Epic company, to say the least.

Presented by the celebrated seventies singer-songwriter James Taylor, Paul and Artie came to the stage wearing proud grins and keeping a polite distance from each other until they turned to shake hands, each projecting the slightly stilted friendliness common to global leaders whose cities are still mapped into their nuclear launch orders. Artie took a moment to fiddle with the podium microphone, tossing off a quip that doubled as a shot at one of his partner's most sensitive spots (“It's mic height! That's what broke up this group!”); thanked their manager, Mort Lewis, and Roy Halee; then complimented the Hall of Fame itself in the slightly jumbled elocution he tended to adopt when making a significant statement: “It has my total credibility and there's not too many of those things around.” To conclude, he turned to the other fellow standing a few feet back from the podium and thanked “the person who has most enriched my life by putting these great songs through me, my friend Paul, here.”

Paul stepped to the podium, a wicked grin on his lips. “Well, Arthur and I agree about almost nothing,” he said. “But it's true. I
have
enriched his life quite a bit, now that I think about it.” He made another crack about the Hall of Fame needing to add a special wing for feuding partners—Simon and Garfunkel, Ray and Dave Davies from the Kinks, Mick and Keith, Ike and Tina Turner—then turned serious, recalling how Artie's voice rang across their neighborhood, how rock 'n' roll had brought them together and delivered them to unimaginable places via the playlist of New York's dominant pop station WINS-AM, which showcased a rainbow of artists, including Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Frankie Lymon, Ruth Brown, the Moonglows, and Elvis, Elvis, Elvis. “We used our imaginations to figure out what were the connections,” Paul said. “It became the dominant interest in our lives, and to this day it's still fascinating … all this time in my life I've never been bored.” The erstwhile partners' reunion, such as it was, waited for the traditional show-ending jam session with a sloppy, all-hands try at “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “The Boxer.”

It wasn't much to spin the pinwheel of even the most excitable S&G fan. Meanwhile, Paul's solo Central Park show in 1991, coupled with Artie's high-pitched complaints about being left out, seemed to mark a new low in the shadow story of their lives together. Yet, the following spring, they joined with Mike Nichols and Elaine May in Los Angeles to play an eight-song set at a reunion-centric benefit for cancer-stricken children. And when Paul decided to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the start of his post–Jerry Landis career with a monthlong stand of retrospective concerts in New York, Artie became a part of that, too.

Plans for the career-spanning shows began with
Paul Simon 1964–1993,
a triple-CD, Paul-curated box set of highlights from his three decades at the forefront of popular music. And though the Simon and Garfunkel period amounted to less than a third of the time he had spent as a solo artist, those seven years had been too extraordinary to play down, particularly in a staged career retrospective. When Paul announced the first batch of what had been titled Concert Event of a Lifetime
*
shows at the Paramount Theater in October, the Simon and Garfunkel reunion was a centerpiece of the news, along with the duo's commitment to perform together at Neil Young's Annual Bridge School Benefit Concert in November. They'd probably make a television special about the reunion, too, though that didn't mean they were actually reuniting; no, they were merely “recapturing as purely as possible what was, not working out something new or recording again.” Just in case fans (or Artie) were tempted to assume anything else.

Paul built the Concert Event of a Lifetime into a thirty-five-song chronicle of his creative journey, starting with an hour-long set with Artie, presenting nine of the “The Boxer”–size jewels in the S&G crown along with a wry, music-enhanced retelling of their earliest days together that ended with a near-full performance of “Hey, Schoolgirl (In the Second Row).” An intermission followed, then a set of Paul's solo works presented in loosely chronological fashion from “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” to “Hearts and Bones” to a handful of favorites from the
Graceland
and
The Rhythm of the Saints
years, climaxing with a wild rendition of “You Can Call Me Al,” lately made even more famous as an unofficial theme song for newly elected vice president Al Gore. The only way Paul could top that was by sending Artie out for “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Paul rejoined him for more of those heart-squeezing harmonies. Then the curtain came down, and there went three thousand people back onto the streets as the last echoes of the show merged with the honks, screeches, and many-tongued curses of New York City.

It was the same onstage: the ten-member band built from musicians drawn from Africa, South America, Europe, New York and Oregon, all bending to fit Paul's peripatetic vision. Each of the major works was informed by still other musicians, traditions, and muses: Artie's harmonies during the first half of the show; then the many-hued second set, starting with the Los Angeles–based Mighty Clouds of Joy bringing the gospel to “Loves Me Like a Rock,” New Yorker Phoebe Snow doing the same for the urban-secular gospel of “Gone at Last,” then Ladysmith Black Mambazo bridging the African American traditions to the roots of the African veld, the headwaters for so much of the music that had flowed through Paul since he opened his eyes and ears five decades earlier—a lifetime of influences and inspirations, of collaborators and creative partners.

All Paul's collaborators had influenced his music, but none could claim anything like the power Artie held over him. As much as Paul tried to deny it, the partnership had marked him, and not just because a world of fans couldn't get past it. At first Paul reveled in their resumed harmony—mostly. “I felt a lot of affection for [Artie] from the audience,” he said after the first few shows. “It feels great when I see that.” Did that sound, in the midst of Paul's extraordinary popular comeback, just a little bit patronizing? When a
New Yorker
magazine writer called to talk a few days later, Artie sounded something less than loving when he shared his thoughts on “America”: “That's Paul Simon taking a posture of disappointed world-weariness,” he said of a song many people had come to see as a vital document on the post-idealist America of the late 1960s. “It is sophomoric, inflated talk when you're just out of college. Now I'm older, and I know honor, money, love, loss, competition. I have a child. I don't feel I'm lost … it behooves me not to accept that. I live in a troubled country, but I won't cashier it. Make something better of America, or else drop the subject.”

Then it was happening again: the averted eyes, the stiff atmosphere backstage, the toxic silence. It went on like this for weeks, all the way until just after the third-to-last show, when something set them off so badly during the encores that they stormed back into a dressing room, slammed the door, and ripped it all open again, the decades of hurts, and the grudges: harsh tones growing into shouts, holding there for a while and then rising into sustained bellowing and then, good God, full-on
screaming
. And even though the door was shut and locked, you could hear it everywhere: down the hall and up the stairs, and then the throats went, vocal cords knotting, fraying, and popping. Neither could speak the next morning. They had to cancel the next show to recover their voices. Amazingly, the final shows were every bit as smooth, their between-song patter just as warm, as they had ever been.

*   *   *

They were teenagers in the late 1950s, a pair of young immigrants set loose in a frigid, steely city. Like Paul and Artie, they took to the street corners to meet their compatriots in teenage hijinks, affected fancy clothes to maximize their impact, and found their way to the west side of Midtown to make their stand. But instead of taking a song to Tin Pan Alley, Sal Agron and Tony Hernandez went to a street corner park in Hell's Kitchen known as a hangout for the Norsemen, an Irish street gang that had recently thumped a friend of theirs. Agron and Hernandez, both fifteen years old, were members of the Vampires, a Puerto Rican gang from uptown. At least a few of the guys in the park were members of an Irish gang, and it didn't take long for trouble to start. When it was over, two of the Irish kids were mortally wounded, stabbed repeatedly by Agron and left to bleed to death on the concrete.

A tragedy by any measure, but in the New York City of 1959, when street gangs (including the Parsons Boys, who tormented Paul and Artie on their way to and from Parsons Junior High) had become the urban menace of the moment, the crime became an instant sensation, and not just because it involved teenage members of a street gang and not just because Agron and Hernandez had committed their crimes while clad in a black cape and wielding a black umbrella, respectively. It was also because they were Puerto Rican, the fruit of the latest wave of immigrants whose darker faces, foreign accents, and inscrutable ways clashed with the upstanding values of the New Yorkers who had the common decency to be descended from one of the earlier waves of immigrants. And if all of that wasn't enough tinder for a blazing tabloid series, think again of those costumes.

Agron and Hernandez had vanished on the night of the bloodshed, so the saga of
THE CAPE MAN MURDERS
(which is how it always appeared on the front page, in all caps, 24-point type) began as a mystery. They were captured soon afterward, but the newspapers kept them in the headlines for more than a year, through the investigation, to the trial, to their sentencing hearing. A few things didn't add up. Agron's knife was unmarked by blood, as were his cape and shoes. But how could you reconcile those facts with his glee at being identified as the murderer? Found guilty, the sixteen-year-old was the youngest person ever to be sentenced to death by the American judicial system. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller commuted the death sentence a few years later, at the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt, among others, and Agron went on to become something like a model prisoner, earning high school and college degrees and developing a passion for social justice, particularly when it came to the inequities of race and class. Paroled in 1979, he had seven years of freedom before dying of a heart attack in 1986 at forty-two. Once past the initial rush of infamy, he declared himself innocent and never displayed much sympathy for the surviving family of the boys who died that night in Hell's Kitchen.

Tracking the story in Kew Gardens Hills, Paul had felt a kinship with the murderer. The middle-class honor student Paul was in many ways the opposite of the impoverished, uneducated ghetto kid. But Agron's look and attitude—at the time, he told the reporters that he didn't care if he burned for the crime—thrilled the good boy from Queens. The Puerto Rican gang member was an outsider, young and wild in the streets, with no interest in anyone's expectations of how nice boys were supposed to behave. And what buttoned-down high schooler doesn't secretly yearn for the weight of the leather? “There were gangs in Queens … I felt the typical middle-class aspiration to be [in one],” Paul said. “I was in a couple of fights.” Thirty years later, Agron reminded Paul of early rock 'n' roll: the curl of his lip, the absence of remorse, the raw power of not giving a fuck. At the same time, Paul could hear the echoes of the Latin dance bands he'd seen sharing the stage with the Lee Simms Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom and the Latin rhythms and voices coming from the fringes of the radio dial, the sound of his youth, the essence of the New York that had created him and then, like his youth, slipped away. Between his memories of the crime, the echoes of the music, and the deeper implications of Agron's jailhouse rebirth, Paul recognized a multilayered tale that was dramatic and exciting, tragic and hopeful, a New York story that spoke as clearly about America as it did about any one man's life. It was a story shot through with rock 'n' roll, with doo-wop, with the passion of Latin dance: music, murder, and redemption—a perfect night in the Broadway theater.