Homeward Bound (58 page)

Now was the time for more inductions and awards, for even greater tributes, for fancy-dress evenings in columned stone buildings. In 2001 he was welcomed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame again, this time for the solo career he had launched amid so much anxiety in 1972. Wearing a white suit over a black T-shirt, he sat patiently at his table in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom and took in Marc Anthony's loving, if teasing, induction with a flickering smile, the light fading a little when Anthony joked about their both being in federal witness protection since
The Capeman
. The crowd responded lightly to Anthony's praise, and didn't warm up very much when Paul took the stage. He played it humble, mentioning so many friends, colleagues, and compatriots that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's record keepers noted that his fifty-name list set a new record for the most thank-yous in one speech. When Artie's name came up, Paul first turned plaintive: “I hope that one day before we die, we'll make peace with each other.” Then, with a sly smile: “No rush.”

The applause was polite, the cheers measured, the sound of respect, as opposed to a rush of affection. Was it the lingering effects of the
Graceland
controversies weighing down their hands? The reports of back-alley tactics used to snatch up what his collaborators, and many others, assumed was theirs? Or maybe it was the criticism he'd dealt to so many of his fellow travelers over the years. Or maybe they were just envious of everything he'd achieved, and how easy he had made it look. No matter: Paul was named the Grammy Awards' MusiCares Person of the Year a few months later, as a tribute to his charitable work, particularly with the Children's Health Fund, an organization devoted to caring for the children of impoverished families that he'd cofounded with Dr. Irwin Redlener, who, coincidentally enough, was related by marriage to Paul's first mentor and manager, Charlie Merenstein. Kennedy Center Honors came a year after that, and in 2007 Paul was the first recipient of the Library of Congress's Gershwin Prize for excellence in popular song. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, and in 2012 the Royal Swedish Academy of Music gave him a Polar Music Prize, an award for great contributions to music whose previous winners included Bob Dylan, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ravi Shankar, Led Zeppelin, Isaac Stern, and the Baltic states.
*
Then came honorary degrees and doctorates from his alma mater Queens College, from Berklee College of Music and Yale University, and from ten times others that he turned down because who wants to listen to that many speeches? It was more than he'd wanted, more than he ever could have dreamed.

*   *   *

Heading to England for the
You're the One
tour in the fall of 2000, Paul dug out some of his old diaries and made a short list of names of the friends from his London era, when they all lived the day-for-night lives of young musicians, trading sets during the evenings and then staying up until dawn sharing their riffs, songs, and stories. The older he got, the more he understood that those precious few months in the mid-1960s, the last days before the fame struck, were the happiest of his life, when he was so young and unencumbered, surrounded by friends and music and then resting in the arms of Kathy, the love of his soft-cheeked young life. Their romance hadn't ended happily. Pulled away by the sudden success of “The Sound of Silence,” Paul had sworn he'd be back within a few months, half a year at most. But then his life spun in a very different direction, and when the six months were over he was on an orbit Kathy could never have entered. She went in the opposite direction, back to the hills of Wales and to a husband, kids, and the quiet family life she was born for. When Paul finally got through to her in the late 1990s, she greeted him warmly and they chatted for a long while.

Paul also spoke to Martin Carthy, the folk guitarist who showed him how to play his distinctive finger-picked arrangement of “Scarborough Fair,” only to be shocked when Paul adapted it to Simon and Garfunkel's style and, with the benefit of Artie's “Canticle,” made it into a cross-national hit, crediting himself as arranger and making no mention of Carthy. Carthy, who soon became one of the most admired folk guitar players in England, with an influence that extended to blues aficionados Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and countless others, had spent years feeling bitter. Paul had made a fortune and never so much as acknowledged Carthy's contribution. “I really became the full-fledged victim,” he said. “And that's a very comfortable place to be.”

Until it wasn't, until that was one of the only things people asked about when he'd rather have been talking about his music, a ritual he started thinking of as, in his words, “trudging the grudge.” Carthy had already stopped feeling upset about “Scarborough Fair” when Paul called from Stockholm in mid-October 2000 to say he'd be playing London at the Hammersmith Apollo and wanted Carthy to play the song with him, at last. Carthy accepted the invitation even before Paul told him his side of the “Scarborough Fair” story, how he really had been paying royalties all that time with no idea that Carthy's manager hadn't been forwarding his client his fair share. That night, Paul and Carthy performed the song together for the first time, and stayed up for hours after, talking about old friends and old songs.

*   *   *

Paul had been kicking it around for years, trying to work out exactly what went wrong with
The Capeman
, and why. He had talked about the show in the decade since its collapse in varying tones of regret, mea culpa, and flashes of anger. He'd complain that the journalists and critics had come in disinterested in Puerto Rican culture, that they had it in for him personally. That terrible
Vogue
story, the one where he'd said, supposedly, that he didn't give a rip about what the Broadway community thought about anything, was totally phony, he said. “I never said any of those things.” That neither Paul nor his managers had ever demanded a retraction and had made similar assertions to other reporters must not have registered
*
in his memory. But then, a few breaths later, he'd think again. “Okay, maybe it didn't flow slickly. Maybe it was a little static. Okay, it wasn't a perfect thing by any means.” A few weeks later he was ready to accept that
The Capeman
really had been kind of, well, substandard. “I made a lot of mistakes. I didn't know anything; I only knew what people told me. Different people told me different things, and I picked a piece of information that I thought applied, and it was wrong.”

Then again on the other hand he could think it through a million times and what would it matter? All he could do was let it go and have faith that someday, somewhere, someone would dust off the
Capeman
and give it another chance. Maybe that's when people would be able to really listen and finally figure out what he had been trying to do.

Almost exactly ten years after the final curtain fell, Paul and
The Capeman
got their chance. The Brooklyn Academy of Music put on a month-long series of shows focused on Paul's music. Billed collectively as Love in Hard Times, the series consisted of three separate programs, each featuring a different set of guest stars performing Paul's works. The first, “American Tunes,” covered the singer-songwriter days, with half a dozen artists (pop-classical singer Josh Groban, the Roches, alt-country singer/guitarist Gillian Welch, multi-instrumentalist Olu Dara, guitarist Amos Lee, and Brooklyn's own indie-rock heroes Grizzly Bear) performing Simon and Garfunkel and Paul's songs from his pre-
Graceland
solo years, and with Paul performing “How Can You Live in the Northeast?,” one of the highlights from his then-current album,
Surprise
. The “Under African Skies” shows covered the
Graceland–The Rhythm of the Saints
period with the help of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, David Byrne, and a few younger African and Brazilian singers. Paul and members of his band performed on about half the songs in both programs. But he sat out all but one of the songs in the third and most daring program, an evening dedicated entirely to the music of
The Capeman
.

The passage of time had a miraculous effect on how New York audiences and critics perceived
The Capeman
, particularly in the oratorio form in which it was performed at BAM. Divorced from the play's book and the awkward turns in its staging, Paul's songs soared. The show received enormous ovations each night, and a new generation of critics couldn't say enough to celebrate what they'd heard. “‘The Capeman' might be [Simon's] most important and enduring work,” the
New York Post
's Dan Aquilante wrote, describing “a classic tragedy firmly rooted in modern times.” The
New York Daily News
's Jim Farber, one of the most venomous critics from the show's original run, tried to pick up where he left off (“It's still a tepid, ponderous and repetitive affair”), but he had to admit that the show's new iteration worked much better than the original production, particularly given such moving performances by the singers. The
New York Times
's Ben Ratliff was also restrained in his praise, but still acknowledged the beauty of the music, particularly in the pair of albums (Paul's and a belated only-on-iTunes release of the original cast album), which, as he noted, were now usually described in print with the prefix “the underrated.”

The Capeman
's redemption tour continued in the summer of 2010, when New York's Public Theater, best known for its Shakespearean productions in Central Park, presented a three-night staging of the show, once again minus the book, at its open-air Delacorte Theater in the park, again in oratorio form, the singers performing a streamlined version of the show from behind music stands. The show enraptured the eighteen-hundred-strong audience on all three nights, spurred even greater praise from the New York critics, and not-so-hushed talk about how the last revived Broadway show to follow the path from Off-Off-Broadway to the Delacorte and then back to Broadway was the late-sixties hippieish show
Hair
. Would
The Capeman
make the same leap? Maybe someday. Stranger things had happened.

*   *   *

“It's over. Long over. I can't even imagine why people would be interested.”

That was Paul in 2000, and you already know what, and who, he's talking about, and which age-old question he had just been asked.

When are you and Artie Garfunkel going to get back together?

Paul could get pissy about the topic, but it was hard to blame him. They had already tried it twice, once in the early 1980s and then again in 1993, and each time had been disastrous—not musically disastrous: their voices had always slipped back together so easily, their unified sound rich and dense with feeling. But then there was that other thing, the nearly lifelong connection, the bond that sank so deep it felt like an invading presence that could turn malignant at any moment. That had to be expelled at all costs.

Sometimes Paul would tell his friends that he didn't even
like
Artie. They were brothers, sure, but a lot of brothers can't stand each other, and that's the kind of brothers they were. He couldn't talk to him anymore, couldn't talk about the weather without it triggering a nasty crack about something that had been said, or not said, decades earlier. At one point in the mid-1980s they were so estranged that they refused to stand close enough together to take a portrait for the cover of a greatest hits collection for the European market, and they eventually came to one of the more absurd compromises in the history of rock 'n' roll: the European record label could find a pair of Simon and Garfunkel–esque models, put them somewhere scenic, and photograph them from afar. Then the real Paul and Artie, in their separate rooms on their separate sides of Manhattan, would try to agree on which shot was best, and that would be the cover.

Still, their connection, and their friendship, continued. When Artie turned forty-eight in 1989, Paul, with the assistance of then-girlfriend Carrie Fisher, sent Artie a birthday package of new clothes. “New outfits for a new decade … the ‘new you,' the ‘new G,' so to speak,” Paul wrote in his accompanying note. Scrawled across a torn-off sheet of wrapping paper, Paul's thoughts meandered from there.

I have not managed to quite grasp the “old you,” so you might consider them as a means to explain yourself to your old friend who loves you. Loves you as a guy, well not as a guy but a friend, sort of a person, well not exactly a person but more as a voice. A strange voice. Yeah, a strange voice.

They had reconciled for the Concert Event of a Lifetime shows in 1993, but that hadn't ended well, and as Paul made clear to
Newsday
in 2000, they kept their distance into the new millennium. During Paul's reunion with Martin Carthy at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2000, he confessed that the one relationship he had never been able to restore was his oldest one: “There's one person I can't reconnect with, and it really bothers me,” he told Carthy. “And that's Artie.”

The distance continued until the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences tapped Simon and Garfunkel for a Career Achievement Grammy in early 2003, and they were touched enough to perform “The Sound of Silence” on the Grammy broadcast, the first time they had sung together in public in nearly a decade. Performing in their old two-voices-and-a-guitar arrangement, they sounded just as they had forty years before, and as the audience stood to applaud, Artie draped an arm across Paul's shoulder in a gesture as familiar, and easy, as the harmonies they had just sung.

They announced the new world tour in early September 2003 and, in Auburn Hills, Michigan, six weeks later, premiered a two-hour show that included a guest set by the Everly Brothers, more than twenty Simon and Garfunkel favorites, and a warmth between the two stars that hadn't been evident since their
Bookends
-era shows in 1968. Playing with the best band they had ever toured with, a seven-piece ensemble of players led by Paul's usual music director, Mark Stewart, the duo breathed fresh life into their familiar songs with new arrangements that tightened some tunes while stretching out others (particularly “Homeward Bound” and “The Sound of Silence”) and drawing out the exotic rhythms that had once been only alluded to in “Mrs. Robinson,” “Cecilia,” and others. Artie added more energy with new twists on his harmonies on most of the songs, but the deeper source of the crowd's sometimes tearful enthusiasm stemmed as much from the emotional subtext of the show, emphasized so cannily in the montage of nostalgic glimpses back to the America that had both inspired and been inspired by the familiar old songs—songs that had accompanied so many members of the graying crowd through their youth and young adulthood, through graduate school and into careers, and then into parenthood. For an evening, at least, it was a homecoming, a reassurance that no amount of time, acrimony, or terrorist-borne disaster could ever bar the door that led back to the way it used to be, when there was still a home to go to, where your friends were still waiting, where the darkest night could brighten with warmth and harmony.