Homeward Bound (70 page)

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e-ISBN 978-1-6277-9035-2

First Edition: November 2016

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The affidavit puts the quotation marks around “Simon and Garfunkel,” emphasizing that their surnames constitute a duly established trade name. An attorney for Prosen's side responded: “I know of no precedent in which one would call his own legal family name an assumed name.”
*
Galicia has also been claimed by Hungary and Poland over the years, fueling confusion between our Louis Simon and another Louis Simon who had played violin in the Hungarian National Orchestra before moving to the United States and joining the same musicians' union to which Paul's father would eventually belong.
*
Much to the bemusement of younger brother Eddie, who had excelled at guitar ever since he began lessons a year or two earlier. Eddie Simon went on to teach the instrument and open his own guitar school in New York.
â
A three-quarter-size sunburst steel string made by the Stadium guitar company. The guitar obviously came from Louis, and when Paul broke a string while attempting to tune the instrument, he was too embarrassed to admit it and so put the instrument back in its case and didn't touch it for a few days. When he finally fessed up, Louis shrugged it off. Guitar strings break all the time.
*
Who had reputedly coined the term
rock and roll
in 1951 to describe upbeat rhythm and blues songs.
*
As would Darcey and Layton, who eventually moved to Nashville and become successful songwriters under their real names, Chris Gentry and Len Chiriaka.
*
One detail Pizzarelli doesn't recall was the name of the song they were working on. “But it wasn't âStardust.' I can tell you that.”
â
Ronnie grew up hearing that as a toddler he'd been bounced on the knee of Bugsy Siegel.
*
Not an exaggeration. When Kooper wrangled an invitation to observe a Dylan recording session a few years later, he insinuated himself into the studio and wound up contributing the soaring organ line to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dylan tapped Kooper to play keyboards in the group that brought electric music to the Newport Folk Festival, and Kooper played sessions with Dylan for many years after that.
*
Talking about his brief Edward B. Marks era to
Rolling Stone
's Nicholas Dawidoff in 2011, Paul said he agreed to let Marks publish his songs only because he felt so bad about being such a lousy salesman. Yet that's a far-fetched interpretation, given his inability theretofore to write a hit song that wasn't “Hey, Schoolgirl,” and even that was only a middling success. Swagger indeed, even five decades later.
*
The Pilgrims included Robert Guillaume, the actor who would become quite famous on a variety of television series, including the top-rated
Benson
in the early 1980s.
*
A large but unnoticed
FUCK YOU
that had been scrawled on the wall behind them had to be airbrushed from the final image.
*
Songs of Earth and Sky
, by Art & Paul, Columbia Records, 1960.
*
Irony compounds over the years. MacColl's love song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which he'd written for then-paramour Peggy Seeger (half sister to Pete), became an enormous hit for popular American singer Roberta Flack. Written in 1957, the song was covered quickly by the Kingston Trio, the Chad Mitchell Singers, and other pop artists in America, but it reached an unexpected zenith when Flack's version topped the
Billboard
charts for six weeks in 1972 after it was used in the Clint Eastwoodâdirected film
Play Misty for Me
.
*
Here's how that worked. After chewing out the William Morris agent, Lewis booked three nights of shows, starting with a Friday evening show at Brown University that paid $2,500. On Saturday, they went to Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, New York, earning $2,000 for an opening slot on a show with Little Anthony and the Imperials. But then Little Anthony never showed up, which spurred a storm of stomps, claps, and hollering from the three thousand students in the Field House, which the college's activities director now imagined might not survive the nightânot unless he could get Paul and Artie to go back and play a second set. And of course they wouldâas long as they got the $4,000 the school had planned to pay Little Anthony. On Sunday they got $2,500 at the State University of New York in Oneonta.
*
About five weeks after Paul returned to the United States, to give you a sense of how extremely quickly it all went.
*
With the help of John Lennon, according to legend.
*
Both pledged to keep their friendship separate from the business disagreement, and continued to enjoy each other's company even while giving affidavits and sitting across from each other while their respective lawyers debated the points of their case. Eventually, Paul and Kornfeld worked out a settlement and went their separate ways as friendsâfriends who hardly ever saw each other after that, but still.
*
The actual number was just north of a million.
*
“We used to have to explain that we were American,” Paul recalled in 1990. “I don't think that it helped that I came back sort of affecting an English accent, either.”
*
Both Paul and Artie called it their favorite song, not only on the album but in their entire careers. Released as a single, the tune stalled at No. 25, much to their surprise and chagrin. “It was above the kids,” Paul mused to the
Record Mirror
's Norman Jopling. He revised his opinion later, conceding in 1993, “It's a college kid's song, a little precious.”
*
Only Ravi Shankar was paid for his music; the rest worked for expenses, which some artists, frankly, stretched to outrageous extremes.
â
Paul insisted that they book his British folksinger friend Beverley Martin, whose voice can be heard on “Fakin' It” asking Mr. Leitch about his day.
*
Movies starring rock 'n' roll artists don't count.
*
For which Artie recalls writing the verse about being a Kellogg's Corn Flake, etc.
â
Hired as a producer for the
Bookends
sessions, John Simon was unpleasantly surprised to see his credit reduced to “production assistance” on the album credits. His predecessor Bob Johnston suffered the same fate on the songs he'd overseen, including the ones that had already been released as singles listing him as the sole producer. Asked for his feelings on the matter, John Simon shrugs. “Revisionism sucks,” he says.
*
Because they were signed originally as a two-man folk act that could knock out songs in just as much time as it took to play them into the microphone, Columbia had generously agreed to cover the costs with its end of the proceeds. It hadn't anticipated that the folk kids would mature into ambitious art rock record makers.
*
“Mrs. R” was ineligible for the movie industry's Academy Awards because it hadn't been intended solely for
The Graduate
.
*
Plus a Soviet intelligence agent, though that wasn't known at the time.
*
However, they stopped short of acknowledging the existence of Tom and Jerry or the specifics of what or who caused the break.

*
The Jewish-owned independent label that introduced Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, and virtually all of blues and rhythm and blues culture to the world from the mid-1940s, providing a musical education to the teenage Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and all who would follow themâwhich adds up to nearly the entire scope of rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues from the 1960s onward.
*
Not counting “The Boxer,” which had been released as a single the previous spring.
*
Which could be the story of a grown-up, postlarcenous version of the footloose antihero in “Somewhere They Can't Find Me.”
*
Excepting the final verse of “El Condor Pasa.”
*
The back cover, sure, but it's the portrait of McCartney, his baby daughter tucked into his winter coat, that pops into your mind when you think about the album.
*
Muscle Shoals, like most of northern Alabama in those days, was in a dry county.
*
The Dixie Hummingbirds recorded for Bess and Ike Merenstein at Apollo Records in the late 1940s.
*
The hint of violence echoes the final verse of “Still Crazy,” only without the yuks.
*
CBS's
Laugh-In
, despite its hippy-dippy characters and occasionally bawdy jokes, doesn't count. Its producers were establishment professionals who knew that dressing up the usual Hollywood shtick in long hair, sideburns, and body paint would be a clever gimmick. When it started to work, their first impulse was to use the show's popularity to make then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon look with-it. Sure, Lily Tomlin came out of
Laugh-In
, and Michaels was a low-level writer there for a while, but the show's voice was still laced with an older generation's bourbon and cigarettes.
*
Intriguingly, the end of Davis's career at Columbia marked the end of Paul's hostility toward the former president. Now they lived in the same building, sent their kids to the same school, and had taken to hanging out together. They have gotten on well ever since.
*
The younger Jonah is played by Paul's son, Harper. An earlier version of the script restaged the entire sequence of a tuxedo-clad Louis leaning in to compliment the boy's singing, but was replaced by a simpler shot of the kid at his little keyboard.
â
Based quite obviously on Kal Rudman, whose radio tip sheet
Friday Morning Quarterback
was enormously influential in the seventies and eighties.
*
In 1980, this was a new and somewhat shocking idea. The 1960s rebels stooping to commercialized package tours? No way
that
could really happen!
*
Concert promoter Ron Delsener on the size of the audience: “I forget what the police said, and of course it's always a fake figure, but if you have X amount of acres, one person takes up three square feet. So that's what we figured, X amount of people. They go half a million, I go
I
didn't say half a million, you guys did. But that sounds great to me.”
*
That was the plan until David Geffen, who had become friendly with Paul, took it upon himself to save the musician from Walter Yetnikoff's ongoing wrath by buying the international rights from CBS and releasing it on his own newly launched label. Instead of pleasing Paul, the move infuriated him, possibly because he knew that with the album at CBS Yetnikoff would have no choice but to praise it to the skies, just a few years after pledging to ruin Paul's career. Instead, Geffen snatched away the rights, and Paul's revenge, behind his back.
*
Whether you liked it or not.
*
They had confronted similarly wild crowds in Europe the previous summer, especially at a beachfront concert in Nice, where enthusiasts started pelting the stage with Evian water bottles, at least one of which clocked Paul in the head.
*
Provenance, mix status, and where it fit into the ongoing stages of the album unknown.
*
Marshall Chess, the son of Chess Records founder Leonard Chess and record man on his own, believes the tape originated with him. Turned on by shipments of albums from South African record companies he made many tapes of his favorites and distributed them to friends, who also passed them on.
*
And avoided them for good after that by working with only English-speaking musicians. They made a few exceptions later, but not many.
*
The song “7 O'Clock News/Silent Night” doesn't really count, given that the headlines about the Richard Speck murders, the death of Lenny Bruce, and so on are less political than simply bad things that happened in America in 1966.
*
Paul's lyric is an abstruse analysis of fame, identity, and the myth that anything or anyone can't become something or someone else at will. Or, as the famous talk show host says about fingerprints, “I've seen 'em all, and man they're all the same.”
*
Nascimento sent Paul a recording of the song and asked if he could write a part for himself with original English words, a task Paul found impossible to perform. He became so panicked about having to let down Nascimento that he became feverish and exhausted and convinced himself he had the dread tick-borne Lyme disease. But when he told this to Warner Bros. uber-boss Mo Ostin, the executive proposed that Paul's symptoms were entirely psychosomatic and he should focus on writing his part. Paul rejected this diagnosisâ“I don't
do
psychosomatic,” he assured Ostinâbut when he brought what he had to the studio and Nascimento told him it was beautiful, Paul soared through the all-night session. “Lyme disease,” he noted, “completely and miraculously cured.”
*
While also composing “The Boxer.”
*
Even given the double entendreâit's the concert event of
Paul's
lifetimeâthe title, particularly the “Event” part, seems much more appropriate for a Streisand-Liza-Celine-caliber show that would involve dancers and rockets and probably bubbles or lightning bolts and would require the construction of a specially designed concert hall on the Las Vegas Strip.
*
Not a band, but the governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in honor of their support for national music culture and publishing rights organizations.
*
As Paul should have remembered, the entire interview had also been captured on tape and been vetted by several layers of editors before being published in the fall of 1997.
*
The reference to “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” was obviously intended.

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