Homeward Bound (16 page)

His first break came at the Troubadour Club, on the Old Brompton Road, near Shepherds Bush. The Troubadour was arguably the most important folk club in London. Bob Dylan beelined to the place when he got to town in 1962. Paul had played a handful of floor sets there during his first visit to England and made enough of an impression to land a booking soon after his return in April 1964. The new songs he'd written that winter were just as popular as the ones he'd played a few months earlier, but “The Sound of Silence” was always the highlight. It was also the song that hit hardest for record company artists-and-repertoire man Bill Leader. “This terribly well-written song, meaningful, hung together beautifully and played on the guitar in an extremely competent way,” Leader said. Paul also knew how to connect with his audiences, making eye contact, projecting his voice and the driving feeling inside the song, unlike so many of the mumbling British folk performers. He stood out in other ways, too. He'd buzz to gigs in a red Sunbeam Alpine sports car, and dressed almost entirely in black. Leader, who worked for Topic Records, Britain's most significant folk music label at the time, also noticed the fans who came to see Paul every time he performed, and the fact that they started turning up even when he wasn't on the bill, just in case he put in a surprise appearance.

After seeing two or three shows, Leader introduced himself to Paul. Did he have a record deal in the United Kingdom? Well, how about recording an album for Topic? Paul definitely wanted to do that, so a few days later he took his guitar to Leader's home. His host led him to a back room where he had set up the portable Revox tape recorder and microphone. They spent a few minutes figuring out the sound levels and microphone angles, then Leader turned on the machine and Paul got to work, singing his latest songs over the rumble of the buses and trucks just outside the window. The noise didn't disturb him. He nearly burst the seams of “The Sound of Silence,” jabbing at the chords and spitting the words with a raw force that collapsed to a whisper at the end of the third verse, only to rise again in the final lines. He went in the opposite direction with the just-written “April Come She Will,” a hummingbird of a song he'd based on a three-hundred-year-old British nursery rhyme. Borne on a sparkling guitar pattern played high on the neck, and sung in Paul's moist, boyish voice, the tune traces a love affair from the dawn of spring to the first chill of autumn, with the tinge of mortality lurking at the edge of every verse.

Leader took the tape to the next executive meeting at Topic, figuring the handful of songs he'd recorded were finished tracks for an album he and Paul would complete in another session or two—Paul had already updated his pitch to club owners: “I also record for Columbia Records in the States and will cut my first LP for Topic Records over here,” he wrote to one regional booker on June 12—but the other Topic executives who heard the Revox tape shook their heads. How could an American songwriter possibly be a Topic artist? Founded as the publishing wing of the Workers' Music Association in the late 1930s, the label had been created specifically to serve the British labor movement. Simon's songs about American racism and civil rights had a spark of protest to them, but very little to do with Britain or British laborers and even less to do with proper British folk music. So, no, thanks.

Leader was less surprised than exasperated by his colleagues' reactionary thinking. But that's how the folk music world ran in Britain, where rules for what constituted a legitimate folk song, or an authentic folk performance, of a song that was part of British folk culture, were dictated almost entirely songwriter, scholar, and unapologetic Stalinist Ewan MacColl.

Born as James Henry Miller to socialist laborer parents in Lancashire, England, in 1915, MacColl became a Communist during the Great Depression. He devoted himself to left-wing theater until the late 1940s, when he came across a copy of American folk historian Alan Lomax's book
People's Songs
(cowritten with Pete Seeger) and decided to start playing folk music. Although he had grown up in England, both of MacColl's parents had been born and raised in Scotland. Given that connection, he adopted his parents' Scots heritage for himself and changed his name to Ewan MacColl. In 1953 he cofounded the club Ballads and Blues—its name was eventually changed to the Singers Club—which grew into a capital for England's most influential folk musicians and scholars. MacColl's Marx-inspired disdain for popular culture and anything else that seemed to violate the established doctrines of British folk music came to define the scene. Eventually he formed a committee to set criteria for defining folk styles and judging which musicians could be trusted to perform truly authentic folk music at his club and every other serious folk club in the British Isles.

MacColl was less successful at ridding folk clubs of the long-standing tradition of floor spots—when audience members can stand and do a song or two, and there was always the chance that someone might play something impure—but his loathing of popular music was shared by folk aficionados around the Western world. Some also rejected the idea that any modern songwriter could contribute to the folk culture, though MacColl, who wrote songs himself, figured that was okay, as long as the songs weren't intended to be commercial. No one could rival his disdain for American popular culture, whose influence over Britain since the end of World War II struck him as catastrophic to the nation's history and character. An entire generation, he proclaimed, “were becoming quasi-Americans, and I find it monstrous!” Never mind that the inspiration for his devotion to folk music had come from a book written by two Americans, or that he was now married to another one.
*
No matter: MacColl's tastes reigned, and to a generation of folk aficionados, including the executives at Topic Records, the likes of Paul Simon, an American songwriter bred on Elvis Presley, was anathema. Just like Greenwich Village, just like every other self-selecting society, the MacColl-inspired British folkies played things by the book: the contempt for outsiders, the blockading of the bridges, the loathing of the new and the different, the feverish testaments to “authenticity” and “legitimacy,” the worship of credentials. As always, though, the calcification of the institution only clarified and strengthened the revolution.

By the time Paul was digging into the British music scene, Dylan's gravitational pull had sent compasses spinning, particularly for the new generation of fans. For them, the old songs were less a destination than a foundation for songs that still needed to be written, the songs that would document their lives, their loves and lusts and loathing, their growing belief that it was up to them to set things straight and change the world. And though Paul had been too buttoned down to impress the Greenwich Village regulars, their counterparts in London saw him as positively dashing. He didn't dress like the British folkies did. His boots were stylish, as were his woolen donkey jacket and black V-neck sweaters. Paul could be serious but also hilariously funny; his wit filtered through a postcollegiate sophistication. And even if his banter fell flat, it was impossible to ignore those finely wrought, emotionally piercing songs.

“I'd never heard anything like him,” says singer-songwriter Harvey Andrews, who first glimpsed the American singer at a club in Birmingham. “His guitar work was better than anybody I'd ever seen.” Fifty years later Andrews still remembers the songs he heard that night. “‘A Church Is Burning,' ‘He Was My Brother,' ‘Sound of Silence' and ‘Most Peculiar Man.' That [last one] was a story song, and a very interesting one, very different. ‘Sound of Silence'—well, there had never been anything like
that
in a lyric. And ‘He Was My Brother'—I'd never heard one like that before, either. When he was finished I was sort of gobsmacked. What is this?
Who
is this?”

Who, indeed. Without knowing of Paul's travel plans, the UK-based Oriole Records had purchased the rights to release the “Carlos Dominguez”/“He Was My Brother” single from Edward B. Marks and released it on May 8 as a Jerry Landis record, with the songs credited to Paul Kane. Not much of a calling card for Paul, but the record did gain the interest of a rising middle-of-the-road singer named Val Doonican, who included “Carlos” on his 1964 debut album,
The Lucky 13 Shades of Val Doonican
. The long-player hit No. 2 on the British charts and stayed on the list for six and a half months, but neither release did much to enhance Paul's reputation. No matter, he kept working.

Soon he had played all the leading clubs in London. The Troubadour, of course, and also the Black Horse, the Roundhouse, and the Enterprise. The more friends he made, the wider his network became. Dolly Terfus, who had come to know a huge swath of musicians and club owners while working the door at the Troubadour, helped him book dates all over the United Kingdom, then called on friends to put him up when he got to their town.

So off he went, to Hempstead, Chelmsford, Leicester, Cambridge; then south to Romford and Bexhill-on-Sea; then north again to clubs in Hull, Liverpool, Birmingham, Widnes, Birstall, and Edinburgh, Scotland. Most often he took the train, which clanged by fields and factories, smoke-stained homes, going from one concrete platform to another, then carrying his guitar and bag of clothes, shoes, and notebooks to the next smoke-draped club, to have a pint with whoever else was playing that night—the chances were increasingly good that it was someone Paul knew. The shows always seemed to go well, even when he made a crucial mistake, as when he arrived at a hard-won show at the Jug O' Punch club in Birmingham precisely a week after he'd been booked to perform. The club's owner, musician Ian Campbell, had another performer booked that night and at first refused to allow Paul even to do a floor spot between sets. Campbell eventually relented, allowing his apologetic guest a four-song set, and when the last notes of “The Sound of Silence” faded from the air, the crowd leaped to their feet to cheer.

In London, the hipper musicians were migrating into Soho, the glittery if sometimes sinister, nightlife district. Introduced to the scene by Redd Sullivan, a sailor turned musician with flaming hair whose broad frame housed a decidedly outsize personality, Paul hustled to draw crowds and juicier gigs. While the bigger clubs had barkers calling passersby to their evening shows, Paul and Sullivan promoted their sets with impromptu sidewalk performances that began with Sullivan calling Paul a towering figure, the largest talent in London, the biggest thing in England and all of the United Kingdom, too. When enough people had gathered to catch a glimpse of this great artist, Sullivan would spread his arms and stand as tall as possible as the relatively elfish Paul leaped from behind him, smiling impishly and already strumming his guitar.

That was business as usual around Soho in the mid-1960s, where mobsters retailed somebody's goods from the backs of their trucks; where the elderly street performer known as Meg the Busker was always welcome to belt out a tune no matter who was performing onstage; where Curly Goss, a cheerfully incompetent crook and part-time porn movie actor (or so he claimed) put on unlicensed folk shows in an ever-changing series of abandoned basements, the addresses of which were so secret that even the musicians wouldn't know where they were playing until Goss took them there. It was all a revelation to Paul, who planned to stay through the end of the summer, when he'd fly back to New York to reteam with Artie and gear up for the release of
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
in October.

*   *   *

Artie spent much of the summer scootering around France, and on August 28 he took the ferry across the Channel to visit Paul and get a look at his life in London. Paul had shows set up for the next few evenings, and incorporated Artie into the act, adding his harmonies to the
Wednesday Morning
songs he'd been performing solo and working out parts for one or two of his newly composed works. Paul's last show for the summer was set for September 1, at the Troubadour Club. He sang a new civil rights song called “A Church Is Burning,” a meditation on aging called “Leaves That Are Green,” and “The Sound of Silence” before calling for his friend to join him on their arrangement of “Benedictus.” When it was over, a motherly forty-year-old woman approached Paul and with a plummy, if vaguely exotic, trill thanked him for his music. “I think you're a very great artist,” she said. Paul smiled and shrugged. Oh well thanks a lot, and all that, it's lovely to meet you. And you are…?

The real answer to that question was a whole other adventure, so Judith Piepe kept it simple. She was a social worker at St. Anne's Church, the particularly liberal outpost of the Anglican Church in Soho. A German refugee after the war, Piepe had spent quite a bit of time in the district's nightclubs, particularly the ones that specialized in folk and other socially conscious forms of music, and her constant presence in the scene, along with her network of friends in and around the music community, gave her an air of influence. Piepe's feelings for Paul ran even deeper than she had been able to tell him that first night. “I knew this was a true prophet,” she said. “This was the bloke nobody had ever heard of. And I knew this is the voice of the now.”

 

CHAPTER 9

HE WAS MY BROTHER

The news about Andy Goodman reached the Queens College campus the same day it hit the national news, on June 24, 1964. Less than a week earlier, Paul's younger schoolmate had boarded a bus with several dozen other Bus Project volunteers going south to register black voters in rural Mississippi. They reached their home base in Meridian, a small town on the east side of the state, their destination on the morning of June 21, the same day Goodman sent a postcard home to his family. “This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine,” he wrote. “The people in this city are wonderful, and our reception was very good.”