Homeward Bound (32 page)

In late 1970 he went to see Clive Davis to tell him that he was about to record a new album. The only catch was that he wasn't going to be working with Artie—definitely not this time, but probably not ever again. Davis, realizing that Columbia's biggest act (all music's biggest act, actually) had called it quits on him, responded badly. “Well, that's the biggest mistake you could make,” he said. “It doesn't matter how good your solo records are, none of them will ever sell like a Simon and Garfunkel album.” Paul, already dreading the prospect of not being able to make hits on his own, got just as upset. That might be true, he shot back, but it was also possible that one day Simon and Garfunkel would be a footnote in the story of his solo career. Davis didn't disagree, exactly, but he also knew how the industry, and the world, worked. There were artists, but then there were
institutions
, and the former was never going to add up to anything close to the latter. That was just how the world worked. “I did try to reason with him,” Davis says. “Do an occasional solo album, fine. Just keep the institution alive. So there was definitely a disagreement there. But there was never any guile to it, there was never a disguise. He knew that I was always going to be honest with him.” And maybe that's what Paul resented the most.

At first Paul thought about forming a band. When he called London-based (but American-born) blues guitarist Stefan Grossman to ask if he'd play on his new album, Paul also mentioned the possibility of starting a long-term collaboration with a couple of other musicians, but the talk ended there. Instead, Paul let the songs dictate who would play them. In December he traveled to San Francisco, where Roy Halee had relocated to set up a state-of-the-art recording studio for the Columbia Records artists who didn't feel like working in New York or Los Angeles. With a top-flight band made up of Stax bassist Duck Dunn, rock/jazz/blues keyboardist Mike Finnigan, and the versatile drummer George Marsh waiting to make music, Paul sifted through his tunes with Halee and got started. He ran through early versions of “Duncan” and “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” with the studio musicians, then spent some time working with Blood, Sweat, and Tears, the chart-topping jazz-rock group Al Kooper had formed (only to be forced out just before they became successful). When
Rolling Stone
writer Ben Fong-Torres came to check in after the first week of sessions, Paul confessed that the days had so far been fruitless. “I've gotten nowhere,” he said. “Magic doesn't happen on a schedule.”

Paul also didn't hide from Fong-Torres that he was working on a solo album, his first without Artie since the UK-only
Paul Simon Songbook
in 1965. “Partly I'm looking forward to it just for fun, and partly as a manifestation of Artie's movie commitment,” he said, going on to keep the Simon and Garfunkel door ajar, or perhaps to ease Clive Davis's mind for just a little while. “When I finish with this he'll probably be finished with the movie, and I'll think about doing something else.” But Paul was much more excited to talk about where he was heading. “Maybe Nashville. Or Jamaica.”

Jamaica? That was unexpected, coming from a folk-singing Jewish intellectual from New York City. But Paul had been entranced by the island's offbeat bop since he heard it in London in the mid-1960s. The Skatalites, the Maytals, and Don Drummond had hits on the UK charts then, and their music's chattering
bang-bang
got under his skin. He'd tried to capture it for “Why Don't You Write Me” during the
Bridge
sessions, but while Hal Blaine had no problem mastering the cadence, and the rest of the musicians could follow him anywhere, something about it still rang hollow to Paul—an essence they couldn't capture in the sterile confines of a state-of-the-art studio in Los Angeles. Still itching to feel that pulse in his chest, Paul thought again about “El Condor Pasa,” how he'd found the Chilean sound by repurposing Los Incas's original track for his own lyrics and S&G's vocals. Only, instead of using a prerecorded track, he'd sketch out an original tune and take it down to where the sound originated, where he could put it into the hands of the musicians who really lived by the rhythm they wrote and played.

Paul got in touch with Leslie Kong, producer of dozens of hits for Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, and Bob Marley, hoping to track down the guitarist who had played on Cliff's 1968 single “Vietnam.” That turned out to be Huks Brown, lead guitarist for Toots and the Maytals and part of the house band at Dynamic Sounds, the Kingston recording studio that had produced most of the significant records by Cliff, the Maytals, and Marley. Kong helped him book three days at Dynamic with Brown and a band made up primarily of Maytals members, and Paul was on his way—but not without a few anxieties. How could he, a white American pop star, jet to Jamaica and expect the local musicians to share with him the music style they had invented? It was easy to imagine they'd look at him like a thief, a musical carpetbagger stopping by just long enough to copy the most valuable thing they had, take it back to New York, and add it to his fortune.

Yet when he got to Kingston and walked into Dynamic Sounds, he was greeted with smiles and the traditional celebratory herb. The studio had a fairly rustic setup, but the spirit within the red, orange, and yellow walls more than made up for whatever technical flaws the room contained. To get things started, Paul took his guitar into the studio to show the basic chords and structure of his tune, then retreated to the control booth to run the musicians through a few takes, then a few more. They were making progress, but as the hours passed, Paul couldn't help noticing that Brown and his compatriots had started muttering and scowling. Soon he learned why: in Kingston, musicians got paid by the song, usually somewhere between seven and ten dollars per finished track. Given how quickly most producers wanted to work, it was decent pay. They had never even heard of someone who would want to stay on one tune all day long. Once someone clued Paul in, he called the musicians together and said he'd pay them as if they'd finished three songs each day, and the smiles and herb were back right away. The song still needed work—it didn't have words yet, for one thing—but when he flew back to New York a few days later, Paul had the foundations of a track that sounded nothing like any song he'd ever recorded before, and also a style of working that would lead him in directions no one, including Paul, would have thought possible.

Over the next few months, Paul worked mostly in Columbia's studios in New York, recording a variety of understated tunes in styles ranging from front porch blues to Latin to art pop and beyond. He spent ten days in San Francisco trying to record “Congratulations,” and came away with nothing but a drum sound for the tune. Grossman spent more weeks recording in New York and Los Angeles, playing lead guitar parts on songs that included “Paranoia Blues,” which, unbeknownst to him, Paul had also recorded with blues/folk guitar and mandolin player David Bromberg playing the lead part. Grossman is featured on the finished track, but nothing else he played over the weeks made it onto the album. Grossman, a seasoned studio player, knew better than to indulge himself with hurt feelings. “He paid for everything and really took care of us. First-class everything. And he's a lovely guy … he's trying to get something from you that you didn't know you had.”

Flying to Paris to record a new backing track with Los Incas, Paul set up a recording session with the jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt's collaborator for many years, to work on a song called “Papa Hobo.” They had a famous time together, and when Paul went back to listen to what they had recorded he realized that the violinist had stretched out one of his breaks into an eighty-second-long digression that sounded so good he decided to stick it somewhere on the record. Mike Tannen, who had gone with him to France, proposed another idea: Paul could give the fiddle-led vignette a name, credit Grappelli as a cowriter, and it would still earn them publishing royalties as with any other song. Paul liked the sound of that, almost as much as he liked the prospect of having his name on a song with a musician whose name could also be found beneath the titles of some of the most influential music recorded during the twentieth century.

Stacked onto record store shelves on January 24, 1972,
Paul Simon
looked like a homey affair. Cover photographs shot by Peggy catch the newly solo artist peeking out from beneath the fur-lined hood of a heavy winter parka, his lips caught in a small, shy smile. Like the photo Paul McCartney's wife Linda shot for the cover of his first post-Beatles album,
*
he looks thinner and less burdened than he did on the cover of his group's last album. But while
McCartney
's one-man band solo music was as homemade as its package,
Paul Simon
, for all its casual-seeming arrangements and performances, is anything but. Each song comes with at least one extraordinary performance set within: a reggae band here, Peruvian instruments there, Latin percussion, a great bottleneck guitar solo, jazz fiddle, and more.

*   *   *

There was plenty of discomfort at the heart of his new tunes, but the married thirty-year-old Paul had traded the theoretical angst of youth for the real grind of adult life in the modern world. The city is cruel, friends get strung out, relationships fall apart, even your subconscious gets overrun by fascist dictators, but the album is more tense than it is resigned. There are flashes of wit, active resistance, and even hope, as in “Mother and Child Reunion,” the finished version of the barely sketched groove he'd recorded in Jamaica. When Paul and Peggy's dog was killed by a car, Paul channeled his grief into a lyric built around the name of an eggs-and-chicken dish he'd seen on the menu of a Chinese restaurant in the West Village. But the mourning in the verses is leavened by the persistent bounce of the rhythm, particularly combined with gospel piano highlights and the passionate voices of the backup singers, who find the uplift waiting just beyond the tragedy, the soul's ascension back into the arms of its creator.

The comfort of faith in “Mother and Child” is lost in “Duncan,” which counterintuitively pairs the story of a salt-stained runaway from Maine's fishing piers with Peruvian flutes and strings. While the song is clearly descended from both “The Boxer” and “El Condor Pasa,” its title character, a guitar-playing youngster whose full name is the Yankee-to-the-core Lincoln Duncan, finds communion with God in the form of a female evangelist who relieves him of his virginity, leaving him “Just thanking the Lord for my fingers, for my fingers.” “Everything Put Together Falls Apart” and “Run That Body Down” describe the perils of overindulgence from two perspectives, the first as a gentle lecture to a strung-out friend; the second, an autobiographical account.

Dystopian visions play out in “Papa Hobo” (life in Detroit), “Paranoia Blues” (life in New York City), “Peace Like a River” (a dream of life in a wicked totalitarian regime), and “Congratulations” (life in a troubled marriage). Throughout, the music leaps and then hangs back. The melodic uplift in the groove of “Mother and Child Reunion” is swept aside by the meandering, nearly a-melodic “Everything Put Together Falls Apart.” The joyful bounce of the Stéphane Grappelli track Paul called “Hobo's Blues” makes way for the tinny
skronk
of “Paranoia Blues.” The spirit of inventiveness, particularly when it comes to blending sounds in unlikely ways, is as striking as it is unprecedented. Mainstream American radio had never entertained reggae music until “Mother and Child Reunion,” the album's lead single, jumped into
Billboard
's top five. The Latin-inspired “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” did nearly as well a few months later. The vaguely naughty song (the tale of some awful yet never-described scandal that took place between the narrator and his neighborhood pal Julio) made people dance even though its rhythm was made entirely by percussion and the
chunk-chunk
of an unplugged electric guitar, its dampened strings being strummed hard.

As a solo debut,
Paul Simon
does a fine job of stepping away from the Simon and Garfunkel institution without going so far that listeners wouldn't know what to make of it. Some songs are weaker than others (“Everything Put Together Falls Apart” is a trifle, and the gospel grandeur of “Congratulations” feels overblown), but critics sang happily, hoisting the record to No. 4 on
Billboard
's album chart and moving nearly 1.5 million copies in its first year. Yet Paul was less than happy with the results. When lead
Rolling Stone
critic Jon Landau's celebratory review described the album as a bit depressive, Paul got so upset he delayed an interview with the
New Yorker
for two weeks because, as a Columbia Records publicist explained to the writer, Landau had missed all the irony and humor in the songs. Soon thereafter, though, Paul was happy to have Landau interview him for a lengthy
Rolling Stone
feature, and their talk ran deep enough to read like a kind of public therapy session, particularly when it came to Paul's relationship with Artie. “We get along by observing certain rules,” Paul said, explaining that the rules mostly involved each of them avoiding doing or saying things he knew would irritate the other.

Still, even if
Paul Simon
had sold more than a million copies, it was a speck on the face of
Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits
, a single album collection Columbia shipped to record stores in mid-June. Centered on original studio tracks, the album also included four previously unheard live tracks recorded during the 1969–1970 tours, and the combination hits-and-rarities lineup went on to rival
Bridge Over Troubled Water
's sales, easily outselling Paul's debut in 1972 and going on to sell fourteen million copies in the next decade or so. Paul chose not to mount a solo tour for his album, but when the actor Warren Beatty asked him and Artie to reunite for a benefit concert for the presidential campaign of South Dakota senator George McGovern, the Democratic candidate attempting to unseat President Richard Nixon, they both agreed to do it. Held in Madison Square Garden, the show played off McGovern's campaign pledge to reunite the country by featuring reunions of disbanded partnerships: Simon and Garfunkel, of course; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and most exciting for some audience members, the comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, both of whom had gone on to big careers in theater and the movies.