Homeward Bound (31 page)

But he and Artie had no plans even to see each other, let alone to do any work together. They had been invited to co-headline the Summer Festival for Peace, a daylong all-star fund-raiser for antiwar political candidates planned for Shea Stadium on August 6, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Paul was eager to do it, but Artie refused even to consider the prospect. So did that mean Paul couldn't do it at all? That hardly seemed right, given how much he believed in the cause, and how much attention the daylong festival would surely receive. So maybe he should go out and play by himself. The promoters were more than willing to book him as a solo. Simon and Garfunkel were so hot that even half the team would be a big draw for New York audiences. But Paul was terrified. He hadn't played a show without Artie by his side for more than five years. Could he hold such a large audience's attention without him? Could he do anything without Artie? No one wanted to hear Paul singing songs by himself anymore, even if they were songs he had written by himself. He'd work himself up like that, but then Peggy would talk him down. They had been married in September 1969, and he had come to depend on her counsel. She was smart, sensible, accustomed to being the boulder in a frantic sea, and she told him to stop being so silly. Of course Paul could do it alone; he'd done it that way for years, all that time in England, where fans had filled the clubs and hushed one another so they could hear every note, so they wouldn't miss a word he uttered. The only thing that had changed since then was that he'd sold millions of records, including the biggest hit album of the year. Paul committed to playing the show.

No one expected it to turn out the way it did. The same mix of peace activists and entertainment pros led by Peter, Paul, and Mary's Peter Yarrow had put on an all-star Winter Festival for Peace at Madison Square Garden the previous winter, and it had been a smash. Jimi Hendrix; the Rascals; Blood, Sweat, and Tears; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and Richie Havens headlined that show, and the lineup for the summer festival was just as lustrous. Paul would share the stage with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steppenwolf, Miles Davis, Dionne Warwick, Johnny Winter, Joe Walsh's James Gang, and many others. But even the hottest bands can't sell tickets to fans who don't know the show they're playing exists: somehow the show's promoters neglected to publicize the summer festival. There were few advertisements, fewer newspaper stories, and even the chatter in the hippie underground was muffled at best. Also, it was a daytime show scheduled for a Thursday. They eventually sold fewer than twenty thousand tickets for a space built for three times that number. To make matters worse, the sound system wasn't powerful enough to drown out the jet engine blasts of the airplanes on their final approach to LaGuardia Airport, which posed a problem even for the superamplified rock 'n' roll bands. And make no mistake, this was a rock 'n' roll crowd: rowdy New York kids juiced for thunder and screams.

It was not a crowd for one fellow with an acoustic guitar and thoughtful musings on social and romantic alienation. Coming out to light applause and the stubborn rumble of disinterest, Paul did the best he could, strumming and singing the songs that had made him famous, that only a few weeks earlier had inspired ovation after ovation from the ten thousand friends and fans gathered to see Simon and Garfunkel at the Forest Hills stadium. None of those people, it seemed, had come to Shea. These people weren't even looking at the stage. They were talking, shouting, and tossing Frisbees, their occasional glances more impatient than intrigued. Was this real or an anxiety nightmare? Paul could feel the strings beneath his fingers, the lights in his face; and that was his voice, singing and talking, asking for a little quiet so everybody could hear, and then launching into “Scarborough Fair,” always a rapturous few moments during a Simon and Garfunkel show. But now it was all airplanes and chatter and laughter and—they were actually
booing
. Then he wasn't playing anymore, and that was it. Turning away from the microphone and the dismal scene, stalking across the stage, shouldering past the throng of whoever the fuck was in the wings, slamming his guitar into his case, stalking wordlessly out of the trash-strewn bowl, into his car, and then—zoom!—a red streak out of the parking lot, out of Queens, back to Manhattan, and locking the damn door.

The bleakness that had stalked Paul since he was an adolescent had never really cleared, the bitter fog drifting behind his eyes, taking hold even in the least likely moments. At the end of one Sunday evening during the Simon and Garfunkel tour in 1969, Hal Blaine had seen Paul leaving the dressing room with his cheeks radiant from the performance, joking and laughing until he glimpsed a solitary custodian sweeping up the garbage that had been left in the arena's empty seats. Paul stopped abruptly. “Did you see that?” Paul asked the others. It's Sunday night; that guy should be home with his family, but now he's all alone picking up garbage all night. It seemed cruel, all the loneliness in the world. His shoulders stooped, Paul shrank inside himself, and when everyone else went for a drink, he slipped into his room and hung out the Do Not Disturb card.

He started seeing a therapist. The actor Elliott Gould had a guy he liked, and Paul grabbed at him like a drowning man, booking four sessions a week to unpack everything he'd been lugging around, just to get to the point where he could have it organized enough to move a little more freely inside his head. He managed to cut it down to three visits a week by mid-1970, but there was still plenty of work to do: the Artie mess, Paul's desperation to strike out on his own, and the terror of what might happen if he did. Maybe he should form a band instead? Or, as his father continued to insist, follow his example and build a more meaningful career in education?
Teach! Teach!
Paul didn't let the old man push him around, but he also couldn't help wondering, especially when it seemed that he'd lost his sense of direction.

*   *   *

Right around the time Artie unleashed his secret about
Carnal Knowledge
during the fall of 1969, Paul had gotten in touch with music department administrators at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and New York University to see if any of them would sponsor a workshop class in songwriting that he wanted to teach. Columbia turned him away, but the other two institutions loved the idea, and eventually Paul chose to go with NYU, due in large part to his relationship with David Oppenheim, who had left public television to run the university's arts department.

The memo Oppenheim had his staff post around the arts buildings sketched the specifics. “Paul Simon of Simon and Garfunkel has offered to teach a course in how to write and record a popular song,” it began. The class size would be limited, and all students would be selected by the instructor. The uncredited class would start in February and meet on Tuesday evenings until the end of the term in May. You didn't have to be an NYU student to be considered, but only practicing songwriters with music and/or lyrics on hand should apply.

Articles about the class turned up in the
Village Voice
, along with
Billboard
and other music publications, and Paul read through the applications and set up auditions based both on the uniqueness of the students' work and on whether he thought he'd like them enough to spend three hours in their company each week. Oppenheim brought into the meetings (and the workshop) Jeffrey Sweet, a student who had won a coveted spot in Broadway musical composer Lehman Engel's private theatrical music writing class, and he recommended Paul give a listen to some songs written by a recent NYU acting school dropout named Melissa Manchester, and Paul liked what he heard. When a pair of teenage sisters from New Jersey buttonholed him on campus just before the start of the first class, Paul steered them into an empty classroom and let them play a few of their original songs, including one that impressed him so much he invited them to stick around for the class, and then Maggie and Terre Roche were in the course, too.

The class began with the start of NYU's spring semester in January 1970, with the just-released
Bridge Over Troubled Water
rocketing up the album charts. Paul sat on the floor with his students and told them how their class would work. He had no idea what he was doing, he said, so it would be an experiment for all of them. When someone asked if he was getting paid, Paul shrugged—he wasn't sure; he didn't really care. The only thing he knew for certain was that they'd have to take a two-week break in late April so he and Artie could play shows in England and Europe. Other than that, they'd all figure things out as they went along.

Eventually the class found its form. Each week, one or two students would hand around a set of lyrics and then perform their latest work. Paul read along, and when they finished, he'd have them play it again, and sometimes a third time. When he was sure he'd absorbed the song, he'd offer thoughts ranging from the general (“Part of the learning process is to imitate first”) to the very specific (“For staccato music you should have more dentalized sounds … more
t
's and
d
's”). He got bored quickly, and loved being surprised by an odd turn of phrase or a piercing image drawn from real life. When Melissa Manchester sang the phrase “laughing lagoons” in one of her songs, he suggested she change it to “laughing da goons” because it sounded more interesting. When another student's lyrics struck him as flat, Paul told her to get a Bible; it was packed with odd, memorable phrases. “Just steal them,” he said. “That's what they're for.”

Paul was particularly struck by the Roche sisters. Their song “Malachy's” had leaped out when they played it during their impromptu audition, and the lyric about weathering a tough set in an Upper East Side club rang so true that it brought him back to when he and Artie had to sing above the disinterested crowd at Gerde's. After the first class, he offered to drive the sisters back to the George Washington Bridge terminal so they could catch their bus back to the New Jersey suburbs. He was in his sports car that night, a two-seater with barely room for two people and a suitcase, but they all jammed in, and as they rumbled uptown he alternated slinging compliments and insults in a way that made Terre Roche think he didn't like them very much after all. They were pretty good but nowhere near as good as they probably thought, he said. He turned to elder sister Maggie: Did she think she was as good a songwriter as Paul McCartney? She figured she was, and he gave her a sour look. “You're not.” He dropped them at the station without a good-bye, but when they turned up at the next week's class, he greeted them with a smile.

So it went through the winter and spring. Off campus,
Bridge Over Troubled Water
dominated the airwaves and record stores, rapidly moving from being a hit to being a cultural milestone. But the adjunct instructor who came into NYU's music building each Tuesday, dressed most often in jeans, a T-shirt, a sweater, and a heavy hooded parka that looked like army surplus, didn't seem to pay much mind. He'd shuck his coat, find a seat, maybe talk about a song or two that had caught his ear on the radio, then invite the evening's first presenter to play his or her latest tune. One week, he borrowed a guitar to play a fragment of a tune he'd just started to write, talking in detail about how it had come to him and where he thought it might go next. He'd think for a moment and try a chord or two. Did that sound like the right move? He'd try another chord, take it in another direction. What about that? Or how about this? “My sense was that he was searching himself,” Manchester says. “He understood that the writer's mind is a muscle. It had to be trained to know how to play, how to get free.”

Some weeks, Paul brought in special guests. One week it was Al Kooper, then the violinist Isaac Stern, who spent much of the time defending the character of classical music, assuming the young students all despised it. For the final session, Paul booked an entire day at the Columbia Records studios on West Fifty-Second Street, complete with an engineer and studio musicians so he could demonstrate how to turn a song into a finished commercial recording. The day was a whirlwind of studio preparations, arrangement scribbling, and overdub after overdub. A small camera crew tracked every move. The camera's lens would hover inches from Paul's face and, as Terre Roche recalled, he'd continue without flinching, without seeming to notice anything beyond the music in his ears and the space between what he was hearing and what he wanted to hear.

*   *   *

As the summer of 1970 fell to autumn, with no Simon and Garfunkel projects or tour dates anywhere in sight, it was hard to figure out what Paul should, or could, do next. He and Peggy were living in a brownstone near Central Park, on East Ninety-Fourth Street, having taken over a three-floor residence once owned by classical guitarist Andrés Segovia. Dark and still, filled with books and Tiffany lamps—Paul collected them—the place was much homier than the modern duplex he'd been in for most of the S&G years. Peggy read Gloria Steinem and pursued her interests in visual design and photography, but she was also the product of a strict, if troubled, family from a Bible-bred section of Tennessee, and took naturally to the role of the stay-at-home wife—albeit a wife who had no patience for a husband who kept complaining that he didn't have anything to do. “You can't just sit here,” she'd tell him. “Go to the office, do
something
!”

If his term at NYU had taught Paul anything, it was that he wasn't ready to obey his father's wishes and toss aside his music career for the life of an academic. The songwriting workshop had its pleasures, but those were less about pedagogy than about being able to hang out with a handful of younger songwriters, hear their work, and, by passing along what he'd learned about songcraft, gain a different kind of insight into his own artistry. Paul had been writing steadily through the year, tapping into a stream of emotionally raw tunes that were faster and funkier than the songs he'd written for Simon and Garfunkel. No longer compelled to steer his songs toward Artie's voice and tastes, he went back to the street corner singers and gospel/soul records that had first spun his head around when he was a teenager, the Latin swing from uptown and the rhythm and blues that had pulled his eyes away from his box score that summer morning when he was eleven.