Homeward Bound (37 page)

In the thick of producing and playing the lead in his self-written fin de siècle film
Shampoo
, Beatty had asked Paul to write some tunes for the soundtrack. Paul took Beatty into the studio and played him an austere piano ballad that still needed lyrics. Beatty fell for it at first listen, saying it didn't need any lyrics as far as he was concerned; he could use an instrumental version as the movie's closing theme. They shook hands to seal the general agreement, but when Paul not only wrote lyrics but also recorded it for his album, Beatty protested heatedly. They'd had a deal! The song was supposed to be for his movie; Paul had no business recording a different version for his record. But of course Paul protested right back. A deal? What deal? They had shaken hands on an
idea
and hadn't even started talking about the guts of a deal. Nothing about money, nothing about rights and restrictions. And
that
was supposed to be a binding contract? Paul didn't think so. He also didn't think Beatty had any business telling him what he could and couldn't do with his music. Beatty was just as stubborn, and Paul told his lawyers to start drafting papers for a cease-and-desist order to keep
Shampoo
from using even a note of his song. They made a deal in the end—Beatty got to use the music in his movie, Paul got to record his own version, and everyone got paid—yet the whole affair clarifies the foreboding in the song Paul chose to conclude the album.

It starts on the minor chord, a three-note descent into a vision of Jerusalem, the cradle of the Jewish people: a Jerusalem forsaken, weeping alone, her children scattered across the desert, lost to the wind, blown across the centuries to new lands, new cultures, new selves. The modernized, the secularized, the urbanized and popularized—this is Paul, so far gone from anything that can be called a tradition or a faith that even when he tries to heed her call, he knows he is too far gone to ever come home. And as he has always suspected, the toll for his indulgences will eventually come due.

And we shall all be called as witnesses

Each and every one

To stand before the eyes of God

And speak what was done.

Musically sophisticated, lyrically probing, and yet pop-friendly,
Still Crazy After All These Years
was a pitch-perfect match for its times. While Bob Dylan's landmark
Blood on the Tracks
goes after the breakdown of his marriage like a desperado across a lawless frontier, and Bruce Springsteen's
Born to Run
tears down oil-streaked highways in search of deeper truths,
Still Crazy
documents the cynicism of the post-Nixon era through eyes jaundiced by political disillusion, professional success, and the stultifying comforts of home. It was released on October 25 to the usual praise and a few sharper takes on what some critics saw as Paul's deepening self-involvement, self-pity, and “slick professionalism.”

No matter,
Still Crazy
became his first chart-topping solo album, launching four singles into the charts, including the first Simon and Garfunkel release in half a decade (“My Little Town” peaked in
Billboard
's No. 9 slot), Paul's first No. 1 solo single (“Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover”), along with lesser hits “Gone at Last” (No. 23 in the fall of 1975) and “Still Crazy After All These Years,” which peaked at No. 40 on the pop chart, but rose into the top five of the adult contemporary list. The album sold enough copies to earn a gold record within weeks, and a platinum disc by the end of the year. In the course of its long arc to and from the top of the charts, where it remained for three weeks in the winter of 1976, “Fifty Ways” was nearly as ubiquitous as “Mrs. Robinson” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” had been in their day. Five years and three albums into his solo career, even in the wake of their one-song reunion, Paul could walk onstage without hearing anyone shout, “Where's Artie?”

Still, Paul and Artie's collaboration on “My Little Town” had touched off a new chain of guest cameos at one another's shows. Most often it came during the encore, a surprise introduction and then two or three songs, “The Boxer,” “Old Friends,” and maybe “The Sound of Silence.” They were all unbilled appearances, however. So when Paul signed on to host the second episode of a new late-night variety show and asked Artie to join him for an extended on-air performance, that was something else altogether.

*   *   *

Paul met Lorne Michaels through Edie Baskin, the photographer he was dating for a time during the
Still Crazy After All These Years
sessions. The thirty-year-old TV producer had hired Baskin to be his new show's chief photographer. Baskin's quirky portraits, along with the whimsical hand-tinting she added to some of them, were a perfect visual representation of what Michaels wanted his decidedly youthful ninety-minute comedy-music-entertainment program to be. The first-ever counterculture-fueled show to be broadcast on a major American television network.
*

Paul and Michaels clicked immediately; it was hard to figure out what they didn't have in common: both were in their thirties, both assimilated Jews—Michaels's real last name is Lipowitz—raised in families rooted in the entertainment business, both precocious as young men, and both comfortable assuming positions of authority. They also knew how to split the difference between their counterculture impulses and their desire to succeed within the structure of established institutions. Their friendship grew quickly, and Paul became a regular visitor to the show's offices and to the long dinners Michaels had with a circle of friends drawn mostly from the show's writing staff and cast. Sitting with Michaels and a rotating crew that included Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Michaels's comedy writer wife Rosie Shuster (a key member of
SNL
's first writing staff), Paul was present to witness the show's birth. One of the show's most talked-about early sketches bore Paul's mark: when Aykroyd recalled seeing a relative making soup from a whole fish she had dropped into a blender, and proposed doing an ad parody for the Bass-o-Matic blender, Paul laughed so hard the writer-actor went back to his office and wrote one of the new show's most famous sketches. “It's hard to get Paul to laugh, you know, because he's so intellectual, so smart … When he started to snort, I said, ‘Man, I got something.'”

Paul had wanted to host the first episode of the show (known temporarily as
NBC's Saturday Night
because ABC-TV had secured the
Saturday Night Live
name for a prime-time variety show it launched that same fall), but Michaels asked him to wait for the second go-round: he wanted to give the cast and crew a week to get comfortable before he had a friend take center stage. Michaels tapped the hilariously seditious long-haired comedian George Carlin to host
Saturday Night
's October 11, 1975, debut, and when he brought Paul in to start building the next Saturday's show, the atmosphere around the eleventh floor of Rockefeller Center's GE Building became tense, particularly among the cast members. Everyone agreed the first show had gone well. They'd need to tweak a few things, of course, but all the time they had spent working together had paid off. The seven cast members had bonded enough to start playing off one another, while Michaels and the writers (many of whom were performers, too) were well on their way to developing a voice that really did sound like a new generation talking. But the show Michaels and Paul were planning had nearly nothing to do with the comic vibe the others had built.

Obviously Michaels wanted to draw as much attention as possible to his newborn show. Just having Paul as a host was a coup, particularly with his new album on the verge of being released. But toss in the Simon and Garfunkel reunion, their first public performance in three years, and their first national exposure since
Bridge Over Troubled Water
, and it was a big enough deal to ensure not only that the second-week ratings didn't fall off from the first, but also that there'd be a boost in the show's viewership, which would only endear it to the NBC executives whose opinions spelled the difference between a show's long, happy life and a fast, inglorious cancellation. So, at first glance, Paul's commitment to hosting was nothing but terrific. Everyone liked the idea of having guest superstars on the show—until the guest superstar became the entire show. Because Paul had no intention of doing just a few songs with Garfunkel. He wanted to turn the spotlight on other artists, friends, and collaborators, too. Artie needed a solo spot, and Paul also wanted to do at least one song by himself. Add up all that time, translate it into network TV segments, and they had almost no time left for comedy, beyond a taped bit they planned for Paul and a short film by Los Angeles–based comedian Albert Brooks. Other than Chevy Chase, who Michaels thought had the charisma and looks to be a breakout star, the rest of the cast would be seen only in a thirty-second mini-skit with Paul.

The resulting tension made for a long week. Belushi, whose wild-haired onstage persona was not so distant from his real-life persona, told Michaels that “the folk-singing wimp” was derailing their show before it had a chance to really get rolling, and Paul didn't help when he kept disrupting rehearsals by staring into the monitors to make sure his bald spot wasn't too visible to the cameras. When showtime arrived at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night, October 18, the scene opened on Paul sitting alone on a stool at the center of the stage singing “Still Crazy After All These Years,” the title track to the album that would be released in less than a week. Chase did the first of his soon-to-be-famous show-opening tumbles (“Live from New York, it's
Saturday Night
!) and then Paul was back, this time surrounded by the Jessy Dixon Singers for “Loves Me Like a Rock.” Next came Randy Newman to sing “Sail Away,” a tune Paul said he wished he'd written. After Chase did his “Weekend Update” news satire, Paul starred in a lengthy taped piece based on the absurd premise of him playing a one-on-one basketball game against the Philadelphia 76ers' Connie Hawkins, then one of the biggest and most fearsome players in the National Basketball Association. Paul did a fine job handling his lines in a gag interview with sports announcer Marv Albert (“I'm spotting him a one-foot, four-inch advantage. I gotta admit that's gonna be a factor in this game. He's got me on shooting ability, but I just have to play my game as I usually play it … [and] stay with my strengths. Basically singing and songwriting.”). Hawkins responded just as ably when asked to size up his opponent (“He's got a lot of savvy and a lot of chutzpah”), then the game began and the joke spun on its axis. From the opening tip, Paul dominated the game, crushing Hawkins beneath an avalanche of hook shots, outside jumpers, and sneaky lay-ins. Interviewed again by Albert after his easy victory, Paul nailed the punch line with a shrug. “When my outside shot is on, it's
on
.”

The Simon and Garfunkel reunion was surprisingly underplayed. About halfway into the show, Paul introduced his old friend, and Artie, who had been sitting with the studio audience, edged through the crowd on his way to the stool set next to Paul's onstage. The familiar needling started immediately.

“So Artie,” Paul said. “You've come crawling back.”

Artie bent over to laugh, then turned cool: “It's very nice of you to invite me onto your show. Thanks a lot.”

“Movies are over now?”

Artie mumbled, “Yeah.”

“A little two-part harmony?” Paul asked.

“I'll try it again. See if it works this time.”

From there it was like a stream slipping through its banks. The “lie-de-lies” in “The Boxer” falling into “Scarborough Fair,” each note trembling with feeling, each syllable laid in its precise position. They moved to the small center stage to do “My Little Town” with the show's band, both singing into handheld mics and visibly struggling to find the balance between moving with the rhythm of the song and dancing like idiots. They kept trying to be serious, but whenever they made eye contact, they couldn't resist the urge to break each other up. By the third verse, Paul started moving closer, edging his partner aside until Artie gave him a little shove back. This only upped the ante for Paul, who stepped right back in, now doing a dramatic finger-point motion that caused his partner to crack up in the middle of a high note.

When it was over, they stood next to each other, a couple of mischievous kids who've just gotten away with something in front of everyone. What could be more fun than that? “I'd still like to do some more stuff with Artie from time to time,” Paul told the
Chicago Tribune
a few days after the
Saturday Night
reunion. Artie was just as enthusiastic, talking about how they might make a new record, how nothing was off the table now. But in the weeks that followed, something happened. When
Newsweek
's Maureen Orth caught up with Paul in mid-December, he said exactly the opposite. “I can't go back and do anything with Artie,” he said. “That's a prison. I'm not meant to be a partner.” Simon and Garfunkel probably wouldn't be very popular these days, anyway—which was extra-fun to say now that Artie's album
Watermark
, released on the same day as
Still Crazy
, had attracted mostly lukewarm notices and an underwhelming reception in record stores Fortunately, Artie had Paul to feel sorry for him. “Poor Artie, he's really depressed now,” he said, and it wasn't like Paul hadn't tried to help. He'd written him “My Little Town,” the elusive song that was as smart as he was, and his public had ignored everything else. And, as Paul pointed out, it wasn't fair. “He just happens to have a voice like an angel and curly hair like a halo,” Paul said, pitying his former partner for his boyish good looks. “But he's a
grown-up
.”