Simon & Garfunkel Read online

  SIMON & GARFUNKEL

  Together Alone

  Spencer Leigh

  ‘Simon and Garfunkel were a team.

  I always knew that.

  I’m not so sure Paul did.’

  Art Garfunkel, 1998

  Acknowlegments

  My thanks to Ben Coker, David Charters, Fred Dellar, Andrew Doble, Peter Grant, Patrick Humphries, Mick O’Toole and Sue Place. Thanks to the various music magazines of the day including Disc, Melody Maker, New Musical Express (NME) and Record Mirror. I’m very grateful to Andy Peden Smith for suggesting that my 1973 book Paul Simon: Now and Then should be updated – and here it is, eventually rewritten. Love as always to my wife, Anne – we met through the first edition of this book in 1973 and are still together.

  Contents

  Foreword by Suzi Quatro

  Preface New Books For Old

  Chapter 1 Born at the Right Time

  Chapter 2 Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

  Chapter 3 To England Where My Heart Lies

  Chapter 4 Blues Run the Game

  Chapter 5 1966 and All That…

  Chapter 6 Graduation Day

  Chapter 7 See How They Shine

  Chapter 8 Everything Put Together Falls Apart

  Chapter 9 Give Us Those Nice Bright Colours

  Chapter 10 Still Crazy

  Chapter 11 Trick or Treat

  Chapter 12 The Days of Miracle and Wonder

  Chapter 13 Lefty or Left Behind?

  Chapter 14 The Capeman

  Chapter 15 Simon and…

  Chapter 16 Surprises

  Chapter 17 The Fighter Still Remains

  Bibliography

  Discography

  Index

  Suzi Quatro

  Foreword

  Simon & Garfunkel, wow... Immediate vivid memories of being fourteen, trying to find out who I am, and discovering this wonderfully unique duo who somehow spoke to me. I was hooked with ‘The Sound of Silence’, but the one that really reached in and spoke to me was ‘I Am a Rock’. I had just started my own career in my first all-girl band, and was feeling like a misunderstood artist. Funny, I still feel like that now even after fifty-two years in the business! Simon & Garfunkel gave me a lifeline.

  Being a singer/songwriter/musician, I dive deep into the artists that I like, so that I know every single breath on every single record. As I did with Dylan, another big love of mine. For me, Simon & Garfunkel are the melodious part of the same genre.

  For some years after the Everly Brothers happened, there was not another harmony match that was so perfect, and then along came these two guys. Their voices fit perfectly together, and Art’s high notes made some of the poignant messages in the songs a little bit easier for me to take, being a highly sensitive teenager.

  Their version of ‘Silent Night’ crossed with a news bulletin was a brilliant idea… Say no more!

  Simon & Garfunkel have been a huge part of the soundtrack of my life. Thank you for the music, boys, and I have enjoyed reading about you. Your story here has been told with sensitivity and accuracy, as is Spencer’s book I am reading on Frank Sinatra.

  With love and respect,

  Preface

  New Books For Old

  In 1973 I wrote Paul Simon: Now and Then, published by a small Liverpool-based company, Raven Books. It sold 8,000 copies but was not reprinted or kept up-to-date. Copies of it now are sold at silly prices, possibly because Paul Simon completists want it and because it is an early example of rock biography.

  As I kept getting emails about it, I wondered if it could be reissued as an eBook. When I read the text for the first time in thirty years, it wasn’t as bad as I suspected but it contained some dodgy opinions. Writing about ‘Mother and Child Reunion’, I dismissed the whole of reggae music, which surprised me as I thought I had loved reggae from the word go. There were mistakes – I had followed an item in the New Musical Express which said that Paul Simon and Carly Simon were related when they weren’t. There was little first-hand research and outside of a few British folkies, I hadn’t spoken to anyone.

  Its big plus was that I had gone through the British musical press and found numerous interviews with Simon and Garfunkel and so I had their thoughts on most matters.

  So, yes, this is the reissued Paul Simon: Now and Then, but only marginally so. Simon & Garfunkel: Together Alone is much more a new book than an old one. Mostly this is a chronological telling of the story of Simon and Garfunkel, both together and alone. As I was writing (or rewriting) it, it did strike me that there are themes that could be separate studies. I’ve done my best with their early years around the Brill Building but it would need their commitment to sort out their full involvement with the pop singles of the late 50s and early 60s; then there is their deep affection for the Everly Brothers and the fact they have sung so much of Songs Our Daddy Taught Us; there is Simon’s on-off relationship with Bob Dylan which is far more ‘on’ than most people imagine; the strong Christian imagery in Simon & Garfunkel’s songs and choice of material throughout the whole fifty years, much more than references to Judaism. A book could be written on the artists who have covered Paul Simon’s songs and how they have treated them.

  It has been great to spend time with their recordings. Phrases from their songs pop into my head all the time and ‘American Tune’ seems to be on repeat in my head. Their songs work on so many levels and even when the meanings are not clear, they still sound stunning.

  Early on, Simon and Garfunkel realised two things. Firstly, the world liked them working together. Secondly, they didn’t.

  Spencer Leigh

  July 2016

  CHAPTER 1

  Born at the Right Time

  Although this book is largely propelled by the differences between Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and it would be a weaker story without that tension, they do have much in common.

  They were born within a few miles and a few weeks of each other. Paul Frederic Simon was born on 13 October 1941 in Newark, New Jersey. The family tree goes back to Romania and includes tailors and shopkeepers, hence Simon’s reference to a previous lifetime in his song, ‘Fakin’ It’.

  Simon’s grandfather was a cantor and his mother regularly attended services, ensuring that her son had a bar mitzvah. Simon’s parents nicknamed him ‘Cardozo’ after a Supreme Court judge, Benjamin Cardozo, who never smiled. Indeed, Art Garfunkel recalls that his stern persona made him a great poker player at school.

  Paul McCartney once said to Paul Simon, ‘How come there are so many Christian references in your songs when you were brought up Jewish?’ It was a good observation: you can tell from Bob Dylan’s songs that he is Jewish but Simon’s songs are more likely to include Christian imagery.

  Arthur Ira Garfunkel was born on 5 November 1941 in New York City, so they had Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty between them. Right from the start, he looked distinctive. Look at the childhood photo of him playing baseball on his Lefty LP and you’ll know it couldn’t be anybody else.

  The two families did not know each other but Simon’s family was to move east to Forest Hills, part of the Queens district. The area is famed for its tennis club and concert stadium complex and playing at Forest Hills would be Simon and Garfunkel’s homecoming gig. The horseshoe stadium, designed that way for major tennis tournaments, could seat 16,000 so homecoming gigs were lavish affairs. The Beatles played there in August 1964.

  Paul’s father, Lou, was ‘the family bass man’ as he played in various dance bands, while Paul’s mother, Belle, was a schoolteacher. Lou played on The Garry Moore Show and Arthur Godfrey and His Friends. He was a bandleader too, but during the 1970s he switched to teaching and obtained a doctorate in linguistics.

  Pa
ul’s brother, Eddie, was born on 14 December 1945. He now administers Paul’s publishing and is his co-manager but he is a competent musician in his own right, and in both stature and looks he resembles his brother. In their publishing office in the Brill Building, they display their father’s double bass.

  Garfunkel was raised in Kew Gardens, known then as the Jewish section of Queens. His father, Jack, sold containers and packaging, sometimes marketing his own products. His mother, Rose, was a secretary. They had three sons – Jules, Arthur and Jerry – with a total of seven years between them. Garfunkel’s earliest musical memory is hearing Enrico Caruso and Mario Ancona sing the duet from The Pearl Fishers: ‘I was five years old and already I knew that I loved melody and the drama of high notes.’

  Forest Hills and Kew Gardens were neighbouring sections, both reasonably affluent, and Paul and Art lived within walking distance of each other. They both attended Public School 164 in Queens, where Belle Simon was teaching. They moved on to Forest Hills High School. They were good students and Simon was a promising right fielder on the baseball pitch.

  When Paul saw Art singing ‘Too Young’ at a school assembly, he realised that performing in public was a key to popularity. Art’s repertoire included ‘I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair’ and ‘Winter Wonderland’ and he had dreams of being a cantor, the lead singer in a synagogue.

  In view of many UK connections in this book, it is apt that their first appearance together, back in 1953, was in something quintessentially British, a school production of Alice in Wonderland with Art as the Cheshire Cat and Paul, most appropriately, as the White Rabbit, the animal who is always running late. Fifty years later, Paul told stadium audiences on their reunion tour, ‘I was the White Rabbit, a leading role, and Artie was the Cheshire Cat, a supporting role.’ The implication didn’t need spelling out.

  Garfunkel once remarked that George Harrison had said to him, ‘My Paul is to me what your Paul is to you.’ Garfunkel commented, ‘He meant that psychologically they had the same effect on us. The Pauls sidelined us.’

  At school, Paul and Art became friends with Paul liking Art’s sense of humour but being wary of his fastidiousness. Every step is neatly planned with Art Garfunkel making lists of things to do and crossing them off as they are completed.

  Art told The New Yorker about their schooldays: ‘Neither of us were the group types, except maybe in athletics. I guess we were drawn together. Being outsiders, in a sense, was one reason. Mutual interests, music among them, was another.’ In 2015, Garfunkel said that he had felt sorry for Paul because he was small.

  In 1953, when Paul Simon was twelve, he and his father were listening to the radio, waiting for the commentary on a New York Yankees game. The current show, Make Believe Ballroom, featured middle-of-the-road music but the host, Martin Block, was about to play the worst thing he said he had ever heard. The record was ‘Gee’ by the Crows, a lively doo-wop record which, fair enough, would be nonsensical to the unconverted. Paul Simon recalled, ‘This was the first thing I had heard on the Make Believe Ballroom that I liked.’

  There’s no definitive answer to the question, ‘What was the first rock’n’roll record?’ but ‘Gee’ is a contender. Soon Paul was trying to find the new music on the stations he could pick up in New York. Although Jewish, he thought there was nothing incongruous about listening to gospel music on Sundays and he acquired a taste for southern country music, loving the wit of ‘In the Jailhouse Now’, a country hit for Webb Pierce in 1955. Artie felt the same way and, once homework was done, they would listen to Alan Freed’s nightly shows on WINS. He was the DJ who had named the new music, rock’n’roll.

  In 1955 Paul and Artie teamed up for a high school dance where they sang a rhythm and blues hit, Big Joe Turner’s ‘Flip, Flop and Fly’. Paul knew Al Kooper, a musician who features in Bob Dylan’s career, and Paul and Al ambitiously tackled ‘Stardust’ as well as rock’n’roll favourites.

  Garfunkel became obsessed with the Billboard Hot 100. He’d watch how the records climbed and fell out of favour. Paul preferred playing the new music. He has often said, ‘I started playing the guitar at thirteen because of Elvis Presley’, and Elvis Presley is a recurring motif in his life.

  Simon discovered that a young schoolboy could not mimic Elvis Presley’s sexuality without derision. He loved the backbeat in Chuck Berry’s songs and his constant theme of what would happen when school was out. He said, ‘I single out Chuck Berry because it was the first time that I heard words flowing in an absolutely effortless way. He had very powerful imagery in his songs and “Maybelline” is one of my favourites.’

  Paul Simon loved the Penguins’ ‘Earth Angel’: he had learnt about oxymorons in English class and he had found one in a rock’n’roll song title. On one level he is right, but angels on earth pop up (or down) all the time in the Bible.

  Although Simon acknowledged his debt to Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, he teamed up with Garfunkel to produce a sound more akin to the Everly Brothers. Paul recalled first hearing ‘Bye Bye Love’: ‘I called up Artie and I said, “I’ve just heard this great record. Let’s go out and buy it.” Artie and I used to practise singing like the Everly Brothers. To me, it was weird that a group would have that name. There was nobody named Everly in Forest Hills. Everybody’s name was Steinberg, Schwartz or Weinstein. I can imagine how odd it was for the rest of the country when a group came along called Simon & Garfunkel.’

  Art Garfunkel said, ‘Don and Phil are not praised enough. As much as we think they’re gods, they’re higher than gods. To me they beat Elvis. We learned from them and we outstripped them, but then they didn’t have the songs of Paul Simon.’

  The Everly Brothers sounded new but their sound emanated from Kentucky and Tennessee. The Everlys took their lead from southern country groups like the Delmore Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys, but they sang faster and addressed teenage preoccupations. Nearly all the Everly Brothers records of the 1950s are wonderful: even when the song is lightweight, it is rescued by magical harmonies.

  During 1957, the fledgling duo sang at neighbourhood dances and Paul recalled that ‘New York was a great rock’n’roll place in those days.’ Even at this level, they knew that Simon & Garfunkel was not a cool name. They adopted the cat-and-mouse pseudonym of Tom and Jerry, marginally better than Tweety and Sylvester. Art was Tom Graph, so named because he studied mathematics, and Paul was Jerry Landis, simply because he was dating Sue Landis.

  Paul said, ‘My dad was a bandleader and by the time I could play a bit of rock’n’roll he would take me out with him if he was playing to a younger audience. I saw how he worked as a bandleader and you can’t learn something like that in school. He taught me how to plan a set, how to interact with other musicians and how to get the best from them. My dad did it effortlessly though and I thought it was effortless until I started getting into fights with Artie. As soon as we met, we were the kind of best friends who would fight.’

  The first song they wrote was ‘The Girl for Me’ which Paul wanted Artie to sing. He formed a doo-wop group around him and they were influenced by a hit band from nearby Jamaica, Queens, the Cleftones. Their demo got nowhere but the song was granted copyright by the Library of Congress.

  Paul’s father, who was playing with the Lee Simms Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom, would write down Paul’s chords. His father would tell him that his tune was in 4/4 and he’d suddenly gone to 9/8. ‘You can’t do that,’ Lou would say. ‘I just did,’ said Paul, thereby discovering one of his songwriting traits.

  A commercialised form of folk music was popular in the 1950s. The Weavers, who included Pete Seeger, had successes with ‘Goodnight Irene’, ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore’ and ‘Wimoweh’. The Everly Brothers took the Appalachian folk songs they had heard from their father, Ike, to make a wonderful acoustic album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, miles from rock’n’roll but an influential album for many musicians. Paul Simon called this 1958 record his favourite LP.

 
; The Clovers had recorded a cheerful R&B novelty written by Titus Turner, ‘Hey Doll Baby’, in 1955. It was released as the B-side to their doo-wop favourite ‘Devil or Angel’. In August 1957, the Everly Brothers gave ‘Hey Doll Baby’ a neat choppy rhythm which they duplicated the following day for their million-selling ‘Wake Up Little Susie’. The lyrics weren’t easy to grasp: for years I thought the Evs were rhyming ‘lovesick’ and ‘mystics’ but it is ‘for love’s sake’ and ‘mistakes’, so Paul and Art could be forgiven for getting the words wrong. As they attempted to put the song into their repertoire, a new song emerged.

  They now had ‘Hey Schoolgirl’ with a hook of nonsense syllables (‘Wu-bop-a-lu-chi-bop’) that owes something to Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’. They considered it sufficiently different from ‘Hey Doll Baby’ to be a song in its own right and thought it had commercial potential. If they made a demo and sent it to the Everly Brothers, maybe, just maybe, they would record it.

  There were many small recording studios in New York and they cut ‘Hey Schoolgirl’ for a few dollars at the Sanders Recording Studio on Seventh Avenue, not far from Columbia’s studios. Did they dream that they might go there one day? Although their thoughts about Columbia would be mixed: ‘Just a come on from the whores on Seventh Avenue’, wrote Simon in ‘The Boxer’.

  By chance, Paul and Art met Sid Prosen of Big Records at the Sanders studio, and he liked what they were doing, or at least said he did. In time-honoured fashion, he was going to make them stars. He saw their parents, secured a contract and released ‘Hey Schoolgirl’ on his small but Big label. The B-side, ‘Dancin’ Wild’, sounded like a continuation of ‘Hey Schoolgirl’ and should have been held back for the follow-up. They promoted it in red jackets and white bucks. With a little payola, it was played by Alan Freed, sold well locally and was released nationally through the King label.