TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111290/1112520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.6 KB | 245 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 112

Songs of a Thinking Man


PAUL SIMON's musical wanderings have taken him from Africa to
Brazil and to the deepest, farthest reaches of himself

By JAY COCKS -- Reported by David E. Thigpen/New York


    It's an old question. It goes back as far as Bridge over
Troubled Water, when Paul Simon gathered some unexpected,
tropical-inflected rhythms around him and first really found his
voice. His lyrical voice, that is: the tart, tempered
combination of irony and melancholy that would turn him into one
of the best writers of his generation, either in the grooves or
on the page.

    There have been, intervening, two decades, a couple of
marriages, one son, a hurtful professional divorce and a group
of exquisite albums. But that Troubled Water question, framed
as an up-tempo goof but phrased suddenly like a suicide note,
still stands. Let's consider it more benignly, as a kind of
standing offer: "Why don't you write me/ I'm out in the
jungle/I'm hungry to hear you." And take him up on it, at last.

    "Dear Paul: How you doing? I suppose we can all hear for
ourselves. Another wonderful new album, The Rhythm of the
Saints. A stone beauty. Another stone beauty. They seem to roll
around every few years or so, and since Graceland in '86, they
seem to come from new territory. Sort of rare and familiar at
the same time. Must be you're still in the jungle, if not
exactly on safari. Africa for Graceland, Brazil now. All those
strange, haunting sprung sounds, gliding guitars and drums
echoing like distant dreams. Is this the way your dreams sound?
Percussive and persistent? The kind that linger into the
daylight, aren't they?

    "And while we're at it: What did the Mama Pajama see Julio
and his friend doing down by the schoolyard? How come we can
call you Al? And in this new song The Obvious Child, what is the
cross doing in the ball park?

    "Yours sincerely . . ."

    "It got me thinking when that first popped out," Paul Simon
says, sitting in the living room of his Manhattan duplex,
watching an early moon come up over Central Park. " `The cross
is in the ball park.' The first thing I thought of was Billy
Graham, or the Pope, or evangelical gatherings. But I came to
feel what that's really about is the cross that we bear. The
burdens that we carry are doable, they're in the ball park."

    Neat enough, especially for a 49-year-old, 5-ft. 5-in. rock
'n' roller who still plays a court-singeing game of one-on-one
and pledges allegiance to the New York Yankees. He is, after
all, the man who sang yet another, still more famous question
("Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?"). Settling in to watch the
Yankees close down a dismaying season a few weeks back, he
speculated on the chances for one heavy hitter to grab off a bit
of individual glory. "I'm not confident he's going to hit
tonight. I saw him last night, and he had that look of defeat in
his eyes. I could tell. Popcorn?"

    That's a knowing bit of self-mockery you hear in the voice,
making room for the accent that would brand him as a sure New
York boy even if his music weren't so uptown all on its own.
Simon is well aware of his penchant for self-reflection --
self-immersion sometimes -- and knows how to undercut and play
against it, as anyone who's seen him larking around on his
producer pal Lorne Michaels' Saturday Night Live shows over the
years can instantly attest. The man who wrote Me and Julio Down
by the Schoolyard and You Can Call Me Al and 50 Ways to Leave
Your Lover knows how to have a good time with a lyric, but only
Paul Simon could write a tune titled Have a Good Time that's a
deliberately dippy paean to incidental ennui and spiritual
indifference.

    "Rhythm of the Saints doesn't have an overall theme," he
suggests. "It jumps around from subject to subject within the
songs, slips from verse to verse. There are a lot of personal
references: family, friends, some love-affair stuff. I know what
all the lines mean in direct relationship to my life."

    Lots of others think they know too. It's one thing to work
into the new record musically, as Simon's friend Quincy Jones
does when he says, "Paul goes straight for the throat. And he's
smart enough to understand the African motor, which has driven
pop music for so long." But it's another to cast the lyrical
runes for references to his personal turmoil, especially when
he is hands-down champion of the Confessional Songwriters,
Elliptical Division. Perhaps it's just another kind of standing
invitation.

    Even Simon, who is adamant about protecting his privacy (and
thus his best material), has become a little less guarded of
late. The release of Rhythm of the Saints coincides with a
couple of loud flourishes from the career of his second wife,
the writer and actress Carrie Fisher, with whom he is not, at
the moment, on speaking terms. This doesn't stop either of them
from writing about the other, however. There is a Simonized
character named Rudy in her current best seller, Surrender the
Pink. But her ex-husband, who has read the book, acts like a man
who was let off easy and maybe got in the last, best licks as
well.

    "It's not really stuff I talk about casually," Simon says,
measuring the words like a jeweler weighing gold. There is a
Saints love song called She Moves On, in which a man falls
victim to a woman's witchery and pays the price: "I fall to my
knees/ Shake a rattle at the skies." But the pain, which undoes
him, also releases him: Simon takes the high ground. "That song
is close to my heart," he admits. "Too close to the heart. It's
about men being afraid of women's anger. It felt pretty real."

    Along with all those effulgent rhythms, it's the finesse of
the language that lofts songs like this out of the arena of
gossip and retribution into something far more formidable. "In
its literary context, his writing is very important," says the
poet Derek Walcott, to whom Simon dedicates a Saints song called
The Coast. "Most poetry is sedate, quiet, self-concerned. His
imagination is much bolder and more refreshing. He reminds me
of Hart Crane."

    It takes some effort on Simon's part to stay in such heady
company. His apartment, elegant and ordered, always has a guitar
handy, but there are books of poetry (Wallace Stevens, Philip
Larkin) open all around the living room, within easy reach, like
so many cerebral snacks. In case this sounds a little rarefied
for a rock guy -- even a rock guy who sang a few tunes to Derek
Walcott's poetry class at Boston University -- it should be
added that Simon also enjoys listening to music as various as
Miles Davis, Prince and Public Enemy. It's not always the sounds
of silence up there on Central Park West.

    It was those very sounds, of course, that made stars of
Simon and his best friend from Forest Hills, Queens, Art
Garfunkel. Under the "nom de 45" Tom & Jerry, the boys had a
minor hit single in 1957, then followed the folk-music trail
into the new decade. Oft-told rock legend #192: how a house
producer at Columbia Records without Paul's knowledge added
electric guitar, drums and bass to an earnest, intimate,
acoustic ballad of Simon's; and how The Sounds of Silence, with
its new rock underpinnings, became a No. 1 single in 1966. It
was a fluke, but Paul and Artie were smart enough, gifted
enough and fast enough to build on it and go for a long, sweet
ride.

    "My best memories go back to the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and
Thyme days, when we were beginning to make albums more
carefully, that we really liked," Garfunkel says of those
post-Silence days. "When we sat back and listened to the
playback of that record, it was a high point in my career." The
highest came in 1970 with the release of Bridge over Troubled
Water, which remains in the top 50 best-selling albums of all
time. It was also the last album Simon and Garfunkel would make
together.

    "We never thought Simon and Garfunkel was going to break
up," Garfunkel says. "We just thought we'd take a break from
each other." "Going out solo was my decision," Simon says now.
"But I was nervous about it." The record company had a case of
the corporate faints: Simon was busting up an act whose last
record had sold 10 million copies. But the boys were having
problems. Garfunkel was getting absorbed in acting, while Paul
was taking his first turns down various lightly charted musical
byways. "There was stuff I wanted to do anyway that Artie
wouldn't have done," says Simon. "He wouldn't have gone to
Jamaica to do Mother and Child Reunion. I know that he wouldn't
have thought it was interesting." On Bridge, Simon adds, "maybe
we sang four [songs] together. The rest is his solo or my solo.
Artie and I were over by January 1970. We were really over
before the '70s began."

    The sympathetic imagination didn't have to strain to see the
break coming. Simon's writing then was as vulnerable, and quite
a bit more open, as anything he would do until his travails with
Fisher resulted in his terrific (but commercially problematic)
1983 album, Hearts and Bones. It was Garfunkel, working down in
Mexico on Catch-22, about whom Simon seemed to be singing when
he asked, "Why don't you write me," just as it was very probably
Garfunkel who was being addressed in The Only Living Boy in New
York, an intensely wistful ballad about the encroachments of
loneliness and the first endings of a vital friendship. "I've
never asked him if any of the songs he's written were about me
and our split," Garfunkel reflects. "But So Long, Frank Lloyd
Wright [also on Bridge] may be. I was an architecture student.
And Why Don't You Write Me sounds a lot like, `Where the hell
are you, Artie?'"

    There has been a little work together during the years
since, including a memorable reunion concert (and resultant
high-selling live album) in Central Park in 1981, but
altogether, their relationship now follows the course of a Simon
song, where endings are lingering but emphatic, and pain, like
some rare vintage, grows keener with age. "He does things that
I could never understand," says Garfunkel, who lives right
across Central Park from his old friend. "He called me up one
day and said, `Artie, I'm dropping your vocals on Hearts and
Bones. It's not turning into the kind of album I want it to. And
by the way, I'm marrying Carrie on Tuesday, and I want you to
come.'"

    Simon's rejoinders to such talk are kept out of conversation
and stashed where they can do the most good: in his songs. "From
what I can see/ Of the people like me," he sings in Allergies
on Hearts and Bones, "We get better/ But we never get well."
Simon does work at it, though, as far from public scrutiny as
he can manage. "Paul's been famous since high school," says
Lorne Michaels, "so he may have gotten soured on the way his
image has been portrayed." The 18-year-old son of his first
marriage, Harper, has temporarily left school and spends a good
deal of time living with Carrie Fisher in California, where he
can be near his girlfriend. When he comes East, his father, an
inveterate night owl, rouses himself early to cook breakfast.
"There's very little bullshit between them," Michaels observes,
and Harper, a Grateful Dead fan, appears to be finding his own
way.

    But there is a stillness that goes beyond quiet in that
apartment overlooking the park. There is a prevailing
inwardness, a tone of twilight reflection, that seems to mirror
Simon's own tenuous spiritual equipoise. "We see very little of
each other now," Art Garfunkel says. "I see him about four times
a year. I miss him. We have very complex feelings toward each
other. We're not close friends anymore. But we are friends at
the bottom of it all. There is a great love for each other that
would snap into place on a dime."

    Simon, however, is not a man who carries a pocketful of
loose change. "Rhythm is reflective of what's happened in the
four years since Graceland," Simon says. "And then there are
aspects of my personal life and my family's personal life that
are more grave than they were four years ago. And that's in
there. It was on my mind, it had to be in there. There's
something about having a very big hit that's happy, like
Graceland, that makes me think a little bit. I couldn't get more
happy. That would really be manic." This is also, mind you, the
author of that rueful piece of self-analysis with the memorable
chorus, "Maybe I think too much." But that's it, after all. The
essence of Simon's music, what makes it last and what makes it
so directly personal. This is the soul of a thinking man.