Homeward Bound (11 page)

Thus came “Wild Flower,” the story of a free-wandering girl set to a grab bag of Bo Diddley beats, acoustic guitars, a pair of soprano saxes making like snake charmers, and a faux-Hawaiian tribal chant (“Manga-wey-ah-poola-wey / Hada-ma-la-hada-ma-ley / Hey!”) that Paul and the group constructed from random syllables. The production doesn't quite make it—the Diddley beat is too familiar to power a journey to distant lands—but you can hear what Paul is after: the allure of the world beyond, the threads linking there to here; everyone moving to the same
lub-dub
; the fear and the ease of love; a world filled with beasts and friends, risk and revelation; the lion in the jungle; the myths and miracles; the radio signal; the long distance call.

When the record fell flat, so did Paul's interest in the group. The other members of Tico and the Triumphs were fine singers and good guys, but the more Paul worked with them, the more he realized that most of the talent in the band resided in its lead singer, Mickey Cooper. Paul had gotten to like him. He could hear the power in Cooper's vocals and see the hunger in his eyes, and he concluded that Cooper didn't really need those other guys. In fact, they were in his way. If Cooper really wanted to make it, Paul said, he should be a solo singer. Cooper wasn't so sure. Mickey Borack was his best friend; they'd been like brothers for years. How could he toss him to the side now? Paul shrugged and found subtler ways to make his point. Tico and the Triumphs became Tico
with
the Triumphs. Then became, simply, Tico. Cooper wasn't proud of himself; he knew he was double-crossing his pals. But he was the son of a cabdriver; nothing had come easily in his family. And here was Paul taking Cooper out to buy him a sporty new jacket, tight pants, and bright, silky shirts, and then accompanying him to the Bruno's of Hollywood photography studio to make publicity pictures. How many people got that kind of treatment? And once it was offered, who in their right mind would turn it down?

Paul set up recording sessions and didn't invite the others. Cooper sang the leads, Paul sang the background parts, and by the time Borack and Beck heard the title of Tico's next single it was already finished. When the rest of the group figured out what was happening, the eruption was as ghastly as it was inevitable: Borack stopped speaking to Cooper. In any case, Paul's new songs for Tico—a dance tune called “Get Up and Do the Wobble,” “Cry Little Boy, Cry,” “Cards of Love,” and “Noise”—all flopped. Cooper, in whom Paul had invested so much time, energy, and money, didn't become the pop star Paul envisioned.

Paul moved on. By the end of 1962 his entire look had changed. He draped a scarf around his neck and took to wearing it nearly everywhere, one end hanging down his chest and the other strung loosely around his throat. Life on campus, and especially the many hours he'd spent with James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and all the other great authors he'd studied, had combined with his growing interest in folk culture and music to end his appetite for schlocky pop music. Not the good stuff, though—he still couldn't get enough of Dion, the Everlys, Elvis, the real masters of the form. Still, by the early 1960s, the Top 40 had turned to cardboard, the charts dominated by the Frankies and Annettes and the other Hollywood phonies. All the interesting people Paul knew in college were stuck on folk music, and not because they were trying to escape to some far-off land of maidens and soldiers and corn-cracking farmers. No, the folk that mattered was about real people and real life, as much about tomorrow morning as about yesteryear. And it wasn't just a college fad, either: the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, and the Chad Everett Trio were all over the charts. You could still make a few bucks in pop music, sure—Paul had another song or two brewing for the teeny-bopper market—but whenever a new song grabbed him these days, it almost always came in a cloud of dust, sweat, and purpose.

When he cut things off with Cooper, Paul also told Bobby Susser that he was done trying to be a showbiz magnate and would be shutting down their jointly held management and publishing companies, effective immediately. Nothing they'd tried had worked, and now things had changed and he didn't need a partner anymore. Susser was dismayed, but Paul said they should still be friends, and so they were. The next time Cooper saw Susser, he was also sporting a loosely draped scarf and urging the singer to follow Paul's example. “You've gotta start singing folk songs! That's what Paul's doing now.”

*   *   *

At Queens College the folk musicians gathered on the upper floor of an old cafeteria that had been replaced with a modern facility a few years earlier. The upstairs of the Old Caf, as they called it, was snug and smoky, just the out-of-the-way place to haul out your guitar or banjo or washboard and raise a voice to the slaves and the workers, to the great protests and to Woody Guthrie's ramblings across the parched fields of the Great Depression. And none of it felt old because the pursuit of justice never ends, and you didn't have to look any farther than this very campus to see it for yourself.

Given the school's antielitist philosophy and the progressive tilt of so many New Yorkers, politics electrified the Queens College campus. The dialogue on campus was like a nonstop debate about the entire contents of the day's
New York Times
. College politics, particularly when it came to the school's administration, ran even hotter. The first major controversy at the college broke out in the early fall of 1958, just days after Paul sat for his first class. Noting the near-complete absence of minority faces among their ranks, faculty members accused college administrators of mounting an organized effort to keep black and minority academics out of the school's faculty. The administration tried to fend off the charges, but students rallied with their professors, organizing a successful college-wide walkout. After a solid year of criticism, newly arrived president Howard Stoke moved to shut down the student newspaper, the
Rampart
, to punish its staff for covering the controversy with such vehemence for so long. Stoke did the same to the school's even more antagonistic newspaper, the
Crown
, declaring that both would be replaced in the fall with a new and, presumably, less radical campus newspaper. But as Stoke somehow failed to anticipate, the new publication, the
Phoenix
, was staffed almost entirely by ex-
Rampart
staffers, who displayed their anger by covering the top of the premiere issue's front page with the text of the censure the National Student Editorial Affairs Conference had slapped on the Queens College administration for its attempt to silence the students' collective voice.

There was so much more to resist. Queens College became the focal point for a student protest against New York City rules banning Communists from speaking on public school campuses, including at the city colleges. Female students, still forbidden from wearing pants on campus, protested the school's treatment of women. Students organized by the nation's most powerful civil rights activists made Queens College a hub for recruiting and training students to be Freedom Riders, busing down to the Jim Crow South to help the black communities build the schools, libraries, and voter rolls they needed to exercise the basic rights they hadn't gained after the Civil War.

The walls of the Old Caf rang with talk of all these movements and initiatives—but not with the guitar or voice of Paul Simon, who kept almost all his political sympathies out of sight. As much as he liked the subtextual meanings in folk music, Paul preferred songs that didn't sound like editorials set to music. The music he connected with most closely were the folk ballads and quirky old-timey tunes that came from the likes of the Kingston Trio and the Brothers Four. So he did most of his strumming in the new cafeteria, entertaining the other students with a few frat brothers in tow, whipping through some familiar folk and pop tunes before closing with his popular cover of the Kingston Trio's arrangement of the little-known cocktail jazz tune “Scotch and Soda.” That always got a big hand, but not from everyone. When newly elected student body president Mark Levy, who had campaigned with a promise to launch an on-campus folk festival, agreed to let Paul audition for his show, he balked at Paul's pop-folk pleasantries. “I was reaching out to blues players and Appalachian players. Some old guy who played the dulcimer,” he says. “All Paul had were these silly romantic songs. Nothing political, nothing ethnic, nothing that, in my limited mind at the time, qualified as folk. So I wouldn't hire him.”

Though too bourgeois for the hard-core folkies, Paul also wasn't entirely clean cut. He smoked marijuana enthusiastically and often. What bugged his close friend Brian Schwartz was that the stoned Paul wasn't anywhere near as forthright or reliable as the sober Paul. Sometimes pot made him giggly; other times he became prankish and heedlessly sharp-tongued, much like his new hero Lenny Bruce, the so-called sick comic whose unsparing and often lewd social commentary was as liberating to some as it was offensive to others. Paul's sense of humor evolved accordingly, and like Bruce, who spent most of the last decade of his life fighting obscenity charges in New York City and elsewhere, it sometimes got him into trouble.

Paul had a severe distaste for academics who condescended to the students, particularly when the student happened to be Paul. He'd already hung a few of his professors out to dry in his Follies skits, but he could also take a much more direct approach, as he did in a class on Middle English taught by a professor notorious for his leather-patched tweeds and his gratingly stentorian boom. Assigned to read a section from the original text of Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
, Paul used his ear for music and rhythm to great effect, gallivanting through the six-hundred-year-old meter and pronunciation with no problem. When he finished, the professor jumped to his feet, the better to drape his student in garlands of claps and bravos: “Magnificent, young sir!” Paul responded with a shrug: “Yeah, well, we speak Middle English at home.” The other students laughed. The professor didn't. Cheeks ablaze, he nodded curtly and called on the next student. At the end of the term, the professor paid Paul back for his impertinence by giving him an F for the course. Brian Schwartz, who was also in the class, was enraged on Paul's behalf. He was vice president of the student body; he could launch an official protest with the administration and get Paul the grade he deserved. Paul waved him off. He'd suck it up—better that than becoming best known for being a victim.

*   *   *

The only problem was figuring out how he
did
want to be known. Paul continued working as Jerry Landis through 1962, but from a greater and greater remove. That guy, with his shiny white bucks and shimmering hair helmet, was a projection of Paul's high school fantasies of the music business. Four-plus years and nearly his entire college education later, Paul had taken on an entirely new palette of feelings and ideas: serious thoughts about identity, morality, and the pursuit of justice. He had read the timeless writers and studied the great philosophers. Like many others on campus, he'd been influenced by the work of Queens College's increasingly well-known philosophy teacher John J. McDermott, whose analysis of the existentialism lurking beneath America's faith in assimilation and self-determination touched the core of Paul's conflicted, post-immigrant consciousness.

The small-time music industrialists in Midtown Manhattan couldn't have cared less about Paul's consciousness—they had no idea who Paul Simon was. When they needed someone to record a bunch of demos or come up with a cheap but plausible stab at a pop radio hit, they called for Jerry Landis. That's the guy they knew, the Tom and Jerry guy who had written and produced the Tico and the Triumphs records, the guy they saw pictured in the ads for his occasional solo singles. But when he sat down to write his own songs, Paul's mind flashed to images much darker and deeper than the high school romantic Jerry Landis could ever imagine. The months of playing folk music led his fingers to new chords and less frantic rhythms. His interior geography was shifting; everything he had learned at college had started to give voice to feelings that had evaded expression for too long. At least one other guy in New York, a newcomer, even, had poured similar feelings into a raw but gripping album of folk songs that Paul's hipper pals at school and in Midtown couldn't stop talking about. Then Paul got his own copy of Bob Dylan's self-titled first album and heard it, too.

By the time Dylan's debut on Columbia Records came out in the early spring of 1962, his reputation as a performer—he had barely started writing songs—and interpreter of Woody Guthrie's free-ranging spirit had made him a kind of superhero to the folkie demimonde in the city. Guthrie was the lanky outlander who had blown across the prairies and highways of the real tumbledown America, collecting old stories and songs that revealed as much about modern times as they did of the old. Dylan's own story was a bit of a mystery. He told some people that he was part Native American and others that he had spent his childhood traveling the nation with a circus. He didn't tell anyone that his real name was Bob Zimmerman or that he had been raised in a middle-class Jewish family in Hibbing, Minnesota, but all that would emerge later.

Paul had already listened to the Dylan record a few times when he dialed up Al Kooper, a neighborhood guitarist he'd met at the height of the “Hey, Schoolgirl” moment, when both their groups were playing the same sock hop. Kooper's family lived just four blocks from the Simons in Kew Gardens Hills, and they had stayed friends. Kooper had skipped college to focus on his music career, so when Louis asked Paul to play a few dance numbers for the kids at Lee Simms Orchestra gigs, Paul often called on Kooper to play the lead guitar parts. It made for a dull evening for the boys, except that Louis paid exceptionally well—Kooper recalls earning one hundred dollars a night—and when they weren't playing, he and Paul could talk about records and bands and, on this one night in the spring of 1962, the much-talked-about record by this Bob Dylan kid.