Homeward Bound (45 page)

For the time being he focused on a piece of property he'd bought in Montauk, the easternmost town in the Hamptons, where he had decided to build a summer home next to the spot where Lorne Michaels and his second wife, Susan Forristal, had built theirs. He hired Paul Krause, the architect Artie had introduced him to in the sixties, to design a sprawling version of a classic shingled beach house with just a few modern touches. (Krause, unlike his client, was a dedicated modernist.) Yet Paul was so intent on perfecting every aspect of the project (including the swimming pool, which was just like Michaels's except, as Paul pointed out, six inches longer) that he made himself a regular presence, driving out from New York every few days to see how it was coming together. It was during one of his drives down the Long Island Expressway when Paul took a second look at the homemade cassette tape Berg had loaned him and fed it into his car's sound system. Soon it was the only music he wanted to hear.

Electric guitars, accordions, saxophones, drums, electric bass, organs, and percussion—all played fast circles through the same two or three chords. And they were always major chords. The minor scale didn't seem to exist for these bands—they didn't even play blue notes in the solos. This was party music, songs to make you slide, spin, and snap your fingers. Some of the tunes were instrumentals; others featured singers vocalizing in an indigenous tongue that made the lyrics sound like chant, an incantation from somewhere beyond the mist. The guitars chimed and chittered, the bass zoomed and pulsed against the
tick-thump-tick-thump-tick-thump
of the drums. The saxophone honked and squealed; the organ burbled. He could hear echoes of nearly everything: early rock 'n' roll music, gospel call-and-response, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, country music, be-bop, “hey-bop-a-loo-bop-a-whap-bam-boom.” These were songs from before the dawn of man, sprung from the loam of creation.

Paul dialed Lenny Waronker in Los Angeles. He'd found this incredible music; he'd never heard anything like it and knew next to nothing about where it came from. All he knew was that someone had written “Accordion Jive Hits Vol. II” on it, and the friend who'd loaned it to him said it was from South Africa. Did he know anything about South African music? Who could help him figure out what, and whom, he was listening to? Waronker knew exactly whom Paul needed to speak with. Just the year before, the label had struck a deal with a South African band named Juluka, a biracial Zulu pop group whose recent album,
Scatterlings
, had made some noise on the British charts. Waronker had worked closely with the band's producer, Hilton Rosenthal, and the two men were friendly enough that the South African wasn't too put out when Waronker's call tumbled Rosenthal out of bed late one night to ask a favor. Paul Simon had flipped for a song that seemed to be from South Africa and needed to figure out who the players were.

When he called Rosenthal, Paul could offer a few more details. The song he loved the most was called “Gumboots.” That name clicked instantly with Rosenthal: he'd heard the song and knew it was by the Boyoyo Boys, a township group whose driving brand of mbaqanga had made them a regular presence on the South African pop charts. At first Paul wanted only to buy the rights to that one song. He didn't really know what he wanted to do with it; he just knew he could figure something out eventually. But Rosenthal had another idea. Maybe Paul should think about doing a full album of South African music? Rosenthal could pull together a bunch of records by the groups with the best players and the most distinctive sounds. If they caught Paul's ear, Rosenthal would get in touch with the musicians and book them for a few days of studio time. Paul said fine, and a week later he had thirty albums' worth of South African pop in his hands. He spent the next few weeks listening, and then dialed Rosenthal's number again. Make the calls, Paul said. Book the studio. He and his engineer, Roy Halee, would be arriving in early February.

It was that easy. This miraculous music, pressed into his palm by Heidi Berg, this pretty young guitarist Lorne had steered his way. She'd slipped the “Gumboots” cassette to Paul thinking it was the key to her debut album when in fact it had unlocked something much more significant to Paul: the next stage in his career. Berg had made him an astonishing gift. Or she would have, had she intended to give him anything more than an idea of the sound she wanted for her own record.

From the start, she told Paul that he could have her tape for only a week, tops. If he really liked it, he could dub a copy for himself. All she wanted was for him to give it back so she could get it into her tape player again. Paul did not give it back. According to Berg, when they met at his apartment to talk music, he'd tell her he'd left it at the office. But when Berg called the Brill Building, no one there had any idea: he must have taken it home, they supposed. She didn't see him much that summer; he was either out at Montauk or off to one of the amphitheaters or concert halls he was set to perform in during his August tour. Berg caught up to him backstage at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, where he had invited her to see the show and say hi. She asked about her “Accordion Jive” tape then, too, and though he didn't have it on hand there, either, he had great news: he'd just bought the rights to the recording of the “Gumboots” song. Now he could plug in one of the melodies he'd been singing over the track, write his own words, and blend his own sensibility into this music from the distant, dusty South African townships. Wasn't that great?

Berg did not think it was great. Berg thought that Paul, her putative mentor and would-be producer, had isolated her best idea and snatched it away for himself. She still regrets what she did next, thrusting out an empty palm and asking, sharply, “Where's my end?” That's all it took for his corneas to ice over and for him to pivot away from her, launching a conversation with someone else a few heads away. But she also remembered what he'd said to her when she first told him about the South African music she treasured. “Why don't you just go there?” He had been completely serious when he said it. He told the same thing to every musician with ears tuned to a faraway sound: figure out where the spirit of the thing lived and go there. Paul hadn't even heard the music when they had that conversation. But once he did, he knew where he was going next, and he didn't care if getting there was going to be complicated.

*   *   *

Paul knew there would be trouble. The South African government, which enforced the racist system of apartheid, had been condemned by the United Nations and most of the world's civilized nations both for its inherently unjust national structure and for the brutality it employed to keep the country's nonwhite majority under heel. Many nations refused to trade with or even acknowledge the authority of South Africa's apartheid government. The U.S. government took another course, justifying its mutually profitable relationship with the racist nation by pointing out the ties between the black South Africans' central opposition party, the African National Congress, and the Communist governments of China and the Soviet Union. That argument held no sway in Europe, though, especially in England, where the struggle against apartheid gathered force through the 1970s and the early '80s. By the mid-'80s the antiapartheid movement had gained a solid foothold in America, where campus protesters shut down numerous colleges and universities to force administrators to rid the institutions of every stock, bond, or mutual fund with any connection to South Africa. For many activists from the 1950s and '60s, the war against apartheid had become the next front in the civil rights movement, particularly for Harry Belafonte, the storied musician/actor/activist who for decades had stood as a pillar of inarguable moral clarity.

Paul had known Belafonte since the 1960s, when both were friends and supporters of the family of Andy Goodman, the murdered Freedom Rider from Queens College whom Paul had come to associate with “He Was My Brother.” The two artists had stayed in touch over the years, and when Paul called to talk through his South African plans, he was at first relieved to hear the older singer's enthusiasm. He could already imagine how beautiful the music would be, Belafonte said, but he also knew how complicated the politics of South Africa, and especially the antiapartheid movement, could be. So if Paul wanted to make it as easy as possible for himself, he had to do one thing before he left: get in touch with the leaders at the African National Congress and other groups in the Pan Africanist Congress and tell them what he was planning to do. Pay your respects, keep the line of communication open. Paul, ever the defiant soul, wasn't enthusiastic about checking with anyone about anything, but Belafonte said he could make it easy for him. “I can introduce you to the powers that prevail to let them know what you're doing, [and] you can have all the necessary passes.” It would have been easy: a couple of telephone conversations, a clear statement of what he had in mind. Given Belafonte's recommendation, Paul would have faced few, maybe no, real questions.

But Paul was an artist, not a politician. He had no interest in the thoughts of governments, political activists, or opposition organizations. He wasn't out to subvert anything or to make himself a part of anyone's movement, and he definitely didn't want politics to become a barrier to the struggle to make music. But when Belafonte mentioned that phrase, “the powers that prevail,” Paul's eyes glazed over, just as they did when Quincy Jones, the other music industry activist with the moral gravitas to steer opinion, told him the same thing. Paul didn't want to put himself, or anyone, in the sights of armed and angry insurgents. As long as no one stood a chance of getting killed, he didn't need to know anything else. As far as Paul was concerned, the only person in the world with the power to tell him where he could make music or whom he could make music with was Paul Simon. The other musicians always had the power to say no to Paul; that went without saying. But when it came to begging a political leader's pardon before he did his work, to have to bow down and acknowledge some other person's authority before he could open his guitar case—well, that wasn't going to happen. Belafonte figured that out before the end of their telephone call. “I saw right then and there that Paul resisted the idea,” he said. “[He] declared that the power of art and the voice of the artist was supreme, and … to beg for the right to passage was against his instinct.”

They left the conversation unfinished; they weren't talking about the same thing. Belafonte's head was in politics, while Paul's thinking began and ended with what he'd heard on the “Gumboots” cassette. Paul had originally told Belafonte that he'd wait for him to get in touch with his contacts at the African National Congress before he went anywhere. But the more he thought about it, the less he wanted to wait. He could have called Belafonte to tell him that. His friend was using his own name and reputation to gain Paul the trust of the organizers who could give his project the patina of righteousness. All he had to do was wait just a bit more. And Paul would not wait. He'd made his plans and now he didn't want to put them off. “It's like having your dad tell you not to take the car on a date you really want to go on,” he said later, with a teenager's not-quite-apologetic smile. “You take the car anyway.”

When news of Paul's impending visit reached the South African musicians' union, its leaders were instantly wary. Less than two years earlier they had stood by while Malcolm McLaren, the British impresario who had given the world the Sex Pistols in the mid-1970s, then started his own career in the '80s, had come to South Africa to record his 1983 album,
Duck Rock
, with the help of mbaqanga stars, including the Boyoyo Boys, whose song “Puleng” impressed the British provocateur so much he repurposed its most memorable parts to make his hit single (No. 3 UK) “Double Dutch,” for which he claimed full authorship. The Boyoyo Boys sued for copyright infringement and got their money eventually, but only after they chased McLaren through the courts for more than a year. How could the Musicians Union know that this Paul Simon fellow wasn't planning to steal from them, too? Rosenthal clarified the situation: Simon had committed to paying the musicians (who usually earned about fifteen dollars for a day's work) three times the two-hundred-dollar daily scale union musicians earned in New York City. Simon had also promised to share writing credit on any song that included any original musical or lyrical contributions from the local musicians. It was the best deal any of them had ever heard of, and it got only better when they considered what would happen when the recording was over. Simon was a big star all over the world; he could introduce South Africa's music to millions of listeners who wouldn't otherwise know that they existed. When the leaders of the Musicians Union of South Africa asked their members if they should send Simon an official invitation to come record, the resolution passed by a large margin. Paul Simon, they decided, could turn out to be the best thing ever to happen to South African pop music.

Paul and Roy Halee got to Johannesburg in early February. During the first week of the sessions in Ovation Studios, Paul and Halee, with Rosenthal there to bridge the gap in languages, cultures, and technical practices, worked with the mbaqanga and Township Jive bands that Paul had heard on the “Accordion Jive” tape. The Boyoyo Boys were there, along with the bands Tau ea Matsehka and Stimela, whose fleet-fingered lead guitarist, Ray Phiri, developed an especially good ear for Paul's musical sensibilities. As in Jamaica during the “Mother and Child Reunion” sessions fifteen years earlier, the atmosphere was a bit strained at first, particularly among the musicians who didn't speak English. They ironed out the misunderstandings soon enough,
*
though, and after that the mood stayed productive and sunny.