Written by: Paul Gleason
A couple years back, Peter Ames Carlin, who is quickly becoming the best rock and roll biographer of his generation, had a wide-ranging and enlightening conversation with me about Bruce, his superb 2012 biography of Bruce Springsteen. Carlin gave me an intimate view into the time that he spent with Springsteen while he was writing Bruce: how the two of them visited Springsteen’s favorite Jersey pizza joint, how Springsteen was candid and open about his battle with depression, and how Springsteen, via cellphone, made sure that a lost Carlin found his way back to the highway so that he could get back safely to his hotel.
In my interview with Carlin – and in Bruce – Springsteen lives up to everything his image entails: a nice, humble, honest, and extremely gifted human being. The interview, moreover, supported everything that I ever felt about Springsteen as a man and a musician: the man and his message were one and the same.
Carlin’s latest biography – his first since Bruce – is Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon (Henry Holt), and it presents him with a difficult task, one that’s much more difficult than his Springsteen book or his other two previous biographies of Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney (I mean, it’s difficult to dislike Wilson, a graceful man who has overcome many mental health issues to give the world some of its most memorable music, and McCartney, who was a Beatle). What makes Homeward Bound a more challenging book to write and, ultimately, Carlin’s greatest achievement is that Simon, unlike Springsteen, Wilson, and McCartney, appears in his pages as a man whose complexities derive from character traits that make him distinctly unlikeable.
This isn’t to say that Carlin spends almost 400 pages attacking the writer of some of popular music’s greatest songs. Quite the opposite: Carlin has nothing but praise for most of Simon’s work, with and without his on-again-off-again partner, Art Garfunkel. He considers Simon & Garfunkel’s 1970 masterpiece, Bridge Over Troubled Water, one of the best and most important albums ever made and extols such Simon solo efforts as Paul Simon (1972), There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973), and The Rhythm of the Saints (1990). Carlin even highlights the much-maligned Songs of the Capeman (1997) as being one of Simon’s best.
But what’s truly extraordinary about Homeward Bound is the way in which Carlin traces Simon’s creative process. In other words, Carlin provides extraordinary insight into the way in which Simon, always with the help of excellent collaborators, made these and what seems like each and every one of his other fine songs and albums.
It’s Carlin’s deep engagement with Simon’s sometimes troubling relationship with his collaborators that makes Homeward Bound such a revelatory book and his best biography to date.
Carlin fearlessly probes Simon’s creative process and, in my reading at least, presents an artist whose work derives from a deep need to control every aspect of the creative process and, unfortunately in some cases, take credit where it should have gone to his collaborators. You’ll have to read Homeward Bound to learn about how this need for control and accompanying need for credit, in many ways, defines Simon’s career from his days with Garfunkel to 1986’s Graceland album and beyond. For now, I’ll just point you to such albums and songs as 1966’s “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” Graceland, and 1983’s Hearts and Bones.
But what’s most interesting and memorable about Homeward Bound is the way in which Carlin interweaves Simon’s lifelong battle with depression into his discussion of Simon’s creative process. More, Carlin’s Simon is a very depressed man – a man who, now in his seventies, never managed to find himself. The music, therefore, in many cases seems to be an attempt to exert control over something, to manage a personality that tends to sway toward darkness and, sometimes even, paranoia.
Carlin succeeds in doing something almost unprecedented in rock and roll biographies. He puts the reader in an uncomfortable position. The reader knows about Simon’s depression and the truly awful decisions he makes to feed his own ego. But he/she also knows that Simon is a chronically depressed guy who might not always be in control of his awful decisions – that these decisions may make him, unlike Wilson, McCartney, and Springsteen, distinctly unlikeable.
We all want to see ourselves in our rock heroes. We want their songs to be an authentic and pure revelation of their inner lives, political beliefs, and deepest feelings. We want their songs to be just as earnest and clear as our own feelings about our own lives.
Carlin’s Homeward Bound is brilliant because it challenges this Romantic notion of the rock musician as hero. It’s also essential reading for any music fan who’s interested in what led to the creation of some of rock’s most essential songs and albums.
