a date on "American Bandstand."NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
By DAVID HINCKLEY
Although the casual top-40 listener would have had no reason to know it, Paul Simon had already placed three records on the Billboard Hot 100 chart by the middle of 1963, when he was a mere 21 years old.
The first, in the early days of 1958, was "Hey Schoolgirl,"
sung with his childhood buddy from Forest Hills, Artie Garfunkel. It peaked at
No. 49, sold around 100,000 copies and earned the two of them
a date on "American Bandstand."
Hey, Schoolgirl in the second row
Now we're going steady,
Hear the words that I want you to know
Well, it's Who-bop-a-loo-chi-bop, you're mine
The second record, early in 1962, was "Motorcycle," which hit No. 99. A year later, "The Lone Teen Ranger," about a guy whose girl prefers a TV hero, peaked at No. 97.
None of these records had Paul Simon's name on the artist. The first was credited to Tom and Jerry, the second to Tico and the Triumphs and the third to Jerry Landis.
As this suggests, Simon was leading a schizophrenic life. On the one side was respectable Paul from a nice, stable middle-class home, studying literature at Queens College and dutifully trying law school. Then there were Jerry, Tico, Jerry Landis, Paul Kane and several other characters, all dying to be the next Elvis, none of them sure how to get there.
Simon was in many ways a Brill Building guy, a devotee and practitioner of the catchy, salable tunes pouring out of that pop music epicenter. He worked there sporadically, good friends with Brill star Carole King, whom he had known as Carole Klein back at Queens College. She'd quit to write songs. He'd advised her to stay and get her education. Now he was seeing her success up close.
But by 1963 he was also taking subways downtown to visit clubs where a different sound, loosely called "folk music," was going beyond "Who-bop-a-loo-chi-bop."
It was folk clubs more than the Brill Building, presumably, that nudged him to write "He Was My Brother," which took Simon from motorcycles and schoolgirls to the murder of his college friend Andrew Goodman, who was one of three civil rights activists who disappeared on June 21, 1964, in Philadelphia, Miss.
Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were working on a voter registration campaign in rural Mississippi that summer for the Congress of Racial Equality. They were paid $9.80 a week to convince black folks that they wouldn't be shot or have their houses torched if they registered to vote.
Many of the local white folks saw this campaign as outside agitation. Several klansmen, in conjunction with law enforcement officials, rounded up these two New York Jews and their troublemaking Negro pal, shot them dead and hid their bodies in an earthen dam.
Simon happened to be in Paris at the time. He had flown to Europe and to a large extent reinvented his musical life, busking on the streets with his guitar, singing folk songs and ballads. He was in the American Express office when he heard of the civil rights murders.
"I had to walk outside," he remembered later. "I was going to throw up. I was so panicked, so frightened. I couldn't actually believe that anybody I knew was dead."
They cursed my brother to his face
Go home outsider
This town's gonna be your buryin' place
He was singin' on his knees
An angry mob trailed along
They shot my brother dead
Because he hated what was wrong
Some Simon scholars have speculated over the years that he'd actually written the song a year earlier. Garfunkel has said Simon played it for him in June 1963. It was released as a single, under either the Paul Kane or Jerry Landis name, and release schedules suggest that could have occurred as early as late '63. Also, some of the details in the lyrics don't match Goodman: The song says he was 23, five years older than the singer. At 20, Goodman was younger than Simon.
Still, if Simon did write it earlier, it was eerily prescient, and either way it became a powerful eulogy. Simon later sang the lyrics as "Mississippi's gonna be your buryin' ground."
It also fit with other new songs Simon was playing in Europe, like the anti-Ku Klux Klan "A Church Is Burning."
Whenever "My Brother" got to Garfunkel's ears, he was impressed. "Up until then we sang and wrote rock 'n' roll songs together, but suddenly one of us could write poetic folk songs," he said. "When I first heard it, I knew that was a song I had to sing."
He did. Simon returned to America and he and Garfunkel recorded the album "Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m.," which included "He Was My Brother" and ended Simon's pseudonym era. From now on he was Paul Simon.
"Wednesday morning" at first made so little noise that Simon had gone to England and picked up his solo career there when he got a call saying a track called "The Sounds of Silence" had been retinkered and was climbing the charts.
So he flew home again. Who knew, maybe this time Simon and Garfunkel would really take him someplace.
On Aug. 2, 1964, the FBI found the bodies of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney. One year and four days later, President Lyndon Johnson signed a Voting Rights Act that led to the largest black voter registration in American history.