This is the portrait of Paul Simon we get from Peter Ames Carlin's (Bruce) entertaining biography: he paid his musicians well, sometimes three times the union minimum. He often tutored younger musicians, chauffeured them and bought them meals. Yet he could be mercurial, "sunlit and laughing one day, consumed by his work the next," a ruthless competitor who shouted down hecklers "with brutal efficiency" and denied songwriting credits to collaborators. And when he was not yet well known, he had the gumption to suggest that the international star Buffy Sainte-Marie open for him during a London concert, not the other way around.
Carlin charts the highs and lows of Simon's career--his and Art Garfunkel's teen years as the doo-wop duo Tom and Jerry, their legendary folk-rock run under their own names, their 1970 breakup after Bridge over Troubled Water, Simon's successful solo albums of the 1970s, misfires such as the film One-Trick Pony and the Broadway musical The Capeman, and the huge success of his landmark 1986 album Graceland. Some of the prose is overly cute (guitar playing that's "forceful enough to make the Kingston Trio's sweaters unravel"), but Carlin writes well about the technical aspects of music. Especially fine is the long chapter about Graceland and the complications surrounding the apartheid-era recording of songs with South African musicians. Filled with delightful anecdotes such as Paul and Art rehearsing in a British launderette in 1965 because Simon liked the acoustics, Homeward Bound is a charming biography. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer