PAUL SIMON, BROADWAY COMPOSER; SINGER MIXES DOO-WOP, LATIN SOUNDS WITH GANG-KILLING TALE IN `CAPEMAN'.

Byline: Timothy White Billboard

``This show, it's a way of saying, `This is what it sounded like in my youth' - because it's gone,'' says Paul Simon, composer and co-lyricist with Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott of ``Songs From the Capeman'' (Warner Bros.), the solo studio record, which arrived in stores Tuesday, presaging the full-cast album for the Broadway show opening Jan. 8.

``Doo-wop, that used to be rock 'n' roll in the '50s,'' Simon continues, ``but now it's just an asterisk of it, and the Latin music that's also in `The Capeman' was in vogue back then.

``In the '50s, when Broadway was at its peak, show scores were also popular music, but when rock 'n' roll started, Broadway was pushed aside by young kids,'' Simon muses. ``The traditions of Broadway - of operetta, and 19th-century Europe - were carried on afterward without being nourished by the great cultural forces that made rock 'n' roll. There are exceptions - (Duke) Ellington wrote something for Broadway (``Beggar's Holiday,'' 1946; ``Pousse-Cafe,'' 1966), and Burt Bacharach wrote music for a successful play (Neil Simon's ``Promises, Promises,'' 1968) - but that's why some of the music since written for it sounds so strange to us.''

Simon explains that the rhythmically aggressive and texturally aggrieved material introduced on ``Songs From the Capeman'' has two aims: to invoke the tragic, true story of Salvador Agron, a 16-year-old Puerto Rican gang member convicted in the 1950s of slaying two suspected white gang rivals in a misreckoned rumble in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and to revisit the doo-wop and Latin pop that were the metropolitan backdrop to Forest Hills High School graduate Simon's coming-of-age experiences in New York in the summer of 1959, back when his studies at Queens College coincided with lurid press coverage of the Vampires gang and Agron, its cape-wearing leader.

A story of America

There are no easy answers or tidy epiphanies in ``The Capeman,'' an intense and timely examination of America's chronic inability to reconcile its inclusive ambitions with the mutual understanding that genuine social assimilation demands. Arriving at a moment when self-exploiting ``gangsta'' personas and mercenary record-company rationalizations for racial demonization are again at odds with personal accountability, ``The Capeman's'' songs make a serious effort to probe how the promotion of violence as a path to self-aggrandizement usually ensures an agonizing aftermath, i.e., a repercussive time when still-greater suffering can occur. As Simon sings witheringly - in the words of the mothers of the slain boys - on ``Can I Forgive Him'': ``The city makes a cartoon of crimes/Capes and umbrellas the glorification of slime.''

Moreover, the experience of creating ``The Capeman'' prompted Simon to revisit a hidden professional history that informs both ``Songs From the Capeman'' and next year's cast album, as well as the ``Old Friends'' Simon & Garfunkel boxed set (Columbia/Legacy) released Oct. 28 - namely the obscure 1958-64 recording and demo work Simon did after his boyhood Tom & Jerry duo with Art Garfunkel clicked with their career-launching 1957 Big Records hit, ``Hey, Schoolgirl.''

``I basically learned how to be a recording artist those years of making demos,'' says Simon, talking at the Westbeth rehearsal studios in Greenwich Village during a lunch break in cast run-throughs for the December preview performances of ``The Capeman.''

``In my neighborhood in Kew Gardens,'' says Simon, ``the biggest thing in doo-wop was the Cleftones from nearby Jamaica, Queens, who I admire immensely and who I imitated on `Bernadette,' which Warner Bros. is putting out as a single for radio. Artie and I, we first sang with a five-person neighborhood group, the Peptones, with Johnny Brennan and two girls, Angel and Ida Pellagrini. We used to send out demo tapes of `The Girl For Me,' a song I wrote with Artie.

``We were 15, 16,'' Simon recalls, ``and we'd do whatever we were told. Once we did `Hey, Schoolgirl,' then all the other disc jockeys, as a form of payola, had you record their songs. (Tom & Jerry went on to do additional sides for Big/King, Hunt, Ember, and ABC-Paramount.) And then there literally must be hundreds of demos I sang on of other people's songs in the little studios around the Brill Building area at 1619 Broadway, where I now have my offices. I was paid $25 a tune.''

The Latin connection

Simon's earliest direct Latin influences arose as a result of father Lou Simon's regular Thursday-afternoon bass-playing stints at the prestigious Roseland Ballroom as a member of the Lee Simms Orchestra. ``The alternate band was a Latin band led by (trumpeter) Ramon Argueso,'' explains Paul, ``and when my father's band took a break, I'd hear the Latin band, and it made an impression.''

Entering college, Simon issued a half-dozen singles (``Anna Belle,'' etc.) on the MGM, Warwick, Canadian American and Amy labels as Jerry Landis and graduated to the higher echelons of the demo business. ``I did about 10 demos for Burt Bacharach,'' Simon recalls. ``But the only tune I remember doing a demo for that became a hit was a song called `Just to Be With You' by the Passions (on Audicon Records in 1959). I'd met Carole King at Queens College by then - Carole was good at math and doing friendly tutoring but not charging me - because she'd made records when she was a kid, too (like `Goin' Wild' and `Baby Sittin',' her 1958 singles for ABC-Paramount). We made that Passions demo together, decided to modulate the vocals a half-step, and they imitated that on the final record.''

Simon also sang the guest lead vocal on the Mystics' ``All Through The Night,'' a modest 1960 chart successor to their 1959 hit `Hushabye.' ``They asked me, did I want a royalty or did I want to be paid 100 bucks,'' he recollects with a laugh. ``I took the hundred dollars, man!''

Coming full circle

Simon was in Paris during a 1964 summer vacation spent hitchhiking and busking through Europe when he read in a newspaper that Andrew Goodman, a student in his Queens College acting class, had been murdered in Mississippi along with two other young civil rights workers. ``I was shaken,'' says Simon, and he wrote the song ``He Was My Brother,'' issuing it on the Tribute label when he returned home.

In 1989, as he was completing ``The Rhythm of the Saints,'' Simon began to reflect on the Capeman news story and its dramatic musical possibilities. Gravitating to doo-wop shows in Newark, N.J., in search of inspiration and talent, Simon met teen-age singer Frankie Negron, eventually using him for the original demos of ``Quality,'' ``Adios Hermanos'' and ``Satin Summer Nights.'' Negron just enjoyed a hit on the Hot Latin Tracks chart with ``Hoy Me He Vuelto A Enamorar'' (WEACaribe/WEA Latina) and is now a falsetto guest soloist on ``Songs From the Capeman.''

``So that's the whole historical and personal process,'' concludes Simon with a grin. ``I don't think this musical can be authentic unless you sort of quote from the original period but then keep it alive by still pouring ourselves into it. One of the hardest things about writing the play for me and Derek Walcott was trying to tell the truth from everyone's point of view. It will be interesting to see to what degree things evolve from here.''

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Photo

Photo: Paul Simon's ``Songs From the Capeman'' musical is being brought to life with the help of cast members Ruben Blades, left, Ednita Nazario and Marc Anthony.