thousand dollars to produce them — and months later realized that he had used them for one of his other artists. I also thought of all the horror stories Ted had told me about the dishonest dealings in Miami’s music scene.
In addition to the questionable ethics of some in the music business, the drug trade was omnipresent in Miami, funding much of the city’s growth.
Only a few days ago had I not been awakened at three a.m. by a mysterious helicopter landing on the strip of land at the edge of my property? I had imagined a drug drop in process. I had also been pulled aside by a policeman cautioning me that a mere two blocks away from my private compound in Coconut Grove was the centre of Miami’s crack cocaine business!
“Ma’am don’t ever drive through these streets after six p.m.,” he had warned me when, because of a road closure, I had been forced to take a different route than usual. “Lock all your doors and windows, look down, and drive fast!”
Not exactly comforting advice.
I thought about the “crime movie” scam I had narrowly escaped, the city’s traffic jams, the biting bugs, and the hurricane risks, and I decided with sadness in my heart that it was time for a change of scenery. The penny had dropped, the spell was broken, my Latin love affair was over. I finally understood why people had always reacted with such astonishment when I told them I had chosen to move from Beverly Hills to Miami.
7
Love Songs in New Canaan
In the spring of 2007 I visited some friends in New York and at the same time contacted a girlfriend from Toronto, Joanne Perica, who I knew had moved to the Big Apple. It turned out that she and her husband and two kids had since moved again and were now calling New Canaan, Connecticut, their home. I accepted an invitation to stay with them for a couple of days.
Little did I know back in 1981, when I performed a concert there, that twenty-six years later I would return. The white-picket-fenced little town was a profusion of quaint churches, budding spring blossoms, and yellow daffodils. What a complete 180 from Miami! The garbageman who came up the wooded, winding driveway handed Joanne’s dog a cookie, everyone greeted each other on the sidewalks, and motorists stopped the moment they saw you approaching the curb.
In Miami, with its madcap Colombian, Venezuelan, and Haitian drivers, I often felt my life was in jeopardy crossing the street, and two of my friends had indeed suffered horrific traffic accidents. That was one of the negative sides of the city, but I knew I would miss the Latin spice of Miami. Still, New Canaan, named after the Biblical land of milk and honey, instantly seduced me with its gentile civility.
Joanne introduced me to a local recording studio and engineer, and offered to co-produce my new CD. Here was the solution to my life! I would move to small-town Connecticut, record with Srdjan, who was only an hour and a half away in Bernardsville, New Jersey, and escape the crooks, con artists, and money launderers of Miami.
I immediately started an online search for a place to live. Only at the last minute, with my Coconut Grove lease about to expire, did I find a home — a spacious white clapboard New England–style house. In July of 2007 I hired a moving company to transport all my furniture, clothes, and guitars, along with my Lexus, bike, and fifty boxes of personal paraphernalia up to New Canaan.
Prince Philip wrote that he had been surprised to learn I was returning to live in an area of North America that would soon be blanketed with snow, and he suggested I escape to the West Indies should I feel the need for some extra sunshine. However, such thoughts were far from my mind at the time. For the moment I was focused on my move and what lay in store for me in my new home. I couldn’t wait to begin rehearsing with Srdjan and to finally start recording together.
Packing up my life in Miami was a huge job. I sold off some of my furniture through Craigslist and enlisted the help of a couple of friends, including Ted. But it was mostly I who stayed up night after night parcelling, labelling, and sealing boxes. I turned up the volume on my stereo and blasted out the music of Julio Iglesias, whose Spanish songs always seemed to lift my spirits and whose music had accompanied my house moves over the years. There was no time for nostalgia, however, even though my dream of living forever in the Latin world had failed. Reality had taught me that things are not always as depicted in songs or on television.
Once unpacked, reorganized, and settled into my new abode, I joined the local YMCA and quickly memorized the town streets. It was fun to be exploring a new area, and Srdjan and I immediately began work on some new songs to add to our program. On weekends he could easily drive up from his home in Bernardsville, New Jersey, heading north toward me along the leafy Merrick Parkway.
Quite frequently I took the train into New York, where I could arrive in Grand Central Station within an hour. Manhattan, with its cultural delights, colourful neighbourhoods, and a few new-found friends, became part of my New England life. I explored Greenwich Village, attended guitar meet-ups in Soho, lunched at Wolf’s Deli and the Russian Tea Room, both of which I remembered from the seventies, and wandered around Central Park, always secretly hoping I might have a chance encounter with a romantic stranger.
Well-intentioned friends arranged several dates for me, but nobody captivated me enough to make me want to pursue a serious relationship. Through attending the occasional concert, play, or charity event, I developed friendships in nearby Westport and Greenwich with people who are still in my life to this day. Vincent, a young French pilot, occasionally cooked dinner at my place, and one fan flew in from Rancho Santa Fe, California, to take me to the theatre in New York. I reconnected with Joseph Pastore, the man who had presented me in Carnegie Recital Hall at the very dawning of my career, and we spent an enjoyable weekend at the home of his friends on Fire Island, drinking wine while discussing parapsychology and extraterrestrials.
At the same time I was making new friends in Connecticut and New York, I was dealing with the task of getting my last name changed. The process of switching my surname from Simon back to Boyd seemed to take forever, as I became caught in a bureaucratic Catch-22 due to the fact that the name connected with my social security number did not match the one appearing in my Canadian passport. Beyond getting my name changed by the government, I also had to wade through entanglements with the many businesses and music publishing organizations I dealt with, to say nothing of the headaches I had restoring my various airline miles, which were all listed under Boyd Simon or Simon Boyd.
Trips down to the Social Security office and the Department of Motor Vehicles in Norwalk, and couriered exchanges with the L.A. County courthouse, which held my original name change documents, were a nightmare and felt like a waste of so much precious time. I swore to my girlfriends that I would never ever change my last name again!
• • •
In New Canaan Srdjan and Joanne immediately hit it off, establishing a link with their common Croatian backgrounds. Slowly we recorded our romantic songs. Srdjan encouraged me to sing “If Only Love,” a song whose melody I had originally written out on a Kleenex box in a hotel room thirty years earlier. What a thrill it was for me to finally sing this lovely song that had been only an instrumental for many years. Somehow my music video for this piece, which had been beautifully filmed in Palm Springs, California, went missing over the years and sadly no copy seems to exist, in spite of extensive searching.
Aside from the time I was working on music or visiting New York, I spent most of my days and nights in New Canaan alone. Indeed, for the most part my only visitor that year was Srdjan, who seemed to delight in my improvised home cooking — though I know his wife and daughter to be far better than I when it comes to culinary skills!
I did have the occasional visitor. Mehdi Ali filmed a partial documentary on my struggles with musician’s
