Simon & Garfunkel album

Bridge Over Troubled Water was one of the biggest-selling albums of its decade, and it hasn't fallen too far down on the list in years since. Apart from the gospel-flavored title track, which took some evolution to get to what it finally became, however, much of Bridge Over Troubled Water also constitutes a stepping back from the music that Simon & Garfunkel had made on Bookends -- this was mostly because the creative partnership that had formed the body and the motivation for the duo's four prior albums literally consumed itself in the making of Bridge Over Troubled Water. And, ironically, it all grew out of events that went back more than two years, to the hookup between Simon & Garfunkel and film director Mike Nichols on the movie The Graduate. The creative contact between Paul Simon and Nichols had yielded one monster hit ("Mrs. Robinson") and some rejections from the film ("Overs," "Punky's Dilemma"), and also a soundtrack that had greatly broadened the duo's audience; and it had introduced would-be actor Art Garfunkel to Nichols. And, suddenly, Garfunkel was involved in the shooting of Nichols' Catch-22, which took up most of his time for the better part of a year, and Simon was left to his own devices during his partner's absences. Thus, the close collaboration between the two, which had existed in this phase of their lives since 1965, was frayed not just at the edges but down to its very core. The very idea of a concept album such as Bookends had been, even if a concept could have been suggested, was thus out of the question.

As it turned out, absent anything as powerful as the sustained first side of Bookends, much of the resulting material here is fine, albeit relatively lightweight: "Baby Driver" with its Jan & Dean-style harmonies and early-'60s rock & roll beat; the upbeat "Cecelia," utilizing the largest array of percussion ever heard on a Simon & Garfunkel song; the live rendition of the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love"; and the reggae beat of "Why Don't You Write Me." Moreover, it was possible to discern a recurring theme on Bridge Over Troubled Water, but this was much more a reflection of the condition of the partnership than a conscious artistic statement -- where Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme had been built around middle-class teen and post-teen zeitgeist, and Bookends focused on the joys and dangers of growing old, Bridge Over Troubled Water had songs that quietly betrayed the fissures in the partnership: "The Only Living Boy in New York" was Simon's personal account of the isolation he felt on a creative level over Garfunkel's extended absence; "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" was a memorial to the architect, written for Garfunkel to sing, but it could just as easily be thought of as a farewell to his longtime collaborator Garfunkel (who had aspirations of being an architect); even "Why Don't You Write Me" was a song about lack of communication that seemed to slot into the division between the two partners.

Bridge Over Troubled Water had a lot more in common with the Beatles' Let It Be album than with any prior Simon & Garfunkel release -- except that Simon, in reaching to the bottom of his song bag, along with Garfunkel and producer/engineer Roy Halee, in applying their arranging skills in this dire situation, came up with a transcendent album. The title track was the best example; by some accounts, Garfunkel had insisted that Simon sing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" on first hearing it. The piece evolved in their hands, however, and ultimately benefited from what many regard as the best recorded vocal performance of Garfunkel's career. Similarly, "The Only Living Boy in New York" was an obviously deeply personal song, but Garfunkel managed to add an extraordinary accompaniment to the composer's lead vocal. And there were places where the two were on the same page from the get-go, such as "El Condor Pasa." The overall effect was perhaps the most delicately textured album to close out the 1960s from any major rock act. Comparing other farewells of the same era, either to partnerships or the decade, the Beatles' Let It Be was a flawed, threadbare representation of the group's work, and the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, which marked the last musical contributions of Brian Jones and their last new work for their old label, was a nasty, unsettling statement. Bridge Over Troubled Water, at its most ambitious and bold, on its title track, was a quietly reassuring album; at other times, it was personal yet soothing, and at other times, it was just plain fun.

The public in 1970 -- a very unsettled time politically, socially, and culturally -- embraced it, and whatever mood they captured, the songs matched the standard of craftsmanship that had been established on the duo's two prior albums. Between the record's overall quality and its four hits -- "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "The Boxer" (which had been recorded and released prior to the LP), "El Condor Pasa," and "Cecelia," which kept the duo on the AM airwaves for months -- the album held the number one position for two and a half months and spent years on the charts, racking up sales in excess of five million copies. It also managed to cross over between segments of the audience that the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and others seldom reached -- siblings from teens to early thirties bought it, and teenagers and their parents alike loved different parts of the record. The songs were widely covered by artists in virtually every category, and the entire LP's worth of material was rethought in a jazz vein by Paul Desmond on A&M Records. The irony was that for all of the record's and the music's appeal, the duo itself -- the partnership -- ended in the course of creating and completing the album. [The August 2001 remastering of Bridge Over Troubled Water is the first-ever CD version of the album that sounds good -- properly mastered off of what sounds like the real first-generation tapes, it lives up to the expectations that one had for this record on CD. Neither of the two additional bonus tracks adds significantly to the record, although the demo of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" does give a hint of the song's evolution.]

Bridge Over Troubled Water was one of the biggest-selling albums of its decade, and it hasn't fallen too far down on the list in years since. Apart from the gospel-flavored title track, which took some evolution to get to what it finally became, however, much of Bridge Over Troubled Water also constitutes a stepping back from the music that Simon & Garfunkel had made on Bookends -- this was mostly because the creative partnership that had formed the body and the motivation for the duo's four prior albums literally consumed itself in the making of Bridge Over Troubled Water. And, ironically, it all grew out of events that went back more than two years, to the hookup between Simon & Garfunkel and film director Mike Nichols on the movie The Graduate. The creative contact between Paul Simon and Nichols had yielded one monster hit ("Mrs. Robinson") and some rejections from the film ("Overs," "Punky's Dilemma"), and also a soundtrack that had greatly broadened the duo's audience; and it had introduced would-be actor Art Garfunkel to Nichols. And, suddenly, Garfunkel was involved in the shooting of Nichols' Catch-22, which took up most of his time for the better part of a year, and Simon was left to his own devices during his partner's absences. Thus, the close collaboration between the two, which had existed in this phase of their lives since 1965, was frayed not just at the edges but down to its very core. The very idea of a concept album such as Bookends had been, even if a concept could have been suggested, was thus out of the question.

As it turned out, absent anything as powerful as the sustained first side of Bookends, much of the resulting material here is fine, albeit relatively lightweight: "Baby Driver" with its Jan & Dean-style harmonies and early-'60s rock & roll beat; the upbeat "Cecelia," utilizing the largest array of percussion ever heard on a Simon & Garfunkel song; the live rendition of the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love"; and the reggae beat of "Why Don't You Write Me." Moreover, it was possible to discern a recurring theme on Bridge Over Troubled Water, but this was much more a reflection of the condition of the partnership than a conscious artistic statement -- where Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme had been built around middle-class teen and post-teen zeitgeist, and Bookends focused on the joys and dangers of growing old, Bridge Over Troubled Water had songs that quietly betrayed the fissures in the partnership: "The Only Living Boy in New York" was Simon's personal account of the isolation he felt on a creative level over Garfunkel's extended absence; "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" was a memorial to the architect, written for Garfunkel to sing, but it could just as easily be thought of as a farewell to his longtime collaborator Garfunkel (who had aspirations of being an architect); even "Why Don't You Write Me" was a song about lack of communication that seemed to slot into the division between the two partners.

Bridge Over Troubled Water had a lot more in common with the Beatles' Let It Be album than with any prior Simon & Garfunkel release -- except that Simon, in reaching to the bottom of his song bag, along with Garfunkel and producer/engineer Roy Halee, in applying their arranging skills in this dire situation, came up with a transcendent album. The title track was the best example; by some accounts, Garfunkel had insisted that Simon sing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" on first hearing it. The piece evolved in their hands, however, and ultimately benefited from what many regard as the best recorded vocal performance of Garfunkel's career. Similarly, "The Only Living Boy in New York" was an obviously deeply personal song, but Garfunkel managed to add an extraordinary accompaniment to the composer's lead vocal. And there were places where the two were on the same page from the get-go, such as "El Condor Pasa." The overall effect was perhaps the most delicately textured album to close out the 1960s from any major rock act. Comparing other farewells of the same era, either to partnerships or the decade, the Beatles' Let It Be was a flawed, threadbare representation of the group's work, and the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, which marked the last musical contributions of Brian Jones and their last new work for their old label, was a nasty, unsettling statement. Bridge Over Troubled Water, at its most ambitious and bold, on its title track, was a quietly reassuring album; at other times, it was personal yet soothing, and at other times, it was just plain fun.

The public in 1970 -- a very unsettled time politically, socially, and culturally -- embraced it, and whatever mood they captured, the songs matched the standard of craftsmanship that had been established on the duo's two prior albums. Between the record's overall quality and its four hits -- "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "The Boxer" (which had been recorded and released prior to the LP), "El Condor Pasa," and "Cecelia," which kept the duo on the AM airwaves for months -- the album held the number one position for two and a half months and spent years on the charts, racking up sales in excess of five million copies. It also managed to cross over between segments of the audience that the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and others seldom reached -- siblings from teens to early thirties bought it, and teenagers and their parents alike loved different parts of the record. The songs were widely covered by artists in virtually every category, and the entire LP's worth of material was rethought in a jazz vein by Paul Desmond on A&M Records. The irony was that for all of the record's and the music's appeal, the duo itself -- the partnership -- ended in the course of creating and completing the album. [In 2004, Sony International released a version of this recording with deluxe packaging as part of their Vinyl Classics line]

In March of 1968, Robert Kennedy was still alive and offering a vision for a way out to the America that had deeply entrenched itself in the Vietnam War. The inner-city rebellions in 1967 had shaken the youth culture's image of their own summer of love in that year. The beginning of America's crippling identity crisis had begun to shudder through the culture that would erupt with the death of Kennedy later that spring and the tragedy of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later that summer. Before it was all over, Martin Luther King, Jr. had also lost his life. In pop culture, rock was exploding everywhere in Western culture. The impact of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds -- both made in 1966 -- and the appearance of Jimi Hendrix on the pop scene in 1967 had ushered in a new way of making records, a way that not only referred to and portrayed everyday life but was part of its acceptance for what it was before attempting to transcend it. Earlier that spring, Simon and Garfunkel had slipped their fourth album into the bins with a whisper, the confoundingly literary, profoundly poetic and stunningly beautiful Bookends. Columbia Legacy has presented us S&G's entire catalog painstakingly remastered with extra tracks. The sound on these discs -- and Bookends in particular -- is amazing. It is literally true that there are instrumental passages and studio atmospherics that have never before been audible. As a pair, the two were seemingly equal collaborators with producer and engineer Roy Halee on a highly textured, multi-layered song cycle that offered observations on everything from urban crises that were symptomatic of larger issues, the prospect of old age and death, the loss and dislocation of those who desperately wanted to inherit an American Dream but not the one offered to them, surreal yet wistful reflections on youthful innocence lost forever to the cold winds of change.

Bookends is a literary album that contains the most minimal of openings with the theme, an acoustic guitar stating itself slowly and plaintively before erupting into the wash of synthesizers and dissonance that is "Save the Life of My Child." The uneasy rock & roll that carries the song through its disaster and the revelation of "Oh my grace, I've got no hiding place," which is the mere hint of what is to come in this wide open terrain of the previously familiar but completely unknown. The classic "America" is next, a folk song with a lilting soprano saxophone in the refrain and a small pipe organ painting the acoustic guitars in the more poignant verses. The song relies on pop structures to carry its message of hope and disillusionment as two people travel the American landscape searching for it until it dawns on them that everyone else on the freeway is doing the same thing. Its sweetness and sophisticated melodic invention are toppled by the message of the song and it becomes an ellipsis, a cipher, turned back on itself into disappearance, wondering what question to ask next. The sound of a lit cigarette is the opening of "Overs," a balladic study in the emptiness at the end of the relationship. The sound of inhaling and exhaling of the smoke tells the entire story. Also woven into the mix is a two-minute field recording of the voices of old people made by Garfunkel, collected from nursing homes and centers for the aged. The disembodied voices are chilling and heartbreakingly beautiful in their different observations, entire lifetimes summed up in a few seconds. This interlude leads into "Old Friends," which carries the message deeper as the image of two old men sitting on a park bench in languid statements of life lived ordinarily but poetically share not only their memories but also the commonality of their fear. A horn section threatens to interrupt the reverie, carrying the chaos they feel, their lack of control over current events, but is warded off as denial and the gentleness of the melody returns and fades into the album's opening theme, suggesting that we preserve our memories. As "Fakin' It" kicks to the fore, we feel the separation inherent in Simon's generational view of the unconscious separation of heart and mind. The tune is as full of hooks as a fishing boat and Halee swipes a bit from the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and eases orchestral layers into the mix, subtly of course, but ever-present and recognizable nonetheless. With "Fakin' It," the depth of the album's meditation presents itself in earnest. Synth lines and handclaps give way to snare drums and acoustic guitars, and the first appearance of loss shows itself for what it is, the passing of life, moment by moment, memory by memory so quickly, that pretending is somehow preferable to the reality of everyday life. When the horn section and strings bring the crescendos and the lyric asserts, "This feeling of fakin' it/I still haven't shaken it/I know I'm fakin' it/I'm not really makin' it." Even Leonard Cohen's dark prophecies never stated the case so plainly -- in a folk-rock tune. The identity crisis inherent in the jazzy "Punky's Dilemma" melds the loss of innocence and childhood with the cynicism of present-day living. The final four tracks of the original album, "Mrs. Robinson," the theme song for the film The Graduate, "A Hazy Shade of Winter," and the album's final track, the George-influenced "At the Zoo," offer as tremblingly bleak a vision for the future as any thing done by the Velvet Underground, but rooted in the lives of everyday people, not in the decadent underground personages of New York's Factory studio. But the album is also a warning that to pay attention is to take as much control of one's fate as possible. The bonus tracks, a different take of "Old Friends" and "You Don't Know Where Your Interest Lies" -- which ended up as the B-side of "Hazy Shade of Winter" -- add dimension to what was easily the most ambitious recording of Simon & Garfunkel's career. Its problematic themes, spare yet striking arrangements, and augmented orchestral instrumentation created a backdrop for the sounds of a generation moving through a workaday world they no longer accepted as real, a world they never understood in first place. That S&G never overstate the case here, never preach to the converted but instead almost journalistically observe the questions in the process of their being asked is a monumental achievement. That they did so in three- and four-minute pop songs is almost inconceivable for the time.

Simon & Garfunkel's second album, Sounds of Silence, was a radical departure from their first, owing to its being recorded in the wake of "The Sound of Silence," with its overdubbed electric instrument backing, topping the charts. Paul Simon arrived with a large song-bag, enhanced by his stay in England the previous year and his exposure to British folk music, and the duo rushed into the studio to come up with ten more songs that would fit into the folk-rock context of the single. The result was this, their most hurried and uncharacteristic album -- Simon and Art Garfunkel had to sound like something they weren't, surrounded on many cuts by amplified folk-rock-style guitar, electric piano, and even horns. Much of the material came from The Paul Simon Songbook, an album that Simon had recorded for British CBS during his stay in England, some parts of it more radically altered than others. The record was a rushed job overall, and apart from the title track, the most important songs here were also, oddly enough, among the least enduring -- "I Am a Rock" and "Richard Cory" -- the former for establishing the duo (and Simon as a songwriter) as confessional pop-poets, as sensitive and alienated post-adolescents, which endeared them to millions of college students going through what later came to be called an "identity crisis," and the latter for endearing them to thousands of high-school English teachers with its adaptation of Edward Arlington Robinson's poem. [This Japanese release includes bonus material.]

Simon & Garfunkel's second album was a radical departure from their first (Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.), owing to its being recorded in the wake of "The Sound of Silence" single, with its overdubbed electric instrument backing, topping the charts. Paul Simon arrived with a large songbag, enhanced by his stay in England over the previous year and his exposure to English folk music (and the work of Martin Carthy and Davy Graham, among others), and the duo rushed into the studio to come up with ten more songs that would fit into the folk-rock context of the single. The result was this, their most hurried and uncharacteristic album -- Simon and Art Garfunkel had to sound like something they weren't, surrounded on many cuts by amplified folk-rock-style guitar, electric piano, and even horns. Much of the material came from The Paul Simon Songbook, an album that Simon had recorded for British CBS during his stay in England, some parts of it more radically altered than others. "Kathy's Song" and "April Come She Will," two of the most personal songs in Simon's output, were close to the stripped-down originals, and among the most affecting (as opposed to affected) folk-style records of their era; Simon's rendition of Davy Graham's folk-blues instrumental "Anji" is also close to his British version, just recorded hotter, while "Leaves That Are Green" is pleasantly ornamented with electric harpischord and features a more prominent rhythm guitar; "Blessed," by contrast, is given a dissonant electric guitar accompaniment that sounds like the Byrds trying very hard to annoy people.

Some of the rest, like "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" and "We've Got a Groovy Thing Goin'," show Simon & Garfunkel sounding more like the Cyrkle later did, with a smooth, hip dual persona far removed from the thoughtful innocence of "April Come She Will" or "Kathy's Song." The record was a rushed job overall, and, apart from the title track, the most important songs here were also, oddly enough, among the least enduring, including "I Am a Rock" and "Richard Cory" -- the former for establishing the duo (and Simon as a songwriter) as confessional pop poets, sensitive and alienated post-adolescents that endeared them to millions of college student going through what later came to be called an "identity crisis" (you had to be there to understand it), and the latter for endearing them to thousands of high school English teachers with its adaptation of Edward Arlington Robinson's poem. Other folk artists, including Phil Ochs, had adapted well-known poems to music, but it was Simon & Garfunkel's effort that took in the classrooms of the era, getting played, discussed and studied at the behest of English teachers who were desperate for anything that would interest and motivate their students -- even if the kids thought it was a joke, it beat reading straight poetry, and the response to "Richard Cory" was kind of radical in the context of the time, when music played on electric instruments wasn't welcomed of even tolerated in most school settings. It earned Simon & Garfunkel a passport to middle-class respectability in official and establishment circles that Bob Dylan, the Beatles, et al., did not yet have. The August 2001 remastering restores the original, uncensored back-cover art (depicting Art Garfunkel holding what the powers-that-were later decided was a decidedly uncool copy of Tiger Beat magazine, airbrushed out of later copies), and also features the first genuinely good sound ever heard on any CD edition of this album, and also includes four bonus tracks. Jackson C. Frank's "Blues Run the Game" (which also appears on the Old Friends box) is the best of them, an acoustic number that offers a more mature folk style, and might have slotted in stylistically on the Sounds of Silence album, except that it fit neither the mood of innocent discovery nor the youthful poet posturing that dominated the rest of the record. "Barbriallen" is a throwback to the duo's Everly Brothers-influenced folk style off their first LP, while "Rose of Aberdeen" is a pleasant if inconclusive example of Simon adapting English folk music, and "The Roving Gambler" is a sweetly sung echo of the folk revival of which Simon & Garfunkel had briefly been a part, outdoing the Everlys (and, for that matter, the Easy Riders) at their own game. Add another half-star to rate the value of the 2001 reissue, for sound and "Blues Run the Game."

Wednesday Morning, 3 AM doesn't resemble any other Simon & Garfunkel album, because the Simon & Garfunkel sound here was different from that of the chart-topping duo that emerged a year later. Their first record together since their days as the teen duo of Tom & Jerry, the album was cut in March 1964 and, in keeping with their own sincere interests at the time, it was a folk-revival album. Paul Simon was just spreading his wings as a serious songwriter and shares space with other composers as well as a pair of traditional songs, including a beautifully harmonized rendition of "Peggy-O." The album opens with a spirited (if somewhat arch) rendition of Gibson and Camp's gospel/folk piece "You Can Tell the World." Also present is Ian Campbell's "The Sun Is Burning," which Simon heard on his first visit to England as an itinerant folksinger, which would later yield such works as "Anji" and "Scarborough Fair." But the dominant outside personality on the album is that of Bob Dylan -- his "Times They Are A-Changing" is covered, but his influence is manifest on the oldest of the Simon originals here, "He Was My Brother." Simon's first serious, topical song, it was what first interested Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson in Simon & Garfunkel. He'd written it before the event, but Simon later identified the song closely with the fate of his Queens College classmate Andrew Goodman, one of three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964. By the time the album was recorded, however, Simon had evolved beyond Dylan as an inspiration and developed a unique songwriting voice of his own in the title track, a beautifully sung, half-lovely song (that also shows his limitations, employing the phrase "hard liquor store" because he needed the extra syllable); "Sparrow" and "Bleecker Street," spritely, mystical, and mysterious, and innocently poignant observations on life; and "The Sounds of Silence" in its original all-acoustic version, a heartfelt and defiant statement about the human condition and the shape of the world. Art Garfunkel's makes his own contribution on the creative side with a beautiful arrangement of "Benedictus." It's surprisingly ambitious but also somewhat disjointed, mostly because the non-original material, apart from "Peggy-O" and "The Sun Is Burning," comes off so arch. The seeds of their future success were here, however, and took root when the version of "The Sounds of Silence" on this album started getting played on the radio, in Boston and Florida, respectively.