Paul Simon on Almost Everything, Chapter 2 of 5: "The S & G Years: 1964-1970"
Simon wasted no time in expanding his palette—"What strikes me is how many colors I used, and how early"—but Garfunkel's choirboy voice and ethereal presence steered the duo towards preciousness
The Moody Blues, January 22, 1966. “The Sound of Silence” had hit #1 on January 1
BUDDY HOLLY WAS DEAD, as was Paul Simon’s beloved doo-wop. Jerry Lee Lewis was ostracized, Chuck Berry in prison, and Elvis at the Colonel’s beck and call. “By the end of the fifties,” Simon said years later, “rock had run out of genuine creative stuff, and it was stupid. The records I was making were stupid. They were just gimmicky.” At the same time, the folk boom was underway, triggered largely by Simon’s almost-exact contemporary, Bob Dylan. Sick of writing stupid songs that never charted, Simon began steeping himself in the work of serious poets, novelists, and playwrights, and in Dylan’s, and other folkies’, music. Sick as well of the claustrophobia of midtown Manhattan’s music district, Simon lit out for England, whose folk scene, he’d heard, was as active as, if not more so, than America’s.
Simon spent the years between early 1963 and late 1965 shuttling between New York and England, flourishing on the English folk-club circuit, his expatriate status giving him a degree of éclat. “I remember being introduced as ‘Paul Simon from New York,’” he said, “and people actually cheered.” He fell deeply in love for the first time, worked hard on his songwriting, learned to play the folkie’s mandatory finger-picking style, and cut a solo album (see below). The songs he’d begun writing were, for the most part, naive civil-rights and anti-war anthems, although, drawing on his new literary influences, Simon managed to imbue one or two with a deeper, existential disaffection.
On one of Simon’s returns home, he bumped into Art Garfunkel, now a graduate architecture student at Columbia, who had cut a few singles himself, as “Artie Garr.” They renewed their partnership (this time under their real names), informally at first, but managed to land a recording contract with Columbia Records, Dylan’s label. The producer who signed Paul and Art, Tom Wilson, had produced Dylan’s second, third and fourth albums—The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changing, and Another Side of Bob Dylan, and within a year would play a key role in Dylan’s move to an electric sound on his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home.1 “I liked Tom a lot,” Simon recalled. “He had a high element of cool.” The song that prompted Wilson to sign Simon and Garfunkel was an anomaly, one of the only early Simon compositions to overcome cliché, its strong lyric conveying a genuine, not merely adolescent, malaise. “Tom signed us because of ‘The Sound of Silence,’ said Simon.2
Between March 10, 1964, when Simon and Garfunkel cut “Sound,” and April 1, they, Wilson, and Roy Halee—the engineer and eventual co-producer who would become Simon and Garfunkel’s, and then the solo Simon’s, essential collaborator—recorded the rest of Simon and Garfunkel’s first, redundantly titled album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. It had precisely one good song.
Released that October, the album went nowhere, selling perhaps 1,000 copies. The following summer, Tom Wilson began hearing from disc jockeys at several East Coast stations, including the late-night jock at Boston’s powerful WBZ, which reached 38 states and parts of Canada, were getting request after request for “The Sound of Silence.”
Tom Wilson was nobody’s fool. On June 26, 1965, the Byrds’ electric version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”, went to #1 on Billboard’s all-important Hot 100. Dylan’s epochal “Like a Rolling Stone,” (Wilson’s final, and most significant, contribution to Columbia Records), was released on July 20, went to #2 on September 4, and stayed on the charts for 12 weeks. The folk-rock era was underway, with folkies plugging in everywhere, and Wilson had a hunch that an electrified “Sounds of Silence” would be catnip to America’s record-buyers. Without consulting Simon (who was in England) or Garfunkel, Wilson went into Columbia’s Studio A with Roy Halee, two electric guitarists, an electric bassist, and a drummer, and recut the song.
Wilson’s hunch was spot on. “We owe him a lot,” Simon was to say. Paul was in London when Garfunkel phoned him from New York. The re-cut “Sound of Silence” was sturdily making its way up America’s charts, and Columbia’s top brass wanted Simon back in the USA immediately. Rather than simply replace the original, acoustic version of “The Sound of Silence” on Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., Columbia wanted to cut an entire new album, entitled Sounds of Silence, that would showcase the new, hit-bound version.
“Kathy’s Song,” one of the few really good early Paul Simon compositions. Simon wrote it for Kathy Chitty, his first serious girlfriend, whom he met in the summer of 1964 on one of his English sojourns. He recorded the song on what was, in fact, the first Paul Simon solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, cut in London for $150 in the summer of 1965. Unreleased stateside until 1981, the album proved an ample repository: nine of its songs, including “Kathy’s Song,” found their way onto Simon & Garfunkel albums.
When Paul Simon stepped off the plane in New York, the song was at #26 at Billboard, its momentum gathering daily. It hit #1 on January 1, 1966. At the eye of a hurricane, Simon and Garfunkel were at a loss to digest a success this spectacular. For the time being, their lives remained unchanged, both still living at home. One night in January, driving around Queens with nothing to do, Paul and Artie pulled into an empty lot and sat listening to the radio. The DJ introduced “The Sound of Silence” as “the Number One record in America!” Garfunkel looked at Simon and said, “Wow. I bet those guys are having a great time.”
The Simon and Garfunkel years (which comprised literally one-tenth of Simon’s 60-plus-year career), were Simon’s least adventurous. He was beginning to explore new sounds and textures—as he says in the interview segment below, “It strikes me how many colors I used, and how early”—but Garfunkel’s choirboy voice and ethereal presence almost inevitably steered the music towards preciousness. Further, it took Simon a good while to rid his songs of the jejune adolescence of “I Am a Rock” or “The Dangling Conversation”’s faux world-weariness (“You read your Emily Dickinson/And I my Robert Frost/And we note out places with bookmarks/That measure what we’ve lost.”) Yuck. Ellen Willis, the New Yorker’s brilliant first pop music critic, had little use for Simon, complaining in 1967 that his go-to subjects, “the soullessness of commercial society and man’s inability to communicate…appealed to kidswho hadn’t read much modern poetry but knew what it was supposed to be about, or were over impressed with their own nascent Weltschmerz, or both.”
By my count, the Simon & Garfunkel corpus (Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.; Sounds of Silence; Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme; Bookends, and Bridge Over Troubled Water) contains only a handful of songs that are still on their feet: literally none, except “The Sound of Silence,” from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M; “Kathy’s Song” from Sounds of Silence; nothing (except perhaps “Homeward Bound,” from Parsley, Sage); “America” (Simon’s best early song since “The Sound of Silence”), “Old Friends,” “Fakin’ It” (which owes its sonic richness and sleights-of-hand to Simon’s ‘50s apprenticeship in Manhattan’s recording studios) and “Mrs. Robinson” (the extended version, not the two truncated takes from The Graduate), in which Simon began to experiment with the verbal obliqueness of his later years, and which won 1969’s Grammy for Best Song of the Year, the first rock song (stretching the term) to do so, all from Bookends. S & G’s final statement, Bridge Over Troubled Water, contains two of their three best songs: “The Boxer” (which Roy Halee considered the best song the duo ever cut) and the title song, in which Garfunkel finally unleashes that tenor, whose power and majesty had almost always been sacrificed for sweetness. Bridge Over Troubled Water won six 1970 Grammys, including Album of the Year, spent six weeks at #1 (the album spent 10), and went on to sell 25 million copies, the industry’s bestselling album ever until Michael Jackson’s Thriller surpassed it in 1983. Still, I am sobered by what I believe to be the case: of the more than 50 singles that Simon and Garfunkel released, just three—”The Sound of Silence,” “The Boxer” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water”—are for the ages.3
There had never been a period when there wasn’t tension between Simon and Garfunkel, going all the way back to the Tom and Jerry days. By Bridge Over Troubled Water, the enmity was more or less out in the open. During the long fade to that album’s “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” (itself a camouflaged farewell to Garfunkel, who had not abandoned his architectural ambitions), when Garfunkel repeatedly sings, “So long… so long”, the close listener can hear, deeply buried in the mix, somebody shouting, “So long already, Artie!” It wasn’t Simon, as many have thought, but Roy Halee, wisecracking about the interminable fade—but also voicing what everyone around the duo knew. Simon, and Garfunkel as well, if to a lesser extent—wanted out; as Garfunkel later said, “I remember thinking, ‘When this record’s over, I want to rest from Paul Simon.’ And I would swear he was feeling the same thing.” Correct. “I didn’t need Artie,” Simon was realizing. His girlfriend and wife-to-be, Peggy Harper, “encouraged me. She thought it was time to leave and do what I wanted.”
Garfunkel, meanwhile, was taking steps towards an acting career, appearing in Catch 22, Mike Nichols’s film of the Joseph Heller novel. When Garfunkel agreed, without telling Simon, to star in a second Nichols film, Carnal Knowledge, that was all it took. “When he agreed to make Carnal Knowledge,” Simon recalled, “something was broken between us. I just wanted to move on. We were finished,” except for an immensely profitable, decades-long string of reunion concerts and tours.
The producer/arranger Quincy Jones, who followed Simon’s career for decades, and contributed an arrangement to There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, the artist’s second solo album, once told an interviewer, “There are a lot of factors that comprise great artistry, including passion, musical curiosity, and fearlessness. And the first rule of being an artist is that you’ve got to protect all three. If Paul hadn’t left Garfunkel, a piece of that artistry could have died. He did what he had to do.”
Garfunkel alone (if not in this photo), singing the not-yet-released “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to the overwhelming applause that his performance of the song routinely generated. Almost unquestionably the duo’s best piece of work, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was also their swan song. By the time the eponymous album was released, Simon had made up his mind to go solo.
Wilson co-produced Freewheelin’ with the legendary Columbia producer John Hammond, who’d signed Dylan to the label.
Re “The Sound of Silence”’s lyrical strength: Dick Summer, the WBZ jock who was largely responsible for putting the song across, was that rare DJ of a literary bent, an English major drawn to the powerful line “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.”
Secrets from a songwriter’s notebook: Simon was especially proud of “Bridge”’s lyric. Asked to name an inspired moment, a special instance of songwriting triumph, Simon cited the line “Like a bridge over troubled water/I will lay me down.” “It just came,” he said. “Seconds before, there was nothing, and then there was.” Simon had had long been drawn to a track on a 1959 album by gospel music’s the Swan Silvertones. Into the group’s version of the well-known pre-Civil War spiritual “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep,” the Silvertones’ lead singer, the Rev. Claude Jeter, had spontaneously injected the line, “I’ll be a bridge over deep water, if you trust in me.” “I thought, ‘this is better than I usually write,’” Simon recalled. “It just seemed to flow through me. In a way, you don’t feel you can even really call it your own….” You can hear Simon’s initial coment (“It just came….”) in the brief audio segment below.
The late Allen Toussaint, incidentally, one of the great masters of New Orleans-rooted music, once said, “When I hear ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’ I tell people, ‘That song had two writers: Paul Simon and God.’” Whatever the source, the song just flowed through him….