Simon & Garfunkel

by Spencer Leigh

  And went without the meat and cursed the bread;

  And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

  Went home and put a bullet through his head.

  Simon retains the surprise but in neither version is there any explanation as to why Richard Cory should have done this. Robinson dwells on his material success and Simon includes orgies and yachts. Simon adds a subtlety to Robinson’s poem by repeating the chorus after his death, thereby implying that the workers envy Cory’s ability in being able to do away with himself.

  It is easy to see why this poem appealed to Paul Simon. They both understood being lonely in a crowd, and such songs as ‘A Most Peculiar Man’ and ‘I Am a Rock’ mark out Simon as a latter-day Mr Robinson. Indeed, Simon emphasises the link by placing ‘A Most Peculiar Man’ next to ‘Richard Cory’ on the LP. There is a sudden jolt in the arrangement for the suicide in ‘Richard Cory’, whereas the death comes with understated delivery in ‘A Most Peculiar Man’. The sweetness of the duo’s harmonies on ‘A Most Peculiar Man’ weakens the overall impact while the version on The Paul Simon Songbook is unsettling.

  Like ‘Richard Cory’, ‘Blessed’ was also written in London. Simon wrote it while sheltering from a downpour in St Anne’s Church in Soho. He updates the Sermon on the Mount for pot sellers and meths drinkers, while the backing duplicates the jingle-jangle of the Byrds.

  In January 1966 ‘The Sound of Silence’ replaced the Dave Clark Five’s ‘Over and Over’ at the top of the US charts, which suggests that competition wasn’t very strong, but for the next month their record and the Beatles’ ‘We Can Work It Out’ criss-crossed with each other at No. 1, an extraordinary achievement. The Beatles and their publicity machine were being held back by two singers who hadn’t done any promotion.

  Indeed, they were both at home with their families. They remember smoking joints and listening to the car radio. ‘It’s No. 1, it’s Simon & Garfunkel,’ said the DJ. Artie responded dryly, ‘That Simon & Garfunkel act must be having a wonderful time.’

  Simon & Garfunkel needed a good manager. They picked Mort Lewis, who was handling the Brothers Four and had been involved with Lenny Bruce, Stan Kenton and Dave Brubeck. He had seen action in World War II, which was good training for dealing with Simon and Garfunkel.

  Lewis could secure $10,000 a week in concert earnings, and they agreed provided the contract could be terminated in six months. The first shows were okay but they needed to work on their introductions and not sound like schoolteachers.

  With bad hairdos, bad hats and the appearance of a comedy duo with the little dark-haired guy and the tall gangly one, Simon & Garfunkel didn’t look hip and never would. Art’s unruly hair was more of an identifying feature than a fashion statement, yet Tim Buckley with a similar style looked as hip as they come. Similarly, look at Bob Dylan with his iconic hair on the gatefold for Blonde on Blonde. I suppose it is all down to who is wearing the hair. Simon and Garfunkel never looked like rock stars and they were stopped by one guard at the entrance to a venue in Detroit. ‘We work here,’ snapped Simon.

  From Nashville, Tennessee, Peggy Ann Harper, Lewis’s wife, was a true life ‘Pretty Peggy-O’, fifteen years younger than him and two years older than Simon. She had dated one of the Brothers Four and then married Lewis in 1965. They proved incompatible and soon divorced.

  At first the bookings were wrong. They were booked for dances alongside the Yardbirds and the Four Seasons. They resolved the issue and found their niche on student campuses. ‘Art and I play the university dates,’ Paul told Keith Altham of the New Musical Express in April 1966, ‘We do about three every weekend all over the States. Do you know how much we earned last night in a concert in America? $4,300. I can’t grasp it. It means nothing to me. Art might say after a couple of concerts, “We earned $13,000 this weekend.” I kinda shrug and say, “That’s a good two days’ work.” Their homecoming concert at Forest Hills was a double-header with the Mamas & the Papas, another harmony group full of disharmony who were climbing the charts.

  Simon and Garfunkel wanted to promote ‘The Sound of Silence’ when it was released in the UK, but this was not possible as legislation prevented aliens working more than six months in the year in the UK. Paul had only worked in small folk clubs and even though that had been on a limited scale, the law was the law, and they’d have to wait.

  Bizarrely, their 45 never made the UK charts, but a cover version from the Irish balladeers, the Bachelors, did. They had had spectacular success with ‘I Believe’ and other oldies – and now they took ‘The Sound of Silence’ to No. 3. Maybe it polarised their audience as they never made the Top 10 again.

  The album was released in both territories as Sounds of Silence, but the British and American versions are different. The UK LP included their new single, the Widnes epic ‘Homeward Bound’, which was held back for their next US album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. ‘Homeward Bound’ is a world-weary account of life on the road for a poet and a one-man band (Simon at the time seeing himself as both) and in a few lines it describes the monotony of touring. A dull thump from a drum accentuates this feeling. The chorus contains an element of hope, and ‘home’ in this instance was London and his girlfriend Kathy, not America.

  More recently Paul Simon has said of ‘Homeward Bound’, ‘It is like a snapshot, a photograph of a very long time ago. I like that about it but I don’t like the song too much. I wish it had an original title instead of one that has been around forever, but it is naïve and sweet-natured. It’s not angry. It was an idyllic time for me.’

  ‘Homeward Bound’ was given a folk-rock setting, and the record made the US Top 10, but stopped at No. 5. The NME carried a New to the Charts feature and Simon and Garfunkel were the subject on 22 April 1966. It was headlined Enter the Intellectual Simon and Garfunkel. To justify this tag, the first paragraph ran, ‘Life is like a game. Everyone keeps trying to find out how to win. If you stopped trying to discover this, life would be nothing. The average rock’n’roll star does not give out similes like this. But then Paul Simon is not average. Simon and Garfunkel are not average.’

  Talk show host Simon Dee, Paul Simon and journalist Keith Altham, 1966 (New Musical Express)

  This ‘intellectual’ slant has been prominent from that day to this in newspaper articles about the duo, and they have encouraged it. There are many pictures of them looking studious and a typical pose was used on that ill-fated Allegro album which showed Garfunkel with the book Papa Hemingway. They felt aloof from their fellow artists. ‘We didn’t have anything to say to them,’ Paul Simon told Melody Maker in 1971. ‘We’d be on planes and getting into these long discussions about whatever – some offshoot of existentialism, some bullshitty college thing – but nobody else was doing that. So, in a way, although we were real good at making pop music, we weren’t of pop music.’

  Nevertheless, other performers were becoming interested in their songs. On 22 April, the Bachelors were at No. 5 with ‘The Sound of Silence’; the Australian folk band the Seekers were at No.16 with Paul Simon’s ‘Someday, One Day’ (a competent but unexciting song and performance); and Simon & Garfunkel were No. 20 with ‘Homeward Bound’. Three Paul Simon songs were in the Top 20. The Seekers took their song to No. 14 (No. 11 in Record Retailer), while ‘Homeward Bound’ climbed to No. 11 (No. 9 in Record Retailer). Apologies for the complexity over the chart placings, but the Guinness Book of Hit Singles follows the trade paper, Record Retailer, which at the time was also printed in Record Mirror. Regardless, the point I want to make is that ‘Homeward Bound’ was to be Simon and Garfunkel’s highest chart single in the UK until ‘Mrs Robinson’ in 1968.

  In addition, a cover version of ‘Homeward Bound’ by the Quiet Five on Parlophone made the UK Top 50, reaching No. 44. Richard Barnes, who later made ‘Take to the Mountains’ and was part of the Quiet Five, says, ‘We had not heard of Simon and Garfunkel but we liked the song and knew we would be competing with them. We both got into the charts but theirs went
up as we went down. Theirs was the best version and Paul Simon had written it, so fair enough.’

  The Bachelors had broken Paul Simon’s songs in the UK and made him around £5,000, but the press reported that he disliked their version of ‘The Sound of Silence’. Whether he made the remarks or not, I can’t say, but he was apologetic to the Bachelors and their fans in the NME: ‘I’ve never said that their version of my song is “disgusting” as one paper reported. I don’t sit in judgment over them. They’ve pleased an awful lot of people with that disc.’

  Even if Paul had never said what was reported, he still felt strongly about their version, as he told Norman Jopling of Record Mirror: ‘Like the Seekers and the Bachelors, what sort of image are we getting with our songs being recorded by groups like that? Our version of “The Sound of Silence” was far superior to the Bachelors’, but we didn’t even make the charts here.’

  Simon was right. Any good intentions that the Bachelors may have had about his songs were lost in sentimentality, an effect magnified by sugary strings. You can’t blame them. They had their own following to cater for and Simon was simply mystified as to why they had chosen his song in the first place. He said, ‘I think it strange the Bachelors should choose to record a very hip song when their style is so conflicting.’

  Perhaps Simon was being too sensitive about his work but if he felt bad about the Bachelors singing his songs he must have been catatonic when he heard Frank Sinatra do ‘Mrs Robinson’, but more of that later. Garfunkel best summarised their attitude to their craft: ‘I care that what we do is good. A lot of people in the pop world are influenced by the fact that you don’t have to be good but I can’t do that. I can’t help but take it seriously.’

  Such integrity is rare in the music business and it continued with their second album, Sounds of Silence. The critics praised their work and a typical critique came from Audio Review (June 1966): ‘urban folk at its very best and the effect is disturbing.’ This comment was all the more poignant when you consider that Bob Dylan’s ‘Love Minus Zero/ No Limit’ had been described as ‘a work of incomparable triteness’ on the previous page.

  Simon & Garfunkel did have their detractors though. Nik Cohn, the author of the famed rock rant, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, was more vehement than most. He debunked the album in his column for Queen saying that they were ‘painful in their goo-eyed sincerity and their self-satisfaction goes beyond a joke’.

  The argument is over authenticity and artificiality. Simon and Garfunkel knew they appealed to college folkies and so the album cover decks them out as students, scarves and all. But fair enough. They were only slightly older than those on the campus and indeed, Garfunkel was still studying. They prided themselves on their honesty and this image was more in line with their own personalities rather than a deliberate attempt to become the darlings of the campus.

  It was something new for rock’n’roll. Whatever anybody thought of Elvis, nobody thought he was the sharpest pencil in the box. None of the major rock’n’roll stars had been well educated: most had left school early. Rock’n’roll fans dismiss Pat Boone and he stood apart from the other performers in another sense as he had a degree. This was marketed as something unusual. When it came to the British beat boom, the lead singer who was best educated (Mick Jagger) did his best to disguise it with his image as a working class yob. Conversely, Simon and Garfunkel paraded their academic leanings but their harmonies were derived from the Everly Brothers. Indeed – Simon and Garfunkel were the Everly Brothers gone to university

  In June 1967 Art received a degree in mathematics from Columbia University and then moved onto a PhD. By that time the automatic deferment for going to grad school had been abolished but if someone was doing graduate work in mathematics, he could claim that this work was essential. If Art were simply in Simon & Garfunkel, this could never have been called essential. Of course, it was pot luck as to whether or not somebody was conscripted to fight in Vietnam. We have never heard of Dylan receiving his papers, but his wife Sara had a child from her first marriage and so possibly he could have claimed exemption as a married man with a child.

  In 1966, Rave magazine said that Eddie Simon was as talented as his famous brother. I don’t know how they knew this, but he was involved with the duo Crib and Ben, and the group the Guild Light Gauge.

  The third Simon & Garfunkel single was ‘I Am a Rock’. I didn’t feel that this worked too well but it reached No. 3 in America. The Hollies, who had had a string of hits, had picked it for their next UK single. Fearing such competition CBS put the song instead onto an EP. Then the Hollies encountered trouble with EMI who objected to the word ‘womb’ in a pop song. The company felt that the BBC might ban it, so it was pulled. How times have changed.

  The Simon & Garfunkel version of ‘I Am a Rock’ was released in the UK and made a respectable No. 17. By then, ‘I Am a Rock’ had appeared on two singles, one EP and two albums by the duo or by Simon on his own. They made a brief promotional visit to the UK, appearing with the Walker Brothers and the Troggs on Ready Steady Go! on 8 July and Top of the Pops on 14 July.

  Sounds of Silence made No. 21 on the US album charts and No. 13 in the UK, not a staggeringly good performance but it was on those charts for thirty-four and 104 weeks respectively and it has been certified double platinum, that is, two million sales in the US.

  Their engineer, Roy Halee, who would become their producer, had worked out the best way to record their voices. ‘I always insisted that they do their vocals together. The two of them on one mic is what gave them their vocal sound. It was very magical when they sang together. It created some tensions as if something went wrong, they both had to do vocals over again. Sometimes their voices were doubled as when they both come in on “Bridge”’.’

  As well as ‘I Am a Rock’ being more successful in America, Paul Simon wrote another major hit. When he was in London, he had written ‘Red Rubber Ball’ with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers. There was nothing special about it and the Seekers had, at first, turned it down. A group from Pennsylvania, the Rondells, was looking for new material. John Lennon suggested that they changed their name to the Cyrkle, following the success of the misspelt Byrds. They did this and they recorded ‘Red Rubber Ball’. It bounced up the American charts and reached No. 2. Its chief selling factor was some punchy brass riffs that showed someone had been listening to ‘It’s Not Unusual’.

  ‘Red Rubber Ball’ was far more successful than Simon & Garfunkel’s next single, ‘The Dangling Conversation’, which illustrates that quality and quantity sold are not the same thing. Once again, the theme is alienation and lack of communication, but it is far more personal than ‘The Sound of Silence’. The singer realises that his relationship is going stale and he displays powerful sarcasm in the third verse.

  The song irritated the rock critic Robert Christgau. We have previously quoted from his article, Rock Lyrics Are Poetry (Maybe), and he continues, ‘Melodies, harmonies, arrangements are scrupulously fitted. Each song is perfect and says nothing… This kind of mindless craft reaches a peak in Simon’s supposed masterpiece, “The Dangling Conversation”, which uses all the devices you learn about in English class – alliteration, alternating concretion and abstraction – to mourn wistfully about the classic plight of self-conscious man, his inability to communicate. To me, Simon’s voice drips self-pity from every syllable (and not only in this song either). The Mantovani strings that reinforce the lyric capture its toughness perfectly.’

  Although I disagree with most of that, I sympathise with the Mantovani strings. It is an attempt to dress the song as another ‘Sound of Silence’, but the words, and to some extent the melody, are lost in schmaltz. The single did make the US Top 40, peaking at No. 25, good going for a song that namechecks Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost.

  The other side of the single is ‘The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine’. Here some dull rhythms and a lack of melody obscure a shrewd lyric. The lyric is a clever list of advertising slogans and
they urge the listener to buy a big bright green pleasure machine, which could be a vibrator. The duo’s breathing is noticeable, perhaps to emphasise the jerking motions. It doesn’t make for repeated listening but it is superior to the covers from the Carnival and Gerry & the Pacemakers.

  These songs gave a taste of the duo’s next album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. This was stronger and considerably better than their previous UK album, although we were short-changed in playing time. However, hold the sleeve up to the light and look above ‘The Dangling Conversation’. You will see that ‘Homeward Bound’ has been blacked out. The song had been placed on their first UK album and so it had to come off.

  The album’s title comes from a line in ‘Scarborough Fair/Canticle’, a track which proved sentimental dynamite. It is their adaptation of an old English folk song, which Simon had learnt from Martin Carthy.

  There was an annual Scarborough fair and so the posters now said, ‘Are you going to Scarborough Fair?’ In 1972 a cross was erected to commemorate the site of the original fair, which had ended, after 600 years, in 1788. The song lists impossible tasks for the lover to perform. It is a sweet, delicate performance but under the layers of harmonies you hear lines from Simon’s anti-war song ‘The Side of a Hill’, which had been on Wednesday Morning 3am.

  This undercurrent is largely background as the main song is dominant. If we now switch from the first track of the album to the last, ‘7 O’Clock News/Silent Night’, we find that Simon is again exploring duality but now we accept the dark conclusion.

  This track starts with them angelically singing ‘Silent Night’; there’s a rumble in the background and you wonder what it is. As it gets louder, you can pick out phrases and then whole sentences. It is a newscaster intoning a gloom-ridden bulletin: the war in Vietnam and a killer of student nurses. The newsman gets progressively louder until it is on a par with the carollers. Point made. End of track. End of album.