Simon & Garfunkel

by Spencer Leigh

  Trivia point: Larry Knechtel played solos on four hit records on four different instruments. There is the piano on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, bass on the Byrds’ ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, harmonica on Dean Martin’s ‘Houston’ and being the guitar man on Bread’s ‘Guitar Man’. He had also raised cattle and prospected for gold (and found it).

  Paul’s demo for ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ is low-key and the song with a few lyrical changes would have worked in that setting. However, he saw it as a bravura performance for Art Garfunkel. When Art worked it through with Larry Knechtel, he could see how Larry’s flourishes could lead into a third verse. Simon came up with the ‘Sail on silver girl’ verse surprisingly quickly and he always felt that it didn’t quite fit the rest of the song.

  Rolling Stone reported that ‘The silver girl who sails on in “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is a hypodermic needle, at least in the mind of a newspaper editor in Monroe, Iowa, who tried to keep the song out of the local high school’s graduation ceremonies… The editor said she was particularly troubled over that “ease your mind” business.’ The silver girl was resolved by Disc. Paul and Peggy were staying with Art and Linda in Blue Jay Way, Los Angeles in a house mentioned in song by George Harrison. Peggy had noticed a few grey hairs, hence the line.

  Simon and Garfunkel, 1968 (CBS Records)

  The song has a strong gospel feel and Simon considered recording it with Booker T. & the MG’s. In the end he employed his usual musicians and the resulting record is outstanding, not only for Art’s vocal but also for Larry’s piano playing. Larry received a special credit and often joined the duo in concert for that number.

  In 1973 Art Garfunkel told Rolling Stone that the arrangement for ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ had been inspired by ‘Ol’ Man River’ from the Righteous Brothers. Like that record, Simon had a growing accompaniment for the song right up to the last line where he suddenly pulled out all the stops.

  When Simon asked Jimmie Haskell to write a string arrangement based on Art and Larry’s demo, he didn’t catch the words and wrote ‘Like a Pitcher of Water’ at the top. Paul was amused and has the music framed in his office. Pitcher of water or not, Jimmie Haskell won a Grammy for his arrangement.

  When Simon first played it to David Clayton-Thomas of Blood, Sweat & Tears, he was unimpressed, one of the few musicians not to rave over it. Simon himself was very pleased with ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and was quick to praise Art’s contribution. ‘It was Artie singing on that one. Artie sang that song, I think, very soulfully. Not black soul. He sang it from his heart and it sounded real.’ He has called it ‘astounding, a virtuoso performance’.

  Around the same time, the Beatles released a new Paul McCartney composition, another song of consolation, ‘Let It Be’, written in a time of turbulence and instability. ‘Bridge’ kept ‘Let It Be’ off the top of the UK charts but it was replaced by ‘Let It Be’ in the US. ‘I couldn’t believe McCartney did that,’ said Paul Simon. ‘They are very similar songs, certainly in instrumentation, in their general musical feel, and lyrically too. They’re both hopeful songs and restful, peaceful songs. He must have written it about the same time that I wrote mine and he gave it to Aretha Franklin, which is funny because when I wrote “Bridge”, I said, “Boy, I bet Aretha could do a good job on this song.” It’s one of those weird things and it has happened simultaneously.’

  The cover versions of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ included soul treatments from Aretha Franklin, King Curtis and Merry Clayton, not to mention the Tamla-Motown artists – Jackson 5, the Miracles, the Supremes and Stevie Wonder. There were country stylings from Buck Owens and Chet Atkins and dramatic fireworks from Roy Orbison and Shirley Bassey.

  ‘Elvis Presley’s version of “Bridge” was the same arrangement as ours,’ said Simon. ‘They copied the bass line. Aretha’s version is tremendous, the best I’ve heard except Artie’s.’ If Simon didn’t rate Presley’s cover too highly, it’s lucky he didn’t catch him in cabaret where Presley used its opening line as a gag to refer to the height of his guitarist, Charlie Hodge.

  Dave Marsh from Rolling Stone wrote of ‘Aretha’s ability to replenish the meaning of “Bridge” after it had been reduced to cliché by Art Garfunkel’s oversung rendition.’ But Art was not so keen: ‘I’m not a fan of Aretha’s rhythm and blues version. I thought I topped them all. I’m sorry if that sounds inflated. The song’s brilliant, it should be possible for someone to do another great version, but it was a hell of a tour de force when I went from so soft to so strong at the end.’

  Simon spoke of cover versions to the New Musical Express in 1971: ‘There are people who haven’t made good attempts simply because they haven’t got the goods to do a good job on anything or because they didn’t have enough time. I mean, there are more bad records than good ones, so the majority of covers won’t be good, but I’m pleased when somebody takes the trouble to do it well.’

  The title has also been parodied and the comedy folk singer Trevor Crozier recorded ‘Trouble Over Bridgwater’ in 1977. That was also the title of an album by Half Man Half Biscuit in 2000.

  In terms of the Great American Songbook, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ is in the Premier League. Not only was it a hit single but it was also the title track of the new Simon & Garfunkel album. At one stage ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ was topping the singles and albums charts in both Britain and America. In the US, the single topped the charts for six weeks and the album for ten. In the UK, the single replaced Lee Marvin at the top for three weeks – Lee Marvin and Art Garfunkel are at the two extremities of popular singing – and it was at the top of the album charts for forty-one weeks, a record only surpassed by the soundtracks for South Pacific (115 weeks) and The Sound of Music (seventy weeks).

  Around 1970, it was thought for about five minutes that Quadraphonic sound would be the next thing. Simon & Garfunkel’s albums were issued in Quad (though who had the equipment to play them?) and there were three newly recorded tribute albums for the Quad market by Caravelli & His Magnificent Strings, the Jim Nambara Quartet, and Shiro Michi. It was soon phased out and There Goes Rhymin’ Simon was one of the last albums issued in Quad.

  One reason why the Bridge Over Troubled Water album took so long was the inaccessibility of Art Garfunkel. Mike Nichols had cast him as Captain Nately in the film of Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch-22. The film ran behind schedule and although Garfunkel did not have a large role, he was involved for long periods of time.

  The film concerns American bomber crews in Italy. Yossarian (Alan Arkin) wants to get out of flying on the grounds of insanity. However, the fact that he doesn’t want to fly only shows that he is sane, hence the Catch-22 of the title. It was an anti-war film at a time when the big films were Patton and The Green Berets, but it was outclassed by the huge success of M*A*S*H.

  Unlike The Graduate, Catch-22 had a big budget ($15m) and the cast included Alan Arkin, Anthony Perkins and Orson Welles. Welles had considered filming the book himself but, as always, he had difficulty in raising finance. With so many subplots and a large cast of characters, this was an extremely difficult novel to film and today it would be made as a TV series. It is a lengthy book with a profusion, not to say a confusion, of characters. The humour stems from black comedy, which is notoriously difficult to pitch right. Indeed, it is hard to raise laughs when you see somebody’s entrails spilling out in front of the camera.

  Buck Henry wrote a good script, playing Lt. Col. Korn himself, the thinker who is prepared to let others take the credit so they are blamed if things go wrong. Nichols had offered Paul the role of Dunbar, a soldier who is intent on keeping out of conflict, but the length of the film dictated that several characters had to be dropped, Dunbar being one of them.

  The fresh-faced Art Garfunkel plays the film’s innocent. Whilst other characters are losing their cool or planning black-market operations, the naïve and idealistic Captain Nately pursues a romance with an Italian prostitute. Stationed in R
ome, he meets an old man and their conversation is reminiscent of Bookends. Nately tells the old man that he will be twenty in January. The old man answers, ‘If you live.’ And he doesn’t, being unwittingly killed as a consequence of Milo Minderbinder’s black racketeering. Luckily, Garfunkel was around long enough to pick up good notices and Mike Nichols offered him a starring role in his next project, Carnal Knowledge.

  Mort Lewis, knowing how films overran, wanted a catch-22 to talk Garfunkel out of the film. Garfunkel was resilient and from January 1969, he was filming on an airfield on Guaymas, Mexico. For five months. Garfunkel rarely smiles on screen and Nichols commented, ‘He just couldn’t get cheerful.’ To rehearse new songs, Simon had to fly to Mexico, and the actor, Bob Balaban, recalled an all-night session in Garfunkel’s hotel room where they worked on ‘The Boxer’.

  While he was hanging around on a film set, Art began his project of reading the books an educated man should read. The first book was by Rousseau. He put a sticker on each one he completed and once the internet was in operation, he put the list on his website, which he keeps up to date. We’re up to 1,227 by the end of December 2015 and that is a biography of Chet Baker, Deep In A Dream, by James Gavin. There could have been a diversion to play Woodstock but Mort Lewis felt there were enough problems meeting existing obligations so no, thank you.

  In November 1969 Simon & Garfunkel performed their first concert dates in a year, a short tour prior to the release of the Bridge Over Troubled Water album. They sang some songs on their own but mostly they worked with a backing band of killer musicians, – Larry Knechtel, Fred Carter, Jr, Joe Osborn and Hal Blaine. They looked a little uncomfortable: Garfunkel stood still while Simon gyrated. They tried new songs with ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ getting standing ovations. They did ‘Song for the Asking’ with Paul on lead and Art the harmonies. On the album, it was just Simon at his most vulnerable.

  ‘The last tour we used the guys who played on the records: drums, guitar, bass, piano,’ Paul Simon told Rolling Stone in 1970. ‘It worked out badly. First of all we came out on stage with the band, and people would yell, “Get that band off, we just want to hear you.” I would say, “Oh, that riff is so old, you said that about Dylan. That’s four years ago, so what are you talking about? Everybody has a band. We’re the only ones around without a band.”’ Still, it was economically favourable that audiences preferred them that way.

  One venue was Carnegie Hall on 28 November 1969. The ticket demand was so great that Mort Lewis wanted them to do two shows in one night. As they only performed for seventy minutes in concert, this was no hardship but he knew that Simon and Garfunkel’s starting position would be no. However, he had a bargaining tool. Simon had requested a lot of freebies for friends and relations and he told him that he couldn’t have them if they were only doing one show.

  Arthur Garfunkel in Catch-22 (Paramount Pictures)

  The following night the show hit Boston. Garfunkel, who was becoming increasingly eccentric, chose to hitchhike rather than fly. He did make the show. Another time, Simon and Lewis passed Art in their limousine and gave him a ‘screw you’ gesture. A concert album was not released at the time but more recently, Live 1969, was issued by Starbucks.

  In September 1969 Paul Simon purchased an out-of-town property, a Dutch farmhouse in seventy acres outside New Hope, Pennsylvania for $200,000. He also owned a property on the East River, while Garfunkel lived in hotels. Garfunkel was worried about Simon’s relationship with Peggy, not because he disapproved but because he felt that they might lose their manager, Mort Lewis, but Mort was unconcerned.

  By now they were playing large venues and Simon did become anxious about performing. Dustin Hoffman had introduced Paul to another actor, Elliott Gould, who in turn recommended his therapist.

  You might have thought that it would be Garfunkel with the anxieties. Fans would often ask one of them, ‘Do you write the words or the music?’ No problem for Simon, but one for Garfunkel. Somewhere along the way Simon would credit him with the arrangements, which was obviously incorrect. This persisted for years including an extraordinary faux pas on The Old Grey Whistle Test, but more of this later.

  For all their success, Simon and Garfunkel had planned Bridge Over Troubled Water as their swansong. ‘We said something to the effect, we’ll finish the album and that will be it,’ said Simon. ‘We didn’t plan to do anything together after that. I would do an album by myself and Artie would work on the movie, Carnal Knowledge.’

  By and large, the album had been made while Art was filming Catch-22 and he added his vocals whenever he was around. ‘We were tired and we fought,’ admitted Paul. ‘We even fought over the twelfth song, finally saying “fuck it” and leaving it at that.’

  When Richard Nixon was elected in January 1969, Paul Simon broke down in tears. His unissued song, ‘Cuba Si, Nixon No’, was unheard for many years but has since become a bonus track. It is a new lyric to a Chuck Berry-styled riff similar to ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ and was sung solo by Paul in concert. It mocked the new president and gave support to the Cuban regime and possibly Garfunkel felt that this might impede sales. On the other hand, it could have been sour grapes, as Simon did not favour Art’s suggestion of Bach’s ‘Feuilles-Oh’.

  As well as the album, Simon and Garfunkel agreed on a TV special for the Bell Telephone Company, the intention being that one would support the other. As a frustrated executive told Advertising Age, ‘We bought an entertainment show and they delivered their own social and political views.’

  Simon and Garfunkel worked with the actor and writer Charles Grodin (Capt Aarfy Aardvark in Catch-22) and the director was Robert Drew, who made documentaries about social issues. They wanted to show how America was split into two with bad housing and poor social benefits and why so many were protesting. Paul Simon revealed, ‘We decided to do a show about America rather than duets with Glen Campbell and dance numbers. Bell wanted to use it as recruitment for the Bell Telephone Company. They didn’t know that we were planning a show which had something to do with real life. They thought it would have to do with TV. We had a film sequence with the Kennedys and Martin Luther King while we sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, and they objected to that. We said, “Why?” and they replied that they were all Democrats – there’s no Republicans in there.’

  Bell wanted to drop the project but Columbia talked them round. A few weeks later, Simon told Rolling Stone, ‘One of the most frustrating things I ever did was to work for hours and hours on that television special and then hear somebody put it down in the worst possible terms. They vilified the show. There was no talk of whether we did it artfully or not. They just couldn’t bear to look at King, couldn’t bear to look at the Kennedys, couldn’t bear to look at Chavez. They said they didn’t want the Woodstock footage in there, no footage of Woodstock, no footage of Vietnam, they said they could live with the Lone Ranger. If we wanted to keep that in, it’s all right.’

  In the end, the show was sold to Alberto-Culver, manufacturer of hair products, for $50,000. CBS put it on air and it was beaten in the ratings by a dancing-on-ice special, so what’s new?

  There were eleven tracks on the Bridge Over Troubled Water LP, one of which was a revival of the Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’. Of the others, four had been issued on two singles and Simon said he was not too happy with three tracks (‘Why Don’t You Write Me’, ‘Keep the Customer Satisfied’ and ‘So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright’.) All this suggests that Simon had held little back and the two years had not been prolific, but the album contained a wide variety of sounds. He said of the finished product, ‘Tempos were different. Instrumentation was different. I think that’s good. I enjoy that.’

  Paul Simon, 1971 (CBS Records)

  For all its variety, the album was by no means a miscellany and every track worked well in its own right. It was a stronger album than Bookends but part of its increased sales was because the songs were more upbeat.

  The album opens with ‘Bridg
e Over Troubled Water’ and moves into ‘El Condor Pasa’, now better known as ‘If I Could’. This was said to be an arrangement of an eighteenth-century Peruvian melody by Los Incas and this interest in world music led to the Graceland album. Simon recorded his lyric over the existing track by Los Incas. His words had the same charm as ‘Scarborough Fair’, and the lyric made the comparisons that you find in ye olde English folk songs. Simon would rather be a sparrow than a snail, a hammer than a nail, and a forest than a street. This was a Top 20 single in the US but it wasn’t released as a single in the UK, leaving the way clear for Julie Felix, whose cover version made the Top 20.

  There are numerous versions of ‘El Condor Pasa’ including a strange distorted one from Yma Sumac, whose wide vocal range made the Guinness Book of Records. Although she comes from the Incas, she performs it with a rock backing and displays her octaves several times over through multi-tracking. The song is missing, believed lost.

  Unfortunately for Simon, ‘El Condor Pasa’ was not an eighteenth-century melody after all. It was written by Daniel Alomía Robles from Peru in about 1929. Robles died in 1942 and his son was to sue for royalties, which Simon settled out of court.

  All this was in the future. By way of thanks, Simon offered to produce a solo album by Urubamba, which featured two members of Los Incas. Urubamba is the name of a river which flows past the Inca city of Machu Picchu. There was a single of ‘El Eco’, which was released by Columbia.

  The third track on the first side was the ultra-catchy ‘Cecilia’ which reached No. 4 as a US single. Strangely, it flopped as a 45 in the UK, but it was not what audiences expected from Simon & Garfunkel, sounding more like Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. The rhythm was recorded in a living room with Paul, his brother Eddie (banging rhythm on a piano bench) and Art all contributing, and it sounded so infectious that it was kept on the record. It is witty and funny but the song was not a UK singles hit until Suggs recorded it in 1996. ‘Cecilia’ is the patron saint of music but that could be coincidence.