Why so many of the iconic duo’s songs still sing to us so clearly down the years.
Fall has not yet formally begun, but over on Political Beats it’s already a hazy shade of winter: We have just given full consideration to Simon & Garfunkel. As I always warn, Political Beats is a show specifically for music lovers — if you’re not the sort of person who wants to hear my co-host and me spend three hours or so discussing the discographical trajectory of a musical artist, complete with illustrative song clips, then turn back for thar be many dragons. (And no — we will never do an Imagine Dragons episode, unless Vivek Ramaswamy agrees to be our guest.)
But Simon & Garfunkel are worth writing about separately on their own terms. Not just because their hits are so long-lasting and ubiquitous, but because Paul Simon’s creative journey is so fascinating. One thing that becomes apparent upon studying the duo’s discography is that it is largely the story of Paul Simon striving to become comfortable in his own skin creatively and personally: a tale of reboots, of a profoundly dilatory working pace and a writing style that began as altogether too mannered and prosaically “literate,” only to slowly refine itself over time and with hard work into poetic profundity. Although Simon & Garfunkel were musically based around Garfunkel’s angelically pure high tenor voice, Simon’s rhythmically fingerpicked acoustic guitar, and the duo’s Everly Brothers–indebted harmonies, lyrically and melodically the writer’s tale is all Paul Simon’s, and his personal and artistic anxieties almost always found their way directly into the pair’s music as they, in their own way, walked off to look for America during the Sixties.
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Paul Simon and Arthur Garfunkel, the sons of Jewish immigrants, met in elementary school and a few years later discovered a knack for singing harmony together. Local party and bar mitzvah gigs followed for the two — now in high school — and since New York City was at that time home to scads of small independent record labels, they began to record some of Simon’s songs in search of chart success. For one hot moment in 1957 they even scored a minor hit under the moniker “Tom & Jerry” with the teen-idol rockabilly track “Hey Schoolgirl,” whose Brylcreemed inoffensiveness is adorably hilarious in light of Simon’s later weighty themes. (Sample lyric: “Hey schoolgirl in the second row/The teacher’s lookin’ over so I got to whisper way down low.”)
Further success never came, and because Simon and Garfunkel were nice Jewish boys from Queens who weren’t about to embarrass their mothers, they dutifully trod off to college — Garfunkel to Columbia University and Simon to Queens College and then Brooklyn Law School. In the meantime they kept recording low-budget quickie singles — sometimes together, sometimes apart — with little impact. That’s when Paul Simon’s eye turned towards the early Sixties Greenwich Village folk scene, and suddenly a man who had spent the last half-decade chasing teenybopper rock trends as a side hobby decided that he and Art should be folk musicians after all.
New York’s existing folk musicians famously disagreed. Simon & Garfunkel, performing under yet another pseudonym (this time it was Kane & Garr), singing delicate choirboy harmonies and milquetoast folk pastiche originals, were immediately viewed as “entryists” trying to fake their way into a musical world they had no authentic roots in. People either remembered “Tom & Jerry” or soon found out about it and reacted accordingly, treating the duo’s new “folkie” sound as a cynical bid for relevance and an attempt to commercially exploit their scene. Simon & Garfunkel’s arriviste roots and vocal slickness grated. But what truly infuriated their competitors is how quickly they got a major-label record deal. All it took was one open mic night in the presence of Bob Dylan’s producer Tom Wilson to get them into Columbia Records’ New York recording studios in March of 1964 laying down their first album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.
The first show Simon & Garfunkel ever performed under their own names, for their official Columbia Records “coming out event” in March 1964, was a legendary disaster in front of an audience ranging from indifferent to quietly hostile. Bob Dylan attended only to pointedly spend the entire show carrying on a conversation with a friend; the studied disrespect of the undisputed king of the scene was the main takeaway from the night. A then-unknown David Geffen had even more devastating feedback; as nothing more than a fledgling mail-room clerk for the William Morris talent agency, he approached Paul Simon after the show and bloodlessly said “You should seriously consider returning to law school.”
The Greenwich Village scene had been eager for a schadenfreude moment to hit Simon & Garfunkel like a pie in the face, and with Wednesday Morning they got it served up on a vinyl platter. The record flopped miserably, selling only 3,000 copies upon initial release. It also flopped deservedly. It is an album of distinctly minimal charms, stodgy and humorless, with unprepossessing original songs matched to weirdly inappropriate cover choices. Wednesday Morning sounded every bit as mannered and artificial as folkies claimed the duo were overall.
The pair disbanded and Garfunkel more or less took David Geffen’s advice, continuing at Columbia and completing his degree. Meanwhile Paul Simon went on a musical pilgrimage to England, convinced that one way or another he had to take some time to “dream it all up again.” During this sojourn he wrote a passel of original songs – “I Am A Rock,” “Homeward Bound,” and “Kathy’s Song” among others – suggesting he’d found a more sophisticated lyrical and musical gear.
In 99 alternate universes, that’s where this story ends: with Art as an architect (or at least a teacher at a New York City private school), and Paul hawking songs to British bands like the Hollies and the Zombies throughout the mid-Sixties. But in our actual universe, serendipitous chance intervened instead. For in early 1965, folk icon Bob Dylan (with Tom Wilson producing) “went electric” on the album Bringing It All Back Home, and almost immediately doubled down with the single “Like A Rolling Stone.” He then dropped Wilson as his producer, which naturally dismayed Wilson. Scrambling desperately for a hit to keep his name relevant at Columbia Records (as opposed to being known as “the guy Bob Dylan asked not to produce him anymore”), he stumbled upon a song from a flop album he’d produced the year before, rush-dubbed electric instruments onto the track to give it a “folk-rock” feel, released it without informing the artists, and in so doing turned a juvenile little dirge called “The Sound of Silence” into a universally-known #1 hit single.
Once Simon realized that “The Sound of Silence” was going to the top of the charts he hopped a plane home, reunited with Garfunkel, and recorded the album Sounds of Silence (January 1966) which, for all its rushed nature and clunky amateurishness, represents the group’s real beginning. Their problems with critics remained: The combination of Garfunkel’s flutteringly pure harmonies with Simon’s exceedingly “collegiate” lyrics – serious, self-conscious, trying too hard for the most part – led even melodically glorious songs like “I Am A Rock” to play ambivalently. Was Simon mocking the ridiculous narrator, safe within the womb of his room with his books and poetry to protect him? Or was he writing autobiographically? Simon’s middlebrow sincerity meant that you could never be sure.
October 1966’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme was emblematic of the approach: The opening “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” and closing “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” were so intentionally indirect in their antiwar/social-protest themes that they divided listeners: admirers thought it “subtle” and “tasteful,” skeptics dismissed it as weak tea for overly prim college students and their parents. “The Dangling Conversation” spells its metaphor of a disintegrating relationship out in references to poetry anthologies by Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. The swipe at Bob Dylan and the folk scene that had rejected Simon (“A Simple Desultory Philippic”) is a crass bleat, a childish recitation of inscrutably inside-baseball grievances.
But two compositions show a different spirit emerging: “Homeward Bound” is an endlessly moving song about the year Simon spent playing solo gigs in England’s sootier corners, wondering what would come of his life. Despite that specifically autobiographical angle, the longing for home strikes a universal chord that, because so honest and nakedly vulnerable, finally no longer feels mediated and mannered. With this one song, far more so than middlebrow poesy of “Sound of Silence,” Simon & Garfunkel created an authentic American standard. And they did so again in an even more unexpected way on “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” a song that inverts every cliché previously established about the duo’s uptight and rigidly choral arrangements: A simple, happy tune with a breezy lyric and a bippin’ boppin’ jazz shuffle accompaniment, “Feelin’ Groovy” is the sound of a man finally learning to turn his superego off for a moment and just enjoy a lovely day and a snappy beat.
Paul Simon was nowhere near done finding himself as a writer. In fact, all of this is mere prelude, for it was the so-called “psychedelic era” of popular music (most associated with the various 1967 revolutions of the Beatles and the “Summer of Love”) that truly threw the pair for a loop.
Were you aware that Simon & Garfunkel headlined the first night of the Monterey International Pop Festival in June of 1967? It’s okay to admit you were not, for they themselves — playing wispy folk tunes to an outdoor sea of nighttime faces with only one acoustic guitar and two voices — knew immediately they’d been humiliatingly overshadowed at an event where the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead proselytized the acid-drenched virtues of San Francisco hippiedom, Otis Redding flattened a field full of unsuspecting California kids with the Stax horns, and both Jimi Hendrix and The Who destroyed their instruments onstage. (The former involved fire; the latter involved both fire and Keith Moon.) The genteel harmonies and sentiments of songs like “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her” or “Benedictus” were going to be completely left behind by the newly psychedelic tenor of the times.
Simon couldn’t hide his panic, hence the song “Fakin’ It.” Written, recorded, and released as a single immediately after Monterey (on July 7, a lightning-fast pace for the normally snail-penned Simon), complete with jarringly dissonant “Strawberry Fields Forever”-like strings and percussion sandwiching an otherwise catchy folk-pop tune, it transparently betrayed his artistic anxieties. The sonically inapposite psychedelic touches (in a song whose central conceit is about imposter syndrome in a romantic relationship) signalled to anyone paying attention that the imposter he was referring to was himself, feeling newly irrelevant in a world he’d already spent a decade trying to succeed in. (“I know I’m fakin’ it/I’m not really makin’ it/This feeling of fakin’ it/I still haven’t shaken it.”)
At a point in mid-to-late 1967 when he might have been expected to bend under pressure to prevailing commercial convention, Simon instead stubbornly chose to be himself, only more so. It cannot be coincidental that this is also the moment where he became a truly great songwriter as well. Rather than don paisley or import mellotrons and oompah-bands into the Simon & Garfunkel sound, he delved deeper into the elements of his own songcraft and guitar style that made him different from everyone else. That unstinting concern for creative autonomy — after having faced so many artistic reboots, so many rethinks, so many musical dead-ends – informs every aspect of 1968’s Bookends, an album which Simon & Garfunkel waited a full year and a half to release after Parsley. What intervened in the meantime was none other than Mike Nichols’ legendary film The Graduate.
Nichols was a fan of theirs and felt their music spoke directly to the plight of The Graduate’s protagonist. Once they agreed to let him use “Scarborough Fair” and “Sound of Silence” at key thematic points in the film, Columbia Records also stepped in to pressure Paul Simon – still dragging his heels after the Summer of Love – to contribute something new as well, hopefully a single. Simon, amusingly mulish even then, would only give them 15 percent of one, which is how the world first heard “Mrs. Robinson.” (It only happened because, in a meeting with Nichols, Art Garfunkel goaded Simon into submitting it as a fragment. They didn’t finish it in time for the film, incidentally — many have been surprised to discover that “Mrs. Robinson” in The Graduate is really just a hacked-out rhythm guitar, some well-placed deets, and a chorus.)
When the finished song — fleshed out with commentary on an America unmoored from its old pieties and verities — finally arrived in April 1968 it did so as part of Bookends. The stark and unglamorous black-and-white photograph on the record’s front cover, with both Paul and Art sporting severe turtlenecks and thoughtful visages, was clearly meant to signal that this was A Serious Album by Serious People. It would have been a disaster of unearned pretension were it not for the fact that Bookends also represented a quantum leap for Simon as a writer. The time spent waiting out the psychedelic trends of 1967 had paid off handsomely: Rock music was now swerving away from Pepper-pomp back into folk/blues/country sounds, and there Simon & Garfunkel were as always, harmonizing briskly to crisp acoustic melodies. The fashion of the times had finally come to them, not the other way around. Bookends’ musical emphasis on rhythm – both in terms of insistently unorthodox percussion and tightly-picked guitar figures – would come to define Paul Simon musically. “Fakin’ It” opens and closes with a hectoringly paranoid clomp; the joyful “At The Zoo” recalls the mood of “Feelin’ Groovy” as it accelerates toward the finish line, and “Mrs. Robinson” rolls through its famous fingerpicked blues-folk changes to the accompaniment of maracas, handclaps, and congas. (The ‘drum kit’ used on the song is literally a lone hi-hat – a delightful production quirk.)
Yet these songs all pale next to “America,” a ballad about the spiritual journey of an entire generation of American youth — young men and women of the late Sixties more lost than Mrs. Robinson ever would be, searching for meaning and identity together in a wider world of convulsive change only to eventually find themselves staring out the window of a Greyhound bus on a cold moonlit night 1,500 miles from home. A conceit like that only survives its pretensions if its spirit is truly pure, and “America” begins with surpassing grace: “Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together.” Off those young lovers go, on a journey that once begun never ends, getting lost in the vastness of an unknown and unknowable country.
The achievement — in melody, song structure, and in the earned poetry of Simon’s conceits – is what makes the journey from the stilted awkwardness of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. in 1964 to the duo’s April 1970 swansong Bridge over Troubled Water so intellectually fascinating, artistically impressive, and moving. I mean no contradiction when I say that, despite its protracted two year genesis, Bridge is nevertheless one of the most invigoratingly fresh and spontaneous-sounding albums of its era. (The Beatles’ similarly terminal Let It Be, released a month later, pales in comparison.)
It was end of the road for the pair because, as it happens, what Mike Nichols giveth — with the national exposure and instant iconography of The Graduate — he also taketh away, and this time in the form of Art Garfunkel himself. Garfunkel, who had caught Nichols’ eye, was cast in his follow-up, a highly anticipated adaptation of Joseph Heller’s anti-war novel Catch-22. (Nichols also had a role planned for Paul Simon, but – fatefully – it got cut during rewrites.) With Garfunkel now off to be a movie star, filming in Mexico for six weeks that inevitably turned into six months, Simon was left at home to stew on his feelings of abandonment and creative frustration in equal measure. Matters weren’t helped when Paul met Art during a break from the schedule and presented him with a new song he had written specifically as a showcase for Art’s solo voice: Garfunkel suggested that he wasn’t really much into this slow piano thing Simon was calling “Bridge over Troubled Water.”
The rest of the album, as it slowly evolved in 1969, feels so emotionally and psychologically immediate precisely because it has this personal drama written all over it — “So Long Frank Lloyd Wright,” “Why Don’t You Write Me,” and “The Only Living Boy in New York” are all about the dissolution of Simon & Garfunkel’s partnership, all written with such a unique mixture of directness and literary craft that they doubled as an announcement that Simon had truly settled in as a major songwriter. He was even more impressive when addressing his own neuroses: “Cecilia” is a rhythmic marvel that picks up directly from where “Fakin’ It” left off and dresses a coded lament about Simon wrestling with his muse (St. Cecilia is the patroness of musical inspiration) in the light garb of a breezy romantic romp. And “The Boxer,” while nothing less than an American anthem now, was clearly germinated as a parable about Simon’s own circuitous and uncertain career through the artistic world:
In the clearing stands a boxer, and a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders of every blow that laid him low
Or cut him till he cried out, in his anger and his shame
“I am leaving, I am leaving” — but the fighter still remains.
When you understand the full range of Paul Simon’s arc from late ’50s onwards, that lyric inevitably takes on autobiographical shading. But “The Boxer” avoids being about one man’s parochial creative struggles and instead becomes universal: a song for everyone who’s taken hit after hit from a cruel or indifferent world, and just gets back in the ring to take some more, because that’s what a man does. When Paul Simon sang it to open the first Saturday Night Live after 9/11, with New York City’s police and firefighters present, the meaning could not have been clearer. (Dylan immediately noticed its greatness as well – he finally gave Simon the hat-tip he’d long deserved by covering “The Boxer” himself, and then released it on the universally reviled Self Portrait just to keep everyone guessing.)
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After Bridge over Troubled Water, there was nowhere left to go for Simon & Garfunkel — an album so transparently written about the breakup of their partnership was not going to be followed by a sequel. Because it conquered the world commercially, however, they were pressured not to make a formal announcement; instead they simply drifted apart until two years later Paul Simon announced he was releasing a solo album. (About that story, see here.) And that was all, outside of a few memorable reunions – a musical career that had the signal virtue of ending on a transcendently high note.
Simon & Garfunkel’s story may seem a strange subject to have spontaneously spent 3,000+ words recounting, but it resonates deeply on a creative level for me because Paul Simon’s struggles (even his resentments) are infinitely more relatable than those of the rock gods. Artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan seemingly emerged from the mists of their respective countries’ hinterlands as untutored pop Mozarts, their every musical move preternaturally (and frustratingly) perfect. Their songs and deeds felt almost Olympian in their remoteness. Meanwhile there was nothing preternatural whatsoever about the considered dedication to craft and practice that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel brought to their music. Early in their career that was what made critics write them off as stiff, but as Simon evolved he turned out in many ways to be the more empathetic embodiment of his generation’s aspirations and anxieties than eccentrics like Dylan or Lennon.
That is why so many of Simon & Garfunkel’s songs from this brief era — a time of massive societal upheaval the effects of which we are still reckoning with — still sing to us so clearly down the years. The search for meaning in “America” has not become less relevant with time; much like Paul Simon, our nation in all its complexity has only become itself, just more so. And at the core of “America” lies a tender insight that Simon & Garfunkel’s music from this era always kept squarely in focus: our search for meaning is ultimately a search for home. Which is why we keep listening to this music even in 2023, letting our minds drift homeward bound.