Simon & Garfunkel

by Spencer Leigh

  There is the fun of ‘Back Seat Driver’ with Paul sounding like the Big Bopper, and the self-pitying ‘Educated Fool’ where Paul has graduated in misery. There is a song about wanting to be a bachelor, ‘That Forever Kind of Love’, a Ricky Nelson-styled song about a marital breakdown. It’s a long way from ‘The Dangling Conversation’ but it is the same writer.

  Paul made a demo of his fast-moving doo-wop song ‘Tick Tock’, which he produced as a single for Ritchie Cordell on the Rori label. The song was picked by the Boppers from Finland in 1979, a record well in line with revivalist groups of the day like Darts and Showaddywaddy.

  Taken together, the demos and singles find Paul Simon copying every commercial sound around. If they were parodies (but they weren’t), some would be on a par with the Rutles. How could Neil Innes have improved on ‘Wow Cha Cha Cha’, a 1961 demo by Paul Simon?

  In the late 70s, when Paul Simon fell out with Columbia, he owed them one more album. When he suggested an album of covers, he was told that this was unacceptable and Columbia insisted on original work. After weeks of negotiation, Simon bought himself out of the contract – a pity as an album of covers would have been good. His performances and arrangements would have been immaculate.

  There could have been another solution. When Van Morrison wanted to leave Bang Records, he gave Bert Berns some new songs all right, but they were composed on the spot and amounted to nothing of value. He was risking his own career as they could have been promoted as the new album and purchasers would think they had been swindled.

  But what if Paul Simon had decided to revisit his early songs and pick the best of them for an album called Play Me a Sad Song? There are good melodies and good lyrics and he could have made an homage to the early 60s with classy remakes and then taken his new songs to Warner Brothers.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

  Art Garfunkel completed his master’s degree in mathematics from Columbia College and moved onto postgrad studies. Although Paul Simon studied English literature at Queens College, his mind was on music. He loved making records.

  The enthusiasm had gone from rock’n’roll – for the most part, the rebellious stars had been replaced by inconsequential pop singers. Don McLean called 3 February 1959 the day the music died, but it was one of a chain of events. It was the day that Buddy Holly died and around the same time, Elvis had been drafted into the army, Little Richard was studying for the church, Gene Vincent had been blacklisted by the union, Carl Perkins had been injured in a car crash, and Chuck Berry was doing time. In their place was something blander, although there were considerable talents around such as Roy Orbison, Del Shannon and Bobby Darin. There were no rebellious figures and the industry hierarchy had control.

  Paul Simon disliked Bobby Vee’s records, which paradoxically were often written by Carole King. He felt that something new was needed, telling Lon Goddard at Record Mirror in 1971, ‘Age made me change my style of music: age and the folk-boom. Rock’n’roll got very bad in the early 60s, very mushy. I used to go down to Washington Square on Sundays and listen to people playing folk songs and when I heard that picking – Merle Travis picking the guitar, Earl Scruggs picking on the banjo – I liked that a whole lot better than Bobby Vee.’

  The performers in Washington Square largely came from Greenwich Village. A bohemian enclave of folk music had emerged from the coffee houses, young performers inspired by social commentators like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Dave Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, paints a vivid picture of the scene and, in 2013, it was the basis for a fictional film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which soaked up the atmosphere of those times, admittedly with little of its humour.

  Ralph McTell contrasts the London scene he knew with that of Greenwich Village. ‘It wasn’t like Greenwich Village for us unfortunately as they had lots of places where you could stay all night and could talk and chew the fat. I go green with envy reading The Mayor of MacDougal Street, which is a fantastic book. We didn’t have those long, languid discussions. I did get to play there which was fantastic. I did the Main Point and the Bitter End with Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. The audiences were kind to me but I could have had an easier start.’

  Although Paul Simon had loved the Everly Brothers’ album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, he had not wanted to follow through on its material. He liked the way the Everlys performed those old folk songs but ‘those mountain songs didn’t say anything to kids in the 22-storey apartments.’

  What captured his attention was the new breed of folk songwriters, who felt passionately about the world around them and said so in their songs. Tom Paxton was one. Phil Ochs was another. The diamond in the rough was Bob Dylan, who performed literate diatribes against modern society in an intense, nasal drone that was, nevertheless, highly effective. It was very different from the cotton-wool world portrayed by Bobby Vee; although Dylan had once, briefly, been Vee’s pianist.

  These songs provided the stimulus that Paul Simon needed and the first song for the new-look Simon was ‘He Was My Brother’. Simon and others have said that this song is about the death of a freedom worker he knew at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, but there is difficulty here. We can date the song to June 1963 and it was recorded in March 1964. However, his friend Andrew Goodman was not killed until 21 June 1964 when he died with his fellow workers, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner. This horrendous act changed public opinion and it has been sung about by Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton and Richard Fariña, all with different songs. In 1988, their deaths were the subject of the film, Mississippi Burning. The likelihood is that Simon wrote his song – and another one about the KKK, ‘A Church Is Burning’, in 1963 and over time he has come to believe that he wrote it for Goodman’s death as it fit the circumstances.

  Art Garfunkel was very impressed. ‘I first heard the song in June 1963,’ he recalled on a sleeve note, ‘a week after Paul wrote it. Cast in the Bob Dylan mould of that time there was no subtlety in the song, no sophistication in the lyric; rather the innocent voice of uncomfortable youth. The ending is joyously optimistic. I was happy the way the song made me feel. It was clearly the product of a considerable talent.’

  Although somewhat neglected, not least by Simon himself, his next song for the folk world, ‘Sparrow’, was better. It is an allegory along the lines of ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ and when it first appeared Garfunkel kindly provided us with a key to its symbolism. The song stands without it and the composition displays a lighter touch than most of his earlier work.

  The third song was ‘Bleecker Street’, a favourite location in Greenwich Village for folk songwriters, among them Tom Paxton (‘Cindy’s Crying’) and Joni Mitchell (‘Tin Angel’).

  Paul Simon took tentative steps by performing his new material in Greenwich Village, but he felt uneasy: ‘There was nothing exotic about me, coming from Queens. They were taken with Bob Dylan because he came from the Midwest, the kid who rode the rails. I was not accepted.’ We now know that Dylan exaggerated his adventures but good luck to him.

  Nevertheless, Paul recorded two new songs, ‘He Was My Brother’ and ‘Carlos Dominguez’ for the small Tribute label where it was issued under the name of Paul Kane. In 1964 it came out on Oriole Records in the UK, this time under the name of Jerry Landis.

  ‘Carlos Dominguez’ was never revived by Simon and/or Garfunkel but it was covered by the Irish singer, Val Doonican, who told me, ‘Alan Paramor, who used to look after my publishing, asked me to listen to this young American lad. I listened to “Carlos Dominguez” and while I was there, this American chap turned up. He introduced himself as Paul Kane, but he later changed it to Paul Simon. If you mentioned it to him today, he probably wouldn’t remember me or the song at all, but it was a very nice little thing.’ For a time too, the comedian Tom O’Connor included it in performances.

  In September 1963 Simon and Garfunkel began performing the new songs in Greenwich Village, this time billed as Kane and Garr, but they di
dn’t fool anyone. Dave Van Ronk has much to say about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton in his memoir but very little about Simon and Garfunkel. Van Ronk saw them perform but everyone knew that they had had a hit with ‘Hey Schoolgirl’ and ‘the mouldy fig wing of the folk world despised them as pop singers. I remember hearing them down at the Gaslight, and nobody would listen. I thought they were damn good but the people who wanted to hear Mississippi John Hurt and Dock Boggs wanted no part of Simon and Garfunkel.’

  They had started performing ‘The Sound of Silence’. Simon said, ‘I used to go into the bathroom because the tiles acted as an echo chamber. I’d often play in the dark, “Hello darkness, my old friend”. The first line came from that and then it drifted off into other things.’

  Indeed, Simon is the king of great first lines. He said, ‘I’ve always believed that you need a truthful first line to kick you off into a song. You have to say something emotionally true before you can let your imagination wander.’

  I would have thought that anyone would have recognised ‘Hello darkness, my old friend’ as a brilliant opening line, but not so. Dave Van Ronk described how it became a running joke. ‘It was only necessary for someone to start singing “Hello darkness, my old friend…” and everybody would crack up. It was a complete failure.’

  ‘I was trying to prove something,’ Simon admitted. ‘I’d think, “Gee, I’m good. Why doesn’t anybody see that?” So naturally I was resentful that nobody did see that.’

  ‘The Sound of Silence’ was influenced by Bob Dylan but Paul told MOJO in 2000 that he never wanted to be compared to him. He said, ‘I tried very hard not to be influenced by him, but I know I would never have written “The Sound of Silence” were in it not for Bob Dylan. Never. He was the first guy to come along in a serious way and not write teen-language songs. I saw him as a major guy whose work I didn’t want to imitate because I didn’t see any way out of being in his shadow if I did.’

  ‘The Sound of Silence’ touches on many of Simon’s themes – alienation, conformity and the role of the media. The lyrics are sober and scholarly and they sound poetic (‘Silence like a cancer grows’). Every line is almost a song in its own right.

  Simon was working as a part-time plugger for the music publisher, E. B. Marks, and if the opportunity arose, he would slide in one of his own. He knew Tom Wilson, a jazz producer for Columbia Records (CBS in the UK), who had been assigned to Bob Dylan.

  A black guy, Tom Wilson was born in 1931, raised in Waco, Texas, graduated from Harvard in 1954 and founded a jazz label, Transition, in 1955. He had worked for the jazz label Savoy, being assigned to Herbie Mann, and then moved to Columbia, where he recorded folk artists, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger.

  Paul Simon played Tom Wilson ‘He Was My Brother’, and Wilson wanted to cut it with a promising folk group, the Pilgrims. Ever the opportunist, Simon said that he often sang it with his friend and could they have an audition. Wilson was intrigued by Garfunkel’s hair as he had never seen a white man with an Afro before (so that’s what you call it). Wilson told the president of Columbia Records, Goddard Lieberson (known, for good reason, as ‘God’), about them. God agreed that a two man, one guitar album could be made quickly at little cost, but he questioned the name, as Simon & Garfunkel sounded like a department store.

  Simon never liked being told what to do and he argued that they had to have real names for folk music. He said, ‘Our name is honest. I always thought it was a big shock to people when Bob Dylan’s name turned out to be Bobby Zimmerman. It was so important that he should be true.’ The implication was that if you had an honest name, your songs were ipso facto honest.

  The album, Wednesday Morning 3am, was made in four sessions in March 1964. It’s a simple production, showcasing the songs and the voices, and an important component was the engineer, Roy Halee, who became a permanent member of their team.

  Roy Halee’s father had been the singing voice for Mighty Mouse and his mother had worked with Al Jolson. Roy, who was born in Long Island in 1934, played trumpet but did not consider himself good enough for professional work. He became a technician for CBS television and then an engineer for their recording division.

  The byline (or buyline) of their first LP was ‘Exciting new songs in the folk tradition’. The sound was good but unexciting. The strumming which begins the opening cut could easily have been the Seekers. By and large, Simon and Garfunkel are singing too sweetly and some of the outside songs were unnecessary, especially a bland run-through of Bob Dylan’s heated ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’. The album falls between the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio and the albums later made for lonely bedsits. Simon and Garfunkel were often pictured with college scarves as if to stress their student background.

  No matter what, Simon and Garfunkel together would never make a good picture, unlike the Beatles, who always looked right. Paul was small (five foot two), Art was tall (over six foot), and you would always be drawn to Art’s hair. Some bands such as Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues and Genesis did not put photos on the covers of their albums, which is sometimes a wise decision.

  Simon and Garfunkel always looked wrong. What induced Garfunkel in 1975 to attend the Grammy awards, of all places, sporting a T-shirt with a painted bowtie? Simon with his long hair and moustache has his own problems – and then this pair are photographed alongside the coolest guys in rock, John Lennon and David Bowie.

  The album includes two gospel songs, ‘You Can Tell the World’ and ‘Go Tell It On the Mountain’, but the performances are bland. The Weavers or the Clancy Brothers would have belted these out. Indeed, Peter, Paul and Mary were climbing the US charts with a spirited ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’.

  ‘Benedictus’ is an experiment which comes off well. It is based on a sixteenth-century setting which Art found in a library. There is a delicate cello in the background and the duo displays control and harmonic sophistication.

  Simon and Garfunkel knew Ed McCurdy as the host from the Bitter End and he was a folk singer and writer with a long and varied career. In 1957 he recorded some bawdy folk songs later packaged as A Box of Dalliance. His plea for world peace, ‘Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream’, written in 1950, is among the greatest songs ever written and was performed when the Berlin Wall was demolished. In 1964 it was recorded by both the Kingston Trio and Simon & Garfunkel and although the Trio have the edge and a fuller sound, Paul and Artie’s version is a good one.

  The Scottish folk song, ‘Peggy-O’, is about an army captain whose advances are shunned so he plans to destroy the village of Fennario in retaliation. The song, originally known as ‘The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie’, exists in many versions and was recorded around the same time by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. It became a mainstay of the Grateful Dead’s concerts. Again, it is a saccharine performance from Simon & Garfunkel, which goes against the grain of the lyrics.

  There is a song, ‘The Sun Is Burning’, from the Scottish folk singer, Ian Campbell, who will come into our story. It’s a round robin with each verse reflecting on the position of the sun, but it could be about a nuclear holocaust. The song was regularly performed by Luke Kelly of the Dubliners.

  Simon’s five songs are ‘Bleecker Street’, ‘Sparrow’, ‘The Sound of Silence’, ‘He Was My Brother’ and ‘Wednesday Morning 3am’. Although the last song gives the album its name, it is not the strongest. It begins as a gentle travelling song but the singer is a criminal on the run for robbing a liquor store.

  Rather like ‘The Sound of Silence’, ‘Bleecker Street’ is a song of alienation. It is not saying how wonderful Greenwich Village is and how great these little clubs are. No, the fog is rolling round the street like a shroud and the performers are juggling art with commerce. It’s a very good song indeed but it is unusual to find Simon retaining his false rhyme of ‘sustaining’ and ‘Canaan’. It is a pity that they didn’t return to this song as it could have worked with a full arrangement.

  The album was issued within a month, but w
ho could tell how the album would sell? President Kennedy had been assassinated in November 1963 and the public wanted uplifting, non-demanding music. How else can you explain the Singing Nun going to No. 1? But the music industry had dramatically changed at the start of 1964 and by April, the Beatles were holding the top five places on the US chart. There might have been a cult following for reflective folk songs, but the real demand was for beat music, preferably from the UK.

  By including popular songs like ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’, Columbia may have hoped for big sales, but as Simon put it, ‘it was a real stiff’. They couldn’t even get bookings to promote it. ‘We couldn’t get a job. Artie and I auditioned at a lot of clubs in the States, but nobody showed any interest in our music.’ The initial sales of the album, prior to any hit singles, were 1,500 copies and it wasn’t released in the UK until 1968, although an EP of four songs was put out at the end of 1965.

  Wednesday Morning 3am was a reasonable start, but no one would call it a classic album. Well, Garfunkel perhaps. He supplies some informative, if pretentious, liner notes. You wonder what Simon really thought of them but it all helped in pushing the merits of his compositions.

  CHAPTER 3

  To England Where My Heart Lies

  Because there were few engagements resulting from the release of Wednesday Morning 3am in the States, Paul Simon thought he would make his first trip to Europe and for thirteen of the next twenty months, he would be there, mostly in England. Art meanwhile would be studying in New York.

  Paul Simon liked to think of himself as a troubadour, wandering from place to place like Woody Guthrie or the writer Jack Kerouac, collecting stories, amassing experiences, carrying a guitar, writing songs, and singing for his supper. But he was also deeply aligned with the great songwriters of New York, assiduously composing highly crafted songs in their cubicles. And Garfunkel? Well, go back to the song ‘Earth Angel’; Garfunkel was his shadow, possessing the angel voice that he wished had been his own. An Everly Brother with wings, as it were.