Simon & Garfunkel

by Spencer Leigh

  This quest is also expressed in the last verse of ‘Mrs Robinson’ and in ‘Papa Hobo’ (1972). The crux of the matter was summarised by Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider: ‘You know this used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.’ We are shown breath-taking American scenery and yet Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) only find ugliness when they enter the towns.

  The next song, ‘Overs’, is about the death of love, but the opening line is also a coda for ‘America’. The singer gives many reasons for leaving, although he never actually leaves. He always stops to think it through and decides to stay. You could argue that it is about how too much travel can do your head in.

  From middle age, we move to old age for ‘Voices of Old People’, which is what it says. The liner note explains, ‘Art Garfunkel recorded old people in various locations in New York and Los Angeles over a period of several months. These voices were taken from those tapes. We wish to thank the United Home for Aged Hebrews and the Californian Home for the Aged at Reseda for their cooperation.’

  But could Art have been arrested? ‘We wanted to tape old people and have their sentiments as part of the theme in Bookends. I went to old age homes where I brought the mic out and sat down and talked about things. I also eavesdropped in Central Park. I would take a long shotgun mic and hide it under my shoulder inside a loaf of French bread and pick up on conversations.’

  Many voices differing in sex, pitch, accent and delivery have been packed into a two-minute collage. It is an unexpected track but it works well the first time at least and each voice is full of conviction and character. Someone, presumably the matron, tries to liven up the proceedings by asking, ‘Are you happy?’ There is no reply. Paul commented, ‘I liked “Voices of Old People” and I loved what Artie and Roy did with the stereo mix of those voices, the way one fades in and one fades out.’

  The phrases and the moods are echoed in the closing songs, ‘Old Friends’ and ‘Bookends Theme’. In these tracks, Simon displays his observations about growing old. He opens quietly and the simile he uses about the old men sitting like bookends is so powerful that it was deservedly used for the album’s title. The song drifts off on a lovely sad melody, although at one stage it is replaced by wild, confused music. The sound of cellos accompanies Art Garfunkel as he asks if we can imagine ourselves in the same position. The conclusion is that all that the elderly possess are their reminiscences. The song would have a new application for Simon & Garfunkel’s reunion shows.

  There are no joys of living on this suite. The album is more dark than light, more death than life. On consecutive tracks, Paul Simon has told us that there is no future for youth, America, love or old age. There is little hope.

  There are only five songs on the second side but once again there are no duds. Unfortunately, though, all but one of them had been used before. Alan Paramor, his UK music publisher, explained, ‘The reason that Bookends had one side made up of previously released singles was simply that Paul Simon has not had the time to write new material. He is not the kind of writer who can force ideas.’

  It would take even longer now that Simon was changing his approach to songwriting. There was a more deliberate fusion of lyric and melody, with the words being chosen as much for their sound as their content.

  In May 1970, Simon spoke to Loraine Alterman of Rolling Stone about his working practices: ‘I write sound and meaning simultaneously now. I used to write meaning first. I’d say what it is I want to say and say it in words. Then I set that with the melody. I don’t like that so much. That period came to an end with “The Dangling Conversation”. You say something specifically. Then I came to realise that you can do it another way. You don’t have to do it that way. Then I went just straight sounds. Now I try to write simultaneously, sounds fit the melody — the right vocal sound, the word as it sounds right with this melody. At the same time you write the meaning. It’s just a skill that you learn by practicing.’ Maybe this led to his songs being more direct and conversational.

  There is a folky blues song, ‘Groundhog’, that Simon wrote around this time but discarded. It has a hypnotic line, ‘Morning is the best time of the day’ which could easily have become popular. He put down a demo, which is on YouTube, but he did not take it further and the song was recorded by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary in 1973 for his solo album, That’s Enough for Me.

  Bookends was released two years before Abbey Road, and like Abbey Road, one side was a suite of songs. The Columbia press release called it ‘a unique understanding of the soul of the young city-dweller’. Dean Friedman would go along with that: ‘The Bookends album contains a lot of my favourite songs. I used to work at the Palisades Amusement Park, a place with carnival rides and Ferris wheels. I used to give away those little purple bulls whose heads would move back and forth and I gave out change in the penny arcade. I would come home late at night and I would put the speakers from the turntable on either side of the piano and I would put my head in-between those speakers and I would listen to Bookends.’

  The only previously unrecorded song on side two was ‘Punky’s Dilemma’, which had its first airing at the Monterey Festival. It had been intended for the scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman is floating in the pool but Mike Nichols didn’t go for it. The whimsical song is a cross between ‘Feelin’ Groovy’, anything by Donovan and those lovely, lolloping songs which John Sebastian wrote for the Lovin’ Spoonful. Unfortunately, its very light-heartedness goes against it as it tends to be overlooked. Put the album on and it’s a pleasant surprise. The song is not as innocuous as its lyric suggests. Note the reference to draft dodging, and the rhythm of ‘Old Roger, draft dodger’ was later developed in ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’. Lois Lane recorded a cover for the UK but the lyric had to be changed to get airplay. Simon had mentioned Kellogg’s Cornflakes and such product placement was a no-no for the BBC. Instead, she sang, ‘Wish I was a golden cornflake.’

  However, a more grotesque amendment was round the corner. This was Frank Sinatra’s ‘Mrs Robinson’. Burt Bacharach describes the feeling: ‘Sinatra has done a couple of our songs and sadly, I’ve been let down by what I’ve heard. He’s so great and when you hear that Sinatra has recorded one of your songs and it is going to be on his next album, you think, “Fantastic, oh golly, I can hardly wait!” and then it doesn’t work.’

  Bacharach was complaining about changes in tempo, but his songs were treated with respect and not recast like ‘Mrs Robinson’. I don’t know how this came to be recorded but you can imagine the conversation…

  Producer: ‘Frank, you should do something for the kids, you know, one of their songs.’

  Frank: ‘Like what?’

  ‘Something from The Graduate. How about “Mrs Robinson”?’

  ‘That one about the broad, okay, we can make that swing, but hold on, that’s the one with “Jesus” in it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, but…’

  ‘No buts. I’m a good Catholic boy and I don’t sing “Jesus”. Cole Porter didn’t write “Jesus”. Lorenz Hart didn’t write “Jesus”. Jesus, who does this guy think he is?’

  ‘Okay, Frank, we’ll change it. I’ll call Sammy.’

  As a result, Sammy Cahn rewrote the lyric and added a few bits of his own. Frank now sings ‘Jilly loves you more than you will know’, a reference to his favourite restaurant owner, Jilly Rizzo. He mentions the PTA and adds his standard schtick like ‘ding ding ding’.

  It’s super-kitsch and I’m sure that Simon didn’t okay the way Sinatra did his thing.

  Ding ding ding.

  CHAPTER 7

  See How They Shine

  All of a sudden Simon & Garfunkel were everywhere, the hottest names in popular music. It was surprising, as no one would have called them charismatic. We recall the famous week in April 1964 when the Beatles held all five places at the top of the US charts. Now, in June 1968, Simon and Garfunkel had the top three albums – The Graduate at the top fol
lowed by Bookends and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Sounds of Silence was still finding a new audience at No. 27 and even Wednesday Morning 3am was picking up attention at No. 163. Although it had nothing to do with Paul, a top-selling single was ‘Simon Says’ by the 1910 Fruitgum Company.

  The Graduate was breaking box-office records and every film company wanted Paul Simon’s services: ‘I was inundated with requests to supply movie scores. Write the title song for this or write the music for some real inane, bullshit youth movie, I’m sure you know the thing… unrest on the campus.’

  Simon stayed firm, saying in 1971, ‘I loved The Graduate but I wouldn’t really want to write the music to someone else’s film again.’ He turned down Midnight Cowboy, saying that he ‘didn’t want to look like Dustin Hoffman’s songwriter.’ He turned down writing for Dustin’s Broadway play, Jimmy Shine, and John Sebastian wrote the score instead, the show running for a respectable 150 performances.

  Midnight Cowboy, with its theme of loneliness in New York City, would have been perfect for Simon. Indeed, Simon, who rarely admits mistakes, may have regretted this as there is a nodding reference to the film on the back of Bridge Over Troubled Water. The photograph shows Art as Joe Buck with Paul trailing behind as Ratso Rizzi.

  On the whole, though, Simon was right. Many of the films in the wake of The Graduate were better left alone. They were routine sub-Graduates and they ended up with sub-Simon scores. Examples of the new wave, anti-establishment movies included Goodbye, Columbus (Richard Benjamin and Ali McGraw), Wild in the Streets (Richard Pryor) and Candy (Marlon Brando and Ringo Starr).

  There was not a follow-up to The Graduate itself although the ending left the story open. Many years later Buck Henry appeared in Robert Altman’s satire on Hollywood, The Player (1992), making a comic pitch for Graduate 2.

  Paul Simon did change his mind for Brother Sun, Sister Moon, a film about St Francis of Assisi, as Paul was to write the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s music. Bernstein told the press that he was going to teach Simon a few things about composition – not sure how well that would have gone down. Although this did not materialise, Simon did see Bernstein and contributed a few words to his 1971 oratorio, Mass. This line is Simon’s, ‘Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.’

  The director was to be Franco Zeffirelli who had made The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, art-house films which became commercial successes. Despite his track record, he had difficulty in obtaining finance and the project was shelved. Eventually, Zeffirelli revived the idea and shot the film with European money and a score from Donovan, who said, ‘What interested me about St Francis was how he changed the music of the church from boring chants about Latin paradoxes to melodies about flowers, minstrels’ ballads.’ How convenient that he should be an early day Donovan, and Donovan did a good job of writing Donovan songs, but the film gathered little interest in 1973.

  Month followed month and there was nothing fresh from Paul Simon. Simon & Garfunkel performed sell-out concerts and their reputation grew, but their repertoire was predictable. They added ‘That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine’, associated with Gene Autry but included on the Everly Brothers’ Songs Our Daddy Taught Us (1958).

  The music industry is highly competitive and, back then, artists made at least one album a year. You have to admire Simon’s cool as well as credit Columbia for not pressurising him into releasing more albums. Simon may have felt guilty over the slow work-rate, as he told Rolling Stone this odd tale about Garfunkel – or was it a joke? ‘Artie used to go into record stores and ask if they had the new Simon & Garfunkel album, even if he knew there was no album coming out. He’d just look in to see if maybe it would be there. It would be a surprise to him.’ It certainly would.

  In March 1969 Art and Mort Lewis were talking on a street corner in New York when twenty-three-year-old Linda Grossman walked by. She was an attractive brunette from Tennessee with a degree in architecture. Garfunkel said, as you do, ‘Will you marry me?’ Embarrassed by this, she crossed the street. Garfunkel followed her into a deli, apologised for his behaviour and invited her to a recording session for ‘The Boxer’ that evening. She became Art’s girlfriend and later his wife.

  Then in April 1969 a bearded Simon introduced us to ‘The Boxer’, saying the single had been recorded in several venues. The basic track was cut in Nashville, the end voices and the horns in St Paul’s Church, New York, and the strings in Columbia’s studios, New York. You hear the pedal steel and piccolo together and yet one was played in Nashville and the other in New York. Also Simon and Garfunkel could be exacting to work with – while making ‘The Boxer’, they and Roy Halee had a sprint across a car park, which Simon won.

  Simon denied Bob Johnston’s assertion that they had taken over 100 hours of studio-time to make a five-minute single. ‘That’s not true at all. It was nowhere near that long,’ he said and then added disparagingly, ‘Bob Johnston would have no way of knowing.’ Johnston no longer produced Simon & Garfunkel and the production credit is to the duo themselves and Roy Halee.

  If we hear ‘The Boxer’ today the lyrics sound crystal clear but there were problems in 1969. Simon told Rolling Stone, ‘‘The Boxer’ has a lot to do with sound and a lot of people said that they couldn’t hear the lyrics. That came from the fact that the lyrics went from one word to another and it was hard to separate them. The end of one sound went into the beginning of the next.’

  ‘The Boxer’ was a superb example of Simon’s new approach to songwriting where the sound was all-embracing. We have a quiet, melancholy start and it climaxes with fantastic, frenetic repetition, which owed something to ‘Hey Jude’. In the midst of it were the lyrics. On the surface the song was about a boxer seeking his fortune in New York. Even though he had bad luck, he is a fighter by nature.

  The lyric was both a metaphor and deeply personal. Simon told Roy Carr of the New Musical Express, ‘I would say that “The Boxer” was autobiographical, but it surprised me. When we recorded it, someone said, “Hey, that song’s about you” and I said, “No, it’s not about me. It’s about a guy who…” and as I was saying it, I thought, “Hey, what am I saying? This song is about me and I’m not even admitting it.”’

  Simon thought that ‘The Boxer’ was worth the effort. ‘I am very pleased with it. It’s one of my favourites of all Simon & Garfunkel records. It’s a very personal song and it’s hard to imagine any other interpretation.’ He said that in 1971 and he couldn’t say that now. There have been many versions of ‘The Boxer’, notably from Bob Dylan on his Self Portrait album, Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond and Mumford & Sons. In 2014 Ben Howard sang a sorrowful version on The Dermot O’Leary Show on BBC Radio 2, which showed it worked fine with voice, guitar, cello and a bit of whistling.

  Indeed, it was mooted that Dylan’s life lay behind the song. Certainly there are parallels but Simon dismissed this. Bob Johnston had produced Dylan’s recording and he was the first to play the cover version to Simon. ‘It was fine… it was original,’ said Simon. ‘Like anything Dylan does, it has its own thing. He did it differently and I didn’t think anyone could do that. Dylan’s version makes me smile.’ Is that damning it with backhanded praise?

  On the back of ‘The Boxer’ was the bright and breezy ‘Baby Driver’, which shows that Simon could be capricious. Whereas ‘The Boxer’ was a narrative, this was a rock’n’roll pastiche with a witty lyric and a good dance beat, something not often said about Simon & Garfunkel.

  The music critic Robert Christgau asserted that Paul Simon’s good taste held him back. There may be something in that. The famed TV producer Jack Good said that rock’n’roll was all about bad taste. ‘Baby Driver’ could be Simon’s response. The car is a sexual metaphor, hence the title and the line about feeling your engine. Everything is in the mix: Beach Boy harmonies, bottleneck guitar, raunchy saxophones and car sounds, not to mention the racing commentary.

  While the son
gwriting Paul Simon was baby-driving, the real life Paul Simon was getting married. He and Peggy Harper married in the summer of 1969 and she is mentioned by name in ‘Run That Body Down’ (1972), but by then he had already dedicated his most famous song, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, to her.

  Richard Meltzer in Rolling Stone called the song ‘the biggest metaphor bonanza of all time.’ It was the logical follow-up to ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song’ and Meltzer continued that ‘he probably decided that somewhere along the line he was gonna sit right down and write an epic testimonial to bridges in general and in particular to the metaphorical functions they perform.’ Sarcastic or what?

  Meltzer pointed out that Simon was fighting a losing battle as the metaphor was not only archaic but also bridges were far from safe. ‘Did you see that photo of the bridge in Pakistan after the flood did it in?’

  During his time in England, Paul Simon had played Bickleigh in east Devon. The story goes that Simon had stood on Bickleigh Bridge and watched the waters rising in the River Exe. Residents claimed that this was the inspiration for the song. Nice try, but Paul Simon was inspired by a 1959 gospel record about the raising of Lazarus, ‘Oh Mary Don’t You Weep’ from the Swan Silvertones. During the Baptist hymn, Rev Claude Jeter, says, ‘I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name.’ The Swan Silvertones are a great gospel group with a depth of feeling and intensity in all they do. Their version of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ is electrifying. They recorded prolifically for King, Specialty and Vee Jay from the end of the war to 1965, when Jeter became a full-time minister. His falsetto is amazing and some of the tenor singing on the King records is by Solomon Womack, who was Bobby Womack’s uncle.

  When Simon was writing his new song, he had to break off for the birthday party of their lawyer Michael Tannen in Manhattan. He arrived late and told the partygoers, ‘I’ve just written my “Yesterday”’ and sang it for them. He told Artie, ‘This is for you’, but Artie said, ‘I can’t sing gospel well.’