Simon & Garfunkel

by Spencer Leigh

  Art chose songs by contemporary writers which would showcase his voice to the best advantage. Among the writers were Jimmy Webb, Carole King and Randy Newman but no Paul Simon. These were classy writers and there was no loss in quality through Simon not being involved. I was very pleasantly surprised when I played this album again in 2015; I hadn’t heard it in full for thirty years and thought it was a superlative MOR record, although that might be damning it with faint praise. Angel Clare, a character in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, was a perfect title, two words which convey Garfunkel’s sound. His multi-layered voice with the children’s choir on Osibisa’s ‘Woyaya’ could not be more celestial.

  The album is technically perfect and the engineering and production was by Ron Halee, who knew his voice and its capabilities. They took enormous pains to get it right and Garfunkel has said that eighty per cent of his time was spent in mixing the instrumental tracks. They sometimes used the clever trick of ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ of taking a very full production and mixing it down.

  As a sound picture, there are no complaints and a much wider audience was deserved on the tracks which used Garfunkel’s voice primarily as an instrument, for example, the merging of ‘Feuilles-Oh’ and ‘Do Space Men Pass Dead Souls on Their Way to the Moon?’ The first is a Haitian folk song, written in French, about a mother trying to save the life of her child. Paul hated it and their treatment of it, but he had gone along with it to be sure it wouldn’t work: it was later a bonus track on a Simon & Garfunkel set. The second has the bizarre composing credit of J. S. Bach and Linda Grossman, not to mention a remarkable title. The overall effect is like the Swingle Singers.

  Randy Newman’s homage to his father, ‘Old Man’, could be a companion to ‘Old Friends/Bookends’, but it is brilliant in its own right, and is much tougher than Simon’s. A man is visiting his dying father and the song concludes:

  Won’t be no God to comfort you,

  You taught me not to believe that lie.

  Jimmy Webb had an impressive portfolio of songs, almost as good as Simon’s – ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘MacArthur Park’ and ‘Up, Up and Away’ – but he relied on others to perform his material. Indeed, in 2015, two of his main channels, Linda Ronstadt and Glen Campbell, were no longer performing and so maybe he will be working with Garfunkel again. Webb does make his own albums but his voice is a songwriter’s voice rather than a singer’s voice and he needs great voices for some of those songs.

  In 1973, Jimmy Webb gave Art Garfunkel two songs for Angel Clare. I would have had ‘All I Know’ down as the first cut on the album, as the opening lines are so unusual.

  I bruise you, you bruise me,

  We both bruise too easily.

  The rest of the lyric doesn’t match this compelling start but it is still good and it was a US hit single, reaching a respectable No. 9, and topping the new AOR listings. The other song was ‘Another Lullaby’, good enough but intentionally somnambulistic.

  A radical reworking of Van Morrison’s ‘I Shall Sing’ turns it into a cheerful little folk song – hardly Van Morrison at all – but it works well, although it is rather slight. There is lovely passage where Garfunkel sings a counter melody to himself. It was a US single but stalled at No. 38.

  The third single, ‘Traveling Boy’, missed the charts completely. This was a good but not great song from Paul Williams and Roger Nichols, who wrote for the Carpenters.

  Then there are the folk songs; ‘Barbara Allen’ and ‘Down in the Willow Garden’ are both beautiful performances. ‘Barbara Allen’ has a lovely mixture of flutes, accordion and strings and he is joined by Paul Simon for the final verse. Art is so intent on the sound that he has overlooked that they are grim and violent songs and he sounds too pallid to be the murderer on ‘Down in the Willow Garden’, which comes with Jerry Garcia’s guitar. Both songs were on the Everly Brothers’ Songs Our Daddy Taught Us.

  Albert Hammond, who had written ‘The Air That I Breathe’, ‘The Free Electric Band’ and, it must be said, ‘Gimme Dat Ding’, wrote one of the best tracks on the album, ‘Mary Was an Only Child’.

  Art Garfunkel released a fine single of a Tim Moore song, ‘Second Avenue’, which was not included on the album. His version and Tim Moore’s original were released simultaneously and he made No. 34 in the US, while Moore’s original was No. 58. It is a moving song of lost love, containing personal details, and I prefer Garfunkel’s lush orchestral recording, although there is not much in it. It has not been served well on reissue as a shortened version has been used. Check out Garfunkel’s single at just over four minutes. I am amazed that neither Art Garfunkel nor Tim Moore’s record companies thought that this song was worthy of major promotion. Even today the song could be a major hit for someone.

  Angel Clare was released in September 1973 and Art only made one appearance to promote it. He appeared without Simon at the Columbia Records sales convention in October where he sang ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ to an audience which included Paul Simon. Still, it was a successful album, making No. 5 in the US and No. 14 in the UK.

  An individual assessment of Garfunkel’s place in Simon & Garfunkel was written by Bob Edmands and published in Cream in May 1973. He said, ‘On the sleeve of their Greatest Hits album, they’ve got that self-satisfied look of average hip millionaires right down to the hand-faded Levi’s. How come they threw it all away.’ He added, ‘Mr Garfunkel’s ego seems to have swelled with a pride in his own talents from the earliest days of their collaboration.’

  Earlier we printed Art’s comments on ‘He Was My Brother’ and Edmands thinks it a miracle that Art ‘didn’t get his face punched at that stage in their relationship’. Edmands sees Garfunkel spoiling Simon’s songs by insisting on top-heavy accompaniments and his insistence on being on the creative side is manifest in ‘Voices of Old People’, a track which Edmands assumes Simon hates as much as he does. ‘Simon should really have told his junior partner where to get off.’ This may contain some truth but Simon doesn’t hold back in interviews and he has never criticised this track.

  Here’s how Simon reacted in 1972 when Rolling Stone suggested he could never be as successful as he was with Simon & Garfunkel. ‘Yeah, like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Don’t tell me that, that I’ll never be bigger than… How do you know what I’ll do? I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing in the next decade of my life. It could be my greatest time of work. Maybe I’m finished. Maybe I’m not going to do my thing until I’m 50. People will say then, “Funny thing was, in his youth he sang with a group. He sang popular songs in the 60s.” Fans of “rock and roll”, in quotes, may remember the duo Simon & Garfunkel. That’s how I figure it.’

  To promote There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, Paul arranged a series of concerts in June 1973, starting with three days at Carnegie Hall and ending at the Royal Albert Hall. The shows featured Simon in concert with Urubamba and the Jessy Dixon Singers. Urubamba were four South American musicians who play flutes, percussion and charango. Two were with Los Incas and Simon used Urubamba on stage for ‘El Condor Pasa’, ‘Duncan’ and ‘The Boxer’.

  Simon had heard the Jessy Dixon Singers at the 1972 Newport Jazz Festival and they joined him for ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Loves Me Like a Rock’ and ‘The Sound of Silence’. They performed a spirited ‘Jesus Is the Answer’ in their own spot. Ian Hoare, reviewing the concert at the Royal Albert Hall for Let It Rock wrote, ‘The crunch came when he allowed the Jessy Dixon Singers to do a couple of numbers on their own. It didn’t matter that they were saying, “Jesus is the answer, there is no other”; they were bursting at the seams with music that expressed a sense of human potential in comparison with which everything Paul Simon has ever done seemed bleached, placid and sterile.’

  Ian Hoare had been at the press conference. ‘He struck me as an arrogant, sulky, pompous little sod, repeatedly comparing himself with Dylan and apparently taking himself 100% seriously as a purveyor of
potentially world-saving observations. More to the point, he was a pedestrian guitarist and had a wet, weedy voice, which sounded exactly like it was – the voice of a would-be pop star of the early-60s breed.’ So you lose some, you wince some.

  The seven-minute version of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ indicates how slowly they took the song. Paul in concert sounded more American than on his studio recordings and he frequently used a half-talking, half-speaking approach to his material, particularly on ‘The Sound of Silence’.

  The concerts led to the album Live Rhymin’ and possibly one reason for the release was so he could lay claim to ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and some others for himself. ‘The Boxer’ was now performed with an additional final verse,

  Live Rhymin’ is generous on playing time but aside from introducing the musicians, his only announcement on the album is to tell the audience, ‘Let’s hope that we continue to live.’ The album made No. 33 on the US album charts and was not on the UK charts, but then live albums are not usually big sellers.

  There is considerably more speech on the bootleg Simply Simon, unofficially released after he played Los Angeles in November 1973. The recording is not as clear as an official release but it is worth catching for Paul’s comments. When someone requests ‘Papa Hobo’, he says, ‘I could play “Papa Hobo” if I could remember the changes, which I can’t.’ He adds a choppy rhythm to ‘Was a Sunny Day’ and runs the song into ‘Cecilia’. His ‘Kodachrome’ is excellent and he receives six bursts of applause and three of laughter during the performance, although the audience must have known the jokes already.

  One track, ‘Death in Santa Cruz’ is not a new Simon song but an Urubamba instrumental. It was featured on Urubamba’s own album, which Simon produced in 1973. He also produced Maggie and Terre Roche but their single ‘If You Emptied Out All Your Pockets, You Could Not Make the Change’ was not released in the UK. Following Paul’s songwriting classes in New York, he had presented a talk on the history of rock’n’roll with Clive Davis. Many anecdotes from the Davis/Simon/ Columbia days are quoted in Davis’ own book. Rolling Stone carried a further one shortly before Davis was ousted from the label: ‘Simon strode into the conference room in the midst of a meeting. Davis was pleasantly surprised. Then Simon slammed a book onto the table in front of the president telling him, “You need to read this book more than anyone I know.” Davis glanced at the volume, The Life of Krishna, as Simon spun round. “Wait, stay,” urged Davis. Simon continued out through the door.’

  The same issue of Rolling Stone contained this quote from Paul: ‘Once in a while when I turn on the radio in the car, the lyrics I hear are really banal. Toast – when I hear Carole King, I think of toast. Carly Simon is an exception. The rest of the stuff is either attempts to be campy or it’s madness and destruction type of rock’n’roll or it’s “Let’s boogie again like we did in the 50s.”’

  Another exception must surely be Peter Yarrow and his much neglected album, That’s Enough for Me. Yarrow had sold 35m records as part of Peter, Paul & Mary, but his solo outings had fallen flat. In an effort to get moving again, he enlisted expert help and Paul wrote and produced ‘Groundhog’, which includes Paul Butterfield with Levon Helm and Garth Hudson from the Band among the musicians. It’s a gentle, reflective song in the ‘Papa Hobo’ tradition and you can imagine Simon performing it himself.

  Yarrow had been influenced by Simon’s cosmopolitan approach to record-making. His songs were recorded in Alabama, New York, Louisiana, Jamaica and London. He used the Jessy Dixon singers and had David Bedford write an intriguing arrangement for ‘Old Father Time’. It’s the Paul Simon record that he never made and is certainly more adventurous than Yarrow’s recordings as part of ‘two beards and a blonde’.

  CHAPTER 10

  Still Crazy

  Paul and Art’s differences in tastes had been noticeable in their solo work. Paul considered Angel Clare ‘too sweet’. He said, ‘I told Art that I want to write an odd piece of nastiness for his next album.’ That nastiness was ‘My Little Town’, an evocative study of childhood and about how difficult it can be to revisit the past:

  Nothing but the dead and the dying,

  Back in my little town.

  That much-repeated line is highly effective and the whole lyric is short but tightly packed with images. Art loved the song and asked Paul to sing with him. They sounded as fresh as ever and for a change Art goes for the lower harmonies. It was produced with Phil Ramone who was producing Paul’s new album.

  Phil Ramone had been born in South Africa in 1934 and was a violin prodigy, playing before the future Queen Elizabeth. The family moved to New York and he studied at Juilliard but he preferred jazz. He was the recording engineer on ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ (Astrud Gilberto) and ‘It’s My Party’ (Lesley Gore) and he worked on the films Midnight Cowboy and Flashdance (marrying Karen Kamon from the cast). At one stage he was working with Billy Joel, Chicago and Paul Simon at the same time and the back cover photograph for The Stranger shows him with Billy Joel’s band. He was an optimistic, upbeat guy – and needed to be.

  ‘My Little Town’ restored the duo to the US Top 10 (No. 9) but, despite much radio play, it was not a UK hit. It was included on both their solo albums, Breakaway (Art Garfunkel) and Still Crazy After All These Years (Paul Simon), which were released side-by-side in October 1975. As the albums only had ten tracks apiece, they contained an A-side, a B-side and a mean side.

  That track aside, Breakaway was produced by Richard Perry, an adventurous producer whose credits included Tiny Tim, Ella Fitzgerald, Fats Domino, Captain Beefheart, Harry Nilsson and Carly Simon. By skilful production, he had produced Ringo Starr’s highly infectious album, Ringo and brought out the best in his voice, and it was a cosmic leap from Ringo Starr to Art Garfunkel. His plan was to ‘make a romantic album for the 70s’, a sentiment Garfunkel wholly embraced, but that meant an album of superior MOR music.

  Art was cool and calm and loved a fragility in the songs he chose, whereas Richard was a volcano of nervous energy. The combination worked and they especially succeeded with ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’. The song had been written by Harry Warren and Al Dubin for a Busby Berkeley extravaganza, Dames (1934), starring Joan Blondell. Dick Powell sang the song in the film but it was a hit for Ben Selvin and later recorded by Frank Sinatra. There have been numerous versions but Art’s was based on the Flamingos’ doo-wop revival in 1959. It’s a beautiful production but I wish Art had repeated the Flamingos’ ‘doo-wop-she-bop’ refrains. It had been one of the few doo-wop records to mention the word itself.

  Art visited the UK to promote ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ on Top of the Pops and he was a model of diplomacy at the press conference at the Savoy Hotel. He wouldn’t be drawn into opinions on either the Bay City Rollers (the current fad) or Paul Simon and most reporters got their copy by writing about his beautiful girlfriend, Laurie Bird, who had played opposite James Taylor (the driver) and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys (the mechanic) in the cult film Two-Lane Blacktop, released in 1971.

  Art told of his plans to tour with a small group in 1976, of how he was writing poetry and ‘noodling on the keyboard’, and how he wanted to produce Stephen Bishop and possibly cut his own album of Bishop’s songs. Bishop wrote two songs on Breakaway, ‘Looking for the Right One’ and ‘The Same Old Tears On a New Background’, which were good but not great ballads. Still, it did lead to him securing his own recording deal. My main complaint about his songs, and also Steve Eaton’s ‘Rag Doll’, is that they were not compelling enough. Some think that Garfunkel’s work as a whole is like that but you only have to hear the vitality as he bursts into the chorus of Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will be Forever)’ to know it is not always so.

  Garfunkel’s energy is evident on the title song by Gallagher and Lyle. It integrates Garfunkel’s voice with Steve Cropper’s guitar, Bill Payne’s synthesiser and the harmonies of David Crosby, Graham Nash, Bruce Johnston and Toni Tenni
lle. It is most infectious and reminiscent of the Beach Boys who had recorded a different song called ‘Break Away’. Bruce Johnston was a Beach Boy and his classic composition ‘Disney Girls’ is neatly placed next to this track. It is a less jaded and more idyllic view of adolescence than ‘My Little Town’. As the song says, fantasy worlds and Disney girls are coming back.

  An intriguing songwriting combination is that of Albert Hammond with Hal David, a lyricist in search of a partner since his break-up with Burt Bacharach. The song ‘99 Miles from L.A.’ is very good, rather like a pop version of Antônio Carlos Jobim. Jobim’s own South American rhythms can be heard on ‘Waters of March’. Garfunkel loves lists and so the lyric grabbed his attention:

  A mile, a must, a thrust, a bump,

  It’s a girl, it’s a rhyme, it’s a cold, it’s the mumps.

  Make what you will of that or take Art’s explanation, broadcast on Radio 1: ‘Don’t take it for granted that there is such a thing as a chair. A chair, that’s great, wherever did it come from? Just a few short years ago you came into the world and you saw all these things. As a child your eyes were wide open at the mystery of all the things that make up our civilisation and in truth, you’ve never really grasped how magical, how fabulous and how busy it all is. You’ve gotten cool about it but you’ve never really gotten cool about it because it’s still terrifically wonderful daily. That song is just about enjoying all these things, it’s celebrating a night, a point, a grain, a bee, a buzzard, a trap, a gun, a death. And it makes a kind of fabulous swirl in the end which is what I’m looking for. To me, it’s like Fellini.’ Convinced?

  The album made No. 7 on both the UK and US album charts but the single of ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ was a UK No. 1, replacing David Essex’s ‘Hold Me Close’, but only lasting two weeks as David Bowie was flying high with his reissued ‘Space Oddity’. The single of ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ made No. 18 in the US and ‘Break Away’ floundered at No. 39.