by David Browne
Like many of his peers, Simon glommed onto the folk music boom that arrived after the Kingston Trio and then Peter, Paul and Mary brought strums and hearty harmonies to the masses. Before long, he’d ditched the doo-wop affectations and was transforming himself into a socially conscious singer-songwriter, just like Bob Dylan and all the newgeneration balladeers playing in nearby Greenwich Village. One night in his parents’ bathroom—either 1962 or early 1964, depending on the source—he began writing a new song about the alienation his generation was starting to feel. (The opening reference to “darkness” referred to the way he’d sing in the bathroom with the lights off.) During his part-time song-plugger job, Simon would often drag along his guitar and play his own songs for publishers. One day, he played “The Sound of Silence” for Tom Wilson, a Columbia Records executive. Wilson liked the song and decided to cut it, so Simon brought along Garfunkel, with whom he’d reconciled after a chance meeting on the streets of Manhattan. Wilson, a young black producer, was impressed with Garfunkel’s white Afro—it was the first he’d ever seen—and before long, the former Tom and Jerry had been signed to the same label as Dylan.
With the contract, they finally reverted to their actual names. Goddard Lieberson, Columbia’s distinguished and erudite president, first thought “Simon and Garfunkel” sounded too much like a department store, and a few Columbia executives considered their moniker too Jewish-sounding. Club-goers at their earliest Village folk-club shows would approach them at intermission and ask when the jokes were coming; they assumed “Simon and Garfunkel” was a comedy duo. But the time called for authenticity over artifice, so they were, finally, Simon and Garfunkel.
Released in October 1964, their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, showcased what they could bring to the folk music table. Their harmonies—Simon on the low end, Garfunkel on the high—were altogether different from the rousing three- or four-part vocal blends heard on the majority of folk records; Simon’s lyrics were pensive and scholarly. “The Sound of Silence” was a snapshot of a generation colliding with conformity, mass media, and “neon gods.” With its images of the homeless, poets reading by themselves, and early morning fog, “Bleecker Street” evoked Greenwich Village’s main thoroughfare after the music had faded for the night. The careful intertwining of the two men’s voices only added to the song’s mood of predawn, empty-streets fragility. But the bare-boned production throughout the album was overly wan, and the two men weren’t altogether convincing in the sturdy–sing-along department (“You Can Tell the World” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain” weren’t as rousing as they wanted to be). Columbia spent all of $3,000 recording it and only sold a depressing 1,500 copies. By the end of the year, Simon had relocated to London and was singing in folk clubs and train stations, and Garfunkel was back in school. Simon and Garfunkel had capsized as quickly as they’d launched.
In the middle of 1965, with folk-rock the industry rage thanks to the Byrds’ cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” the strangest thing happened: Without Simon or Garfunkel’s knowledge, Wilson overdubbed electric guitar, bass and drums onto the original “The Sounds of Silence.” The transformation made all the difference: The electric guitar made the song spooky and spectral, as if listeners were walking into a long, darkened tunnel. Simon was in England when he heard the news, and from London, he read each week, stunned, as the song began climbing the charts.
In need of a manager, the duo reached out to Lewis, then overseeing the Brothers Four, a blatantly commercial folk group. Lewis freely admitted that jazz was his preferred genre; after the war, he’d stumbled into a job in the office of a press agent for one of his heroes, jazz pianist Stan Kenton, and eventually managed Kenton and pianist Dave Brubeck. Lewis first met Simon and Garfunkel at his Manhattan apartment around Thanksgiving 1965, where Simon was visibly impressed with Lewis’ personally autographed copy of a Lenny Bruce LP. (“You know Lenny Bruce?” Simon asked in amazement.) Still, Simon was skeptical. At a subsequent meeting with Simon and a lawyer, Lewis declared he could get Simon and Garfunkel $10,000 a week in concert earnings. Simon asked Lewis to step outside for a few minutes. When Lewis returned, Simon said they would sign with him, but only if the contract could be terminated in six months. At twenty-four, Simon had already devoured the lessons, good and bad, of the music business and didn’t fully trust Lewis.
Lewis wasn’t kidding; within two months, they were playing colleges on weekends and taking home thousands of dollars a night. They quickly capitalized on the hit with an album, Sounds of Silence, largely comprised of dour melodies Simon had written in London: songs about recluses and suicides (“Richard Cory,” “A Most Peculiar Man”), isolation (“I Am a Rock”), failed romance (“April Come She Will”), and premature nostalgia (“Leaves That Are Green,” in which Simon looked back wistfully at his life of a few years before). For all its rainy-day ambience, the album was meatier, in both production and material, than their debut. From the second it began, with Simon’s doleful opening guitar lick, “I Am a Rock” found a middle patch between cranky isolation and record-making smarts and became their next hit.
By early 1969, when work on the Bridge Over Troubled Water album commenced, the two could look back on an astonishing three years. Each album had sold better than the one before and, just as important, advanced their art as well. Sounds of Silence gave way to late 1966’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. The album was more precious than Sounds of Silence: “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” and “Cloudy” twinkled like stars, and “The Dangling Conversation” worked in references to Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost amidst its pointed sketch of an erudite couple on the rocks. Simon’s “A Simple Desultory Phillipic” couldn’t decide whether it was a mockery of protest songs or an attempt to copy Dylan. (Likewise, bleating organs throughout Sounds of Silence were directly lifted from a Dylan record of the period.) But the duo’s creative balance—Garfunkel’s tendency toward the opulent and grand, Simon’s toward reflection and sheltered intimacy—played out beautifully in “Homeward Bound,” “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall,” and a cascading Garfunkel showpiece called “To Emily, Wherever I May Find Her.” Simon was loosening up as well: Featuring members of Dave Brubeck’s band, “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” added a slice of jaunty bounce to their repertoire.
The following year, director Mike Nichols used some of their older songs—and a new, unfinished one originally called “Mrs. Roosevelt” but renamed “Mrs. Robinson”—for his film The Graduate. When the movie became a smash by capturing post–Kennedy assassination disaffection, complete with a Jewish leading man in Dustin Hoffman, Simon and Garfunkel were embedded even further into the mass consciousness. Bookends , from 1968, was half devoted to a suite of songs that looked at life from childhood to old age, from the urban chaos of “Save the Life of My Child” to the young couple on the road in the luminous “America” to the graying couple on a park bench in “Old Friends.” The album’s flip side collected a random assortment of unconnected but equally thrilling singles and B-sides like “Fakin’ It” and a more polished version of “Mrs. Robinson.” The often affected quality of their first records—heard even in the poetry-student tone in Simon’s between-song comments during early shows—burned away, replaced by songs and singing more conversational, more direct, and less mannered; they could also be whimsical in the best way.
As rock stars, they didn’t always fit the bill. Their private lives were secretive; neither Simon’s London girlfriends nor he and Garfunkel’s dabblings in pot and acid ever made the tabloids. (Writing to a friend from London, Garfunkel joked about not using the postal service to send them hash.) They were precise and orderly, taking vacations every December and January. After concerts, their dressing rooms would be visited not by groupies yearning to sleep with them but by girls eager to share their poetry. At one Detroit concert, a security guard stopped Simon and Garfunkel at the backstage door, thinking they were audience members. �
�Well, we work here,” Simon said, calmly. Their hipness, or lack of it, was far less important than their considerable craft.
By late 1969, Simon’s musical sojourns continued pressing onward. In the same way gospel had inspired “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a love for South American music drew him to “El Condor Pasa,” a gently floating ballad he’d heard performed in Paris by the Peruvian band Los Incas. Another day on Blue Jay Way, his younger brother Eddie—an equally skilled guitarist as well as the eerily spitting image of Paul, down to their identical fresh-from-the-Army-barber haircuts of the mid ’60s—began banging a rhythm on a piano bench. Simon and Garfunkel soon joined in, and Simon taped it for fun. It wasn’t much beyond a clanky, bustling rhythm track, but Simon kept returning to it, drawn in by its mesmerizing polyrhythmic pull. Eventually he pulled out a guitar and began playing along, and out came a new, rollicking song, “Cecilia.”
Simon’s fastidiousness and musical-explorer tendencies weren’t the only reason for the delay in completing Bridge Over Troubled Water. Just as the sessions were getting underway, Mike Nichols reentered their lives. After The Graduate, Nichols had decided to adapt Joseph Heller’s absurdist World War II novel Catch-22 to the screen. Since filming would take place in Mexico and Rome, Paramount gave Nichols a sizable budget of $15 million. Having grown friendly with both men, especially Garfunkel, Nichols offered Garfunkel a role as the naïve, idealistic Captain Nately.
From the start, Garfunkel’s participation in the film was a sensitive issue. Lewis tried to talk him out of it; he and Simon both felt it would take Garfunkel out of action on the album for too long. But Nichols convinced Garfunkel, and Garfunkel himself thought the timing—a threemonth shoot—would work out: While he would be filming, Simon could be working on new material. In January 1969, Garfunkel, who was paid $75,000 for the role, departed for Guaymas, a town in northwest Mexico so remote that it could only be reached from Mexico City by way of a thirty-hour train ride.
Catch-22, which entailed a fully operative airfield, freshly constructed roads, and working B-52 bombers, didn’t promise to be an even remotely trouble-free production. Cast and crew were stranded in Mexico for almost five months. In order to rehearse their new songs, Simon had no choice but to fly down to Mexico himself at least once. Sequestered in Garfunkel’s hotel room, the two worked on their harmonies and arrangement of “The Boxer” into the night, keeping at least one cast member, a young New York-based actor named Bob Balaban (later to find wider fame appearing in most of Christopher Guest’s satirical, improvised films), awake in his room next door. Filming of Catch-22 continued in Los Angeles in June, followed by scenes in Rome in the fall.
Returning to Los Angeles, Simon was now on his own. His central collaborator would now be Halee, a stocky, patient, and equally fastidious studio technician several years older than Simon. (His short, partedon-the-side haircut and shirts and ties worn in the studio made his age even more aparent.) Simon began to grumble to some of his studio musicians about Garfunkel’s absence or, other times, that Garfunkel was holding him back creatively. During film breaks, Garfunkel popped in when he could, Simon presenting him with new songs he thought his partner should sing or with largely completed tracks. An early point of contention became “Cuba Sí, Nixon No.” Reflecting his ongoing love of early rock and roll, Simon had written a mocking song about the thennew president, set to a frisky stomp that recalled Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven.” The song’s recording became a barometer of each man’s diverging musical tastes. During one early rehearsal, Simon, reveling in a groove and rhythm unlike anything the two had done on their first four albums, sang and played the half-finished song with a smile. Leaning in to harmonize, Garfunkel struggled to find the right vocal blend to match the song’s tone.
When a near-complete take was ready, they and Halee gathered in the Columbia control room for a playback. As the song boomed out of the speakers, Simon was animated, playing air guitar and bouncing on his heels. Garfunkel, hands tucked into pockets, stood silently, nodding ever so slightly. As much as Simon loved it, Garfunkel wasn’t feeling it, and later they argued over whether or not it fit in with the rest of the album. The song was ultimately dropped.
Although the album should have been wrapped up by fall, other commitments intruded. In October, Simon and Garfunkel went on the road for the first time in over a year, playing ten concerts between New York and Los Angeles. To beef up their sound onstage, they brought along a band—Knechtel, Blaine, Osborn, and Carter—who joined them for several songs each night. Also along for a good portion of the tour was a two-man film crew.
With an incomplete album hanging over their heads and Columbia growing more impatient with each week—a Christmas release was now out of the question—the last thing Simon and Garfunkel needed was an additional project. But earlier in the year, they’d committed to a television special sponsored by AT&T, a company so desperate to appear hip that it doled out over $600,000 for the rights to the show. Hired to oversee the project was Robert Drew, a former Life magazine correspondent who’d produced well-regarded documentaries (or “candid films,” as he called them) on JFK, firefighters, farmhands, and heroin addicts.
On the set of Catch-22, Garfunkel had befriended Charles Grodin, a thirty-four-year-old Pittsburgh-born actor with a slew of TV and Broadway credits to his name. Grodin had blandly handsome features that disguised a subversive side and a dry, off-kilter sense of humor (and his Orthodox Jewish background as well). Before long, Grodin began joining Garfunkel on visits to Simon’s Blue Jay Way house. After Simon had had unsatisfying meetings with potential directors for the film, he asked Grodin, who had some stage directorial experience on his résumé. Grodin helped Simon flesh out the framework for the special and agreed to direct and work with Drew.
Shortly before the scheduled airdate of November 30, 1969, executives from AT&T gathered in a screening room at Drew’s Fifth Avenue offices to watch the finished product, Songs of America, for the first time. They expected to see a music special and did—half the time, anyway. Cameras caught Simon and Garfunkel onstage and in hotel rooms, arriving at airports, and rehearsing for their tour. The concert footage made it clear that all they needed was Simon’s resonant, agile guitar chords as accompaniment; despite the caliber of their musicianship, the rock band behind them often felt intrusive. The AT&T types watched as one hit after another—“America,” “Homeward Bound,” “The Boxer”—tumbled out. As always, Garfunkel stood rigidly as he sang, as if preparing to read a term paper in front of a class, while Simon had a tendency to casually gyrate in time with the rhythm.
During the first half of the hour-long special, though, the phone executives began shifting in their seats. In preliminary meetings, Simon told Drew he wanted to make “a home movie about where he thought the nation was,” as Drew recalled. In Simon’s mind, the country was split in two and unraveling at every turn. (He’d broken down in tears the night Nixon had been elected.) To the discomfort of the AT&T executives, half of the hour-long special adhered unwaveringly to Simon’s vision. As their music played in the background, the phone company reps watched footage of decaying housing projects, burning buildings, and bloodied antiwar protesters hurling rocks at police. A montage of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy was set to the just-finished but still-unreleased “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which never sounded more mournful. “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” accompanied a pastiche of Vietnam soldiers and hand-holding hippies. “Punky’s Dilemma,” a slice of subtly anxious draft-dodger whimsy from Bookends, was heard over footage of congressional hearings and Lyndon Johnson. Both Simon and Garfunkel were seen questioning the country’s role in Vietnam (“It’s . . . crap,” said Garfunkel, disgustedly). In one outtake, the duo sang a birthday song to the country, on the verge of its bicentennial, then broke into an imitation of an exploding atomic bomb.
The AT&T men watched in silence and left. Later, an executive from its ad agency called Grodin and yelled at him: �
�You’re using our money to sell your ideology,” he barked. Someone else from AT&T told Drew they’d never air it. At the very least, the company demanded that Coretta Scott King’s speech during footage of a civil rights rally be lowered in volume. “This is not what we contracted for,” an AT&T executive told Advertising Age. “We bought an entertainment show, and they delivered their own personal social and political views.” The Washington Post devoted an op-ed to the controversy, but AT&T wasn’t swayed: The company dumped the special, selling the rights to Alberto-Culver, maker of hair products like VO5 and Noxzema, for $50,000 and taking a considerable financial loss in the process.
When the show eventually aired on CBS, it was massacred in the ratings by its competition, a Peggy Fleming dancing-on-ice special. By then, it hardly mattered to its two stars. Taken aback by AT&T’s qualms, Simon and Garfunkel wound up spending most of their earnings on lawyers who fought to keep the show on the air. Little about the partnership felt effortless anymore.
Arriving at Columbia’s studio on East 52nd Street in early January, Clive Davis was both elated and curious. After a year of waiting, he was finally going to hear a new Simon and Garfunkel album. Davis, who’d taken the reins at Columbia in 1967 after rising from a job in the label’s legal department, was both old and new school. With his thinning head of hair and omnipresent suits and ties, Davis looked his thirty-seven years. Yet his fan-boy enthusiasm for pop—even the corporate-psychedelic patterns of his suits—set him apart from previous label heads. With his ingratiating manner (if not his own formidable ego), Davis knew how to relate to bands like Santana and Big Brother and the Holding Company, both of whom he’d signed to Columbia early in his tenure.