1966 at 50: Simon and Garfunkels' Sounds of Silence

I can't remember how young I was but I was watching it on a black and white tv. The screen was rounded like a bloated rectangle and the image was really just light burning out of a dark blue gloom. Two men at a microphone. A little plink of guitars and then the song:

And the doctor smells his friends....

That's what I heard. It bothered me a little that it made no sense with the rest of the song but I had an image of a man in a white coat opening his apartment door to his dinner guests and running his head up and down their coats, sniffing. The air of my home was restless with absurdism, it seemed to hang in the light like static charges ready to spark and whizz your hair up like a clown. There was nothing weird to me about a doctor who smelled his friends and it didn't faze me that someone had written a song about it. It took me decades of dismissing Paul Simon's real lyrics for their preciousness and English teacher smugness. That they were presented with such an earth-inheriting meekness made me only hate them more. Then, not too long ago, I just listened to the stuff again.

The middle bit I missed just then was how Mr Cook, my year 12 English teacher taught the Simon and Garfunkel Bookends album as poetry. It was a different album, Bookends, but I saw a little more of what the duo had to offer. Then again, this was in 1979 and my most played album for more than a year an a half was Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols. I doubt this LP would have made a deeper impression than that gentle and deep river of song.

What did change me was seeing The Graduate on tv when I was at Uni. It was one of those movies like Casablanca or Cabaret that seem to ride on a buzz decades after the end of their shelf life. There's a lot of Simon and Garfunkel in the movie and they were the nominal score providers. But it's the final shot, the freeze frame when Dustin and Katherine are smiling at the back of the bus and Sounds of Silence comes on. An opening arpeggio, the first few lines (long corrected from fetishistic doctors and their friends) coolly intoned and then the band kicks in. It was the first time I'd noticed that bit.

There are a few faltering moments when the electric backing feels a little out of time but there's a good reason for that. The song had appeared on the duo's debut, the self-consciously titled Wednesday Morning 3 AM, in an acoustic version. Producer Tom Wilson, took that and slapped the wrecking crew on to it behind the artists' backs and released it as a  folk rock single. That was the hit.
Why? Because adding a jangly Danelectro, a thumping Fender bass and drumkit to the shimmering eeriness of the song with its neon gods and prophets' words on subway walls and the chilling flourescent shimmer of its vocal harmonies would not be matched for alien singalong value until the Byrds' Eight Miles High a few months later.

No acoustic version of this song has ever had the forward momentum of this electrified one and as an album opener, the combination of the perfectly matched voices, pre-psychedelic rock arrangement and the lyric compel. The pair had been performing together from the age of eleven, school pantos, school dances, anything. Simon wrote a song for them at thirteen (the lyric sheet with chords are in the Library of Congress) and together or apart, they both gravitated and here, on this consolidating disc and the power of a rock sound behind them it must have felt like the closing of the circle. Sounds of Silence isn't just a pretty song with poetic words, it's an arrival.

Then, after the bright solemnity of that we get all perky with Leaves that are Green. A shiny harpsichord and acoustic guitar over a gang of shakers and scrapers. It sounds like a radio ad from the time until, instead of a thick Madison Avenue voice speaking about deodorant in comes Paul Simon with his soft tenor delivering the kind of line that normally has me stopping a song summarily. "I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song. I'm twenty-two now...." For me it's like song titles with the word song in them. It. Isn't. Clever. Not even back in 1966. Paul Simon at his twee-est does this (the line about real estate here in my bag in America also makes me wince) and it can make it hard for me to keep listening. But in preparation for this blog post I kept the song going and just listened. Happily, after the opening self-referential lines, the number settles into a lovely ditty. Beyond it being a boy/girl song I don't know what it's about but I don't skip it when it turns up.

Blessed churns with clean electric guitars with exotic sounding string bends. The voices come in in high head voice singing a mix of The New Colossus, the sermon on the mount and Christ's cry of despair from the cross. From shouts in perfect fifths to fluid descents to major thirds this arrangement is a marvel of religious ambiguity. Blessed are the best and worst except for Paul, wandering alone around Soho in the dead of night, knowing he has lived too much in seclusion. This is the closest that this vocal harmony powerhouse ever really got to sounding like their jangly contemporaries The Byrds but this is almost the opposite of the latter's then recent Turn Turn Turn with its affirmation of cosmic equilibrium. The narrator here is seething with rage and at no more fierce a point than when the deceptively controlled harmony about being forsaken rolls in with light and ice.

Kathy's Song begins with a finger style arpeggio on an acoustic guitar. Simon's vulnerable high vocal enters with a series of halting lines of sheer worship for the woman of the title. There is pain rather than ache in his voice. She is distant, an ocean away and his longing racks him. The intensity of his thoughts (she is the only truth he has ever known) shift this from a plain love song into territory more eerie and forbidding to these ears. There is something important that has been left unrequited here and he sings across that abyss knowing that it is unbridgeable. This is as scary as anything Ian Curtis or Michael Gira wrote in the name of relationships. A guitar and a soft slow wail of anguish. Know the feeling ... well, I have known the feeling.

Somewhere They Can't Find Me starts with an urgent arpeggio on an acoustic before Simon comes in with his desperate story of fleeing the side of his lover to escape the law after he robbed a store. On the run, creeping down the alleyway to the sounds of a rock band and a jazzy early morning muted trumpet, he bolts away from his sanctuary, the memory of his moment of destruction in hot pursuit. Great piece of work with some soaring harmonies.

Anji is a guitar piece he picked up while living in the U.K. Written by famous folky Davey Graham it sounds exactly like the guitar figure in Somewhere they can't find me. Perhaps this was a way of crediting Graham after Simon pinched the piece for his own song (itself a re-write of one of his own earlier songs). If nothing else it highlights Simon's guitar skills which are considerable throughout the album. Far from the bedsit songwriter he might seem to be, he shows his years of craft and performance in some pretty fine picking.

Richard Cory starts with Duane Eddy bends on bass strings and a shuffling rock beat. Simon comes in with his take on the poem by Edward Arlington Robinson about a local king among men who surprises everyone with a violent suicide. Simon adds two things that lift it from a poem with chords. He sings from the point of view of a commoner, coveting Cory's life from the factory floor as he describes the rich man's lifestyle, wishing to be him. The second addition is that after the line about the bullet through the head the narrator's chorus bashes back in. He still wishes he could be Richard Cory. If that doesn't send a chill you're not listening.

A Most Peculiar Man starts with a gentle guitar figure on the fourth with an organ beneath it emphasising the fourth. The pair come in in close harmony and a sweet melody about a loner in a boarding house who, on the other end of the scale to Richard Cory, also commits suicide. But this is a gentler method, gas from the stove and sleep. Most peculiar only because he wasn't another neighbourhood drone seething through a daily grimace of politeness and internal stress. Is his suicide due to this? Was his nonconformity a refusal or incapacity? All we have is the judgement of the neighbours who are happy enough extending the futility of his life beyond the grave. A lovely blend of grimness and shimmering beauty.

April Come She Will is Art Garfunkel's sole spot unaccompanied at the microphone. His perfect pitch and diction carry his angelic vocal tone through Simon's embellished folk rhyme about the tangling of seasons with the stages of young love, from the freshness of spring to the desolation of winter. This might have been the kind of precious folk song that drove Bluto in Animal House to tear a guitar form the arms of a folky at a party and smash it to pieces against a wall. It's kept from that by the vulnerability of the vocal and the space around it. A memento mori.

We've Got a Groovy Thing Going with its fuzzy Rhodes piano and beat group rhythm. The pair sing the entire thing in harmony. The trumpet from Somewhere They Can't Find Me comes back in and adds a little class to what is in effect a try hard piece meant to show they can rock out. Everything about it works but while I don't skip it I don't celebrate it either.

I Am a Rock is the album's other classic. Referring to John Donne's short poem on the importance of belonging this seems to be boasting the diametric opposite until the final lines when the narrator's comfort is an icy one. Starting with a flashy acoustic figure Simon enters with a couple of lines about the winter's day  before the drums crash in and the pair sing in unison before breaking off into gorgeous dynamic harmony as the band around them swells into bravado with an ingenious emulation of a mandolin on the electric guitar after the chorus. Three verses of this thrilling affirmation of individuality fall back to the opening's solo guitar flurry and Simon's rueful admission that his narrator has given up all joy of belonging as well as its pain and continues into the freeze.

While the act is called Simon and Garfunkel this record is almost wholly Paul Simon's show. It does need Garfunkel's voice to prevent it from sinking into uniformity. Simon's songwriting and playing are a good counter example to anyone (like myself) who might need reassurance that the '60s folk scene produced Bob Dylan and a lot of precious whingers. These songs have strength and drama and for each sweet sheaf of vocal glory there is a memento mori lurking in the lower corner where the dog might sit in a Renaissance portrait. The story of its making is one of patchwork and shoehorning but it doesn't sound like it. What it does sound like is the early venture that showed what would work and then what worked so well it broke them apart. But here, for about forty minutes is the first excitement rendered practical with experience. If nothing else, this album is a song-cycle of experience.

Listening notes: This is based on the high resolution remaster download of 2014.