THE BEAT GOES ON: Simon and Garfunkel

The fortieth anniversary of the original Woodstock Arts and Music Festival has revived interest in the sounds of that era. There’ve been numerous tribute concerts and tours featuring artists who performed at the original 1969 festival—Melanie stopped by the Colonial in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, last month, and every concert by the Berkshires’ own Arlo Guthrie is something of a Woodstock flashback. Plenty of TV documentaries and Ang Lee’s feature film, Taking Woodstock, filmed in large part in Chatham, New York, where it was given a sneak preview at the town’s Crandell Theatre a full month before it went into general release, have also fanned the flames of nostalgia for Woodstock and the age of Aquarius.

Among the musicians who were most conspicuous for their absence at the original Woodstock—Bob Dylan included—were Simon and Garfunkel. It’s easy to forget that of the significant musical groups of the Woodstock era, Simon and Garfunkel loomed large as much for their artistry and critical acclaim as for their considerable commercial appeal. By the end of the sixties, the folk duo was also a veritable hit machine, scoring over a dozen top 10 hits and a handful of number ones, including “The Sound of Silence,” “I Am a Rock,” “Homeward Bound,” “A Hazy Shade of Winter,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “Cecilia,” “The Boxer,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

These folk-based, harmony-laden pop songs were as much the defining sound of the era as Jimi Hendrix’s feedback-drenched guitar solos and the Who’s juiced-up, maximum R&B. Paul Simon’s songs betrayed a self-consciously poetic streak, and the duo’s architectural harmonies, especially Art Garfunkel’s yearning, heartstruck high tones, spoke of the bitter disappointments, political and romantic, of the age; Simon’s deceptively simple acoustic guitar fingerpicking, the musical background to most of their music, also helped create an overall effect of undergraduate sincerity.

That collegiate sincerity—a euphemism, really, for sophomoric pretentiousness—was embedded in Simon’s lyrics, such as these lines from “The Dangling Conversation”:

And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost…
Can analysis be worthwhile?
Is the theater really lost?

Nevertheless, and in spite of themselves, as previously noted, Simon and Garfunkel were hitmakers with a poetic streak whose harmonies could be traced from Renaissance madrigals through the high lonesome sounds of brother duos in early American country music. Simon was a consummate songwriter with one foot in Tin Pan Alley and the other in the Anglo-Irish folk tradition (he spent considerable time in England studying at the side of folk masters such as Martin Carthy), Garfunkel a precise vocalist. The two were hippie brothers, grade-school friends in Queens, New York, with musical roots going back to the early days of rock ’n’ roll (they had their first pop hit as teenagers when their song, “Hey, Schoolgirl,” recorded under the name Tom and Jerry, got radio airplay in 1957).

The recently released Live 1969, featuring seventeen previously unreleased tracks recorded at various concerts in November of that year—which would prove to be their final shows before an acrimonious breakup, followed by the inevitable scattered reunion concerts and tours over the ensuing decades—offers a window into what made the duo so compelling, so influential … and so infuriating, to listeners as well as to each other. While the liner notes of the album note a “a palpable warmth” between these old friends, one also hears a frosty distance between the two—really, a lack of any rapport at all other than that which was encoded into the music. Simon is a virtual specter, rarely uttering a word, ceding the frontman role to Garfunkel, who comes across at times as a self-centered prig, such as when a heckler suggests that the volume on keyboards be turned up.

“You want the keyboards louder?” he says. “What label do you produce for?” The tone is smug and self-righteous, bespeaking a performer so full of himself that he can’t imagine that the opinion of an audience member might actually matter. Garfunkel evinces more self-aggrandizement in introducing the Simon-penned “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” by taking credit for the song’s idea. He was an architecture student, and loved buildings, and one day said to his pal Paul, Why don’t you write a song about Frank Lloyd Wright? Voila, the song, which, of course, is one of the duo’s least memorable numbers.

Paul Simon gets a bad rap for a lot of things, and for a long time he’s been blamed for wanting to go solo, for dumping Garfunkel—whose voice truly was one of the marvels of folk-pop music in the sixties and seventies—in favor of putting himself out front as a singer and frontman. Of course, time proved the wisdom of such a move, as Simon has racked up a remarkable solo career of brilliant songs in a myriad of styles, from mid-seventies neo-gospel to mid-eighties Afropop-influenced rock to mid-nineties Brazilian rhythms to more recent excursions into electro-folk.

But at their best, Simon and Garfunkel were truly an unparalleled duo, drawing on the tradition of the country-brother duos, later popularized and made ready for rock ’n’ roll by the Everly Brothers, their most obvious role models, and creating their own sound in their sophisticated harmonies and arrangements.

If one can overlook the enormous egos waging underhanded battle on Live 1969 and just appreciate the haunting beauty of “Patterns,” the epic Americana of “The Boxer,” and the gospel transcendence of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” one comes away with newfound appreciation for these quintessential sixties artists, whose music and whose lives, together and apart, speak as much to the meaning of Woodstock as that of anyone who was there. [SEPTEMBER 2009]

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning editor-in-chief and music critic.

THE GOODS

Simon & Garfunkel
Live 1969
Columbia/Legacy
www.legacyrecordings.com

Photo courtesy Frank Driggs Collection/Legacy