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SIMON AND
GARFUNKEL (ARTIST BIOGRAPHY)
Paul
Simon and Art Garfunkel are American popular musicians and
Singer-songwriters known collectively as Simon & Garfunkel. They
formed the group Tom and Jerry in 1957, and had their first taste of
success with the minor hit “Hey Schoolgirl”. As Simon and Garfunkel,
the duo rose to fame in 1965 backed by the hit single “The Sound of
Silence”. Their music was featured on the landmark film The Graduate,
propelling them further into the public consciousness. It was later
used in the 2009 film The Watchmen, but only after seeking special
permission from the artists themselves. They are well known for
their close harmonies and sometimes unstable relationship. Their
last album, Bridge over Troubled Water, was marked with several
delays caused by artistic differences. Simon and Garfunkel were
among the most popular recording artists of the 1960s, and are
perhaps best known for their songs “The Sound of Silence”, “Mrs.
Robinson”, “Bridge over Troubled Water” and “The Boxer”. They have
received several Grammys and are inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame and the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2007). In 2004,
Rolling Stone ranked Simon and Garfunkel #40 on their list of the
100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
They have reunited on several occasions since their 1970 break-up,
most famously for 1981’s The Concert in Central Park, which
attracted more than 750,000 people
History
Early history
Close friends through childhood, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel grew
up in the same Forest Hills neighborhood just blocks away from one
another. They met in elementary school in 1953, when they both
appeared in the school play Alice in Wonderland (Simon as the White
Rabbit, Garfunkel as the Cheshire Cat). They were classmates at
Parsons Junior High School and Forest Hills High School in New York
City, and began performing together in their junior year as Tom and
Jerry, with Simon as Jerry Landis (whose last name he borrowed from
a girl he had been dating) and Garfunkel as Tom Graph (so called
because he was fond of tracking (“graphing”) hits on the pop charts).
They began writing their own songs in 1955, and made their first
professional recording, “Hey, Schoolgirl”, for Sid Prosen of Big
Records in 1957. Released on 45 and 78 rpm records, the song—with B
side “Dancin’ Wild”—sold 100,000 copies, hitting #49 on the
Billboard charts. Both Simon and Garfunkel have acknowledged the
tremendous impact of The Everly Brothers on their style, and many of
their early songs (including “Hey, Schoolgirl”) bear the mark of
this influence.
They later performed their hit on American Bandstand, right after
Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire”.
Subsequent efforts in 1958 did not reach near their initial success,
and after high school the duo went to separate colleges, with Simon
enrolling at Queens College and Garfunkel at Columbia University.
While enrolled in college, they both joined the same fraternity,
Alpha Epsilon Pi.
In 1963 they found prominence as part of the Greenwich Village folk
music scene. Simon, who had finished college but dropped out of
Brooklyn Law School, had—like Garfunkel—developed an interest in the
folk scene. Simon showed Garfunkel a few songs that he had written
in the folk style: “Sparrow”, “Bleecker Street”, and “He Was My
Brother”—which was later dedicated to Andrew Goodman, a friend of
both Simon and Garfunkel and a classmate of Simon’s at Queens
College, who was one of three civil rights workers murdered in
Neshoba County, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964.
These three efforts were among five original songs by Simon included
on their first album for Columbia Records, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.,
which initially flopped upon its release on October 19, 1964.
First breakup
Shortly after finishing recording, the duo split and Simon moved to
the United Kingdom, where he performed at Les Cousins and The
Troubadour Club in London and toured provincial folk clubs. In these
venues he was exposed to a wide range of musical influences and,
while in England, recorded his solo The Paul Simon Songbook in 1965.
Recorded on three different dates in June and July at Levy’s Studio,
London, the album was released as an LP but then deleted about 1979
at Simon’s request,[citation needed] and re-released on CD with
bonus tracks in 2004.[3] During this period in London he also
collaborated on a number of songs with Bruce Woodley of The Seekers,
including “I Wish You Could Be Here”, “Cloudy”,[citation needed] and
“Red Rubber Ball,” which would be a U.S. #2 hit for The Cyrkle in
1966.
While Simon was in England that summer of 1965, radio stations
around Cocoa Beach and Gainesville, Florida, began to receive
requests for a song from the album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. called
“The Sounds of Silence”. The song also began to receive radio
airplay in Boston. Seizing the chance, the duo’s U.S. producer, Tom
Wilson, inspired by The Byrds’ hugely popular electric versions of
Bob Dylan songs, used the studio band of Bob Dylan (who had
collaborated with him on his landmark hit Like a Rolling Stone that
year) to dub electric guitars, bass and drums onto the original
“Sounds of Silence” track, and released it as a single, backed with
“We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin’”. The dubbing turned folk into folk
rock, the debut of a new genre for the Top 40, much to Simon’s
surprise.
In September 1965, Simon first learned that it had entered the pop
charts while he was about to go on stage in a Danish folk club. The
song hit number 1 on the pop charts by New Year’s Day, 1966.
Reformation and success
A red vinyl promotional copy of Simon & Garfunkel’s single “I Am a
Rock”, from 1966.Simon immediately returned to the United States and
the group re-formed for the second time to record more tracks in a
similar style, though neither approved of what Wilson had done with
The Sounds of Silence.[citation needed] The result was a sequence of
folk rock records which have endured as well as any in the genre. On
January 17, 1966, the duo released the album Sounds of Silence,
which – helped by the title track’s success – hit #21, while
Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was re-released and reached #30. Among the
tracks on The Paul Simon Songbook that were rerecorded (some with
electric backing) for Sounds of Silence were “I Am a Rock” (which as
a single reached U.S. #3 in the summer of 1966), “Leaves That Are
Green”, “April Come She Will”, “A Most Peculiar Man”, and “Kathy’s
Song”.
Further hit singles came, including “Scarborough Fair/Canticle”,
based on a traditional English ballad with an arrangement by Martin
Carthy, and “Homeward Bound” (later U.S. #5), about life on the road
while Simon was touring in England in 1965. The song is reputed to
have been written when Simon was stranded overnight on a platform at
Widnes Central railway station after mis-reading the timetable. A
plaque commemorates this event at the station.
More tracks from The Paul Simon Songbook were included with recent
compositions on their October 10, 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary
and Thyme, which refined the folk rock sound hastily released on
Sounds of Silence. “Cloudy”, co-written earlier with Bruce Woodley,
was included on “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, & Thyme”. However, a
Woodley credit was incorrectly omitted.
In early 1967, Pickwick Records, which had a reputation as a
low-quality label, decided that it would capitalize on the duo’s
newfound fame by releasing an album entitled The Hit Sound of Simon
& Garfunkel. This album consisted of ten tracks recorded from the
late 1950s and early 1960s while the duo still called themselves Tom
& Jerry, including their hit “Hey, Schoolgirl”, and its B-side,
“Dancin’ Wild”. Simon and Garfunkel then sued Pickwick because the
company was presenting the music as recently-recorded material, not
as songs written and released over five years earlier. Soon
afterwards, Pickwick withdrew The Hit Sound of Simon & Garfunkel
from the market.
That same year, Simon and Garfunkel contributed heavily to the
soundtrack to Mike Nichols’ film The Graduate, which was released on
January 21, 1968, and instantly rose to #1 as an album. According to
a Variety article by Peter Bart in the May 15, 2005 issue, Nichols
had become obsessed with Simon and Garfunkel’s music while shooting
the film. Larry Turman, his producer, made a deal for Simon to write
three new songs for the movie. By the time they were nearly finished
editing the film, Simon had only written one new song. Nichols
begged him for more but Simon, who was touring constantly, told him
he didn’t have the time. He did play him a few notes of a new song
he had been working on; “It’s not for the movie… it’s a song
about times past — about Mrs. Roosevelt and Joe DiMaggio and stuff.”
Nichols advised Simon, “It’s now about Mrs. Robinson, not Mrs.
Roosevelt.”
As their albums became progressively more adventurous, The Graduate
Original Soundtrack was immediately followed in March 1968 at the
top of the charts by Bookends, which dealt with increasingly complex
themes of old age and loss. It features the top-25 hit singles “A
Hazy Shade of Winter”, “Fakin’ It”, “At the Zoo”, “America”, and a
full version of “Mrs. Robinson”, the classic from the Graduate
soundtrack, which became #1 as a single.
At the March 1969 Grammy Awards, “Mrs. Robinson” was named Record of
the Year, while Simon was also honored with the Grammy for Best
Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or a Television Special.
Second breakup
By 1969, the duo’s success began to take its toll. Garfunkel had
begun to pursue a career in acting and was featured in the role of
Nately in Nichols’s film adaptation of the novel Catch-22.
Garfunkel’s filming leave conflicted with and subsequently delayed
the recording of the duo’s next album, and to add insult to injury,
the part in the film which had initially been promised to Simon was
completely cut from the script.
The duo’s deteriorating personal relationship continued into their
late 1969 tour, which featured performances at Miami University in
Oxford, Ohio on November 11 and Southern Illinois University in
Carbondale, Illinois on November 8, recordings of which are
supposedly widely bootlegged. Video footage of the tour was shown on
their controversial November 30 television special Songs of America,
which TV sponsors refused to endorse because of its distinct
anti-Vietnam War message.
The recording of what would be their final album, Bridge over
Troubled Water, was not without tension. The LP was originally
supposed to feature twelve tracks, but the duo could not agree on
the twelfth track: Simon refused to record a Bach chorale track
favored by Garfunkel, while Garfunkel refused to record a song Simon
had written called “Cuba Si, Nixon No”. No middle ground was reached,
so the album was released with only eleven songs.
Bridge over Troubled Water was at last released on January 26, 1970.
Its title track, featuring Garfunkel’s soaring vocals, was a massive
hit and one of the best-selling records of the decade, staying #1 on
the charts for six weeks and remaining on the charts for far longer.
The album includes three other top-twenty hits: “El Cóndor Pasa” (US
#18), “Cecilia” (US #4), and “The Boxer”—which, finished in 1968,
hit #7 on the charts the following year—as well as a live recording
of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye, Love” from a 1969 tour concert in
Ames, Iowa.
At the subsequent March 1971 Grammy Awards, the album and single
were named Album and Record of The Year, respectively, and also won
the awards for Best Engineered Record, Best Contemporary Song, Song
of the Year, and Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists. Their 1972
Greatest Hits album has sold over 14 million copies in the U.S.
becoming the number one selling album by a duo.
The duo finally split in 1970 to much chagrin but little surprise,
and the two men went their separate ways. Simon continued writing
and went on to a very successful solo music career, recording
several classic albums, including There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973),
Still Crazy After All These Years (1975), and his most highly
celebrated solo album, Graceland (1986), collaborating with the Zulu
choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo among others. Garfunkel split his time
between acting and recording solo and collaboration albums, to mixed
reviews. His most critically acclaimed album was the 1978 effort
Watermark, almost all of the songs for which were penned by
acclaimed songwriter Jimmy Webb. |
