The Smashing Tunes Thread (Part 1)

Culture
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I’d have Praise You before it but a wonderful track.

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no gra for this seminal track?

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@Fagan_ODowd good article about Simon & Garfunkel from the Torygraph this week

Fifty years ago, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were on top of the world with their best-selling masterpiece Bridge Over Troubled Water. Shame they hated each other, writes Martin Chilton

Some grudges last a lifetime. In his late 70s, was still festering about a cutting jibe from his teenage friend [Art Garfunkel] even though the stinging remark about his short stature was by then six decades old. For a duo who joined forces to create some of the most sublime harmonies in popular music – lasting classics such as Homeward Bound, The Sound of Silence and Scarborough Fair – Simon and Garfunkel certainly rank as one of the most discordant pairings in music history.

Between 1964 and 1968, these two young Americans made five magnificent albums – Wednesday Morning, 3AM, Sounds of Silence, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and Bookends – before starting work on their final masterpiece, Bridge Over Troubled Water.

That final studio album, released on January 26 1970, was for many years the best-selling LP of all time, certified platinum eight times. It won five [Grammy awards], including Album of the Year and Song of the Year (for the title track), and is regarded as one of the finest records of the 20th century.

But the atmosphere around the album’s creation was toxic, and the duo acrimoniously parted ways soon after its release. Although they have brokered occasional peace treaties, Simon and Garfunkel’s relationship remained fragile and volatile for the following 50 years. As septuagenarians, they were still bickering and trading insults.

Both musicians were born in 1941 (Simon is 23 days older). Garfunkel’s family were of Jewish emigrant stock and his family settled in the Forest Hills district of Queens in New York, were the Simon family lived. The pair met at primary school, in the fourth grade. Simon remembers talking to Garfunkel in the auditorium while “waiting for the school buses to come”.

They later said they bonded over a shared love of the Everly Brothers, and were soon impersonating the famously quarrelsome sibling singers in school shows. “We got along fine,” Simon recalled about meeting Garfunkel. “We’ve known each other since we were 11 – and have been having arguments since we were 12.”

Within three years the pair were performing regularly under the name Tom & Jerry, a foreshadowing choice, as it turned out, to choose the name of a pair of natural squabblers. Their first single, ‘Hey, Schoolgirl’, peaked at No49 in the American charts. At 16, they were interviewed by Dick Clark on American Bandstand. Although a music career appealed, both were bright students and went off to pursue graduate studies.

Garfunkel studied architecture at Columbia University in Manhattan, which he dropped after three years to major in mathematics, going to on to complete a masters. Simon earned an English literature degree from Queen’s, before briefly studying Law in Brooklyn.

When they met up again in the early 1960s, they resumed performing together, playing the folk clubs. They thought they were too old to be called Tom & Jerry and cast around for a new name. “No one could figure out what to call the band, so by default they took our last names,” said Garfunkel. The rest, as they say, is history.

In November 1968, they started what would turn out to be a tortuous year-long process to record Bridge Over Troubled Water, and the cracks in their partnership were starting to open up. Although they liked each other’s sense of humour and were close friends for the most part, there was also a deep rivalry and self-interest in the mix of their relationship.

“We were trying to make one perfect person together,” admitted Garfunkel in the 1980s. “I guess he was using my popularity as part of who he was, but I was using his drive to get someplace, because I’m more of a laidback guy and always was. I don’t think I would have had the career I had if it weren’t for the engine that Paul Simon is.”

After recording just two of the 11 tracks for the final Bridge Over Troubled Water album – The Boxer and Baby Driver – Garfunkel made the fateful decision to make his acting debut as Lieutenant Nately in an adaptation of[ Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.] Simon had also originally been cast in the movie but was told shortly before filming was due to start that his serviceman character had been cut from the script by director Mike Nichols.

Simon was somewhat resentful when an excited Garfunkel flew off at the start of 1969 – and became even more annoyed when filming overran, partly because the cinematographer would only shoot for one hour a day so he could get the same lighting at the Mexican location. While Garfunkel was having fun on set with actors such as Alan Arkin, Orson Wells and Bob Newhart, Simon remained in New York and Hollywood writing material for the new album. Two songs – Why Don’t You Write Me and The Only Living Boy in New York – reflected his frustration. In the latter, the lyrics “Tom, get your plane right on time / I know your part’ll go fine / Fly down to Mexico" were easily read as a thinly-veiled barb at Garfunkel, who had been Tom in their original incarnation.

Garfunkel finally returned to America in September 1969 and, after taping a CBS TV special called Songs of America, they resumed working on the album on November 2. The recording session came straight after concerts in Detroit and Wichita. Simon said they were “exhausted”; Garfunkel confessed his long-term partner was “getting on my nerves”.

Matters only got worse when Simon found out that Garfunkel had accepted another film role from Nichols – alongside Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge. Simon recalled how angry he had been on a CNN podcast 47 years later. “I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And he said, ‘I was afraid that you’d stop working on this [music] if I told you.’ So that really pissed me off, and I just decided that’s the end of that. I don’t want to do this anymore… when he agreed to make Carnal Knowledge, something was broken between us. I just wanted to move on. We were finished.”

The album itself was a sensation. The wonderful musicianship of the famed session group The Wrecking Crew – the golden trio of Joe Osborn on bass guitar, Larry Knechtel on piano and organ and Hal Blaine on drums played on the album – only added to the record’s transcendent appeal. The success of the LP made an immediate split difficult; Bridge Over Troubled Water was hailed as a triumph. There was money to be made touring brilliant new songs such as Cecilia, El Condor Pasa (If I Could) and So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Simon and Garfunkel remained on tour in late 1969 and travelled to Europe in early 1970, coming to London in April to play the Royal Albert Hall. Their relationship problems were simmering below the surface, though. It irked Simon that Garfunkel received wild applause for his solo renditions of the title song. “His performance of Bridge Over Troubled Water would produce this incredible reaction and I would be standing in the wings and he would be taking the bows I would think ‘Arthur, Arthur’,” lamented Simon a decade later.

Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon at the 1970 Grammys, where they won three awards for Bridge Over Troubled Water CREDIT: CORBIS

Later, when Garfunkel heard about Simon’s gripe, he was upset. “How many songs did I sing upfront and have a real tour de force of vocal? Does he resent that I had that one? I find that ungenerous,” he responded.

They continued to play dates up until 18 July 1970, when, following a concert at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queen’s, they shook hands in the parking lot and agreed to go their separate ways. Eleven months later they agreed to come together again for one brief set, as part of a fundraiser for Democratic Party presidential nominee George McGovern, but their unease was palpable. Rolling Stone magazine described them as looking like “they had not spoken in 12 years”. When they concert ended, they parted for the next decade.

Simon, who is justly hailed as a masterful singer-songwriter in his own right, remained prickly about the work he done in the 1960s as part of Simon and Garfunkel. “It was a much younger person who wrote The Boxer. I don’t think about any of those things. I am not even a fan of some of the early work,” he said in 1981.

Both have reflected publicly on the reasons for the break-up. “We were so forced to travel together through the power of business it began to tell on our friendship… it was always so true or nothing it began to be abrasive being forced together so much on tour,” said Garfunkel. Simon believed that the pair, who were still in their twenties when they split, were dealing with issues from their childhood. “The problems were working out the last bit of adolescence. Competitiveness or whatever, that rivalry. So when it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work on a pretty childish level.”

The competitiveness took several forms. Their teenage collaboration ‘Hey Schoolgirl’ was the only song they ever co-wrote. Simon, a world-class lyricist, was irked over any suggestion that the words of their great songs were somehow a shared triumph. “He didn’t write any of the songs. I wrote all the Simon and Garfunkel songs,” he pointedly told Anne Nightingale in 1980.

One of the main issues between them seems far more personal, a sign that their relationship was always anchored in their childhood competitiveness. Simon, who was 5’ 2”, has always been touchy about his lack of height. The late actress Carrie Fisher, the second of three Simon wives, was one inch shorter than the singer, something she found amusing. “I used to say to him, ‘Don’t stand next to me at the party – people will think we’re salt and pepper shakers’.”

When Nigel Farndale interviewed Garfunkel for The Telegraph in 2015, he asked the singer whether Simon might have “a Napoleon complex” about his height. “I think you’re on to something. I would say so, yes,” replied Garfunkel. Two years later, when Simon was a 76-year-old man, he was still revealing his insecurities over the fact that Garfunkel stood eight inches taller than him. “I remember during a photo session Artie said, ‘No matter what happens, I’ll always be taller than you.’ Did that hurt? I guess it hurt enough for me to remember 60 years later,” said Simon.

During the 1970s, the musicians remained in occasional contact. For a time, Garfunkel moved away from music, taking a job as a mathematics teacher after wedding architect Linda Marie Grossman. “I’d just got married and moved to Connecticut, and there was a nearby preparatory school and so I taught math there,” Garfunkel later recalled. “It was a weird stage of my life, to leave Simon and Garfunkel at the height of our success and become a math teacher. I would talk them through a math problem and ask if anyone had any questions and they would say: ‘What were the Beatles like?’”.

After a bitter divorce from Grossman in 1975, Garfunkel was involved with actress and photographer Laurie Bird from 1974 until her suicide in 1979. At this traumatic time, Simon offered the olive branch of a Simon and Garfunkel re-union. In September 1981, 11 years after Bridge Over Troubled Water, the pair reformed to record a stunning free concert in Central Park, New York, that was attended by more than half a million people and recorded for posterity. “What a night,” declared Garfunkel to a cheering audience. “Yes, it did feel like Paul’s heart was going out to me,” he later told reporters.

A tour followed and the feeling of goodwill from that tour lasted long enough for them to plan a collaboration on a new joint studio album called Think Too Much. By the time the album was released in November 1983, by which time it was called Hearts and Bones, the pair had fallen out again and Garfunkel’s contributions had been wiped from the final product.

Simon’s demand for autonomy over production frustrated Garfunkel. When Simon was interviewed by the Sarasota Herald Tribune, the paper revealed that the two musicians had ended up working in separate studios. “I realised that by including him on it I would probably improve the overall quality, certainly would improve the sales and would satisfy a lot of people,” admitted Simon. “I also knew we’d end up in some terrific fights over points I really didn’t want to fight about. And that’s exactly what happened.”

Garfunkel did not like being treated as a background singer. “From what I understand one of the things that Art Garfunkel used to do when he was very angry at Paul was that he would disappear. What seemed to be common knowledge that what that he said he was going for a walk and didn’t come back for days. And it turned out apparently that he was walking between two towns in South America. Paul blew a gasket and he was fired,” revealed sound engineer Dan Nash.

Simon decided to turn Hearts and Bones into a solo album. “We had to make sure all Art’s vocal parts were erased from the master tapes,” recalled Eric Korte, another sound engineer on the album. Garfunkel was still smarting about this snub when he was interviewed by Time magazine seven years later. “Paul does things that I could never understand. He called me up one day and said, ‘Artie, I’m dropping your vocals on Hearts and Bones. It’s not turning into the kind of album I want. And by the way, I’m marrying Carrie on Tuesday, and I want you to come.’"

Incredibly, with Simon’s stock high again after the success of his superb solo albums Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints, they patched up things enough to tour again in 1993. As ever, the truce did not hold for long. The fractious nature of the tour was described by Simon’s business manager Joseph Rascoff in his book Paul Simon: The Life. “They never came to blows but there was shoving, and I had to step between them.”

Simon’s candid reflection about the childishness of their fall-outs seems key to understanding this bust-up. The blew up over the trivial matter of the rendition of a version of The Boxer. Garfunkel accused Simon of “singing over him” and coming in at the wrong time.

Garfunkel retaliated and did the same thing on another song. “At intermission, Art comes up to me and says, ‘You tried to make me look like a fool on The Boxer’. I said, ’No, Artie, it was a mistake. Mistakes happen, just like you forgot to do, I love you’. That’s when he looked me in the eye and said, ‘I didn’t forget. I just wanted you to see what it feels like to be made a fool of’.”

Like an embittered ‘on-off’ couple with dependence issues, they tried to patch up things a decade later with the 2003-2004 Old Friends in Concert Tour. On that extended tour, there did seem to be genuine warmth between the sixtysomethings, and they were even joined on stage by The Everly Brothers in some shows. They remained on amicable terms throughout the decade and embarked on another reunion tour in 2009 that took them across Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

Although their final tour together went well for the most part, it ran into trouble when Garfunkel damaged two vocal chords during the trip abroad. He later reportedly claimed that Simon’s insistence on loud on-stage instrument monitoring had caused problems. Simon and Garfunkel were forced to cancel their proposed shows in America in the spring of 2010.

They have not performed together since a gig in June 2010, when they flew to Los Angeles to participate in the American Film Institute’s tribute to Nichols. It’s a weird coincidence that their final show was in tribute to the man whose casting decision for Catch-22 sparked some of the original disagreement.

A decade on from that swansong, Simon and Garfunkel fans live in hope of a fifth reunion by these two old friends; concert ticket sites are tracked by thousands of fans awaiting notification of any new tour. It’s a tall order to expect one final OAP tour, though, especially after Garfunkel re-opened old wounds a few years ago with his harsh words about Simon’s shortness. Garfunkel said the pair had only got together in the first place as young boys because he felt sorry for Simon because of his height. He said he offered the young Simon his friendship as a compensation, adding, “and that compensation gesture has created a monster”.

Whether it was Garfunkel’s intention or not, his insult may have finally burnt the last bridge over troubled water.

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I listened to the Sound of Silence this morning. It is in my top five songs of all time.

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Your top 5 changes with the weather.

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:+1::+1:

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We haven’t had it for a while.

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I know he was banned by the OP, but here’s a nice entro and a lovely rendition of a classic song.
Starts at 24 min.

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Here’s a far better version…

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Sonic Youth - Teenage Riot

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The Jackson 5 were a grand band.

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