A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 135: “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel, and the many records they made, together and apart, before their success. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Blues Run the Game” by Jackson C. Frank. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hick. Episode 135 The Sound of Silence By Simon and Garfunkel Today, we're going to take a look at a hit record that almost never happened. A record by a duo who had already split up, twice, by the time it became a hit, and who didn't know it was going to come out. We're going to look at how Adieu, who started off as a Neffley Brothers knock-off,

before becoming unsuccessful Greenwich Village Fokies, were turned into one of the biggest acts of the 60s by their producer. We're going to look at Simon and Garfunkel, and at The Sound of Silence. Hello, darkness, my old friend, a talk with you a... Because a vision softly creeping, left its seeds while I was sleeping. The vision that was planted in my brain Still remaining the sound of silent The story of Simon and Garfunkel starts with two children in a school play.

Neither Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel had many friends when they met in a school performance of Alice in Wonderland where Simon was playing the White Rabbit and Garfunkel the Cheshire Cat. Simon was well enough liked by all accounts, but he'd been put on an accelerated program for gifted students, which meant he was progressing through school faster than his peers. He had a small social group, mostly based around playing baseball,

but wasn't one of the popular kids. Art Garfunkel, another gifted student, had no friends at all until he got to know Simon, who he described later as his one and only friend in this time period. One passage in Garfunkel's autobiography seems to me to sum up everything about Garfunkel's personality as a child and indeed a large part of his personality as it comes across in interviews to this day. He talks about the pleasure he got from listening to the chart rundown on the radio.

It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists. When a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with rags to riches, I watched the record jump from, say, number 23 to number 14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun. Garfunkel is, to this day, a meticulous person. On his website he has a list of every book he's read since June 1968, which is currently up to 1,310 books,

and he has always had a habit of starting a lavatory project and ticking off every aspect of them as he goes. Both Simon and Garfunkel were outsiders at this point, other than their interests in sport, but Garfunkel was by far the more introverted of the two, and as a result he seemed to have needed their friendship more than Simon did. But the two boys developed an intense, close friendship, initially based around their shared sense of humour.

Both of them were avid readers of Mad magazine, which had just started publishing when the two of them had met up, and both could make each other laugh easily. But they soon developed a new interest, when Martin Block, on the middle of the road radio show Make-Believe Ballroom, announced that he was going to play the worst record he'd ever heard. That record was G by the Crows. Paul Simon later said that that record

was the first thing he'd ever heard on that programme that he liked, and soon he and Garfunkel had become regular listeners to Alan Freed show on W.I.N.S., loving the new rock and roll music they were discovering. Art had already been singing in public from an early age. His first public performance had been singing that King Cole's hit, Too Young, in a school talent contest when he was nine. But the two started singing together. The first performance by Simon and Garfunkel was at a high school dance and,

depending on which source you read, was a performance either of Shiboom or of Big Joe Turner's flip-flop and fly. if I die. Don't ever leave me, don't ever say goodbye. Give me one more kiss, a whole little long, long time. Give me one more kiss, a whole little long, long time. I love me, baby, to the feeling hit my head like wine. The duo also wrote at least one song together, as early as 1955.

Or at least Garfunkel says they wrote it together. Paul Simon describes it as one he wrote. They tried to get a record deal with the song, but it was never recorded at the time, but Simon has later performed it. The first song that we sang was called The Girl for Me. It went like this. Oh, the girl for me is standing there.

That's the one flowers in her head. And I know she'll be true. Even at this point, though, While Art Garfunkel was putting all his emotional energy into the partnership with Simon, Simon was interested in performing with other people. Al Cooper was another friend of Simons at the time, and apparently Simon and Cooper would also perform together. Once Elvis came onto Paul's radar, he also brought a guitar,

but it was when the two of them first heard the Everly brothers that they realised what it was they could do together. Simon fell in love with the Everly brothers as soon as he heard Bye Bye Love. I think I'm going to cry. Bye, bye, I feel like I could die. Bye, bye, bye, my love, goodbye. There goes my big... Up to this point, Paul hadn't bought many records.

He spent his money on baseball cards and comic books, and records just weren't good value. A pack of baseball cards was five cents. A comic book was 10 cents, but a record was a dollar. Why buy records when you could hear music on the radio for free? but he needed that record. He couldn't just wait around to hear it on the radio. He made an hour long two-bus journey to a record shopping queens.

Bought the record, took it home, played it and almost immediately scratched it. So he got back on the bus, travelled for another hour, bought another copy, took it home and made sure he didn't scratch that one. Simon and Garfunkel started copying the Epley's harmonies and would spend hours together. singing close together watching each other's mouths and copying the way they formed words, eventually managing to achieve a vocal blend through sheer effort, which would normally only come from familial closeness. Paul became so obsessed with music that he sold his baseball card collection and bought a tape recorder for $200.

They would record themselves singing and then sing back along with it, multitracking themselves, but also critiquing the tape, refining their performances. Paul's father was a bass player, the family bassman, as he would later sing, and encouraged his son in his music, even as he couldn't see the appeal in this new rock and roll music. He would critique Paul's songs, saying things like, You went from 4-4 to a bar of 9-8, you can't do that, to which his son would say, I just did.

But this wasn't hostile criticism, rather it was giving his son a basic grounding in song construction, which would prove invaluable. But the duo's first notable original song, and first hit, came about more or less by accident. In early 1956, the doo-wock group, The Clovers, had released the hit single Devil or Angel. Its B-side had a version of Hay Doll Baby, a song written by the blues singer Titus Turner,

and which sounds to me very inspired by Hank Williams' Hey Good Looking. that song, tell me how you feel since your man's back home. Hey, god, baby, and I can't remember when I bought it to. That song was picked up by the Everly Brothers, who recorded it for their first album. Here is where the timeline gets a little confused for me. because that album wasn't released until early 1958, although the recording session for that track was in August 1957. Yet that track definitely influenced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel

to record a song that they released in November 1957. All I can imagine is that they heard the brothers perform it live, or maybe a radio station had an acetate copy. Because the way everyone has consistently told the story is that at the end of summer 1957, Simon and Garfunkel had both heard the Everly Brothers perform Hey Doll Baby, but couldn't remember how it went. The two of them tried to remember it and to work a version of it out together,

and their hazy memories combined to reconstruct something that was completely different, and which owed at least as much to wake up Little Susie as to Hay Doll Baby. Their new song, Hey School Girl, was catchy enough that they thought if they recorded a demo of it, maybe the Everly Brothers themselves would record the song. At the demo studio they happened to encounter Sid Prozen, who owned a small record label named Big Records. He heard the duo perform and realized he might have his own Everly brothers here. He signed the duo to a contract,

and they went into a professional studio to re-record Hey School Girl, this time with Paul's father on bass and a couple of other musicians to fill out the sound. Of course, the record couldn't be released under their real names. There was no way anyone was going to buy a record by Simon and Garfunkel, so instead they became Tom and Jerry. Paul Simon was Jerry Landis, a surname he chose because he had a crush on a girl named Sue Landis. Art became Tom Graff, because he liked drawing graphs. Hey School Girl became a local hit. The two were thrilled to hear it played on Alan Freed's show,

after Sid Frozen gave Freed $200, and were even more thrilled when they got to perform on American bandstand, on the same show as Jerry Lee Lewis. When Dick Clark asked them where they were from, Simon decided to claim he was from Macon, Georgia, where Little Richard came from, because all his favourite rock and roll singers were from the South. Hey School Girl only made number 49 nationally,

because the label didn't have good national distribution, but it sold over 100,000 copies, mostly in the New York area, and Sid Prozen seems to have been one of a very small number of independent label owners who wasn't a crook. The boys got about $2,000 each from their hit record. But while Tom and Jerry seemed like they might have a successful career, Simon and Garfunkel were soon to split up, and the reason for their split was named True Taylor. Paul had been playing some of his songs for Sid Prozen to see what the duo's next single should be,

and Frozen had noticed that while some of them were Everly Brothers sounder likes, others were Elvis sounder likes. Would Paul be interested in recording some of those too? Obviously, Art couldn't sing on those, so they'd use a different name, True Taylor. The single was released around the same time as the second Tom and Jerry record, and featured an Elvis-style ballad by Paul on one side, and a rockabilly song written by his father, on the other.

But Paul hadn't discussed that record with Art before doing it. And the two had vastly different ideas about their relationship. Paul was Art's only friend, and Art thought they had an indissoluble bond, and that they would always work together. Paul, on the other hand, thought of art as one of his friends and someone he made music with, but he could play at being Elvis if he wanted, as well as playing at being an Everly brother. Garfunkel, in his memoir published in 2017, says, The Friendship was Shattered for Life.

He decided then and there that Paul Simon was a bass person, a betrayer. But on the other hand, he still refers to Simon over and over again in that book, as still being his friend. even as Simon has largely been disdainful of him since their last performance together in 2010. Friendships are complicated. Tom and Jerry struggled on for a couple more singles, which weren't as successful as Hayes School Girl had been, with material like Two Teenagers, written by Rosemary McCoy.

But as they'd stopped being friends and they weren't selling records, they drifted apart and didn't really speak for five years, though they would occasionally run into one another. They both went off to university, and Garfunkel basically gave up on the idea of having a career in music, though he did record a couple of singles, under the name Artie Gar. But for the most part, Garfunkel concentrated on his studies, plying to become either an architect or maybe an academic. Paul Simon, on the other hand, while he was technically studying at university too, was only paying minimal attention to his studies. Instead, he was learning the music business. Every afternoon, after university had finished,

he'd go around the Brill Building and its neighbouring buildings, offering his services both as a songwriter and as a demo performer. As Simon was competent on guitar, bass and drums, could sing harmonies and could play a bit of piano if it was in the key of sea. He could use primitive multitracking to play and sing all the parts on a demo and do it well. That's an excerpt from a demo Simon recorded for Bert Baccarac, who has said that he tried to get Simon to record as many of his demos as possible, though only a couple of them have surfaced publicly. Simon would also sometimes record demos with his friend Carol Klein, sometimes under the name the cosigns. As we heard back in the episode on Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Carol Klein went on to change her name to Carol King.

and become one of the most successful songwriters of the era, something which spurred Paul Simon on as he wanted to emulate her success. Simon tried to get signed up by Don Kirchner, who was publishing Goffin and King, but Kirchner turned Simon down. An expensive mistake for Kirchner, but one that would end up benefiting Simon, who eventually figured out that he should own his own publishing.

Simon was also getting occasional work as a session player and played league guitar on The Shape I'm In, by Johnny Restivo, which made the lower reaches of the Hot 100. Between 1959 and 1963, Simon recorded a whole string of unsuccessful pop singles, including as a member of the Mystics. He even had a couple of very minor chart hits. He got to number 99 as Tico and the Triumphs. And number 97 as Jerry Landis. But he's as cool as he can be

But he was jumping around around But he was jumping around, hopping onto every fad as it passed and not getting anywhere and then he started to believe that he could do something more interesting in music. He first became aware that the boundaries of what could be done in music extended further than Ubapaluchi Bar when he took a class on modern music at university, which included a trip to Carnegie Hall to hear a performance of music by the avant-garde composer Edgar Varez. Simon got to meet Verez after the performance, and while he would take his own music in a very different and much more commercial direction than Verez's,

He was nonetheless influenced by what Verra's music showed about the possibilities that existed in music. The other big influence on Simon at this time was when he heard the free wheel in Bob Dylan. If you're travelling in the north country fire, while the winds hit heavy on the borderline, remember me to one who lives there, she once was a true love mine. Simon immediately decided to reinvent himself as a fokey, despite at this point knowing very little about folk music

other than the Everly Brothers Songs Our Daddy Torto's album. He tried playing around Greenwich Village, but found it an uncongenial atmosphere and inspired by the line of notes to the Dylan album, which talked about Dylan's time in England. He made what would be the first of several trips to the UK, where he was given a rapturous reception simply on the grounds of being an American

and owning a better acoustic guitar, a Martin, the most British people owned. He had the showmanship that he'd learned from watching his father on stage and sometimes playing with him, and from his time in Tom and Jerry and working around the studios, and so he was able to impress the British folk club audiences, who were used to rather earnest scholarly people,

not to someone like Simon, who was clearly ambitious and very showbiz. His repertoire at this point consisted most songs from the first two Dylan albums, a Joan Baez record, Little Willie John's Fever, and one song he'd written himself, an attempt at a protest song called He Was My Brother, which he would release on his return to the US under yet another stage name, Paul Kane. Simon has always stated that that song was written about a friend of his, who was murdered

when he went down to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders. But while Simon's friend was indeed murdered, it wasn't until about a year after he wrote the song, and Simon has confused the timelines in his subsequent recollections. At the time he recorded that, when he had returned to New York at the end of the summer, Simon had a job as a songplugger for a publishing company, and he gave the publishing company the rights to that song and its B-side,

which led to that B-side getting promoted by the publisher, and ending up covered on one of the biggest British albums of 1964, which went to number two in the UK charts. Oddly, that may not end up being the only time we feature a Val Duna can track on this podcast. Simon continued his attempts to be a fokey, even teaming up again with Art Garfunkel, with whom he'd re-established contact, to performing Greenwich Village as Canaan Gar. But they went down no better as a duo than Simon had as a solo artist. Simon went back to the UK again over Christmas 1963, and while he was there,

he continued to work on a song that would become such a touchstone for him that of the first six albums he would be involved in, four would feature the song, while a fifth would include a snippet of it. The sound of silence was apparently started in November 1963, but not finished until February 1964, by which time he was once again back in the USA and back working as a songplugger.

It was while working as a songplugger that Simon first met Tom Wilson, Bob Dylan's producer at Columbia Simon met up with Wilson trying to persuade him to use some of the songs that the publishing company were putting out. When Wilson wasn't interested, Simon played him a couple of his own songs. Wilson took one of them,

he was my brother, for the Pilgrims, a group he was producing who was supposed to be the black answer to Peter Paul and Mary. Wilson was also interested in the sound of silence, but Simon was more interested in getting signed as a performer than in having other acts

perform his songs. Wilson was cautious though. He was already producing one fokey singer-songwriter, and he didn't really need a second one, but he could probably do with a vocal group. Simon mentioned that he had actually made a couple of records before as part of a duo. Would Wilson be at all interested in a vocal duo? Wilson would be interested. Simon and Garfunkel auditioned for him, and a few days later were in the Columbia Records studio on 7th Avenue, recording their first album as a duo, which was also the first time either of them would record under their own name. Wednesday morning 3am, the duo's first album, was a simple acoustic album, and the only instrumentation was Simon and Barry Cornfield, a Greenwich Village Fokie, on guitars, and Bill Lee,

the double bass player who played with Dylan and others on bass. Tom Wilson guided the duo in their song selection, and the eventual album contained six cover versions and six erudence. was written by Simon. The cover versions were a mixture of Houtanari staples like Go Tell It on the Mountain, plus Dylan's the times they are a change in, included to cross-promote Dylan's new album and to try to link the duo with the more famous writer, and one unusual one. The Sun is Burning, written by Ian Campbell, a Scottish folk singer who Simon had got to know on his trips to the UK. But the song that everyone was keenest on,

was the sound of silence, the first song that Simon had written that he thought would stand up in comparison with the sort of song that Dylan was writing. and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there that regarded them as a complete joke. Dave Van Runk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing Hello Darkness, my old friend, for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance,

though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn't been laughing at them specifically. He'd just had a fit of the giggles, and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan. The album was recorded in March 1964 and was scheduled for release in October In the meantime, they both made plans to continue with their studies and their travels. Garfunkel was starting to do postgraduate work towards his doctorate in mathematics, while Simon was now enrolled in Brooklyn Law School,

but was still spending most of his time travelling and would drop out after one semester. He would spend much of the next 18 months in the UK. While he was occasionally in the US between June 1964 and November 1965, Simon now considered himself based in England, where he made several acquaintances that would affect his life deeply. Among them were a young woman called Cathy Chitty, with whom he would fall in love and who would inspire many of his songs,

and an older woman called Judith Piapp, and I apologise if I'm mispronouncing her name, which I've only ever seen written down, never heard, who many people believed had an unrequited crush on Simon. P.F ran her London flat as something of a commune for folk musicians, and Simon lived there for months at a time while in the UK. Among the other musicians who stayed there for a time was Sandy Denny, Kat Stevens and Al Stewart,

whose bedroom was next door to Simons. PEP became Simon's de facto unpaid major and publicist, and started promoting him around the British folk scene. Simon also at this point became particularly interested in improving his guitar playing. He was spending a lot of time at Lay Cousins, the London Club that had become the centre of British acoustic guitar. There are roughly three styles of acoustic folk guitar. To be clear, I'm talking about very broad brush categorisations here, and there are people who would disagree and say there are more, but these are the main ones.

Two of these are American styles. There's the simple style known as Carter Scratching, popularised by Mother Maybel Carter of the Carter family, and for this, all you do is alternate bass notes with your thumb while scratching the chord on the treble strings with one finger, like this. That's the style played by a lot of country and folk players who were primarily singers accompanying themselves. In the late 40s and 50s though, another style had become popularised, Travis Picking. This is named after Merle Travis, the most well-known player in the style, but he always called it Mullenberg Picking after Mullenberg County, where he'd learned the style for Mike Eveli, the Eveli brother's father, and Moes Rager, a black guitarist. In Travis Picking, the thumb

alternates between two bass notes, but rather than strumming a chord, the index and middle fingers place simple patterns on the treble strings like this. That's again a style primarily used for accompaniment, but it can also be used to play instrumentals by oneself. As well as Travis and Ikevalley, it's also the style played by Donovan, Chet Atkins, James Taylor and more. But there's a third style, British Baroque folk guitar, which was largely the invention of Davy Graham. Graham, you might remember, was a folk guitarist who had lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart

when Bart started working with Tommy Steel, and who had formed a blues duo with Alexis Corner. Graham is now best known for one of his simpler pieces, Angie, which became the song that every British guitarist tried to learn. Dozens of people, including Paul Simon, would record versions of that. Graham invented an entirely new style of guitar playing, influenced by ractime players like Blind Blake, but also by Bach, by Moroccan Ood music,

and by Celtic backpack music. While it was fairly common for players to retune their guitar to an open major chord, allowing them to play slide guitar, Graham retuned his to a suspended fourth chord, D-A-D-G-A-D, which allowed him to keep a drone going on some strings while playing complex modal counterpoints on others. While I demonstrated the previous two styles myself, I'm nowhere near a good enough guitarist to demonstrate British folk baroque.

So here's an excerpt of Davy Graham playing his own arrangement of the traditional ballad She Moved Through the Fair, re-cast as a Raga, and retitled She Moved Through the Bazaar. Graham's style was hugely influential on an entire generation of British guitarists, people who incorporated world music and jazz influencers into folk and blues styles, and that generation of guitarists was coming up at the time and playing at lay cousins. People who started playing in this style included Jimmy Page, Bert Yanch, Roy Harper, John Remborn, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake and John Martin. And it also had a substantial influence on North American players like Jonny Mitchell,

Tim Buckley, and of course Paul Simon. Simon was especially influenced at this time by Martin Carthy, the young British guitarist whose style was very influenced by Graham. But while Graham applied his style to music ranging from Dave Brubeck to Lutheran hymns to Big Bill Brunsie songs, Carthy mostly concentrated on traditional English folk songs. Carthy had a habit of taking American folk singers under his wing, and he taught Simon several songs,

including Carthy's own arrangement of the film. traditional Scarborough Fair. Simon would later record that arrangement without crediting Carthy, and this would lead to several decades of bad blood between them, though Carthy forgave him in the 1990s, and the two performed the song together at least once after that. Indeed, Simon seems to have made a distinctly negative impression on quite a few of the musicians he knew in Britain at this time,

who seemed to, at least in retrospect, regard him as having rather used and discarded them as soon as his career became successful. Roy Harper has talked in liner notes to CD reissues of his work from this period about how Simon used to regularly be a guest in his home and how he has memories of Simon playing with Harper's baby son Nick, now himself one of the greats of British guitar, but how as soon as he became successful he never spoke to Harper again.

Similarly, in 1965, Simon started a writing partnership with Bruce Woodley of The Seekers, an Australian folk pop band based in the UK, best known for Georgie Girl. The two wrote red rubber ball, which became a hit for the circle. And also Cloudy, which the Seekers recorded as an album track. When that was recorded by Simon and Garfunkel, Woodley's name was removed from the writing credit, though Woodley still apparently received royalties for it. But at this point, there was no Simon and Garfunkel. Paul Simon was a solo artist

working the folk clubs in Britain and Simon and Garfunkel's one album had sold a minuscule number of copies they did when Simon briefly returned to the US in March record two tracks for a prospective single this time with an electric backing band one was a rewrite of the title track of their first album now titled Somewhere They Can't Find Me

and with a new chorus and some guitar parts Nick from Davy Graham's Angie the other a twist beat song that could almost be Manfred Manor Georgie Fame, We Got a Groovy Thing Going. That was also influenced by Angie, though by Bert Yanch's version rather than Graham's original. Yanch rearranged the song and stuck in this phrase, which became the chorus to We Got a Groovy Thing Going. But that seems to be a groovy thing going.

was never released, and as far as Columbia were concerned, Simon and Garfunkel were a defunct act, especially as Tom Wilson, who had signed them, was looking to move away from Columbia. Our Garfunkel did come to visit Simon in the UK a couple of times, and they'd even sing together occasionally, but it was on the basis of Paul Simon the successful club act, occasionally inviting his friend on stage during the encore, rather than as a duo, and Garfunkel was still seeing music only as a sideline, while Simon was now utterly committed to it. He was encouraged in this commitment by Judith P. F. P. P. P. P.ep. Who considered him to be the greatest songwriter of his generation, and who started a letter-writing campaign to that effect, telling the BBC

they needed to put him on the radio. Eventually, after a lot of pressure, they agreed, though they weren't exactly sure what to do with him, as he didn't fit into any of the pop formats they had. he was given his own radio show, a five-minute show in a religious programming slot. Simon would perform a song, and there would be an introduction tying the song into some religious theme or other. Two series of four episodes of this were broadcast, in a plum slot right after Housewives' choice,

which got 20 million listeners, and the BBC were amazed to find that a lot of people phoned in asking where they could get hold of the records by this Paul Simon fellow. Obviously, he didn't have any out yet. and even the Simon and Garfunkel album, which had been released in the US, hadn't come out in Britain. After a little bit of negotiation, CBS, the British Arm of Columbia Records, had Simon come in and record an album of his songs, titled The Paul Simon Songbook. The album, unlike the Simon and Garfunkel album, was made up entirely of Paul Simon originals.

Two of them were songs that had previously been recorded for Wednesday morning 3am. He was my brother, and a new version of The Sound of Silence. Within the sound of silence The other ten songs were newly written pieces like April Come She Will, Cathy's song A parody of Bob Dylan entitled A Simple Dissultory Philippic

And the song that was chosen as the single I Am a Rock A winter's day In a deep and dark December I'm gazing from my window to the streets below on a freshly falling silent shroud of snow

I am a... That song was also the one that was chosen for Simon's first TV appearance since Tom and Jerry had appeared on bandstand eight years earlier. The appearance on Ready Steady Go, though, was not one that anyone was happy with. Simon had been booked to appear on a small folk music series, Hart Song, but that series was cancelled before he could appear. Re-Diffusion, the company that made the series,

also made ready-steady go, and since they'd already paid Simon, they decided they might as well stick him on that show and get something for their money. Unfortunately, the episode in question was already running long, and it wasn't really suited for introspective singer-songwriter performances. The show was geared to guitar bands and American soul singers. Michael Lindsay Hogg, the director, insisted that if Simon was going to do his song, he had to cut at least one verse, while Simon was insistent that he needed to be. to perform the whole thing because

it's a story. Lindsay Hogg got his way, but nobody was happy with the performance. Simon's album was surprisingly unsuccessful, given the number of people who called the BBC asking about it. The joke went round that the calls had all been Judith Piapp doing different voices, and Simon continued his round of folk clubs, pubs and birthday parties,

sometimes performing with Garfunkel when he visited for the summer, but mostly performing on his own. One time he did perform with a full band, singing Johnny B. Good at a birthday party, backed by a band called Jokers Wild, who a couple of weeks later went into the studio to record their only privately pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits. The guitarist from Jokers Wild would later join the other band who played at that party, but the story of David Gilmore joining Pink Floyd is for another episode. During this time, Simon also produced his first record for song,

someone else, when he was responsible for producing the only album by his friend Jackson C. Frank, though there wasn't much production involved, as like Simon's own album, it was just one man and his guitar. Al Stewart and Art Garfunkel were also in the control room for the recording, but the notoriously shy Frank insisted on hiding behind a screen so they couldn't see him while he recorded. It seemed like Paul Simon was on his becoming a respected mid-level figure on the British folk scene, releasing occasional albums and maybe having one or two minor hits, but making a steady living.

Someone who would be spoken of in the same breath as Ralph MacTell, perhaps. Meanwhile, Art Garfunkel would be going on to be a lecturer in Mattshire. mathematics, whose students might be surprised to know he'd had a minor rock and roll hit as a kid. But then something happened that changed everything. Wednesday morning 3 a.m. hadn't sold at all, and Columbia hadn't promoted it in the slightest. It was too collegiate and polite for the Greenwich Village folkies, and too intellectual for the pop audience that had been buying Peter Paul and Mary, and it had come out just at the point that the folk boom had imploded. But one DJ in Boston, Dick Summer, had started playing one songfell.

from it, The Sound of Silence, and it had caught on with the college students who loved the song. And then came spring break 1965. All those students went on holiday, and suddenly DJs in places like Cocoa Beach, Florida, were getting phone calls requesting the Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel. Some of them with contact at Columbia got in touch with the label, and Tom Wilson had an idea. On the first day of what turned out to be his last session with Dylan, the session for Like a Rolling Stone, Wilson asked the musicians to stay behind and work on something. He'd already experimented with overdubbing new instruments on an acoustic recording with his new version of Dylan's House of the Rising Sun. Now he was going to try it with the

sound of silence. He didn't bother asking the duo what they thought. Record labels messed with people's records all the time, so the sound of silence was released as an electric folk rock single. This is always presented as Wilson massively changing the sound of the duo without their permission or knowledge. But the fact is that they had already gone folk rock back in March, so they were already thinking that way. The track was released as a single with We Got a Groovy Thing Going on the B-side, and was promoted first in the Boston market, and it did very well.

Roy Harper later talked about Simon's attitude at this time, saying, I can remember going into the gents in the three horseshoes in Hempstead during a gig and were having a pee together. He was very excited and he turns round to me and says, guess what man, we're number 16 in Boston with the sound of silence. A few days later I was doing another gig with him and he made a bee-line for me. Guess what? I said, you're number 15 in Boston? He said, no man, we're number one in Boston. I thought, wow, number one in Boston, eh? It was almost a joke because I really had no idea what that sort of stuff meant at all. Simon was even more excited

when the record started creeping up the national charts, though he was less enthused when his copy of the single arrived from America. He listened to it and thought the arrangement was a bird's rip-off, and cringed at the way the rhythm section had to slow down and speed up in order to stay in time with the acoustic recording. I have my arms that I have my words like silent. I have to say that while the tempo fluctuations are noticeable once you know to look for them, it's a remarkably tight performance given the circumstances. As the record went up the chart, Simon was called back to America to record an album to go

along with it. The Paul Simon's songbook hadn't been released in the US, and they needed an album now, and Simon was a slow songwriter. So the duo took six songs songs from that album and re-recorded them in folk rock versions with their new producer Bob Johnston, who was also working with Dylan now, since Tom Wilson had moved on to Verve records. They filled out the album with The Sound of Silence, the two electric tracks from March, one new song, Blessed, and a version of Angie, which came straight after somewhere they can't find me, presumably to acknowledge Simon lifting bits of it. That version of Angie also followed Yanch's arrangement, and so included the bit that Simon had taken for We Got a Groovy Thing Going

as well. They also recorded their next single, which was released on the British version of the album, but not the American one, a song that Simon had written during a thoroughly depressing tour of Lancashire towns. He wrote it in Widness, but a friend of Simon who lived in witness later said that while it was written in Witness, it was written about Birkenhead. Simon has also sometimes said it was about Warrington or Wiggin, both of which so close to witness and so similar in both name and atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to mix them up. A tour of one night stands my suitcase and guitar in hand and every stop is neatly planned for a poet and a one-man band. These tracks were all recorded in December 1965 and they feel

featured the wrecking crew. Bob Johnston wanted the best, and didn't rate the New York players that Wilson had used, and so they were recorded in LA with Glenn Campbell, Joe South, Hal Blaine, Larry Nechtel, and Joe Osborne. I've also seen in some sources that there were sessions in Nashville with 18 players Fred Carter and Charlie McCoy. By January, the sound of silence had reached number one, knocking We Can Work It Out by the Beatles off the top spot for two weeks, before the Beatles record went back to the top. They'd achieved what they'd been trying for for nearly a decade, and I'll give the last word here to Paul Simon,

who said of the achievement. I had come back to New York, and I was staying in my old room at my parents' house. Artie was living at his parents' house too. I remember Artie and I were sitting there in my car one night, parked on a street in Queens, and the announcer said, number one, Simon and Garfunkel.

And Artie said to me, that's Simon and Garfunkel, they must be having a great time. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on.

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