Art Garfunkel spent the early Sixties at Columbia University, in uptown Manhattan. He had his nose buried in books and eraser dust, taking all the prerequisite courses for a Masters degree in mathematics—but he always found the time to sing.
Singing remained his passion, and his outlet. As the courseload grew thicker, he took more frequently to the stairwell and the soundbooth. Between 1961 and 1962, he recorded a number of singles for Octavia and Warwick Records, under the name “Artie Garr.” Through his collegiate associations, he soon discovered the illustrative, ideological folk musings of Bob Dylan.
At the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house, Art would take to the grand hall—his heels together, shoulders back, and hands clasped gently before him—and he’d listen to the walls as they echoed Dylan’s songs back at him, reverberating a choir of angels. “The rooms were bare plaster walls with no furniture, and the sound was a lot of fun. [I was] very stimulated by it.”
In her blog post “Men Getting High,” Erica Sipes describes Art Garfunkel as “an extremely rare voice-type,” singing from the chest “between high tenor and low alto.” Producing such a range from the chest requires great restriction of the larynx, which most tenors—regardless of their vocal power and control—cannot accomplish. Consider Frankie Valli from the Four Seasons: an incredible singer, though he must jump from his chest (modal) voice into his head (falsetto) voice.
As a countertenor, Art can glide his voice from chest to head with ease. He has such command of his larynx that “the lion’s share of his vocal cords are held straight and do not vibrate.” Only the edges vibrate, meaning the vibrations are faster and the frequencies are higher, and with higher frequencies comes higher notes. As Erica Sipes put so brilliantly, “It’s analogous to why the thick, chunky strings on a piano produce the lowest notes, whereas the far-thinner strings at the other end produce much higher notes.”
From the chest, most people can only produce low notes; they switch to forming the sound within their nasal cavities (re: falsetto) when their chest power is maxed-out. However, since it’s the bellow of the lungs through the larynx that produces most vocal power, a falsetto produced inside the head lacks such strength and “richness,” coming across more like a kazoo or a flute. If you’ve ever been caught off-guard by a joke or a spook, you’ve probably noticed your laugh was a higher pitch than you'd expect, and the sound was coming from the back of your head rather than from behind your sternum; this, dear reader, is the falsetto.
“During the early days of opera…the high male voice reigned supreme…and the people who owned them were loved as extreme and otherworldly…” For centuries, composers tailored their songs to the ranges of powerful male tenors. They were the rockstars of the classical era, and they came in two flavors: lyric and dramatic. A lyric voice is “light, sweet, and relatively nimble,” whereas a dramatic voice is “more forceful, with a stronger declamatory style.” — Art’s voice would be classified as ‘lyric,’ while the vocalists Jon Anderson and Geddy Lee (of prog-rock bands Yes and Rush, respectively) would be classified as ‘dramatic.’
Of course, there’s an overlap between the flavors (both prog-rock vocalists can nimbly enunciate, and Art Garfunkel can briefly bellow boldly) but altinos tend to be born with and trained for one spectrum over the other. Most shotguns spray, and most rifles snipe, but sometimes you can be surprised. Falsettists like Prince could pierce the air, castrati like Michael Jackson could give a good trill, and mezzo-soprano Whitney Houston could sustain a ‘messa di voce’ of ballistic-velvet… but Art Garfunkel, with his “extremely rare voice-type” and lifetime of practice, could do it all.
6.28.1966, Holland — at Schiphol Airport, the Netherlands
— Chapter II —
The Sound of Silence
The post-True Taylor era was quiet for Paul Simon. He commuted from his parents’ home in Kew Gardens Hills to Queens College, a few blocks north. He spent his afternoons writing lyrics and melodies, refining their sound in the acoustics of his parents’ tiled bathroom. He wore-out and replaced the strings on his guitar. He became a student of pop music, frankensteining his own catchy-yet-derivative songs with notes and tunes and themes heard on the radio.
Paul tried to reinvent himself, generating what Jordan Runtagh called “a whole Rolodex of impractical stage names.” He revived the name “Jerry Landis” and traded his red blazer in for a white one, punctuated by the same ol’ seersucker bowtie. He waxed his hair and piled it, finger-curled, atop his head. He wore the handiwork of the Adler Shoe Company: oxfords whose insoles were thickened two-to-four-inches in the heel. “Elevator shoes,” as they were called, were advertised towards short and shorter men, with slogans such as “Build up your Ego, Amigo!” and “Now YOU can be taller than SHE is!” Catalog ads promised discretion by mailing them in “plain paper” — the same way porno-mags were home-delivered in midcentury America.
Fresh-faced, Paul posed for headshots with a midtown publicist. He acquired a manager and knocked on the doors of every producer and label in Manhattan. Eventually, someone gave him a shot: a part-time job writing melodic arrangements for other artists. Each composition earned him a mean twenty-five dollars. “I did a lot of demos,” he later told the Rolling Stone. “Other people’s songs. I was a kid of seventeen or eighteen years old who could come in and learn a song… A publisher would get a song and they’d say, ‘This song would be great for Dion.’ So we’d get somebody in and I would be Dion, and then I’d sing all the background, ‘ooh ooh wah ooh,’ I’d do all those things, and then sing the lead, and for that get paid $15 a song. I did that when I was in school, and that’s how I learned a lot about the studio.”
As for his own songs, he kept trying; pretending to be Dion was just his foot in the door. “I always published my own songs, right from the beginning… That’s a result of having been exposed to the business since I was about fifteen. By the time it came around to do [these demos], I knew that you can keep your own publishing. A lot of people simply don’t know that. There’s only a handful of writers who really own their own publishing.”
His manager covered the paperwork but Paul always kept himself informed. He believed it best to be aware of an industry when crawling around inside it. The only aspect he shielded himself from was the studio bills. “I never did look at them. I did not want to be inhibited. A lot of times I don’t do anything but sit in a studio for an hour or so [and] just talk. I like the studio to be a home—to be comfortable—and then I think, ‘I’m talking to this guy, and if I talk to this guy for two hours that costs $300.’ Or, ‘If we don’t get a track down, it’s like $1500 a day here.’ That’s no good… but, for the most part, they’re pretty nice to me here. Why shouldn’t they, right?”
He befriended a classmate at Queens College—a girl named Carole Klein—and they began a brief but prolific musical partnership. “Carole would play piano and drums and sing. I would sing and play guitar and bass. The game was to make a demo…and then sell it to a record company. Maybe you'd wind up investing $300 for musicians and studio time, but if you did something really good, you could get as much as $1,000 for it.”
Carole also collaborated with her soon-to-be husband, Gerry Goffin. She used the nom de plume “Carole King” when she and Goffin sold the song “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” to the Shirelles, who promptly took it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in December of 1960. Paul was happy for her, of course, but also envious.
She arranged a meeting for him with her publisher but they ultimately weren't interested. Paul's mouth was bitter with Carole King's success. He was consumed by jealousy and digested by despair—but he was not discouraged. He leaned into the wind and pressed onward.
NYC, 1959: RCA Victor recording session for the young and beautiful Carole King (center), with Gerry Goffin (behind) and Paul Simon (right; session guitarist “Jerry Landis”). Overseen by Al Levins (left) who co-founded the Brill Building.
Paul strolled Broadway, lingering outside the offices of agents and managers. One such was Jim Gribble, the representative of “The Passions” and “The Classics” (both Brooklyn-born foursomes, formed of Italian youths in ‘58 and destined to become one-hit wonderful) and the soul quintet “The Fiestas,” who did considerably better. Another of his clients—Brooklyn-born quintet “The Mystics,” formed of Italian youths in (you guessed it) 1958—had a hit song called “Hushabye” in the summer of ‘59. Alan Freed closed his radio show with it for weeks, and it sat in the Top 10 for nine of them.
The Mystics were trying to avoid being one-hit wonderful, and they could've churned something out for the summer of 1960 if their lead singer hadn't quit. The “okay” quintet became an “okayish” quartet in a snap, and a feverish Jim Gribble went outside for some air. He leaned against the wall and palmed his forehead. He looked up.
Not three feet away was a short, baby-faced teen with polished hair and new shoes. The boy was sitting in a plastic chair—orange, with tubular metal legs—and staring back. On the chair beside him sat an old guitar.
The Mystics’ bassist later recalled, “On any given day, there would be dozens of guys and girls hanging out in [Gribble's] office, waiting for him to listen to them and decide if he wanted to put them on a record.” Gribble looked around the lobby, bare, and again to the boy. After a full breath, he signaled with a tidal curl of his fingers. The boy rose, without words, and followed him into the studio.
“[There] always seemed to be…this one kid, Jerry Landis—with his guitar—off in a corner somewhere, always practicing and writing down songs. He was always there… small and unnoticeable, among these crowds of eager teens waiting and wanting to be discovered.” And on this day, Jerry Landis—a.k.a. Paul Simon, but two-to-four inches taller—was the only one there.
They gave him an audition, and Gribble liked what he heard. Paul signed-on with the four ex-street rats of Brooklyn, which seemed a radical mashup at the time. “We had all been kid runners for the mob,” the bassist said, referring to the original Mystics, “so we were from the streets—we were tough guys—and we didn't take shit from nobody. And here was Jerry, this little nerdy guy from Queens—with a guitar as big as he was—leading us.”
Paul recorded three tracks with the Mystics but none of them made traction. The first two tracks had been heavily mixed, washing away the sonoral quality of Paul’s voice. It wasn’t long before he realized he could be doing better on his own, so he left. As the bassist recalled, “We were too tough for him, and we didn't think we would all look good together onstage… I remember him saying something about ‘he wanted to do his own thing anyway,’ and ‘singing with a group’ was not it.”
He reinvented Jerry Landis as a balladeer, crying of heartbreak in songs penned seemingly for the “neckers at Lookout Point” demographic. Such sophistry included “I’m Lonely,” “Loneliness,” “Play Me a Sad Song,” and “I Wish I Weren’t In Love.” He could hit the notes, sure, but his emotions weren’t fully formed; Paul was acting like Jerry Landis, rather than becoming him.
He was a naive kid, imitating rock'n'rollers in sound and appearance, though the writing on the wall seemed to say Paul could never be anything but himself—something he had not tried since he first discovered the limelight. In ruminating, Paul realized he had to go back to his roots — to the talent shows and school dances; to the days of basement strumming and tape-stacking; to the strength of a partnership, and open-ended creative control.
And that’s what he did. Literally—he went back to the talent shows and the school dances. Revisiting Parsons Junior High, he discovered a quartet of youngsters that packed a powerful harmony. He was only nineteen-years-old at this time, but he was four-years-experienced with the music industry. Emulating Jim Gribble and Sid Prosen, Paul approached the foursome after a show and smooth-talked himself into becoming their manager.
Paul’s neighborhood fame still carried clout. He was a nationally-certified hitmaker, even if only for a hot minute—but, in the eyes of impressionable and idealistic boys, once on the charts is enough cause for idolizing. He may not yet have been an expert in the music industry but, to these boys, he was an acclaimed virtuoso and a well-traveled legend. They gladly offered him complete creative control of their image.
The first step was renaming the band. They became “Tico & the Triumphs,” which Paul borrowed from a record label and a sports car. Practices were held at a makeshift ‘vocal laboratory’ in the Simon family basement on 70th Road. Early into the union, one of the four Triumphs came to blows with Paul over aspects of their songwriting. When the others sided with Paul, the disgruntled Triumph resigned from the group.
‘Jerry Landis’ begrudgingly stepped into the vacant position behind the microphone, and he was reborn as a frontman. Their October 1961 single “Motorcycle” brought Paul back into the limelight. Metropolitan radio stations across America included “Motorcycle” in their playlists, and the song reached #99 on the Billboard Hot 100. It might have gone higher but the small-time Madison Records label couldn’t handle the high demand and, as the pressures and cost of production rose, they went bankrupt.
Paul sold the master recordings to Amy Records—a label that could manage high demand—but it was 1962 now, and America had moved on. Paul disbanded the Triumphs and moved backward, to 1957; he wrote and recorded a solo tribute to television’s great western “The Lone Ranger.” The show aired 221 episodes across eight years, with a production schedule so jam-packed they’d film 52-78 episodes back-to-back and air them consecutively until the well ran dry. It was an American epic in the early days of television, and recording a tribute song during its run would have been a brilliant idea… but that was five years ago.
In 1962, Paul Simon penned “The Lone Teen Ranger” — a love song about a young boy whose crusty complexion and meek attitude can't hold a candle in the eyes of his schoolyard crush to the broad-shouldered, gunslinging, messiah of the Wild West. He bemoans her kissing the television screen on close-ups of the Lone Ranger, convinced she's entranced by his “flashing eyes, wavy hair, and dreamy voice,” as national music critic Paul Lester writes—but “he couldn't be more wrong. It's the raw masculinity, the brave feats of derring-do, and the flouting of authority that attract her.”
“The Lone Teen Ranger” has a cheesy theme and a simple chorus, and yet…it's brilliant. The background harmonies are tight and punctual; the guitar strumming is energetic; the simple chorus is catchy, fun, and duplicatable upon first listen; and the theme, though cheesy, is charming. This song fits perfectly into the nostalgic cultural image we have of this era—when the quaint, rollicking Fifties had not yet given way to the mellow-yet-thundering Sixties.
Paul Simon had written derivative and tropic songs when he was younger (and, keep in mind, he's only nineteen here) but this song, although of an uncharacteristic “common teen complaint,” flirts with symbolism and subtext. Recall: the bemoaning boy has misinterpreted his cuckolding as ‘superficial’ because he cannot fathom his own shortcomings as the reason his girl practices escapism with a “real man.”
The symbolism weaves itself into the melody as “sonic allusions” throughout the structure of the song. It begins with a deep-voiced man bellowing the horseman's catchphrase, “Hi-ho, Silver — away!” followed by the rhythmic plucking of puckered lips, simulating a galloping horse. The bridge is punctuated by gunshots, a ricochet, and the catchphrase again before the chorus reintroduces us to the galloping horse.
The saxophone solo midway through the song is a direct reflection of the show's galloping theme: the racing drums and brass of “The William Tell Overture.” (You'd know it if you heard it.) At the song's end, the deep-voiced man asks, “Who was that masked man?” as had many bit characters in the show, at the end of every episode, as the Lone Ranger rode off into the sunset…
These sonic allusions pepper the tune with thematic and familiar mental images, bringing the Lone Ranger to mind whenever speaking of the boy, thus leading us to associate the boy with the Lone Ranger — the subject of his own distaste. The boy, symbolically and literally, has become the Lone TEEN Ranger: his love has abandoned him, just as society had done to the mythic cowboy.
On top of the well-woven thematic and reverent sonic textures, Paul's voice sounds not only rich and colorful but professional. He has the whines and yelps of Fifties troubadours nailed; he has the purified timbre of someone who's bathed in the genre for years—and for good reason. His decade of diligent practice and perfectionism are evident in the crisp, contained aura of this two-and-a-half minute ode equally devoted to television's greatest western hero as it is to the naivete, passion, and insecurity of youth.
Billboard, Cash Box, and other music mags called this ‘Jerry Landis’ song a hit, yet it peaked at only #97 and fell out of airplay all too suddenly. Maybe it sounds dated, trite, or corny now, but “The Teen Lone Ranger” stands today as a milestone in Paul Simon's musical development: evidence of his pursuit of mastery, and a glimmer of his artistic range to come.
As the spring of 1962 wrapped up, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were on two different paths that couldn’t be more similar. Paul was smoking weed on Queens College campus, finishing an English lit. degree and dreaming-up inoffensive, American pop songs for teenyboppers. Artie on the other hand was rolling an art history degree into blunt wraps and toking reefer on his way west, to California, where he planned to hitchhike through the summer.
Paul buried Jerry Landis in a shallow grave and, incidentally, also thought to journey west. Wandering the streets of San Francisco, he bumped into Art Garfunkel, and the two reconnected. Art invited Paul on his travels, and for a week they hitchhiked together, catching-up, reminiscing, and singing.
Art introduced Paul to the likes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, whose folk stylings proved a minimalistic and sincere vessel for symbolism, ambiguity, and expression. Paul was thunderstruck; folk music appeared to be an advanced level of songwriting compared to pop, being far-more poetic. Even before the age of twenty he had mastered the manufacturing of pop music—the assembly of a catchy chorus, shallow verses, and electric or moody melody—but folk, it seemed, was a challenge.
Paul was enchanted, and he took immediately to the form. He and Art had once again found common ground in the musical world, but Paul was days away from a holiday in Europe. Art had been pent-up in the loins for four years and he needed to bust a choral nut—badly—so, the twosome agreed to reconnect in New York at the end of the summer.
Paul made his way to Britain and Art finished his hitchhiking trek across California. When they returned to Manhattan in August, Paul began studies at the Brooklyn Law School and Art started his Masters program at Columbia. The duo set-up their old recording equipment and surrounded themselves with the hits of the folk genre, absorbing their influence. Paul took-up his pen.
They stalked label scouts in Greenwich Village and managers in Midtown. They knocked on every door in the Brill Building, pitching their routine for a recording contract. New to the genre, and yet unrefined in their sound, they came away empty-handed. Paul dropped law school and found work in the sound labs of the Brill Building, plugging other artists’ demos to neighboring producers and executives. He was barred from slipping his own work into the pile, and it disgusted him to tout others’ hog slop as “the next big hit” knowing full-well he could write, record, and sing better than half of these schmucks could do with only one.
The twosome rehearsed their new sound in the evenings, when the city fell quiet. Daylight hours were sacrificed to obligations: Art's mathematics courses and Paul's vinyl-hustling gig, often eschewed for lonely practice sessions, writing and recording new material. The pressures of ambition, ambiguity, and indignation fueled his creative process, and his folk voice began to take shape. His tinkering morphed into demos and, soon enough, whole songs. He took the name “Paul Kane,” inspired by an Orson Welles film, and slipped an unrequited tape into a dropbox at work.
Although this practice was verboten, the producer liked what he heard, and he signed Paul to a short deal. Four of his more mellow songs were recorded: “Bleecker Street,” “Sparrow,” “The Side of a Hill,” and the Latin-flavored ballad “Carlos Dominguez.” In the latter, Paul spoke through the titular character, voicing his own dark anxieties: “I search for a truth, all I found was a lie. I look for eternity, but I find all men die. I'm looking for answers, but I find only fate. I'm searching for love [but] all I find in this world is hate.”
“Carlos Dominguez” didn’t fare well in America but, thanks to a recent connection in Britain, a London publisher had licensed his song for a crooner. Paul was ecstatic to be receiving accreditation in Europe, so he flew across the pond to their office in the West End. The label’s cofounder recalled, “This young American sat there in our tiny, cramped office… [He] took out his guitar, and started to play… I was very impressed and had no doubt [he] was unique.”
His impromptu show of appreciation earned him brownie points and proved his true talents. He was signed to a British recording contract on the spot. Before he returned to America, he recorded the protest song “He Was My Brother” (which was later dedicated to a former Queens College classmate who had been murdered by anti-Civil Rights agents in Mississippi) with “Carlos Dominguez” as its B-side. It was released in May, and re-released in 1964.
Paul regrouped with Art in his parents’ basement to showcase his most recent efforts in writing and arranging folk music. As music critic Paul Lester wrote, “Paul Simon just may be the greatest songwriter who ever lived. No other songwriter—certainly of the modern age—matches his consistent poetic quality. No one leans as little on cliché, dares as many brave rhymes, or adventures into as many genres. Few cover the range of topics, ideas, and emotions [he] does, or describes things in [such an] unexpected-yet-perfect way. Even if you disagree that he is the absolute best songwriter, you must consent that he has few peers… and fewer equals.”
In a 1967 interview with the New Yorker, Art Garfunkel said he and Paul had “different disciplines. I follow [outright logic] rather than the play of ideas. I have very few beliefs. Paul is the opposite—what I call a ‘divergent thinker.’ He loves the idea of going off in different directions. … We had a small hit record in 1956; it was just rock ’n’ roll. Then, in 1963, Paul started writing songs—songs that were different. Bob Dylan had opened it up. I thought Paul’s songs were really nice.”
Prompted by Paul Lester, in a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Art said that “Paul’s poetic style was so advanced; so [many] shades of dark grey. He had an unusual, sophisticated poetic gift” that was “reflective and melancholic.” He honed this sound until it became “emblematic of the 1960s” while simultaneously remaining “so apart from the tumult” that defined the decade.
Paul Simon has described writing as “an excruciating process.” See, to become a great writer, a person must first expose their soul. They must bury themself in self-doubt, anxiety, and inferiority. They must shed their fears and bare their truth self. They must rip their psyche apart, hollow-out their mind, and scoop the pains from their heart to sew upon their chest.
Supplying an example, Paul said “I’ve been working on one song for three months now… Every time I pick up the guitar, I start on the song. When I go to sleep, I spend half an hour thinking about it. Songs get stagnant, and they turn on me. Lines that were good you begin to discard.”
“My early songs were derivative. I was influenced by so many people… I use less imagery now; less metaphor. I give you the picture, stretch it, and let you feel it. When your mind is about to turn off, I try and get a word or a line that’s different, so you snap back. If I lose the guy, I don’t get him back. I want to make the words rich and yet plain—tasteful without being prissy or too delicate. One word can throw it off. It’s not poetry. I’m writing sounds that must be sung, and heard sung. I’m conscious of the medium I’m working in. What should be said in a song? What would be better said in an essay? A song is an impression when it’s heard only once… When you’ve made your impression, stop. I don’t want the audience to have time to think.”
“There’s the other kind of song, like ‘The Dangling Conversation.’ It’s intricately worked out. Every word is picked on purpose. Maybe it’s English-major stuff, but if you haven’t caught the symbolism, you haven’t missed anything, really. You’ve got to keep people moving. The attention span is very limited. People don’t listen carefully. Unless you jolt ’em, it’s going to be down the drain. You’ve got to get the right mixture of sound and words. I write about the things I know and observe. I can look into people and see scars in them… These people are sensitive, and there’s a desperate quality to them; everything is beating them down, and they become more aware of it as they become older… They’re educated, but they’re losing, very gradually. Not realizing, except for just an occasional glimpse. They’re successful, but not happy, and I feel that pain. They’ve got me hooked because they are people in pain. I’m drawn to these people, and driven to write about them.”
“In this country, it’s painful for people to grow old. When sexual attractiveness is focused on a seventeen-year-old girl, you must feel it slipping away if you’re a thirty-three-year-old woman… What’s intriguing is that they are just not quite in control of their destiny. Nobody is paying any attention to these people, because they’re not crying very loud… I met a Puerto Rican acid-head by the Park one day, and he said, ‘You’re Paul Simon,’ and we talked, and I took him to my apartment. It must have looked like Shea Stadium to him. I said, ‘I want to lay the Beatles album on him,’ so I put the earphones on him, and he’s flipping out, and I think: Everybody should have what I have. I used to think I was much sharper than everyone else—very aware, perceptive, seeing things. Then, recently, I realized it wasn’t true. Everyone’s perceptive. Everyone is sensitive and perceptive, and they all know what pain is. I have compassion for that.”
From therein came echoing, the Sound of Silence.
On February 19, 1963, Paul Simon took his guitar into the bathroom of his parents’ house. He turned the lights off and the sink on, creating a meditation chamber of white noise and black sight. “The main thing about playing the guitar,” he said, “was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream. And I was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the bathroom, because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber. I'd turn on the faucet so that water would run—I like that sound; it's very soothing to me—and I'd play. In the dark:”
‘Hello darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again.’
On this day, the words continued to come; they flowed through him like the water in the sink. “Because a vision softly creeping / Left its seeds while I was sleeping / And the vision that was planted in my brain… Still remains / Within the sound…of silence.” Twenty-one years of disgruntlement, disappointment, and dissatisfaction surfaced within him, frothing, like a baking soda volcano. He spoke of blindness and sacrilege; of anxiety and alienation.
“In restless dreams I walked alone / Narrow streets of cobblestone.”
Many have thought this song to be a response to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but Paul had actually written it three seasons prior. The song’s release, however, coincided with the national mourning period that followed. American youth resonated with the ideas Paul outlined: the inability of many to communicate with one another, on an emotional level; the peddled consumerism that invades our streets, homes, and eyes through billboards, televisions, and advertisements; the inescapable voices of those who speak through media without care for their words, and those of us who abide without thinking; the feeling of being the only sane person in the room, while everyone else chains themselves to the caravan.
“And in the naked light I saw / Ten thousand people, maybe more.”
When asked how, at such a young age, he was able to consider these deep topics and then condense his message so purely into five short verses, Paul replied, “I have no idea.” The discography he’d produce over the next half-century would say otherwise. Within the upcoming decade alone he’d dive deeper into the themes he alludes to here—spirituality, relationships, love, media, and politics—writing dozens of sincere, relateable, and vulnerable songs. In the process of creating each one, he said “The music always precedes the words. The words often come from the sound of the music and eventually evolve… It's like a puzzle to find the right words to express what the music is saying.”
“‘Fools,’ said I, ‘You do not know / Silence like a cancer grows.’”
When asked of the meaning behind “The Sound of Silence,” Art Garfunkel said it was about “the inability of people to communicate with each other—not particularly internationally, but especially emotionally—so what you see around you are people unable to love each other.” When asked the same, songwriter Paul Simon said “It’s not a sophisticated thought, but [rather] a thought that I gathered from some college reading material or something. It wasn’t something that I was experiencing at some deep, profound level—i.e. ‘nobody’s listening to me, nobody’s listening to anyone.’ It was a post-adolescent angst, but it had some level of truth to it and it resonated with millions of people. Largely because it had a simple and singable melody.”
“My thinking is that if you don’t have the right melody, it really doesn’t matter what you have to say; people don’t hear it. They only are available to hear when the sound entrances and makes [them] open to the thought. Really, the key to ‘The Sound of Silence’ is the simplicity of the melody and the words, which are youthful alienation. It’s a young lyric, but not bad for a twenty-one-year-old.”
“And the people bowed and prayed / To the neon god they made.”
Vice-employed music journalist Luke Winkie, best known for “adding very important commentary to the Yeezus conversation,” has an altogether different theory on how Paul came to write the anthem of Sixties melancholia: Art Garfunkel implored Paul Simon to eat him alive. He buried his face into Art’s exposed abdomen and sucked out the liver “with his eager tongue, added salt, and let the deliciously pungent filtered toxins play with his taste buds.” Next went Art’s small intestines, as Paul “let the pinkish sausage link rope down his throat with outstanding precision,” and on occasion he “would chomp-down on one of the small-intestine sausages, letting an explosive rapture of de-oxygenated blood and semi-digested food coat the walls of his mouth.”
Paul “was not going to let anything go to waste. He sucked on the bones much like you and I might suck on a jolly rancher, until the constant erosion left it malleable.” Losing consciousness, Art flashed Paul “a proud wink.” Paul then “thanked his friend for such a great meal, and [he] hanged Garfunkel’s remains in the smokehouse.” With his hunger satisfied, he finished writing.
“And whispered in the sound…of silence.”
The salted snow that encrusted the eaves and sidewalk gutters in New York’s five boroughs melted with time, and—by May of 1963—Art and Paul had reunited on the stage. In and around Queens, in cafes and the like, they performed under the sobriquetical billing “Kane & Garr.” Neither of them, it seemed, were willing to unveil their true personages to the public. In September, they signed “Kane & Garr” for a performance slot at Gerde’s Folk City, a Greenwich Village cafe that hosted live music on Monday nights.
From the stage, the twosome performed a set of three songs, with the first being “The Sound of Silence.” It had not been performed publicly before, but the duo had refined their harmony in the ‘vocal laboratory’ of 70th Road, and their rendition this night was somber, beautiful, and precise. Seated at the other end of the cafe, Tom Wilson was captivated.
At the time, Tom Wilson had been producing Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin'” — both the album and the titular song, which the folk guru had written deliberately as an anthem of the era. Tom expressed his impression to the singer-songwriters after their set. Paul, recognizing the producer from his time in the Brill Building, asked Tom if he could get an audition at Columbia Records. Tom smiled and, following a reasonable pitch, considered it.
“Paul was working for a music publishing company,” Art recalled, in an interview with the Rolling Stone. “His job was to take the company’s catalog and peddle it around to the various labels, trying to interest [them] into having their artists record these particular songs.” Hustling vinyls didn’t give him any satisfaction, but it got him access to the Brill Building—the centrepoint of New York’s recording industry. Consequently, Paul “had connections with the major labels.”
“I was going to school uptown,” Art remembered. Many moons ago, his roommate Sanford Greenberg had succumbed to glaucoma and lost his vision. Art helped Sanford finish the semester by reading his textbooks aloud and writing-out Sanford’s dictation for essays. In May of 1963, Sanford graduated with honors.
As a show of gratitude for Art’s selfless devotion, Sanford gifted his roommate a check for $500, with the sole condition that it be spent to record a demo of “The Sound of Silence.” Art obliged. Paul took the resultant demo into the Brill Building one day, and, “After a certain point, [he found and] told Tom Wilson at Columbia Records, ‘Well, I have some songs of my own that I never showed you. Would you be interested in hearing them? My friend’s uptown; he sings them with me.’ [Tom] liked us right away and set up an audition. We recorded four tunes, and at that recording session, the engineer in the booth was somebody named Roy Halee.”
“Roy came out and adjusted the mikes very carefully. Roy later said, ‘As soon as you guys started singing, I was very concerned that everything go right with this act.’ From the beginning we sensed that he was very much on our side. And the next time we had to come back and sing more, the next week, we requested that that guy with the yellow button-down oxford shirt be the engineer again. And he’s always been there.”
Roy had discovered the only manner with which to capture the angelic quality of their harmonies: as if on stage, both voices had to sing into the same microphone at the same time. The natural blending of their voices was something no mixing board could duplicate. It was decided that every song thereafter, recorded by the duo, would require them side-by-side. Using this process, Roy Halee would go on to earn four Grammys mixing for Simon & Garfunkel, and he’d help Paul Simon to earn many others in future projects.
Roy Halee
The four songs churned out by Roy Halee and the boys earned them a meeting with Clive Davis, the thirty-one-year-old bald jabroni-slash-A&R exec with Columbia Records. Clive was a native of Brooklyn, and also of a Jewish upbringing, so he felt an understanding of the twosome even before their keesters hit his plush pleather seats opposite the credenza.
The first item on Clive’s agenda was the arrangement. Roy Halee could mix in the studio, but his colleague Tom Wilson had brought the boys in, and he’d serve as a supervisor on the production of their first record—an influential but largely supportive role, to ensure the album sounded cohesive yet generated potential hits. Paul expected all of this, of course. The folk genre was on the rise, but melancholic hit singles were few and far between.
The second item on his agenda was their appearance: they were both hip urban youths, coming-up in an age of beatniks that was still dominated by rock ‘n’ roll. They’d have to shed the blazers and wingtips in favor of the ‘scruffy urban Jew’ look they’d been cultivating on the campus green. They’d dress as low-key as a pedestrian, and they’d be performing against type—something neither had done since elementary school—which meant embracing their natural image: a tiny, quirky block-head and an orange-afro-sprouting beanpole wallflower.
The third item on his agenda, following suit, was their stage name: it had to change. “Kane & Garr” and “Tom & Jerry” were both trash; ancient history. If they were to be signed at Columbia, they needed something as powerful and pure as their sound. They needed to be themselves.
Henceforth they were to be known as “Simon & Garfunkel.”
The glaucoma-funded demo “The Sounds of Silence” ultimately morphed into the studio album “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” under the guiding hands of Roy Halee and Tom Wilson. It was recorded across three sessions in March of 1964, and the final tracklist featured four of Simon’s original compositions, five covers, and three traditional folk songs with a harmonic twist. Roy Halee polished the album while the duo underwent Columbia’s “promotional showcase.”
The record was slated for an October release, giving “Simon & Garfunkel” just over six months to build-up a fanbase. Their first concert was held March 31, 1964, at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. This club was three years into becoming one of the most influential venues in music history, having already hosted the first concerts of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary in 1961. Later careers to be kickstarted here included Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Byrds, The Mamas and The Papas, Sonic Youth, and 10,000 Maniacs.
Simon & Garfunkel performed numerous times at Gerde’s Folk City and the Gaslight Cafe, earning themselves a considerable reputation — though it was not one to be proud of. As fellow folk singer Dave Van Ronk, who was witness to many of these performances, later said: “‘Sounds of Silence’ actually became a running joke; for a while there, it was only necessary to start singing ‘Hello darkness, my old friend…’ and everybody would crack-up.”
Promotion of the album slowed to a stop. Art returned to his studies and Paul moved to England, which he had enjoyed during his brief stint as ‘Paul Kane.’ He met Kathy Chitty (six years his younger) on April 12, 1964, at the Railway Inn Folk Club in Essex, where she was employed to sell tickets. The two fell quickly for one another. She traveled with him through France, Spain, and England—hitchhiking, and sleeping under bridges.
He made friends with local folk artists in Essex, Kent, and Greater London. Reconnecting with the British record scene, Lorna Music (the small-time publisher that sold his “Carlos Dominguez” single) signed him to their Oriole label and released “He Was My Brother” as a single. Paul earned a paltry but stable income under Lorna and, as a result, he could afford to rent an apartment with Kathy. They invited Art Garfunkel to visit for the summer.
Art was disheartened by the release of “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” which had only sold 3,000 copies. Its failure only convinced him further that music was less of a career and more of a hobby. He completed his art history major, onward to earn a B.A. in 1965. He continued at Columbia's Teachers College for the next two years, focusing on mathematics education.
Paul returned to America, briefly, to tour the contiguous forty-eight states with Kathy. Upon their return, in January of 1965, Paul dedicated himself to his music. Law school was buried in the back of his mind. He was reborn as a career musician, though he was yet to make a career of it.
His landlady, of all people, assembled a tape of the singles Paul produced at Lorna. She sent it into the BBC with a glowing recommendation. A few days later, Paul awoke to his demos playing on the “Five to Ten” morning show. Britain seemed to like him. And he liked Britain.
Lorna and Oriole were absorbed by Columbia Records who, given Paul Simon's well-timed spike in popularity, wanted him to put out an album. Over the next few months he recorded some of his yet-unsung compositions, including “I Am a Rock” and “April Come She Will.” (Thanks to his stringent songwriter-ownership clauses, he would later re-record these songs in his pairing with Art Garfunkel.)
Columbia released “The Paul Simon Songbook,” his first solo album, in August of 1965. Tom Wilson had slept on Paul's couch for the month of June while they produced it. Sales of the album weren't anything to write home about but Paul still felt happier in London than he ever had in New York. He was making new friends, he was making good money, and he was in love.
One of the singles on “Songbook” had been penned for his girlfriend. Aptly named “Kathy's Song,” he sang as if confiding to her: “I gaze beyond the rain-drenched streets / To England where my heart lies,” and as “I stand alone without beliefs / The only truth I know is you.” The final verse became a favorite of Paul's fangirls, after 1966: “And as I watch the drops of rain / Weave their weary paths and die / I know that I am like the rain / There but for the grace of you go I.”
Tom Wilson had moved on from the failure of “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” to focus on the production of Bob Dylan’s 1965 album “Bringing It All Back Home.” In the spring, a colleague asked Tom if he had sent that old S&G single—the one that starts off ‘Hello Darkness, my old friend’—into any radio stations along the eastern seaboard. Tom said he hadn’t.
This was peculiar because, as he was about to find out, “The Sound of Silence” had become popular on the campuses of Boston and the beaches of Florida. In Beantown, a third-shift DJ at WBZ had been spinning it on the requests of college kids. Undergrads from Harvard and Tufts brought it south during Spring Break, to Cocoa Beach, where it came to garner just as much airplay.
Tom was floored. He knew that, if it was carrying clout with its target demographic, he had to revive the song for a mainstream audience. Taking inspiration from the Byrds’ rockish cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” (which he produced), he jazzed-up the backing track with a drumbeat and poignant electric instrumentation. Simon & Garfunkel were none the wiser.
In a 1973 interview with Rolling Stone, Art said that Tom Wilson “never called to ask” for permission to remix it — though, as the song's original producer, one could argue he didn’t need their consent. “We were in England… But he never called to ask. You could do pretty much what you wanted with Paul and Artie in those days.”
Prompted on Tom’s role in the breakout of Simon & Garfunkel, Art conceded that he deserved credit for “being the midwife;” for “turning [S&G] around from straight folk into pop, or rock…” Bob Dylan had once been asked a similar question in 1969. The interviewer posited there being some truth to Tom Wilson giving Bob Dylan the rockish sound that made him mainstream. The folk guru laughed, hemming and hawing, before ultimately conceding: “He did to a certain extent. That is true. He did. He had a sound in mind.”
It was a rare practice in the recording industry to take an existing song, overdub it, and re-release it as something new. When Tom’s bosses at Columbia heard the updated version of “The Sound of Silence,” they were hesitant, but it was undeniable that the song had found a new driving rhythm. The updated sound hooked you, appealing to the folk genre without dipping away from the mainstream sound. As a result, it was both familiar and fresh—exactly the blueprint for “coolness” as outlined by Raymond Loewy’s MAYA Principle. And as the father of industrial design and the auteur behind the streamline moderne aesthetical revolution, Raymond Loewy was a man who knew a thing or two about “cool.”
Tom Wilson
Paul was touring the small-time venues of Denmark in autumn of 1965. As was his custom in keeping up-to-date with the industry, he purchased a copy of Billboard Magazine from a street vendor, and he thumbed through it. High-up on the Hot 100 chart was a song called “The Sound of Silence.” His heart skipped a beat. Doubt washed over him: the kind of doubt you conjure as a defense mechanism, to keep from inflating your expectations.
He purchased a copy of Cashbox and flipped it open to the hit listings, only to see “The Sound of Silence” similarly near the top. This was no fluke. He phoned Artie as soon as he got the chance, but it seemed Art had already given the updated version a listen. He said of its new sound, “It's interesting. I suppose it might do something; it might sell.”
Paul was now more worried than excited. He couldn’t get the track in Europe so Art mailed him a 7” vinyl single. Upon its delivery a few days later, Paul set it to his turntable and “was horrified when he first heard it.” His child had been torn apart and frankensteined back together. Most glaring was the rhythm section, which “slowed-down at one point so [their] voices could catch-up.”
But America saw it differently. A gentle, weepy groan of teenage melancholia had been replaced by a heart-swelling, passionate plea for harmony in an era of shifting public opinion. Columbia had released the new commercial single on September 13, 1965, and America was swooning.
Simon & Garfunkel were effectively disbanded but, on Columbia’s insistence, they reconvened in the Brill Building for discussions on their next album. Clive Davis said they’d capitalize on the single by titling the album likewise, calling it “Sounds of Silence.” Of Columbia’s haste, Art said, “We were under the influence of big business, you know? We had this Number One single and it was a case of business trying to make the music conform to the situation.”
Time was of the essence. In December, they recorded eleven songs: ten original compositions by Paul Simon and one cover. Half of Paul’s contributions were rearrangements of songs released on his “Songbook” solo album, including “April Come She Will” and “Kathy's Song.” Three were singles slated to launch out of the new S&G album: “I Am a Rock,” “Homeward Bound,” and, of course, “The Sound of Silence.”
As Art recalled, “Our manager called us at the hotel we were staying at. We were both in the same room. We must have bunked in the same room in those days. I picked up the phone. He said, ‘Well, congratulations. Next week you will go from five to one in Billboard.’ It was fun. I remember pulling open the curtains and letting the brilliant sun come into this very red room, and then ordering room service. That was good.”
December closed in darkness for Paul Simon. “I remember Artie and I were sitting there in my car one night, parked on a street in Queens, and [through the radio] the announcer said, ‘Number one, Simon & Garfunkel.’ And Artie said to me, ‘That Simon & Garfunkel — they must be having a great time.’ Because there we were, on a street corner [in] Queens, smoking a joint… We didn't know what to do with ourselves.”
By the first day of 1966, “The Sound of Silence” was at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. As the month dragged on, “The Sound of Silence” fought tooth-and-nail to retain their throne against “We Can Work It Out” by The Beatles—genre-revolutionaries who were already a decade-deep in the national zeitgeist. High praise for Simon & Garfunkel meant a necessary change in tone for the reigning champs, The Beatles, who dove headlong beyond folk and into psychedelia. They released “Revolver” (largely considered their greatest album) that summer.
“Sounds of Silence” was released on January 17, 1966. Lead single “The Sound of Silence” charted on Billboard well-into the warmer weeks of mid-year, making Top 10 in dozens of countries, including Japan, Australia, the Netherlands, and West “the Good Half” Germany.
Today, “The Sound of Silence” is widely regarded as “the quintessential folk song.” Rolling Stone ranked it #157 of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, while BMI claimed it to be the 18th most-performed song of the century. (Consider this powerful 2015 cover by David Draiman, of Disturbed, which Paul Simon called “wonderful.”)
In 2013, the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress announced it would preserve “The Sound of Silence” and its accompanying album for the remainder of the human experience, calling it “culturally, historically, [and] aesthetically significant.”
The success of “The Sound of Silence” brought Paul Simon the recognition and acclaim he so desperately desired. Unfortunately, the fame was too much for Kathy to bear. She pulled Paul aside and said, essentially, she couldn’t stand in the way of his dreams, yet she couldn’t stay with him if he continued down this path.
After a silent and heartbreaking understanding, Kathy returned to England—alone. Paul went on to call “Sounds of Silence” a “morbid album,” adding “I tend to think of that period as a very late adolescence. Those kind of…people who are very sad or very lonely—and you tend to dramatize those things. [However, it] depends on the song. ‘A Most Peculiar Man,’ which dealt with a suicide…was written in England, because I saw a newspaper article about a guy who committed suicide.”
“In those days it was easier to write, because I wasn’t known and it didn’t matter if I wrote a bad song. I’d write a song in a night, and play it around in the clubs, and people were very open then. No attention, and so, no criticism… [Back then], I didn’t have standards. I was a beginning writer then, so I wrote anything I saw. Now I sift… Now I have standards.”
“I think a lot of the praise we’ve had is really not warranted. If people’s standards were higher… A lot of the things we’ve done have been hack. I don’t take the title of ‘poet.’ It would be a slap in the face of Wallace Stevens to do that. But I see the possibility now that I could be one, and that pop music could be an art form.”
“I care that what we do is good,” Art stated, in a 1967 interview with the New Yorker. “A lot of people in pop music are influenced by the fact you don’t have to be good, but I can’t do that; I can’t help but take it seriously… Pop music is the most vibrant force in music today. It’s like dope — so heady, so alive.”
And this was only the beginning.
