Simon & Garfunkel  was an American folk rock duo consisting of singer-songwriter Paul Simon and singer Art Garfunkel.  They were one of the most popular recording artists of the 1960s and became counterculture icons of the decade’s social revolution.  Their biggest hits—including “The Sound of Silence” (1964/1965), “Mrs. Robinson” (1968), “Bridge over Troubled Water” (1969), and “The Boxer” (1969)—reached number one on singles charts worldwide.  Their final studio record, Bridge over Troubled Water, was their most successful, becoming one of the world’s best-selling albums.  Since their split in 1970 they have reunited several times, most famously in 1981 for the “The Concert in Central Park”, which attracted more than 500,000 people, the seventh-largest concert attendance in history.  (More from Wikipedia)

 

 

Not all of the news is bad, however.  Sometimes “what might have been” turns out to be more than anyone could ever have expected.  The history behind the glorious hit single “The Sounds of Silence” (now identified as “The Sound of Silence”) by Simon and Garfunkel requires me, as usual, to make a big detour in the process, and to pick up the Bob Dylan story from earlier in this post. 

Meanwhile, during March 1964, Tom Wilson was the producer for the first album by Simon and Garfunkel, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.  Like Bob Dylan’s first album, it was a fairly conventional folk album with numerous traditional folk songs and cover songs, including “The Times They Are A-Changin’”; there were only four songs that had been written by Paul Simon. 

The first song on Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. is “You Can Tell the World”, a gospel song that had been written and performed by Gibson & Camp.  At that time, the latter gentleman was known as Bob Camp; he later took the name Hamid Hamilton Camp and also Hamilton Camp   When I first encountered him, Hamilton Camp was in a supporting role on one of my favorite sitcoms of all time, He & She.  The show starred Richard Benjamin (as a cartoonist) and Paula Prentiss (as a social worker) as a married couple; they have one of the longest lived marriages in Hollywood (52 years and counting).  One of the Benjamin character’s cartoons had become the basis of a television show; the perfectly cast Jack Cassidy co-starred as the egomaniacal actor who played “Jetman” on that show.  Hamilton Camp played the folksy handyman for the apartment building where the couple lived, and the cast also featured Kenneth Mars as a firefighter who often walked into their apartment via a plank that he extended from the firehouse into a window in their apartment.  

Despite the stellar cast, innovative plot lines, and a lead-in from Green Acres, the show was cancelled after only one season.  He & She is now considered to be a ground-breaking series that paved the way for the MTM shows of the 1970’s like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show; they ran back-to-back for years, and I never missed them.  Those shows basically ruined me for television programs in future years. 

I didn’t know that Hamilton Camp was also a folksinger until I got to college and discovered that his 1964 album Paths of Victory was a favorite album of the College Republican crowd that I began running with.  For some reason, they considered it to be the perfect album to play if you were really depressed; for myself, I loved Paths of Victory because it included covers of seven – count them, seven – Bob Dylan songs, most of which were unfamiliar to me.  The album also includes Camp’s best known song, “Pride of Man”, later covered by Quicksilver Messenger Service and Gordon Lightfoot.  I have found several other Hamilton Camp albums over the years, but never that one, so I guess I am going to have to break down and order it sometime.  Actually I have always loved “the hunt” and rarely order a particular album, even one as beloved as this one. 

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Anyway, in its initial release in October 1964, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was unsuccessful, possibly overshadowed by the Beatles.  Of one song on the album, “The Sounds of Silence” – performed acoustically, like all the rest – Art Garfunkel wrote in the liner notes:  “‘The Sounds of Silence’ is a major work.  We were looking for a song on a larger scale, but this is more than either of us expected.” 

Wikipedia describes what happened next:  “On June 15, 1965, immediately after the recording session of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, [Tom] Wilson took the original acoustically instrumented track of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1964 version, and overdubbed the recording with electric guitar (played by Al Gorgoni and Vinnie Bell), electric bass (Joe Mack), and drums (Buddy Saltzman), and released it as a single without consulting [Paul] Simon or [Art] Garfunkel.  The lack of consultation with Simon and Garfunkel on Wilson’s re-mix was because, although still contracted to Columbia Records at the time, the musical duo at that time was no longer a ‘working entity’.  Roy Halee was the recording engineer, who in spirit with the success of the Byrds and their success formula in folk rock, introduced an echo chamber effect into the song.  Al Gorgoni later would reflect that this echo effect worked well on the finished recording, but would dislike the electric guitar work they technically superimposed on the original acoustic piece.” 

For the flip side of the single, Tom Wilson added a song that Simon and Garfunkel had recorded a few months earlier when they were trying for a more “contemporary” sound.  “We’ve Got a Groovey Thing Goin’” wasn’t anything like the serious-natured hit song on the “A” side; when the Sounds of Silence album was rushed to the stores after the success of the newly electrified single, the liner notes about this song said simply:  “Just for fun”.  Paul Simon seemed to like the now somewhat embarrassing Sixties slang term “groovy”; he also wrote “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)”.  Besides being a single for Simon and Garfunkel (backed with “I Am a Rock”), a band called Harpers Bizarre took “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” to #13 in 1967. 

“The Sounds of Silence” began climbing the charts and was the #1 single in the country for the first three weeks of 1966 (sandwiched between a Dave Clark Five song and a Beatles song).  Simon and Garfunkel began working together again and went on to have one of the most storied careers in American popular music.  “The Sounds of Silence” is among several Simon and Garfunkel songs that were used in the 1967 film The Graduate; using existing songs in a soundtrack was unusual in those days, though it is commonplace now.  In 1999, BMI said that “The Sounds of Silence” was the 18th most performed song of the 20th Century.