Waters of March is one of my all-time favorites, and as much as I liked Garfunkel's harmonies with Simon, I don't think I could get through his version of Waters of March when there are so many great versions of that song. ![]() I'm a great fan of Brazilian jazz and Jobim is one of the greats in that genre. That said, I was never much into Garfunkel outside of his perfect harmonies with Simon. He crosses styles from all over the world, mixes different musical styles together, with lyrics that run from humorous, to stories of humanity. But as a soloist and when you take in the full catalogue of Paul Simon's work, to me he's one of the great songwriters of the last 100 years. Your opinion of Simon & Garfunkel matches up with my opinion of Dylan, from early on to now- with maybe a couple of excepted albums. As kids, though, Paul and Art bonded over Mad Magazine.īy the way, I love "Waters of March" as sung by Art Garfunkel (which I only discovered recently and only because Spotify pushed it at me).ĭylan vs Simon is a personal hot button of mine. It's highly aspirational, beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions," and full of great classics. I also learned that Garfunkel has kept a list of all the books he's read, going back to 1968 and up through the present day, and you can read the whole list on line, here. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun.” 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, #23 to #14 in a week. He talks about the pleasure he got from listening to the chart rundown on the radio - “It was the numbers that got me. 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 had a small social group, mostly based around playing baseball, but wasn’t one of the popular kids.Īrt 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. Simon was well-enough liked, by all accounts, but he’d been put on an accelerated programme for gifted students which meant he was progressing through school faster than his peers. 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. Knowing little of S&G's background, I learned a lot from that episode: I guess if he was a rock, our derision didn't hurt him. You're a rock, are you? That's so interesting. I was with some of my girlfriends and a boy from our class, walking by, suddenly and, I think sincerely, sang out "I Am a Rock." Oh, how we laughed at him! It still makes me laugh. They did seem self-absorbedly gloomy, and I completely identify with the people who thought it was funny to intone - out of the blue - "Hello darkness, my old friend." I have a vivid memory from 1965, when "I Am a Rock" was a hit, and I was 14. ![]() I've never been much of a Simon and Garfunkel fan, though, of course, I've often enjoyed listening to their songs. That's from the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," " Episode 135: 'The Sound of Silence' by Simon and Garfunkel." 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." Dave Van Ronk 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.
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