Some music is an aural snapshot of a time and place. In it, I can hear, taste, feel, see a bygone age.
Simon and Garfunkel have always dropped me right me right on my ass in the 1960s. On one hand, Simon and Garfunkel were just square enough to be safe listening for the Mrs. Robinson generation. And yet, they provided a ray of light through the clouds in the minds of a generation of Benjamin Braddocks in search of their identity after rejecting the call of their parent's generation to go into careers like 'plastics'. The Graduate aside, Simon and Garfunkel are a product of the 1960s. They started at the cusp of transition in this country, not full fledge in the middle of it. Their songs work for an America coming out of the self-absorbed 1950s into the personal, political, civil, and global revolutions of the 1960s. I smelled burning nagchampa incense on "The 59th Street Bridge Song", and on "Homeward Bound" I felt the rough polyester of an Amtrak seat on my back.
A 1967 concert newly released from Columbia/Legacy recordings, Live from New York City, 1967, is a sample of the penultimate folkies in their heyday. Art Garkunkel's witty comments and their use of two voices in harmony with a folk guitar accompaniment give the performance a purity somewhat exempt from the chaos of the times. Some of their best songs still had yet to be written, and the country was just beginning to seriously crack as love-ins turned into a more militant form of protest. The Long Hot Summer and race riots were just around the corner, but for that night, America was still retained some of its innocence.
Back then, when musicians wanted to protest, they wrote songs like "A Church Is Burning", which, presumably, is about the torching of black churches by white hate-mongers in the South. Songwriters like Dylan were slinging venom and making accusations such as Dylan's "Masters of War," but Simon and Garfunkel often were concerned with the business of healing in "A Church Is Burning" and later in their finest work "Bridge Over Troubled Water".
This isn't to say that they were above feeling blue.
One of their more subtle and brilliant songs, "The
Dangling Conversation", turns a stagnant relationship
into a college literature class. Full of vivid images
and faded magnificence, it seems like a sketch for an
unwritten Arthur Miller play more than a song.
More than anything this album reminds me that Paul
Simon was one hell of a guitar player. He plays a six-
and 12-string acoustic guitar for this concert and
his ability to pluck such wonderful melodies amidst
all his chaotic strumming is mesmerizing. His
fingerpicking is flawless to the point of sounding
like an update of the work of folk musicians from the
1920s and 1930s who often relied on a single guitar to act
as a bass, guitar, and percussion for a song. Anyone
glancing at the credits of the album will perhaps
wonder what Garfunkel was doing up on that stage with
him, since Simon played guitar, sang, and wrote or
adapted all the songs. But Garfunkel is just more
subtle, adding background vocals and accents to
Simon.s songs that distinctly differentiate the Simon
and Garfunkel phase from the Simon solo phase. Simon
can't reach that same state of vocal angst that
Garfunkel belts out in "For Emily, Whenever I May Find
Her".
Even when Beck is armed with just an acoustic guitar
he sounds nothing like Simon and Garfunkel. He beats
on his guitar and hauls melodies out of it, rather
than gently seducing them like Paul Simon. But there
were a number of parallels with this Simon and
Garfunkel recording and a Beck concert at Lincoln
Center a few months back I could not shake. First, the
venue for the Beck show was Avery Fisher Hall, home to
a gargantuan organ and host of classical performances
far more often than rock stars. Back before the same
venue had been remodeled and was still known as
Philharmonic Hall, Simon and Garfunkel had played
songs there that would be forever associated with
their generation. They certainly weren't the only ones
writing those songs, just one of the few to have
achieved mainstream success; plenty of smaller, lesser
known artists still played similar music in small
cafes in Greenwich Village. And when Beck took the
stage, he was as much a representative of a
significant chunk of today's American youth as he was
a musician. An indie hero, well versed in all aspects
of pop culture, ironic, and mistaken as a slacker by
an elder generation, Beck is not the only one who
plays his type of music, and he's not necessarily the
best at it. But he has achieved mainstream success
with it. Because of that, he too will someday bring us
back to these days, our own more innocent time. (Even
recent history is noticeably more innocent). However,
while we wait for Beck to release one of his current
masterful concerts 30 years from now, Simon and
Garfunkel will do just fine.
— 1 November 2002
