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SIMON AND GARFUNKEL
PARSLEY, SAGE, ROSEMARY AND THYME
Columbia Records
CS 9363
From the original 1966 album liner notes
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Side 1
SCARBOROUGH FAIR/CANTICLE
-P. Simon-A. Garfunkel-
PATTERNS
-P. Simon-
CLOUDY
-P. Simon-
HOMEWARD BOUND
-P. Simon-
THE BIG BRIGHT GREEN PLEASURE MACHINE
-P. Simon-
THE 59th STREET BRIDGE SONG (Feelin’ Groovy)
-P. Simon-
Side 2
THE DANGLING CONVERSATION
-P. Simon-
FLOWERS NEVER BEND IN THE RAINFALL
-P. Simon-
A SIMPLE DESULTORY PHILIPPIC
(Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission)
-P. Simon-
FOR EMILY, WHENEVER I MAY FIND HER
-P. Simon-
A POEM ON THE UNDERGROUND WALL
-P. Simon-
7 O’CLOCK NEWS/SILENT NIGHT
-P. Simon-
The selections are BMI
Produced by Bob Johnston
Cover photo: Bob Cato
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Notes by RALPH J. GLEASON
The New Youth of the Rock Generation has done something in American popular song that has begged to be done for generations.
It has taken the creation of the lyrics and the music out of the hands of the hacks and given it over to the poets.
This seems to me to be the true meaning of the remarkable achievement of Simon and Garfunkel. They have clearly demonstrated by the ultimate logic of this materialistic society – sales-dollar volume – that there is not only a market for intellectuality, but that America’s New Youth, the Rock Generation, bred on rock and roll, rhythm and blues, folk-rock and television shows, wants its music to deal with the meaning of life itself and not be just a mumbling collection of dream-world images (half motion-picture and half slick-magazine fiction) hung up on romance as opposed to love, speaking in a Bijou Theater vernacular no one ever used in real life, and dealing not with truth or beauty, but with least-common-denominator juvenile trivia.
That Simon and Garfunkel – and the other representatives of the new generation’s songwriters, an elite which includes Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, John Sebastian, Marty Balin, Dino Valenti, Tim Hardin, Al Kooper, Smokey Robinson, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, John Phillips and others – have succeeded in putting beauty and truth and meaning into popular song, fractures the stereotyped adult view that the music of youth is at best only trivial rhymes and silly teen-age noise, and at worst offensive.
This generation is producing poets who write songs, and never before in the sixty-year history of American popular music has this been true.
The music of Simon and Garfunkel shows evidence of other virtues, too, besides the poetry of the lyrics. There’s a delicate musical design of almost lapidarian detail. It has vitality but it is controlled, the sounds being made deliberately for the artist’s conscious purpose. Take the second line in Scarborough Fair/Canticle (a delicate interweaving of two songs). The anti-war message that is implied and sometimes explicit in this is always signaled by the electric bass.
Take the glorious kaleidoscope of rushing feelings, blowing winds, shifting colors, bursting moods of joy and exultation in Cloudy. The song is effervescent, one is refreshed hearing it. The references to Tolstoy and to Tinker Bell, and the great line, “Why don’t you show your face and bend my mind,” all assume a common experience and a common language, the international language of youth.
Take the way Art Garfunkel has arranged the voices – not only on Cloudy with its background, but also on Scarborough Fair/Canticle and his own featured number, For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her. The voices blend, separate, interweave and sing counter to one another with the delicacy of a clear glass etching.
The range of expression of Simon’s lyrics and melodies is impressive. In this album, there is the probing, almost enigmatic A Poem on the Underground Wall, which has deep psychological implications; grave, murky images and mysterious, furtive figures. Yet it is a clearly seen episode with suggestions of religious, almost prayerful links to the subconscious (“he holds his crayon rosary”).
Then there is the straight-ahead satire of The Dangling Conversation and The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine (again the rhetoric of youth: “Do the figures of authority just shout you down…”) with their open shafting of the cocktail hour conversation and the mad, mad, mad world of television and radio commercials. A Simple Desultory Philippic carries this still further, snipping away at certain figures on the contemporary youth scene.
But even when the thrust is toward the New Generation, the moral, the implication and the message (these are not message songs in any heavy sense, each of them being so beautifully lyric and melodic) reach beyond the whole world, which may be why they are so effective. Only in Artie Shaw’s fascinating autobiography, “The Trouble with Cinderella,” has the very special loneliness of the performing artist in our society been so well expressed as it is in Paul Simon’s Homeward Bound: (“each town seems the same to me, the movies and the factory”).
And then there is 7 O’Clock New/Silent Night. I will not tell you in advance what goes on here. My first hearing of it brought chills to my spine and tears to my eyes. It is one of the most effective statements about the world today that I have heard.
The pristine beauty of the voices, the delicate inevitability of the structure of the songs (both the lyrics and the music), the range from deepening seriousness to joyous exuberance (The 59th Street Bridge Song is such a happy song) is overwhelmingly impressive.
There are songs of alienation but there are songs of love, too, and they touch closely the prevailing philosophical current of the New Youth which is that of creativity AGAINST the machine and, thus, FOR humanity.
It is no accident that this album is dedicated to Lenny Bruce. As is becoming evident, he was a secular saint. His torture, like that of youth and the new music, at the hands of the establishment (remember when Congressional hearings deplored the state of popular music?) links them together.
Today’s popular music is in good shape indeed – at least the portion of it represented by this album. It has strength and it has beauty, it has lyricism, meaning and, above all, that quality of broad appeal which still retains form. And its music speaks for more than the moment. The songs in this album are songs for all time.
Stereo – CS 9363
Mono – CL 2563
COLUMBIA (Lp)
STEREO “360 SOUND”
® “Columbia” Marcas Reg. Printed in U.S.A.
CS 9363
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