Particularly striking was “ The Sound of Silence” which, even in its spare acoustic form, came across with the force of a revelation. While S&G’s selection and treatment of the outside material was largely unremarkable, the five original tunes made it clear that the two youngsters shared an undeniable gift. As much as anything, S&G’s 1964 debut album,” Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” stands as a distillation of the musical path Paul and Artie had traveled, along with so many of their generation: it’s an unselfconscious pastiche of Everlys-schooled vocal/rhythmic interaction, folk-pop staples, esoterica, English lit-inspired metaphors, and poetic imagery, underlaid with a budding social consciousness. As it turned out, Wilson was right – but acclaim was still a year, and an album, away. Wilson heard something in Simon’s overtly poetic songs and Garfunkel’s keening tenor. After a live audition, Simon & Garfunkel scored a record deal, courtesy of Columbia Records staff producer Tom Wilson, a jazz specialist (Miles Davis). While Simon claims that he failed to get even one Marks tune covered, he fared better with his own material. Marks, working in some of the tunes he’d been writing on the side as he pitched songs from the Marks catalog to A&R reps at the labels. Remarkably, they’d broken into the Top 50 as 15-year-olds in 1957 with their Everlys knockoff “Hey, Schoolgirl.” Tom & Jerry, as they then called themselves, even lip-synced the song on Bandstand, but nothing more came of that initial foray into the pop mainstream.Ī few years later, Simon moonlighted as a songplugger for publisher E.B. Like so many of their peers, these two natives of Forest Hills, Queens, were musical sponges, but they didn’t leave it at that.
As it turned out, though, Simon & Garfunkel were far from your average folkies. Like so many other harmony-enthralled youngsters, they’d cut their teeth on the Everly Brothers, they knew the Great Traditional Songbook as well as the next folk group, and they were driven by the same strivings as the rest of their generation – to get into a good college, to please their parents, to be admired by their peers, and to have some fun along the way. During the early-’60s era of earnest faux-folkiness, Simon & Garfunkel seemed at first to be utterly typical.
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