Fire and Rain (5 page)

They'd been friends and competitors as long as anyone could recall. One day in the fall of 1957, when they were both sixteen, they'd gone shopping together for sweaters. Even though they were mere Queens high-school students, they'd actually placed a song on the charts, “Hey, Schoolgirl,” and needed to spruce up their wardrobes. In the store, they began arguing: Simon wanted one type of sweater, Garfunkel another. In the end, they couldn't agree on what to wear and wound up leaving with nothing. A few hours later, they laughed about it, and the cycle began again.

As children, they'd lived within three blocks of each other, in the middle-class section of Queens, New York, and went to the same elementary school, P.S. 164 in Flushing. Simon had migrated from nearby Newark, New Jersey, where his father, a bass player and bandleader named Louis Simon, had been born. The family—which also included Louis' wife Belle, who taught school, and a younger son, Eddie—moved to Kew Gardens Hills, a largely Jewish section of the borough. Garfunkel was already living there with his parents, Jack and Rose, and his two brothers, Jules and Jerry. Simon had taken note of Garfunkel's singing during a school talent show. “I saw you on that stage and I thought, ‘That's how you get popular,'” Simon told him after they'd become friends. Garfunkel took note of Simon's sense of humor, and they finally met during a sixth-grade production of
Alice in Wonderland
.

From the start, rock and roll drew them together. Inheriting his father's love of music, Simon began learning guitar and playing his own type of music. At a ninth-grade dance, he and Garfunkel joined up to sing Big Joe Turner's recent hit “Flip, Flop and Fly”—“I'm a Mississippi bullfrog, sittin' on a hollow stump,” went part of its rollicking lyrics. By the time they were attending Forest Hills High School, they were singing songs by the Crew Cuts and their heroes, the Everly Brothers. Once, when they were trying to learn the Everlys' “Hey Doll Baby” from memory, they inadvertently came up with a song of their own, “Hey, Schoolgirl,” in half an hour.

While they were putting it on tape in a Manhattan studio, Sid Prosen, owner of a local indie label with the presumptuous name of Big Records, overheard them. In the immediate way in which the early rock and roll business worked, he offered to make a record out of it on the spot. Prosen spoke with their parents, cut a deal, and, two days later, shipped fifty thousand copies of “Hey, Schoolgirl” to record stores and jukeboxes. One obstacle remained to assimilating themselves into the culture: their names. They rechristened themselves Tom and Jerry: Garfunkel was now Tom Graph, a nod to his love of math and charting pop hits on graphs, while Simon rechristened himself Jerry Landis.

With its “who-bop-alook-chi-bop” hook and its tale of a smitten teen who eventually lands the girl, “Hey, Schoolgirl” recalled the Everlys enough to peak at a respectable number 49 on the charts. Before they knew it, Tom and Jerry were wearing white bucks and singing the song on Dick Clark's
American Bandstand
around Thanksgiving 1956. They were rock stars—but, it turned out, only for a moment. Tom and Jerry's second single, the less confident “Our Song,” recycled the “Hey, Schoolgirl” chords and died quickly. A third single, “That's My Story,” amounted to banal white doo-wop and also withered. By the time they graduated from Forest Hills High School, their career was finished.

For the next few years, they barely spoke. Mere months after “Hey, Schoolgirl,” Simon had cut a single on his own—a hiccupy slice of Queens rockabilly called “True or False,” under the name True Taylor. The secretive recording signaled that Simon was intent on a career in pop music—and that he suspected his partner wasn't equally driven. Garfunkel, who had such a sharp, numbers-driven mind that he was already tutoring math in high school, was miffed by Simon's side project. They went off to different colleges—Garfunkel to Columbia to study architecture, Simon to Queens College, right near his parents' home—and fell out of touch.

As “Hey, Schoolgirl” proved, Simon was a quick, savvy study when
it came to pop music trends. Those skills were only sharpened in the early '60s, when he took jobs at song publishing companies during his noncollege hours, where he'd sing on demos of songs being pitched to stars. In the process, he learned about record-making—and, just as important, which pop styles were in vogue at what moment. Cutting records on his own with various pseudonyms, he tried his hand at sweet ballads with pitter-patter beats (“Just a Boy,” “Shy”) and Elvis imitations (“Teenage Fool”). A savvy bid at airplay, “Play Me a Sad Song,” implored a disc jockey to spin something woeful to ease his angst. In “It Means a Lot to Them,” he was the archetypal nice Jewish boy, concerned about receiving the consent of his girlfriend's parents. The tracks were polished and au courant, but the arrangements—syrupy backing vocals and clip-clop rhythms—sank them. His sense of humor and developing sense of rhythm only poked through on “The Lone Teen Ranger,” a novelty record with a honking sax solo that tapped into the
Lone Ranger
TV show frenzy.

Like many of his peers, Simon glommed onto the folk music boom that arrived after the Kingston Trio and then Peter, Paul and Mary brought strums and hearty harmonies to the masses. Before long, he'd ditched the doo-wop affectations and was transforming himself into a socially conscious singer-songwriter, just like Bob Dylan and all the newgeneration balladeers playing in nearby Greenwich Village. One night in his parents' bathroom—either 1962 or early 1964, depending on the source—he began writing a new song about the alienation his generation was starting to feel. (The opening reference to “darkness” referred to the way he'd sing in the bathroom with the lights off.) During his part-time song-plugger job, Simon would often drag along his guitar and play his own songs for publishers. One day, he played “The Sound of Silence” for Tom Wilson, a Columbia Records executive. Wilson liked the song and decided to cut it, so Simon brought along Garfunkel, with whom he'd reconciled after a chance meeting on the streets of Manhattan.
Wilson, a young black producer, was impressed with Garfunkel's white Afro—it was the first he'd ever seen—and before long, the former Tom and Jerry had been signed to the same label as Dylan.

With the contract, they finally reverted to their actual names. Goddard Lieberson, Columbia's distinguished and erudite president, first thought “Simon and Garfunkel” sounded too much like a department store, and a few Columbia executives considered their moniker too Jewish-sounding. Club-goers at their earliest Village folk-club shows would approach them at intermission and ask when the jokes were coming; they assumed “Simon and Garfunkel” was a comedy duo. But the time called for authenticity over artifice, so they were, finally, Simon and Garfunkel.

Released in October 1964, their debut album,
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
, showcased what they could bring to the folk music table. Their harmonies—Simon on the low end, Garfunkel on the high—were altogether different from the rousing three- or four-part vocal blends heard on the majority of folk records; Simon's lyrics were pensive and scholarly. “The Sound of Silence” was a snapshot of a generation colliding with conformity, mass media, and “neon gods.” With its images of the homeless, poets reading by themselves, and early morning fog, “Bleecker Street” evoked Greenwich Village's main thoroughfare after the music had faded for the night. The careful intertwining of the two men's voices only added to the song's mood of predawn, empty-streets fragility. But the bare-boned production throughout the album was overly wan, and the two men weren't altogether convincing in the sturdy–sing-along department (“You Can Tell the World” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain” weren't as rousing as they wanted to be). Columbia spent all of $3,000 recording it and only sold a depressing 1,500 copies. By the end of the year, Simon had relocated to London and was singing in folk clubs and train stations, and Garfunkel was back in school. Simon and Garfunkel had capsized as quickly as they'd launched.

In the middle of 1965, with folk-rock the industry rage thanks to the Byrds' cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone,” the strangest thing happened: Without Simon or Garfunkel's knowledge, Wilson overdubbed electric guitar, bass and drums onto the original “The Sounds of Silence.” The transformation made all the difference: The electric guitar made the song spooky and spectral, as if listeners were walking into a long, darkened tunnel. Simon was in England when he heard the news, and from London, he read each week, stunned, as the song began climbing the charts.

In need of a manager, the duo reached out to Lewis, then overseeing the Brothers Four, a blatantly commercial folk group. Lewis freely admitted that jazz was his preferred genre; after the war, he'd stumbled into a job in the office of a press agent for one of his heroes, jazz pianist Stan Kenton, and eventually managed Kenton and pianist Dave Brubeck. Lewis first met Simon and Garfunkel at his Manhattan apartment around Thanksgiving 1965, where Simon was visibly impressed with Lewis' personally autographed copy of a Lenny Bruce LP. (“You
know
Lenny Bruce?” Simon asked in amazement.) Still, Simon was skeptical. At a subsequent meeting with Simon and a lawyer, Lewis declared he could get Simon and Garfunkel $10,000 a week in concert earnings. Simon asked Lewis to step outside for a few minutes. When Lewis returned, Simon said they would sign with him, but only if the contract could be terminated in six months. At twenty-four, Simon had already devoured the lessons, good and bad, of the music business and didn't fully trust Lewis.

Lewis wasn't kidding; within two months, they were playing colleges on weekends and taking home thousands of dollars a night. They quickly capitalized on the hit with an album,
Sounds of Silence
, largely comprised of dour melodies Simon had written in London: songs about recluses and suicides (“Richard Cory,” “A Most Peculiar Man”), isolation (“I Am a Rock”), failed romance (“April Come She Will”), and premature nostalgia
(“Leaves That Are Green,” in which Simon looked back wistfully at his life of a few years before). For all its rainy-day ambience, the album was meatier, in both production and material, than their debut. From the second it began, with Simon's doleful opening guitar lick, “I Am a Rock” found a middle patch between cranky isolation and record-making smarts and became their next hit.

By early 1969, when work on the
Bridge Over Troubled Water
album commenced, the two could look back on an astonishing three years. Each album had sold better than the one before and, just as important, advanced their art as well.
Sounds of Silence
gave way to late 1966's
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
. The album was more precious than
Sounds of Silence:
“Scarborough Fair/Canticle” and “Cloudy” twinkled like stars, and “The Dangling Conversation” worked in references to Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost amidst its pointed sketch of an erudite couple on the rocks. Simon's “A Simple Desultory Phillipic” couldn't decide whether it was a mockery of protest songs or an attempt to copy Dylan. (Likewise, bleating organs throughout
Sounds of Silence
were directly lifted from a Dylan record of the period.) But the duo's creative balance—Garfunkel's tendency toward the opulent and grand, Simon's toward reflection and sheltered intimacy—played out beautifully in “Homeward Bound,” “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall,” and a cascading Garfunkel showpiece called “To Emily, Wherever I May Find Her.” Simon was loosening up as well: Featuring members of Dave Brubeck's band, “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)” added a slice of jaunty bounce to their repertoire.

The following year, director Mike Nichols used some of their older songs—and a new, unfinished one originally called “Mrs. Roosevelt” but renamed “Mrs. Robinson”—for his film
The Graduate
. When the movie became a smash by capturing post–Kennedy assassination disaffection, complete with a Jewish leading man in Dustin Hoffman, Simon and Garfunkel were embedded even further into the mass consciousness.
Bookends
, from 1968, was half devoted to a suite of songs that looked at life from childhood to old age, from the urban chaos of “Save the Life of My Child” to the young couple on the road in the luminous “America” to the graying couple on a park bench in “Old Friends.” The album's flip side collected a random assortment of unconnected but equally thrilling singles and B-sides like “Fakin' It” and a more polished version of “Mrs. Robinson.” The often affected quality of their first records—heard even in the poetry-student tone in Simon's between-song comments during early shows—burned away, replaced by songs and singing more conversational, more direct, and less mannered; they could also be whimsical in the best way.

As rock stars, they didn't always fit the bill. Their private lives were secretive; neither Simon's London girlfriends nor he and Garfunkel's dabblings in pot and acid ever made the tabloids. (Writing to a friend from London, Garfunkel joked about not using the postal service to send them hash.) They were precise and orderly, taking vacations every December and January. After concerts, their dressing rooms would be visited not by groupies yearning to sleep with them but by girls eager to share their poetry. At one Detroit concert, a security guard stopped Simon and Garfunkel at the backstage door, thinking they were audience members. “Well, we
work
here,” Simon said, calmly. Their hipness, or lack of it, was far less important than their considerable craft.