Simon & Garfunkel

For rock music, 1966 was the year that marked its coming of age: the release of albums such as "Sounds Of Silence", "Pet Sounds", "Revolver", "Blonde On Blonde" signalled the definitive twilight of original rock'n'roll and the dawn of a new, more complex musical era.

Perhaps the best way to trace this path is through the metaphor of the seasons: if 1950s rock'n'roll had embodied the "spring" of postwar American youth, and if the early Sixties had celebrated the summer of California, now, by the mid-Sixties, restless autumnal moods were closing in: the Beach Boys themselves recorded "Pet Sounds", an album about the end of summer (and of youth), the surfers Jan & Dean wrote the melancholy "Save For A Rainy Day" (in truth, the work of Dean Torrence alone) and the Mamas & Papas would sing their famous ode to paradise lost, "California Dreamin'" (...on such a winter's day).

Yet autumn arrived early with the duo Simon & Garfunkel: the true manifesto of the new musical season was a single released in September 1965 called “The Sounds Of Silence”. 

For the few who had heard it, the song already existed in acoustic form on the debut album by young Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.” (1964). Yet it had remained as obscure as the rest of the album. It was when producer Tom Wilson decided to add an electric arrangement to the song, following the example set by Bob Dylan, that the track was set to pave the way for the successful second album that would follow a few months later, in January 1966. From that moment on, that particular style blending folk (albeit a refined, sublimated folk) and rock would become the hallmark of Simon & Garfunkel's output. 

Theirs was a style caught between two genres, just as it was caught between two generations. Simon & Garfunkel drew on two main musical influences, one rooted in the past and the other in the present and future: the first was the crystalline vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers, the other was the singer-songwriter tradition of the new folksingers, particularly Bob Dylan. And it is precisely from this suspension between nostalgia for the past and unease about the future, between echoes of rock and refined folk suggestions, that the unrepeatable atmosphere of “Sounds Of Silence” emerged: in their still-young, graceful voices one could sense a residue of the innocence of early rock'n'roll, the innocence that belonged to the Everly Brothers, but at a time when that innocence had by then almost entirely vanished. “The Times They Are-A Changin'”, as a prophetic Dylan once sang.

Yet distancing themselves from protest songs, Simon & Garfunkel gave voice to the inner world of the many young people who, no longer quite so young, could no longer listen to rock'n'roll with the same old enthusiasm: the carefree era of Elvis and Chuck Berry, of the twist and of Phil Spector, of happy Californian surf culture, of drive-ins and reckless car rides, was over. An entire culture had reached its end, and American youth had been forced, against its will, to grow up prematurely: the assassination of Kennedy and the ongoing war in Vietnam had ushered in a season of unease and lost certainties. Rock music was about to change profoundly, and “Sounds Of Silence” soon became the emblematic album of a generation desperately searching for its own identity.  

From its very title, the album seems to stand at the opposite pole from rock'n'roll: against that brash, noisy music stands now the “sound of silence”, against innocence and carefree abandon stand sentimentality and introversion. Simon & Garfunkel's songs resemble a poem or a delicate lullaby more than a rock song: painting autumnal atmospheres, framed by romantic images of solitude and restless surrender, theirs is an evocative music with a marked tendency toward symbolism, an element that sets it apart somewhat from Bob Dylan and the more genuine folksingers. It is also a music built on an irreconcilable contrast: musically sweet and enveloping, in contrast with the cold and existential unease evoked by the lyrics.  

In mood and themes, “Sounds Of Silence” can be likened to another masterpiece released the same year, “Pet Sounds” (with which it also shares a famous session player: drummer Hal Blaine, from Phil Spector's circle): in both albums looms the end of “summer”, the nostalgia for an adolescent world now irretrievably lost. But where Brian Wilson's work still breathes a dreamy ecstasy, one last warm glow of the September sun, in “Sounds Of Silence” the spell has already been broken and the cold has reached the doorstep of the soul.

With something like a whispered invocation to the muse of “darkness”, friend and companion of the grey days that have grown short, an initiatory journey through autumn begins. The title track, “The Sound Of Silence”, with its graceful melancholy and electric impact, is one of the absolute peaks of folk-rock. It is the song that best captures the twilight of an era, the desolate atmosphere of the “end of the party” (or of summer) when everyone has already gone home: only two boys remain, a guitar, and the silence enveloping them in the cold of night, carrying them into a poetic, visionary world.

One of the recurring themes on the album is the symbolic rhythm of the seasons, though here it lacks any real cyclical return: it is always summer giving way to autumn, just as youth irreversibly gives way to maturity and old age. “Leaves Are Green”, seemingly more buoyant, is an emblematic memento mori: a meditation on the swift passing of time, through the classic image of autumn leaves carrying with them the memory of lost loves, of a past season when the leaves were still green and “the heart was full of love”.

More explicitly, “April Come She Will” presents nature's cycle of life and death, one that humankind can never fully match: for human beings there is no time for renewal, for a new spring, but rather the awareness of love's brief arc which, like youth itself, will never return (much as in “Caroline No” on “Pet Sounds“). Worth noting is the carefully chosen title, in which the meaning of “will”, of hope, is left ambiguously undefined: the phrase “come she will” can indeed be read as “she will come”, but read the other way round it becomes the question “will she come?”, to which the answer is implicitly no. 

The other main theme of the album, already hinted at in “The Sound Of Silence” itself, is that of loneliness, distance and the failure of communication between human beings: in “Blessed”, the protagonist feels abandoned even by his own God; in “Kathy's Song”, a sweet ballad with soft, acoustic textures, another faithful companion of autumn and lonely afternoons makes its appearance: the rain. In “Somewhere They Can't Find Me” the protagonist must experience flight from other people. Passing through the instrumental “Anji” (from the repertoire of English folk guitarist Davy Graham), in the following two songs, “Richard Cory” and “A Most Peculiar Man”, the flight goes even deeper, becoming a flight from life itself. “We've Got A Groovey Thing Goin'” is the only track with pronounced rock'n'roll traits, but the context is different, the contrast even colder and more jarring: of rock'n'roll only the form remains, along with a few typical expressions (“baby, baby”), but its spirit has been lost. 

With the extraordinary “I Am A Rock”, at last, winter arrives. And it is here that the word “rock” is stripped even of its new musical meaning, reverting instead to the plain, bare word “rock”: a symbol of that which tries to withstand life's blows and the pain of feeling but which, in being so, is itself devoid of life and feeling. “I Am A Rock” is not truly a song of victory, but conceals rather an unconditional surrender, a retreat into the comfort of poetry alone. Winter has now arrived: “a deep and dark December”. After it, nothing will ever be the same again.

A few years later, Simon & Garfunkel would achieve enormous worldwide success with “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, passing along the way through the heights of “Bookends”. And yet, “Sounds Of Silence” will endure in the decades to come as a unique, unrepeatable work, an extraordinary testament to the day when, to borrow two Schillerian terms, rock turned from “naive” into “sentimental”.

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16/10/2007