Simon and Garfunkel: Live From New York City 1967

AUDIOPHILIA-November 2002

D. Malcolm Fairbrother

The Sixties, an era as steeped in hazy mythology as any period in time ever was, was not really a decade. Strong argument can be forwarded that this culturally and socially significant reference point began in 1965 when Bob Dylan plugged his folk guitar into a Fender amplifier, thus polarizing and electrifying his audience in the same instant, or maybe when John Lennon and Paul McCartney began to experiment with the sound and structure of the pop song on Rubber Soul. What began as an idealistic Peter Max psychedelic poster image of a time of peace and love fueled by pot and groovy music took only six years to disintegrate into the chaos of street anarchy disguised as anti-war protest, a nation turning viciously on its own children with the shootings at Kent State, and the sinister side of the drug world that swallowed icons such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.

If you, gentle reader, find it hard to look back through the smoke of burning doobies, the fumes of tear gas and the acrid clouds billowing from burned-out neighborhoods razed by riot to find a moment of pure idealism and the magic that two voices and one acoustic guitar can weave, then look no further than the recently released Simon and Garfunkel CD, Live From New York City, 1967. Therein you will find a healthy dose of simplicity that will remind you of how innocent music in general, and folk music in particular, once was.

The concert occurred on a winter's night on January 22. Recorded with superior clarity given the available equipment of the day, S&G Live serves as a firm reminder of just how extraordinarily effective two-part harmony, given an expressive array of strong material with which to work, can be. The concert opens with He Was My Brother; the song seems somewhat dated, given the topic of the murder of a freedom rider amidst the racial turmoil of a historic South, yet remains valid, even if only as a footnote in a historical context. The bitterness of the lyric is tempered by the sweetness of Paul Simon's rhythmic chording and a harsh reality is rendered musically palatable in the quaintly curious way that is the wont of many folk songs from that era. A Church Is Burning is another example of such a song style, and it replicates the same emotional response in its presentation on this CD.

An enthusiastic and appreciative crowd is treated to a wide range of styles and yet each song remains a testament to the strength of the two performers, well steeped in the poetic tradition of the coffee houses, occasionally barely able to conceal or contain their youthful dreams of creating legitimate rock music, and poised to follow fellow poet and troubadour Bob Dylan into the jingle-jangle morning of folk-rock, where a high-voltage barrage of electric music blasted fire into the poetry of the day and musicians became poets once more. Leaves That Are Green is a poetic acknowledgement of the passing of time and the inevitability of death, its natural imagery simply stated to maximize the effect. Every high school student who ran into an English teacher who tried to penetrate adolescent consciousness with the music of the day to rekindle any spark of an interest in poetry would be comfortably familiar with Richard Cory, Simon and Garfunkel's reworking of Edward Arlington Robinson's poetic examination of the grass maybe not always being greener on the other side of the fence, especially when the fellow who lives there blows his brains out.

Suicide and alienation play large thematic roles in much of this collection as it does many of Paul Simon's compositions throughout the body of his work. A Most Peculiar Man is another such examination of a suicide. The acoustic starkness of The Sound Of Silence, not yet the electric hit that stormed the airwaves and secured a lasting foothold in the collective conscious of a generation, is in this rendition a much more suitable match to the song's theme of isolation and helpless alienation. Homeward Bound captures the loneliness of a musician's life on the road; although the theme has been well mined by many a musician in the last thirty-five years, the tune remains one of Simon's gleaming nuggets, original and evocative in its day.

I Am A Rock hints at the aforementioned dream of making powerful electric music; one could almost say that its sub-title is 'I Am A Rock Star'. In its swaying delivery lie the seeds of the more energetic song that it became. In a similar fashion, the two performers take an angry love song, You Don't Know Where Your Interest Lies, and create vocal cadences that leave no doubt as to the direction they were heading--straight into the emerging genre of folk-rock. A Hazy Shade Of Winter is an instructive encapsulation the merging of Simon's themes and his dreams, as once again, two voices and one guitar take the audience to the brink of rocking out while doing some serious navel-gazing.

Often forgotten is the skill with which Simon plays his guitar, be he churning out the driving rhythm that augments the peculiar subject matter, an obscenity-scrawler, in Poem On The Underground Wall or be he delicately weaving a lacy romantic texture around Garfunkel's vocal purity on a love song as powerful as For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her. One need search no further than the instrumental interpretation of Dave Graham's spirited exercise in nimbleness and dexterity, Anji to further cement Simon's solid reputation in this regard.

Although it is true that Benedictus, a rather heavy-handed treatment of a traditional folk song, is substandard to some of Simon's original material, this piece, and the moralistic fable-song Sparrow show that he is willing to experiment with form and style. This risk-taking allows the song-writer to stretch his considerable talents to the point where he is capable of creating a masterwork such as The Dangling Conversation, a song that the artists themselves acknowledge was the most difficult to write and to record. Here the song is exquisite in its achingly delicate presentation.

To spend an hour with Simon and Garfunkel at the peak of their careers as folk artists and at the threshold of their careers as contemporary musicians is to be reminded that the pivotal measure of time known as The Sixties began with hope and was steeped in an ephemeral innocence. It is not unlike sitting around the warmth of a fire with old and trusted friends, recalling the bittersweet days of the mostly happy childhood of a naive generation that grew up quickly, yanked into adulthood by the harshness of the malicious and malodorous events of the real world it ran into just a few short years down a bumpy road.

Time, time, time, see what's become of us, indeed!