Simon and Garfunkel- Bookends- Art Garfunkel

In a sober appraisal of Bookends  by Simon and Garfunkel, it would be easy but grossly inaccurate to dismiss the five hits from it, “A Hazy Shade of Winter”, “At the Zoo”, “Fakin’ It”, “Mrs. Robinson”, and “America”  as simply Oldies radio fare, teetering on the apron of anachronism. Yet long before there were DVDs and DirecTV, Simon and Garfunkel reunited in 1981 for a concert which was filmed in New York City’s Central Park. Not only was the massive crowd turnout a testament to Simon and Garfunkel’s enduring popularity and importance, but the video of the performance became an icon on PBS across the country for three decades.

And after watching the first post-9/11 telecast of New York City-based Saturday Night Live, who can ever forget the “cold” opening of steely-eyed native son Paul Simon singing “The Boxer”, surrounded by the grim yet defiant phalanx of NYC firefighters, police officers, and paramedics? Paul Simon had earned that right to represent the moral voice and conscience of emerging 21st century America, in part because of the album Bookends, released in April 1968 with his musical partner Art Garfunkel. According to long tall tenor Art Garfunkel, we have the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band  in 1967 to thank as inspiration for the Simon and Garfunkel masterpiece Bookends the following year. Certainly not in songs or sounds per se, but Art explains that Sgt Pepper… established the album format as no longer a hit single or two surrounded with filler, but a complete musical statement, with a beginning, middle, and conclusion, unfolding “…like a major motion picture,” Garfunkel explained to me In the Studio. Bookends  was Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s answer to the Beatles’ artistic challenge, and the American duo cleared the bar masterfully in Spring 1968. Bookends went to #1 sales in both America and the UK, and since then Rolling Stone magazine has ranked Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel as the #21 album of the entire Sixties as well as #234 on their Top 500 Albums of All Time. Art Garfunkel is my guest in my ultra-rare classic rock interview. –Redbeard