In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: Art Garfunkel

  • Simon and Garfunkel- Bridge Over Troubled Water- Art Garfunkel

    Simon and Garfunkel- Bridge Over Troubled Water- Art Garfunkel

    In January 1970, America’s Simon and Garfunkel followed up the sublime Bookends and its critical and commercial success with an even bigger blockbuster, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Containing no less than four Top Ten hits, there was “Cecilia”, “The Boxer”, “Baby Driver”, the South American folk song translated from the original Spanish “El Condor Pasa”, and the award-winning timeless classic “Bridge Over Troubled Water”.

    Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water   swept the 1971 Grammy Awards  with six, including Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year for the title song. For many years the top-seller in recorded music history, this iconic album ranks as #172 on Rolling Stone magazine’s “Top 500 Albums of All Time”, considerably higher #7 on the BBC’s all time list, and has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide.  Yet Bridge Over Troubled Water also contained the pithy Paul Simon song “Keep the Customer Satisfied”. Even before the proliferation of the internet, Art Garfunkel made this observation to me In the Studio in the early Nineties.

    “In the last twenty years we’ve seen very, very few things that are conceived as NOT commercial enterprises. The truth is that rock’n’roll became a multi-billion business, and businessmen moved in on it,” the Columbia PhD (in mathematics!) reminded us. “You have to go back to that innocent time (pre-Woodstock Festival 1969) to get a little more of an innocent thing where music was the emphasis, and the love of a great record was the reason for the existence of many a tune. These were not calculated financial bids to make a profit,” Garfunkel stressed. “They were about ‘Let’s see how great the record can be’. Sure, the kids are gonna buy it, and this is commerce, but somehow that was not the focus. And since then we’ve seen the whole thing corporatize itself, to the great loss of the spirit of what it could be…When I think of those days (of making Bridge Over Troubled Water), everything was The Record and how wonderful it could be. And the fact that The Beatles were influencing us. I guess the money was not so big as to be intrusive.”

    ( L-R The Graduate director Mike Nichols, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel)

    Art Garfunkel joined me In The Studio  for this very rare classic rock interview marking Simon &and Garfunkel Bridge Over Troubled Waters. –Redbeard 

  • Simon and Garfunkel- Bookends- Art Garfunkel

    Simon and Garfunkel- Bookends- Art Garfunkel

    On the double-nickel anniversary 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 in New York City’s Central Park which was filmed. 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

  • Monterey Pop Festival -Art Garfunkel

    Monterey Pop Festival -Art Garfunkel

    June 16-17-18  was the  anniversary of the Monterey Pop Festival which, more than anything else, crystallized in many people’s minds the Summer of Love in 1967. Besides memorable performances by established hitmakers of the day the Mamas and Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, The Who, Buffalo Springfield, Otis Redding, and the Jefferson Airplane, Monterey Pop was the debutante coming out party for a singer from Beaumont Texas by way of San Francisco named Janis Joplin, and an African-American from Seattle named Jimi Hendrix. The electric guitarist had just arrived back in the States from London prior to the release of their first album with his trio, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and would burn up the Monterey Pop stage- literally. The Monterey Pop Festival was organized by John Phillips (of the Mamas and Papas), their record producer Lou Adler, and by New York City-based Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, the latter of whom fifty years on shared these memories and some illuminating cultural and social observations with me In The Studio. – Redbeard