Much of the material was crafted alongside producer John Simon, who joined the recording when Paul Simon suffered from writer's block.
Simon's lyrics concern youth, disillusionment, relationships, old age, and mortality. Side two largely consists of unused material for The Graduate soundtrack. Side one of the album marks successive stages in life, the theme serving as bookends to the life cycle. Bookends is a concept album that explores a life journey from childhood to old age. The duo had risen to fame two years prior with the albums Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and the soundtrack album for the 1967 film The Graduate. Produced by Paul Simon, Roy Halee and Art Garfunkel, the album was released on April 3, 1968, in the United States by Columbia Records. Bookends is the fourth studio album by Simon & Garfunkel. I don’t think Paul made a penny out of it.” It later turned out he had never claimed to have written the song, and had never received authorship royalties for it. Carthy and Simon made up years later and played together on stage.Release Date: Notes:Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing in gatefold jacket. But, Carthy, adds, “The only person who made money out of Scarborough Fair was Art Garfunkel because he wrote the Canticle. Carthy had taught Simon his guitar arrangement of the song that appeared later on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, but only Simon and Garfunkel were credited on the album. It was making him cross.”Ĭarthy and Simon famously fell out for decades over the traditional English folk song Scarborough Fair. “We kept getting the giggles and couldn’t do it. Simon tried to teach them the doo-wop he had practised as a boy on the streets of New York. “He bought himself a really pretty car, a Sunbeam Alpine.” Carthy and a friend, fellow folk singer Paul McNeill, helped him fit its hard top. “Paul moved into the grubby downstairs flat,” he says. Carthy remembers it well because he’d just moved out of it to a flat up the road. Simon lived in a house on Haverstock Hill, in now swanky Belsize Park. In Punky’s Dilemma, he sings, “Wish I was an English muffin about to make the most out of a toaster.” In it, Simon can be found listening to “the Salvation Army band / Down by the Riverside”. The side two song A Hazy Shade of Winter was written there. Simon’s time in London is evident elsewhere on the album. The Telegraph’s Maurice Rosenbaum described it as “of outstanding interest”, and praised Paul Simon’s obliquely imaginative songwriting.Īrthur Schmidt in Rolling Stone began by sneering at the duo’s physical appearance on the cover but went on to laud Simon’s lyrics and even grudgingly admitted, “Mrs Robinson is a wonderful song about America, even a rock and roll song, and it is rather poignant.” But there was no suggestion then that it would later make the magazine’s list of greatest albums of all time. Its hushed melancholy comforted at a time of mass upheaval, even as tensions were growing between these close school friends who had been performing together since their early teens. Bookends would be Simon & Garfunkel's penultimate album. The album’s beautifully crafted song structures, with harmonies that contained nostalgia for the Fifties, and lyrics that spoke of disillusionment with wryness and warmth, struck a chord with a generation. It hit the shelves one day before the assassination of Martin Luther King, and less than six weeks after the deadliest phase of the Vietnam War for US forces convinced commentators that the war was lost. On April 3, 1968, one of the Sixties' defining albums was released. Bookends by Simon & Garfunkel, with its trio of classic singles, Mrs Robinson, A Hazy Shade of Winter and At the Zoo, reached the top of the charts in both the United States and the UK.
0 kommentar(er)
