FTR: First Listen #7.
Crate #: 2 (jazz & folk records)
Record #: 57 (of 65): Simon & Garfunkel, Bookends (1968)
1. Bookends Theme (Instrumental)
2. Save The Life Of My Child
3. America
4. Overs
5. Voices of Old People
6. Old Friends
7. Bookends Theme
8. Fakin’ It
9. Punky’s Dilemma
10. Mrs. Robinson
11. A Hazy Shade Of Winter
12. At The Zoo
My dad is a Simon & Garfunkel fan, and so I became familiar with some of their songs as a kid. While I never became a huge fan of theirs myself, what intrigued me as a kid was the same thing that likely intrigued my young father upon first hearing their records: those harmonies. I definitely remember the effect that those delicate, precise, often-haunting harmonies and countermelodies had on my young ears, and the imprint they had on a mind that was just beginning to grasp those musical ideas. However, save those few songs played in the house and hearing the B-sides recorded for The Graduate, this is an album I had heard of a lot more than I had actually heard.
• At first I wasn’t, but I admit that I’m growing to be kind of a fan of the synth on “Save The Life Of My Child.”
• In addition to making rambling, Jack Kerouac-inspired lyrics ethereal yet cogent, the harmonies on songs like “America” make S&G albums completely worthwhile, if even solely for their aesthetic sound appeal.
• Notwithstanding the fact that the lyrics are some of the most poignantly honest words about a withering relationship anyone could write, that wistfully sour Eb played at the end of the arpeggiated Ab chord does something to push “Overs” over its melancholy tipping point. The dilemma of the speaker’s hesitancy, expressed in Simon’s last line, is utterly and simply overwhelming.
• “Voices Of Old People” is exactly that — voices of old Jewish folks in mid-conversation; a concept track unlike any other. I wonder who could get away with something like that now.
• Lyrically, side one of the album is some of the most beautifully penned music I have ever heard. I think, perhaps, the reason that much present-day music is released without lyrics in the liner notes is because they would all fail by comparison…Which brings me to side two. While I do like its production, including the stomp-clap chorus, I feel like “Fakin’ It,” the first of the B-sides from The Graduate that didn’t make the film, doesn’t live up to the lyrical content of the album’s first side.
• “A Hazy Shade Of Winter” (clearly referencing, if not swaggerjacking, the rhythm and ostinato motif from Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman”) brings the album into accessible territory, where it remains through the rest of the album for the danceable, if not oddly anthropomorphic “At The Zoo.”
Track #: 2 - “Save The Life Of My Child”
-BrotherSpanky
