Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 126

Record label: CBS

Produced: Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Roy Halee, Bob Johnson and John Simon

Recorded: September 1966; January 1967; June 1967; October 1967–February 1968

Released: April 3, 1968

Chart peaks: 1 (UK) 1 (US)

Personnel: Paul Simon (g, v); Art Garfunkel (v); Hal Baline (d, pc); Joe Osbourne (b); Larry Knechtel (p, k); Jimmie Haskell (ar)

Track listing: Bookends Theme; Save The Life Of My Child; America; Overs; Voices Of Old People; Old Friends; Bookends Theme; Fakin’ It (S); Punky’s Dilemma; Mrs Robinson (S); A Hazy Shade Of Winter (S); At The Zoo (S)

Running time: 29.13

Current CD: Sony 4950832 adds: You Don’t Know Where Your Interest Lies; Old Friends (previously unreleased)

Further listening: Old Friends the Simon & Garfunkel boxed set (1997)

Further reading: The Complete Guide To The Music Of Simon & Garfunkel (Chris Charlesworth, 1997); The Boy In The Bubble: The Paul Simon Story (Patrick Humphries, 1988); www.simonandgafunkel.com

Download: iTunes; HMV Digital

Bookends was the fourth album from Simon & Garfunkel but the first to reach a mass audience. Side one comprised a song-suite tracing the journey from birth to death – all original Simon compositions, aside from Voices Of Old People, drawn by Garfunkel from taped interviews with OAPs, which is the only jarring note in an otherwise seamless sweep.

Save The Life Of My Child reflects the raucous paranoia of America as the Vietnam war tore the nation apart, and parents everywhere scratched their heads and asked, ‘What’s become of the children?’ It was also one of the first pop songs to use a synthesizer, and probably the first to use a sample – Simon & Garfunkel themselves can be heard singing Sounds Of Silence way down in the mix. America is timeless – a weary, disaffected odyssey – and its pristine production, blank-verse narrative and timely state-of-the-nation reflections ensure that it sounds as fresh in the twenty-first century as it did in 1968. Overs is a bleak catalogue of marital breakdown, while the concluding Old Friends finds Simon reflecting: ‘How terribly strange to be 70’ – not a sentiment shared, or cared-about, by many of his contemporaries at the time.

Never one to be rushed by a deadline, Simon didn’t have enough new songs to complete Bookends, so the second side was padded out with previously released singles. Fakin’ It was a dope-induced contemplation of an earlier life; Hazy Shade Of Winter had been a pounding, atmospheric single in 1967; while At The Zoo was an engaging if none-too-subtle parable – human society symbolised by animals – but all matched Simon & Garfunkel’s exacting standards. The two new songs were the quirky Punky’s Dilemma – which director Mike Nichols rejected for The Graduate – and the song about that film’s mature femme fatale, Mrs Robinson.

Simon & Garfunkel only had complete control of three of the five albums they recorded together, and in many ways Bookends stands as their finest moment. The duo stood in charge of the production and overall sound, and were eager to leave the formulas of pop-production and willing to experiment, which may help to explain the album’s timeless quality. It was to be two years before there was another Simon & Garfunkel album, the all-conquering but, by comparison to Bookends, a little sterile Bridge Over Troubled Water.