Today in Music (1966): Simon & Garfunkel hit #1 with “The Sound of Silence”

The Sound of Silence (aka “The Sounds of Silence”) Simon & Garfunkel

Writer(s): Paul Simon (see lyrics here) First Charted: November 20, 1965 Peak: 12 US, 11 CB, 11 GR, 12 HR, 50 AC, 1 CL, 7 UK, 2 CN, 2 AU, 1 DF (Click for codes to charts.) Sales (in millions): 1.0 US, -- UK Airplay/Streaming (in millions): 7.0 radio, 193.0 video, 513.86 streaming

The Sound of Silence Disturbed

Released: December 7, 2015 First Charted: February 6, 2016 Peak: 42 US, 17 AR, 22, 29 UK, 40 CN, 4 AU, 1 DF (Click for codes to charts.) Sales (in millions): 1.5 US, 0.6 UK, 3.45 world (includes US + UK) Airplay/Streaming (in millions): 7.0 radio, 846.0 video, 651.24 streaming

Awards (Simon & Garfunkel): Click on award for more details.

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Awards (Disturbed): Click on award for more details.

About the Song: Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel started working together as teenagers in 1955, writing “The Girl for Me.” Two years, later, they recorded “Hey, Schoolgirl” as Tom and Jerry and took it to #49 on the Billboard Hot 100. They continued to work under different aliases, with minimal success. By 1964, they were performing on the Greenwich Village coffee house circuit, FB but still struggling for their break. It came via the song “The Sound of Silence,” a ballad which featured only vocals and acoustic guitar. Simon said it took him six months to write the song, one line per day. DT He worked in the bathroom. The tiles produced an echo chamber and Simon found it soothing to work in there with the water running and the lights off, TB hence the line “hello darkness, my old friend.” TC Simon played the completed version for Garfunkel on February 19, 1964. SS It was one of four songs on the demo that earned them a contract with Columbia Records. They recorded the album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., which featured “The Sound of Silence,” and released it in October. Unfortunately, both the album and song went nowhere. Simon went to England and recorded The Paul Simon Songbook, which included an acoustic version of “The Sound of Silence.” Art Garfunkel went back to graduate school. Folk music, however, was big in the Boston area, from where Joan Baez and other folkies hailed SJ and a local station started playing “The Sound of Silence.” Columbia was convinced they’d have a hit if they reworked the song with new electric instrumentation. Wilson, who was producing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” asked the session’s musicians to add electric guitar, bass, and drums to the song. The new, amplified version became a hit before Simon & Garfunkel even heard it. RS500 In fact, Simon didn’t even know it had been re-recorded until he picked up a copy of Billboard in the Netherlands. TC Simon said, “It had some level of truth to it and it resonated with millions of people.” DT He told NPR he thought the success of the song was due to “the simplicity of the melody and the words, which are youthful alienation.” DL The song played a key role in the 1967 movie The Graduate, “underlining the quiet alienation fo Dustin Hoffman’s character Ben.” SS In 2015, Disturbed recorded a cover of the song. While the original was perfect for the radio playlists of middle-of-the-road, adult contemporary stations, this was a cover by a heavy metal band that turned the song into a menancing anthem as singer David Draiman’s voice builds throughout the song. Paul Simon himself endorsed the cover, calling it a “really powerful performance” WK after seeing the band on Conan. Resources: DMDB encyclopedia entry for Simon & Garfunkel DMDB encyclopedia entry for Disturbed FB Fred Bronson (2003). The Billboard Book of Number One Hits (5th edition). Billboard Books: New York, NY. Page 190. TC Toby Creswell (2005). 1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time. Thunder’s Mouth Press: New York, NY. Pages 603-4. DL TheDelite.com (6/26/2019). “The Best Songs of All Time – According to Critics and Fans” by Claire Gillespie RS500 Rolling Stone (4/7/2011). “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” SJ Bob Shannon and John Javna (1986). Behind the Hits: Inside Stories of Classic Pop and Rock and Roll. Warner Brothers, Inc.: New York, NY. Pages 12-13. SS Steve Sullivan (2013). Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings (Volumes I & II). Scarecrow Press: Lanham, Maryland. Pages 109-10. DT Dave Thompson (2011). 1000 Songs That Rock Your World. Krause Publications: Iola, WI. Page 122. TB Thunder Bay Press (2006). Singles: Six Decades of Hot Hits & Classic Cuts. Outline Press Ltd.: San Diego, CA. Page 74. Related Links: First posted 4/19/2020; last updated 10/11/2023.

Today in Music (1964): Simon & Garfunkel Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. released

Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. Simon & Garfunkel

Released: October 19, 1964 Peak: 30 US, 24 UK, -- CN, -- AU Sales (in millions): 1.0 US, -- UK, 2.5 world (includes US + UK) Genre: folk rock

Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to charts. You Can Tell the World Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream Bleecker Street Sparrow Benedictus The Sound of Silence (acoustic version) He Was My Brother Peggy-O Go Tell It on the Mountain The Sun Is Burning The Times They Are A-Changin’ Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. Total Running Time: 31:38

Rating: 2.188 out of 5.00 (average of 6 ratings)

About the Album: Simon & Garfunkel’s debut album “doesn’t resemble any other Simon & Garfunkel album, mostly because their sound here was fundamentally different from that of the chart-topping duo that emerged a year later. Their first record together since their days as the teen harmony duo Tom & Jerry, the album was cut in March 1964, at a time when both Simon and Garfunkel were under the spell of folk music. As it had in 1957 with ‘Hey, Schoolgirl,’ their harmonizing here came out of the Everly Brothers’ playbook, but some new wrinkles had developed – Paul Simon was just spreading his wings as a serious songwriter and shares space with other contemporary composers.” BE “The album opens with a spirited (if somewhat arch) rendition of Gibson and Camp’s gospel/folk piece You Can Tell the World, on which the duo’s joyous harmonizing overcomes the intrinsic awkwardness of two Jewish guys from Queens, New York doing this repertory. Also present is Ian Campbell’s The Sun Is Burning, a topical song about nuclear annihilation that Simon heard on his first visit to England as an itinerant folksinger the year before.” BE “But the dominant outside personality on the album is that of Bob Dylan – his Times They Are A-Changin’ is covered, but his influence is obvious on the oldest of the Simon originals here, He Was My Brother. Simon’s first serious, topical song, dealing with the death of a freedom rider – and dedicated to Simon’s slain Queens College classmate Andrew Jacobs – it was what first interested Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson in Simon & Garfunkel.” BE “By the time the album was recorded, however, Simon had evolved beyond Dylan’s orbit and developed a unique songwriting voice of his own, though he still had some distance to go. His other originals betray the artifice of an English major at work, sometimes for better, as on Sparrow and the original, all-acoustic release of The Sound of Silence, and at times for worse, on the half-beautiful but too-precious title song (which he would re-write more successfully as ‘Somewhere They Can’t Find Me’).” BE “There are also a pair of traditional songs, a beautifully harmonized rendition of Peggy-O – which they probably picked up in Greenwich Village, or from recordings by Dylan or Joan Baez – and Go Tell It On the Mountain, both of which fit well into the zeitgeist of the folk revival.” BE “The record didn’t sell on its original release, however, appearing too late in the folk revival to attract much attention – Bob Dylan was already taking that audience to new places by adding electric instruments to his sound. But the seeds of the duo’s future success were planted when, months after the album had been given up for dead – and the duo had split up – the all-acoustic rendition of ‘The Sound of Silence’ started getting radio play on its own in some key markets, which possessed to producer Wilson to try and adapt it to the new sound, overdubbing an electric band.” BE

Resources and Related Links: DMDB Encyclopedia entry for Simon & Garfunkel BE All Music Guide review by Bruce Eder Other Related DMDB Pages: First posted 5/5/2011; last updated 10/9/2023.