Deep Album Cuts Vol. 266: Simon & Garfunkel
My last deep cuts playlist was The Bangles, who recorded a hit cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter," and more or less coincidentally I'm following it up with the duo who made the original.
Simon & Garfunkel deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. Kathy's Song
2. Bookends Theme
3. Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall
4. The Only Living Boy In New York
5. He Was My Brother
6. April Come She Will (live)
7. Save The Life Of My Child
8. The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)
9. Baby Driver
10. Overs
11. Sparrow
12. Leaves That Are Green
13. Cloudy
14. Song For The Asking
15. Punky's Dilemma
16. The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine
17. Somewhere They Can't Find Me
18. Bleecker Street
19. Keep The Customer Satisfied
20. Richard Corry
21. Patterns
22. Benedictus
23. So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright
24. Blessed
25. A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)
26. Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.
27. A Most Peculiar Man
28. Why Don't You Write Me
29. Bookends Theme (Reprise)
30. Old Friends (live)
31. The Sun Is Burning
Tracks 5, 11, 18, 22, 26 and 31 from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (1964)
Tracks 1, 12, 17, 20, 24 and 27 from Sounds of Silence (1966)
Tracks 3, 8, 13, 16, 21 and 25 from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966)
Tracks 2, 7, 10, 15 and 29 from Bookends (1968)
Tracks 4, 9, 14, 19, 23 and 28 from Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970)
Tracks 6 and 30 from The Concert In Central Park (1982)
A few years ago I made a Paul Simon deep cuts playlist and noted that I briefly considered trying to cram his solo career and Simon & Garfunkel into one playlist, but decided to give each catalog its own space. Of course, the duo's discography is a bit smaller -- they only made five LPs, three of them under a half hour long, that contained quite a lot of hit singles. So it was pretty easy to winnow it down to an 80-minute playlist of, essentially, the less popular half of their catalog, which made me put more emphasis on getting the sequencing right. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was one of my parents' LPs that I played regularly when I got my first turntable, and the 1999 compilation The Definitive Simon & Garfunkel has also gotten a lot of rotation over the years, but some of these albums I needed to check out for the first time and explore a little.
A lot of these songs are still pretty well known in one form or another. In 1967, "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" was a top 20 hit for Harpers Bizarre, a group fronted by future big time producer Ted Templeman (Van Halen, The Doobie Brothers), but the Simon & Garfunkel version never charted, so it seemed like fair game to include here. Gary Puckett charted with a cover of "Keep The Customer Satisfied" in 1971. "The Only Living Boy In New York" was a hit for Everything But The Girl in 1993. "April Come She Will" and "The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine" were among the Simon & Garfunkel songs that appeared on the soundtrack to The Graduate, and the latter charted after it was released as the B-side of "The Dangling Conversatoin." And of course "Baby Driver" appeared in the 2017 Edgar Wright film named after the song.
Paul Simon's music absorbed a wide variety of instruments, genres and cultural influences over the course of his solo career, and there are hints of his future adventurousness in the Simon & Garfunkel albums. "Save the Life of My Child" sounds pretty ahead of its time for 1968, and actually features a Moog bassline played by producer John Simon with assistance from the synthesizer's inventor, Robert Moog. Paul and Art reunited on stage and on record many times after Bridge Over Troubled Water, but both times they attempted to make an album together, in 1975 and in 1982, things never came together. Their 1981 free concert in Central Park reputedly drew the largest concert audience ever at the time, and spawned a multi-platinum live album -- they mostly played the hits, although the concert did feature a couple deep cuts, "April Come She Will" from Sounds of Silence and "Old Friends" from Bookends.
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