By the start of 1965, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had already broken up twice. Their debut album Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. was a commercial failure. Simon had headed off to England to join their folk music scene, while Garfunkel returned to Columbia University to finish his graduate work in math. However, by the year’s end, the duo’s failure had turned into one of the decade’s biggest hits. Re-mixed to join the emerging Folk-Rock movement, “The Sound of Silence” captured the hearts of a generation of young people, blending folk harmonies and lyrical beauty with the sixties’ jangly rock of the decade’s end. The song also introduced the world to the songwriting of Paul Simon – who would become one of the most important voices in American popular music for decades to come.
Paul Simon grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, New York – only a few blocks from his future performing partner, Art Gafunkle. The pair knew each other from elementary and middle school, and by high school, they were performing together under the name “Tom and Jerry.” Modeling their style and harmonies on the popular Everly Brothers, the duo had a minor hit with the song “Hey, Schoolgirl” in 1957. The song hit the Top 50, and the young 15-year-olds even performed on American Bandstand. Despite this early and promising start, the pair did not find immediate success as performers in the music industry. Garfunkel recalled: “We got a quick education in the record business…But I left and went to college. I was the kid who was going to find some way to make a ‘decent’ living.”
While Garfunkel headed off to Columbia, Simon headed to Queens College, where he studied English and continued to write songs. He also befriended another young songwriter and Queens student, Carole King. Although they never wrote together, they did record demos together as Queens students. King recalled in her memoir: “When I entered Queens College in the fall of 1958, I had no idea that Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon were anything other than fellow freshmen until I saw their photo in a magazine with a caption identifying Artie as “Tom” and Paul as “Jerry.” […] Paul and I soon became friends. Among the things we had in common were a similarity of age and a desire to stay involved in writing and recording popular music. Hoping to earn some extra cash, we began making demos together as the Cousins. Paul played bass and guitar, I played piano and we both sang. Some songs were his, some were mine, and some were written by other people. The income was negligible, but we would have done it for nothing.” While Carole’s songwriting career with her then-husband, Gerry Goffin, took off, Paul worked various jobs with music publishers during the Brill Building era of the early ‘60s.
Like many teenage rock ‘n’ roll fans of the fifties who headed off to college, both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel found themselves pulled towards folk music at the start of the 60s. Simon recalled: “The early ’60s were a very bad time. …around that time, I was 18 or 19, and the music was lousy so I started looking for other areas …and I settled for folk; it touched me more.” The pair reconnected, and by 1962, they were consistently working together again…this time honing their skills in the arena of folk music and performing under their real names – “Simon and Garfunkel.”
Simon and Garfunkel were now folkies and their first hit was written in a soft, folk-ballad context. However, it wasn’t until they were unexpectedly reconnected with their rock-n-roll roots that this ballad became the transformative and iconic classic that we now know and love – ”The Sound of Silence.”
In an interview with Uncut, Simon recalled the experience of writing his iconic track: “I wrote it in the bathroom in my parent’s house because the room was tiled, so there was an echo. I used to turn the lights off and leave the water running. It was like white noise, you know? My brother says it was amazing that I wrote it, because everything I’d written before that was way below it in quality. It was a step up. It was probably one of those things when you’re in some kind of serotonin/dopamine flow, and it just comes out. But I was too young to know that those things happened. So I just took it as, ‘That’s a good one, I could close my act with this one.’”
Simon and Garfunkel were singing it locally and had perfected its haunting harmonies when Simon brought the song to Columbia producer Tom Wilson. Wilson would become known for his extensive work with Bob Dylan in the sixties (which he had just begun around the same time he started working with Simon and Garfunkel). Wilson was interested in using “The Sound of Silence” for the group The Pilgrims before hearing Simon and Garfunkel sing it as a duet. In presenting the song, Simon explained to Wilson that they had refined the arrangement for two people and asked if he and Garfunkel could show him their performance: “So…Artie and I go up there and sing ‘The Sound of Silence.’ We sang it, and to our surprise, they signed us.”
The result was the pair’s debut album Wednesday Morning 3 AM. Recorded at Columbia Studios in New York City, the album was produced by Wilson and engineered by Roy Halee. The album was released in October 1964 and marketed as “exciting new sounds in the folk tradition.” In addition to the original release of “The Sound of Silence,” the album features an eclectic range of influences, from a cover of Dylan’s “Times They are A’Changing” to an arrangement of the “Benedictus” from Orlando di Lasso’s Missa octavi toni – a 16th-century setting of the Latin Mass.
The album was initially a flop – lost in the sea of Beatlemania. Simon headed off to England, while Garfunkel returned to his graduate work at Columbia University. However, in 1965, Wilson heard about a Boston-area DJ – WBZ-FM – who began consistently playing “The Sound of Silence” on Wednesday mornings at 3 A.M.. Despite the early slot, the song began to gain popularity with Cambridge’s college students and then spread out to other FM stations along the east coast.
Wanting to build on the moment, Wilson went back to the original record and re-listened to the track. It was still great, but it was very soft. Especially to be a hit. He went back into the studio and brought in some of the musicians he had just worked with for Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” – Bobby Gregg (drums), Al Gorgoni (guitar), and Bob Bushnell on bass.
Wilson’s decision to add a rock element to Simon and Garfunkel’s acoustic-folk song is perfectly in-line with the times. 1965 is the year that we often cite as an important time for the development of folk-rock. Certainly, Bob Dylan’s electrified performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is one of the key moments of this shift. The folk legend who had given the world “Blowin in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changing,” famously traded in his acoustic guitar and harmonica for a Fender Stratocaster. That same year, The Byrds released their cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” – combining Dylan’s folk song with the sounds most associated, at that time, with the jangly rock guitar of George Harrison and the Beatles
In many ways, this was a completely natural progression. Musicians like Dylan and the members of the Byrds (like many of their college-aged fans) had turned to folk music at the start of the sixties, when so much of the pop music was directed towards a teen audience. However, it is important to remember that when these same musicians had been teenagers themselves, they had been listening to and playing early rock and roll (Chuck Berry, Elvis, etc.). Thus the shift to folk rock brings together all of their influences and experiences up to this point. Likewise, Simon and Garfunkel’s progression happened in much the same way — from teen rock/pop, to folk, and with a little help from producer Tom Wilson, they jumped directly into the sea of folk-rock at exactly the right time… in 1965.
In addition to the sonic changes to the song, when the album was re-released by Wilson in 1965, there was also a tiny shift in the song’s title. Most of us know the song as “The Sound of Silence,” in the singular. But the very first release of the song on Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. lists the song as plural – ”The Sounds of Silence”
People like to tell the story of the re-release as the origins of the singular version of the title – as a way of separating the versions, but it’s a little more complicated than that. After the lackluster reception of Wednesday Morning 3 AM, while Art Garfunkel was back to graduate school, Paul Simon had headed to England to participate in the folk music scene there. While in England, Simon recorded his Paul Simon Songbook which was released there in August of 1965. This album featured solo versions of two songs from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. album: “He Was My Brother” and the “Sound of Silence”
This looks like it may actually be the first time we see “Sound of Silence” listed in the singular. But, this release could not have affected Wilson’s decision making, since Wilson released the folk-rock version of the song without Simon even knowing. Thus, Simon would have had no say in the choice to change the title at that point. While it may have been a coincidence, perhaps more likely, it is an indication that the song was always intended to be titled The Sound of Silence, and had somehow had gotten pluralized in the first release.
Wilson didn’t tell Simon or Garfunkel that he had remixed the record and re-released it in September of 1965. Simon came upon the news, by chance, while still in Europe. The songwriter had a habit of picking up a copy of Billboard every week, and even overseas, he kept it up. In September, he was in Denmark when opened his copy of Billboard to see “The Sound of Silence” listed at number eighty-six. He then bought a copy of Cashbox to verify and saw the same thing. Returning to England, he got a call from Garfunkel who excitedly explained the phenomenon in the states. They had a hit!
The Sound of Silence hit number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on January 1, 1966. The hit brought Simon and Garfunkel back together and they became two of the most important musicians of the second half of the sixties, releasing a string of hits including “Mrs. Robinson” and the soundtrack of the film The Graduate, as well as their final release together, “Bridge over Troubled Waters,” in 1970.
“The Sound of Silence” was the perfect song at the right moment. It brought together the folk movement of the early sixties with the ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll roots that had inspired most of their childhoods.
After the breakup of the partnership, Paul Simon continued his career as one of the most important songwriters of the following decades. He has won 16 Grammys and, in 1982, was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Simon and Garfunkel were inducted as a partnership into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, and in 2001, Paul Simon was inducted again as an individual. In addition to these major accolades, he has also received The Kennedy Center Honors in 2002, and The Polar Music Prize in 2012. In 2007, Paul Simon was the inaugural recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song by the Library of Congress for his contributions to American Music However, back in 1965, no one would have guessed that this young, seemingly failing, songwriter would go on to shape the course of popular music history for more than five decades. Thanks to some ingenuity from producer Tom Wilson to pick up on the merging landscapes of folk and rock music in the mid-sixties, Paul Simon’s legendary song was given a second chance at life, and rewrote the soundtrack for the rest of the decade.
