The folk act who outsold Bob Dylan in the 1960s
The course of cultural history requires an angle, a form of arc that allows us to follow the narrative neatly. That angle is usually a pack of stinking lies, and we barely even know it. The retrospective throughline that just about every music journalist in recent history has peddled is that Bob Dylan came along and changed the game overnight.
Sure, the Beatles were buoyed by hysteria and conquered the commercial charts, reaching record sales that embarrass even their best peers, conjuring the image of a proud ant holding a leaf aloft on its own only for its mate to waltz by balancing a two-litre bottle of cider on its spiny. However, their rampant success is marked by the notable asterisk that Bob Dylan was pretty much entitled to a chunk of those sales.
The freewheelin’ folk troubadour brought untold depth to the decade, inspiring his fellow artists the very moment that his fated second record was released in 1963. Thereafter, everyone was clinging to his coat tails artistically and owed him a debt of gratitude for the divine influence. So, with that kind of lore established in the history books, you might expect lofty sales figures from the man himself.
In truth, while The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan certainly didn’t flounder, it was far from an explosive commercial triumph either. The record that did indeed change the world in time reached a disappointing 22 in the US charts upon release, and while it took the number one spot in the UK, this wasn’t until the year after its release. If anyone can call to mind the record that is 22nd in the charts currently, then I’d be happy to buy them a pint.
Of course, this position does not underplay the importance of the album, and soon enough, subsequent records like John Wesley Harding would go on to hit second in the US charts, his highest position in the US in the 1960s, but the figures don’t align with his barnstorming influence. Even the monumental Blonde on Blonde only climbed to ninth.
Dylan released nine albums during the course of the 1960s, about four of which are probably in the running to be considered the greatest of all time. You’d be hard pushed to say any dropped below a solid four stars. But despite this, in his native USA, RIAA and Billboard data suggest that he only sold around 10 million records. I use the term ‘only’ loosely there, but considering The Supremes reached double that, Herb Albert even eclipsed him, it is rather notable.
Was Bob Dylan the best-selling US folk artist of the 1960s?
In fact, the ‘Jokerman’ singer was even outsold by a fellow folk act on the US decade-end sales report. That’s certainly not a position that Simon and Garfunkel expected to find themselves in when they briefly quit the music industry after the failure of their debut album. But in a strange way, Bob Dylan would be responsible for his own second-place finish to the diminutive folk duo.
Their dainty folk debut, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, proved to be a huge flop, in part, because it was released amid the hubbub of the British invasion. The band struggled for sales and airplay. Meanwhile, The Rolling Stones’ debut was topping the UK charts and coming in at an impressive 11th in America. It was clear that the buzz of rock ‘n’ roll was illuminating a different future than many folkies had planned.
Dylan detected this from afar and thought about ditching his figurative gingham to ensure he had the wider impact he had intended. So, at Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he decided to get on board with the buzz of the electrified revolution. He plugged in, and folk rock was born. In truth, it wasn’t much different. It was just a little louder to stand up against the cacophonous roar of the times. His defining statement on this front was ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, a folk track as heavy as anything in the world of rock, and with more to say than most of the pop songs in the chart combined.
Sitting behind the mixing desk of this masterful effort was Tom Wilson. He had also been around for the recording of ‘Sounds of Silence’, a sweet little masterpiece that lacked the muscle to stand up to the boisterous boys from Britain. It slumped out of the charts, prompting its progenitors to go their separate ways. However, Wilson knew a good track when he heard one, and he felt certain that the fate of such a masterpiece was not the ash heap of history. The solution he concocted was simple: give it the ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ treatment.
Without even Simon and Garfunkel’s knowledge, during Wilson’s recording sessions with Dylan, he asked drummer Bobby Gregg and guitarist Al Gorgoni to stay behind. He then welcomed Vinnie Bell and Bob Bushnell into the mix, and an impromptu rock band were formed. The dual frontmen, Simon and Garfunkel, were untold miles away, apart and depressed. They weren’t needed; Wilson still had the master tape for what was then called ‘The Sounds of Silence’, and in potentially the earliest example of remote working, the band simply played electric instrumentation over the top of the original acoustic recording and the two were later spliced.
Paul Simon would only learn about the results of this experiment when he picked up the paper and saw ‘Sounds of Silence’, as it was printed, heading towards an overtake of The Beatles’ chart-topping hit, ‘We Can Work It Out’. True to Dylan’s electrified version of folk, the song remained the same in terms of its core – that was unimpeachably beautiful in the first place – it had just been rendered a little flashier for an era where standing out had suddenly become more important as the ’60s got swinging at an unprecedented pace.
Suddenly, the band were no longer a flop. And Dylan was no longer laughing at them, as he, unfortunately, had a few months earlier. As the story goes, a handful of days before Simon and Garfunkel were set to play their first scheduled show at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, Dylan met Simon for the first time, and the duo famously had nothing to say to each other in an awkward and cagey encounter.
When the Gerde show came about, Dylan slunk to the end of the bar with the critic Robert Shelton; as a hush descended and their set began, Dylan started guffawing at what was supposed to be a spiritual moment. The duo kept playing, cutting a vicious glance in the original vagabond’s direction, but the laughter didn’t abate. While Shelton said the giggles were merely bad timing, he did confirm that the meeting the week before was frosty enough to open up the potential that Dylan was scoffing intentionally.
Just how successful were Simon and Garfunkel?
So, it almost seems like payback on all fronts that he would later do them a favour with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and that they would then go on to surpass his sales with the song that it inspired. Much of their success would come at the tail end of the decade, just about eclipsing Dylan by a matter of tens, and accelerate into the 1970s, but they also proved that the frenzy of one massive success is more profitable in music than a stream of solid returns.
Hell, in the 1970s, they would even outsell the Stones despite breaking up at the very beginning of the decade. “I always was well aware of the fact that Simon and Garfunkel was a much bigger phenomenon in general, to the general public than The Rolling Stones,” Paul Simon commented in 1972.
At the time, Bridge Over Troubled Water was romping through the charts, pushing the duo towards a new global pinnacle despite the fact that they had just called it quits. It soon became the best-selling album of all time – it has since fallen out of the top ten – and at the close of the 1970s, it remained in the top spot with 25million sales recorded. The Stones’ best was less than half that at the time, so you can retract any scoffs you might’ve made over Simon’s statement if you disagreed. Dylan’s best-selling record to this day remains Highway 61 Revisited, and that has only notched around 4million units.
So, while Simon might have bemoaned, ”I usually come in second (to Dylan), and I don’t like coming in second,” there’s at least one aspect where he just about came out on top.
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