How ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ launched Simon and Garfunkel to stardom
“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 their recent split. It soon became the best-selling album of all time, and at the close of the 1970s, it remained in the top spot with 25 million 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.
However, eight years earlier, such a feat seemed an impossibility for young Artie and little Paul. Their dainty folk debut, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., proved to be a huge flop. 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. At least that was clear to Bob Dylan.
The original vagabond had been musing over the landscape of music for a while. The Beatles were mounting a Promethean monument within it. So, at Newport Folk Festival, he decided to get on board with the buzz of their 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 charts 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 British Invasion and 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 sessions Wilson’s recording sessions with Dylan, he asked drummer Bobby Gregg, 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 work in music, 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.
Ironically, as Al Stewart comments in Paul Simon: A Life, “Paul was horrified when he first heard it”.
He heard the band slipping out of time, trying to match the tape that Wilson was playing them. But Wilson had called it right. He channelled the zeitgeist spearing and shifting ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and saved Simon and Garfunkel from ruin, proving that the marriage of genres was, indeed, the future, by catapulting the duo who would go on to mimic his ways and write the biggest album of the 1970s never mind the ’60s.
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