The costly mistake Simon and Garfunkel nearly made with ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’
By the time Simon and Garfunkel released their final studio album together, they were already standing on uneasy ground. The record’s title track would go on to become one of their biggest and most enduring hits, but remarkably, it almost never opened the album at all.
The intimate ballad is a textured take on a gospel song, but it was the last song the duo recorded together. “We were really best friends up until Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Paul Simon said in the recent documentary series In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon. “[Afterwards], it didn’t have the harmony of the friendship…that was broken.”
The end of a partnership that stretched back to their elementary school days had already cost their hugely successful brand millions of dollars. But even before they officially split, the two had come dangerously close to making a fatal mistake.
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel spun the song ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ practically out of thin air, with the essence of the track taking “maybe 20 minutes”, Simon told CBSN, adding, “The first two verses were done in two hours”. Perhaps that’s why they weren’t leaning on the song being the first of their final album triumph, though according to Simon, it was still “better than [what] I usually write”.
Amid their disagreements, the pair considered releasing the catchy pop-rock singalong ‘Cecilia’ as the lead single instead. Its lighthearted tone stood in sharp contrast to the more reflective mood of the rest of the album, which often feels like a farewell to their musical partnership. The song’s link to St Cecilia, the Catholic patron saint of music, was also somewhat accidental. It began at a small gathering when the duo, along with friends, started drumming on a piano bench, improvising what would become one of their most recognisable tracks.
Yet the label’s boss Clive Davis insisted that ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ be the title track of its eponymous album, with its near five-minute grieving on “When times get rough, And friends just can’t be found”.
However representative of the dire times the duo was in, the plaintive song and its album stayed in their number one positions for six and ten weeks, respectively. They took home the Grammys for ‘Album of the Year’, ‘Record of the Year’ and ‘Song of the Year’ in 1971, and their album sold over 25 million copies.
Nonetheless, the infectious tune ‘Cecilia’ was not a bad performer itself, peaking at number four on the Billboard Hot 100. The song is now synonymous with the band’s irresistible energy, a magnetic reflection of the fleeting absurdity of pop culture, and an instantly recognisable hit. Although not perhaps as meaningful, this first song alternative would have gladly sold a couple million more albums, yet history will never reveal how much of a difference it all would have made.
Triumphant and resonant of its hymn influences, ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ is a perfect closing tune to celebrate a magnificent collaboration. It’s “a gospel phrase which Paul took from a gospel group. It was in a Baptist church hymn. He liked the phrase, and he used it,” Garfunkel confirmed on a press tour in 2003, referring to the song ‘Oh Mary Don’t You Weep’ by the Silvertones.
Solemn and evocative, it’s an effort so triumphant that, if heard as a standalone piece, it would supply listeners with all the best juice from a Simon and Garfunkel experience. Perhaps it’s all the better that they led with this one.
