How Simon & Garfunkel delivered the Greenwich Village folk revival’s soaring swansong
Bob Dylan once said: “To me, folk is just a bunch of fat people.” And when referencing that quote, the filmmaker Ethan Coen quipped: “That sort of disavowing the shit that you actually love is interesting and real and human.” You see, the thing is, folk music was never meant to be huge, Bob Dylan never actually meant to change the world, Joni Mitchell should never have really made any more than a room full of drunken people in gingham cry.
There shouldn’t be any success stories from the eternal dive bars of dog-eared six strings and hard-luck tales. Even the origin of modern folk lies in the mystic no-mans-land of 200-year-old songs about star crossed lovers, framed murderers and wandering undesirables by artists unknown. However, almost-fittingly, folk is a realm human defiance and from humble streets, it outdid itself.
In 1957, Jack Kerouac had just encapsulated the zeitgeist with On the Road, and, in the process, told a million youthful pariahs that the true home for artistic periphery persons was actually in the heart of New York. On the jacket sleeve of modern copies, you will find the following testimony from Dylan himself: “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” Thus, he wandered over to the Big Apple and set up shop in the Zip Code for the disenfranchised: Greenwich Village.
The issue was the bohemian New York suburb was literally swarming with fellow bohemians. There was a regional shortage of flannel, whisky and good fortune. Thus, you had a thousand artists playing the same songs in the same basement bars on the same nights, like some rolling Groundhog Day of whining “fat people”. This was fine, all in all, but it took an assegai of glowing originality from Simon & Garfunkel to finally put a line under it.
The last hoorah from the Greenwich Village folk heyday was offered up in hymnal style by the legends who helped to spawn the scene in the 1960s, and in turn, pretty much the entirety of modern alternative culture. And it was never really supposed to happen which meant that the music kept its humbling humility. The beauty of their 1970 triumph Bridge Over Troubled Water is in its duality—it is both meekly tender and roaringly exultant. Just like the folk scene, it is a record that kicks about in the gutter but has its gaze firmly fixed on the stars.
This folk zenith was a scene that burst at the seams. In the 1970s, it finally morphed into modern forms and left the reams of beat text reverberating but nevertheless finally placed back on the bookshelf. Its grand Yankee goodbye was a beautiful apotheosis of an entire musical pinnacle that we are still positively reeling from (perhaps never to be bettered). Thank you to folk and thank you to Simon & Garfunkel for their fitting send-off—a send-off that courts hardship as an interesting suitor then outdoes it at every turn.
If that seems grandiose at times with the title track of this album, then what the hell can you be grand about if not that? And thereafter the dainty ditties unfurl so perfectly formed it is as though the ether has been incubating them for aeons just for the duo to coax down gently and work them into velveteen tracks. Farewell Greenwich, you served us well, but it was time for folk to leave its subterranean home and effortlessly rattle the rafters of concert halls without a strain.
