The Simon & Garfunkel album Paul McCartney wishes he’d written
It seems that in the 1960s, everyone who was remotely interested in music had a story about the first time they listened to The Beatles. Growing up in a post-war world meant that life wasn’t the most joyful. People were working dead-end jobs in factories, trying their best to make a living in a country riddled with debt. Then, all of a sudden, here came a band that gave people permission to have fun again.
“When I heard the Beatles. I knew what I wanted to do,” said Ozzy Osbourne when discussing the band’s influence. “My son says to me, ‘Dad, I like the Beatles, but why do you go so crazy?’ The only way I can describe it, is like this, ‘Imagine you go to bed today and the world is black and white, and then you wake up, and everything’s in colour. That’s what it was like!’ That’s the profound effect it had on me.”
There was something incredibly infectious about the band that completely took the world by storm. The UK were the first to be exposed to it, as they would listen to The Beatles and find themselves becoming swept up in sweet-sounding harmony and excellent instrumentation. Once they flew out over the United States, their infectious sound spread throughout the States in the blink of an eye.
“It transformed America,” recalled E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt. “On February 8th, there were no bands in America; on February 9th, we had Ed Sullivan, and on February 10th, everybody had a band in their garage. It was literally overnight.”
The two of them wrote very original music. Songs like ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ swept various nations because of how beautiful they sounded. Their upbeat nature meant people could tap their feet and dance to the music, but the lyrics surrounding this harmless sense of love were very sweet-sounding, and people loved to sing along to them.
However, just because The Beatles were very original songwriters who took the world by storm, it doesn’t mean that other musicians didn’t influence them. While discussing the British invasion, Steve Van Zandt noted that one of the first acts to bring it to an end was Bob Dylan with his new folk-rock sound. “The floodgates opened until the summer of ’65,” he said. “When the Americans took the charts back with the folk rock of The Byrds and Bob Dylan.”
John Lennon was famously inspired by Bob Dylan, who was also taking the American charts by storm. While Dylan respected the Fab Four, he didn’t like the album Rubber Soul, as he felt like it was a blatant rip-off of his work. “What is this? It’s me, Bob. [John’s] doing me!”, he said. “Even Sonny and Cher are doing me, but, fucking hell, I invented it.”
Paul McCartney was equally influenced by other artists; however, rather than wanting to write like Bob Dylan, he wanted the penmanship of Simon and Garfunkel. He was specifically inspired by their record Bridge Over Troubled Water, which John Lennon was convinced he could hear on the song ‘Let It Be’.
“Nothing to do with The Beatles,” said Lennon when discussing the track. Concluding, “It could’ve been Wings. I don’t know what [Paul was] thinking when he writes ‘Let It Be’. I think it was inspired by Bridge over Troubled Water. That’s my feeling, although I have nothing to go on. I know that he wanted to write a Bridge over Troubled Water.”
