How Simon and Garfunkel reformed the Everly Brothers
The entire basis of rock and roll harmony singing probably wouldn’t exist if not for The Everly Brothers. Even though their original material tended to be straightforward country-infused rock and roll, their knowledge of twin harmony made their songs impossible to resist, turning tracks like ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’ into operatic experiences for teenagers. Although the band may have sounded sublime on record, they were never reconnected until Simon and Garfunkel came along.
By Paul Simon’s admission, there’s a good chance that his duo act with Art Garfunkel wouldn’t have existed without The Everly Brothers. A few years after the Everlys broke onto the scene, Simon was penning songs designed to follow in the group’s footsteps, featuring close harmony vocals that sounded heavenly working off acoustic guitars.
Simon wasn’t the only one being influenced by the Everlys in the 1960s, either. When working on their first handful of tunes, John Lennon and Paul McCartney would often try to emulate what the duo was doing, often featuring close-harmony singing on their early ballads like ‘If I Fell’ and later in the track ‘Two of Us’.
Although the duo was responsible for the greatest music of the early 1960s, the band’s end was bound to get ugly. After spending decades with each other, both Phil and Don Everly had grown a lot outside of their duo act, with Don hitting the bottle fairly hard. By the time the group was set to take the stage, all of the tension of the past decades erupted in front of the audience.
Turning up to the show drunk, Don tried to make his way through most of the setlist before Phil brought everything to a close. Throwing down his guitar, the duo stormed offstage, never to take the stage again. Although the band was officially dead from that moment on, Simon felt that the group should be able to have one final hurrah.
When putting the pieces of Simon and Garfunkel back together in the early 2000s, Simon pushed Phil and Don to patch up their differences as their opening act, telling Rolling Stone, “They basically came out of retirement for us. I said, ‘Phil, look, if you’re going to retire, you might as well come out one more time and take a bow and let me at least say what it is that you meant to us and to the culture.’”
After a massive response to their stateside shows, Phil and Don figured that it would be a good idea to go out on their own once again. As the tour ground to a halt, The Everly Brothers were back in the public eye again, going on a tour independently in 2005, chronicling their musical history together.
Although the relationships may have been rocky, Simon remembers that the sound of their voices hadn’t changed a bit in the years since. As he put it, “They met in the parking lot before the first gig. They unpacked their guitars — those famous black guitars — and they opened their mouths and started to sing. And after all these years, it was still that sound I fell in love with as a kid. It was still perfect.”
