The 1968 album that became Paul Simon’s first serious record
The biggest stumbling block for someone like Paul Simon is being taken seriously as a lyricist.
Anyone can claim to write some of the greatest pop songs that the world has ever heard, but if they don’t have the actual lyrical voice to back everything up, it’s never going to go very far when someone starts comparing them to the true legends of rock and roll. But Simon was determined to keep pushing himself until he found songs that he knew could stand with the best melodies of all time.
After all, no kid comes up with a song like ‘The Sound of Silence’ by accident. Simon had captured a feeling that everyone was going through in the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy, and even though a lot more people were interested in what the likes of Bob Dylan were saying, Simon had a more nuanced take on what the country was feeling at the time. Dylan was one to lecture his audience at times, but Simon was there more to observe what was happening around him and make stories out of that.
That’s half the reason why a tune like ‘Richard Cory’ worked so well, but even when he and Art Garfunkel were making their best tunes, something felt a little bit off about their albums as a whole. There was no shortage of fantastic tunes across their records, but Bookends was the first time that their records held together as a whole for Simon. Which is strange because it doesn’t really hold together at all if you look at it.
Both sides are practically two separate records stacked on top of each other, but in this case, that isn’t exactly a bad thing at all. Simon wanted the opportunity to make songs that spoke to people, and even if that meant cutting his album in half, that was what he was going to do to ensure that he was making the record that he wanted to make.
And compared to everything else that he had done, Simon felt that he had finally hunkered down and delivered something that he could be proud of years after the fact, saying, “Bookends was our first serious piece of work, I’d say. I still like the song ‘America’. ‘Mrs Robinson’ is a little dated now, but the line ‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio’ is interesting for a song that has nothing to do with Joe DiMaggio.”
That line might have been a fine time capsule for the time, but if you look through Simon and Garfunkel’s early records, you can see why Simon felt that they finally got things right. Their first album had basically done nothing, and even if they had innovated their sound to a certain degree on Parsley, Sage Rosemary, and Thyme, the fact that Simon had less-than-kind words about ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song’ was always going to mark it down a few spots in his personal album rankings.
But even if they had finally hit upon the kinds of songs that worked, that meant that the shit was immediately going to start hitting the fan. Bridge Over Troubled Water was still a great album all things considered, but after spending the majority of the record at each other’s throats, Bookends feels like the first and only time where Simon felt like the duo finally had each other’s best interests at heart when they were making their record.
That kind of camaraderie wasn’t meant to last forever by any stretch, but Simon didn’t expect it to, either. The evolution of any songwriter is about making something great and then moving on, and while Simon would love to have a record that feels as good as Bookends felt to make, it was better for him to take a chance and see where things went whenever he released a new record.
