Who plays piano on 1970’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’?
It was one hell of an LP send-off for Simon & Garfunkel.
Topping the album charts across both sides of the Atlantic and all over the world, 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water cemented a chartered course between the two of doggedly eschewing pop trends to mammoth success. Shaped by New York’s folk revivalism after shaking off their former Tom & Jerry rock and roll act, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel would soldier past psychedelic excess and roots rock jam in their quest to summon stirring songcraft from the Old World tradition.
While never above orbiting the charts and deploying serious pop chops in their work, Simon & Garfunkel always remained tethered to a realm somewhere arcane and buried in the sediments of European spirituality washed over to the States.
Such reverence for music’s deeper foundations shone throughout Bridge Over Troubled Water’s stirring title track, a gospel-charged beam of hymnal awe that found an immaculate marriage of church congregation and the very top of the Billboard Hot 100.
The pair roped in some of the biggest session players to cut ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’s’ anthemic number. For its string arrangements, industry legends Jimmie Haskell and Ernie Freeman were recruited for their composing skills, Haskell himself shifting the song’s key from G major to E-flat major as captured on record. For some sonic density, the big names of Phil Spector’s old Wrecking Crew band lent their expert alchemy: Hal Blaine on drums, Joe Osborn handling bass, and one of the most celebrated session keyboard players in pop history.
So who plays piano on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’?
It wasn’t the first time he’d been credited on a Simon & Garfunkel record, his keys on Sounds of Silence and Bookends, plus bass on ‘Mrs Robinson’, but Larry Knechtel’s piano work on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ would tower over his already glittering CV for the rest of his career.
A key multi-instrumentalist of the Wrecking Crew cohort, Knetchel had worked with some of rock and pop’s biggest names, including The Everly Brothers, The Byrds, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds opus, and The Doors’ debut, for a truly enriched and diverse session CV. Yet, while recognising how powerful Simon & Garfunkel’s 1970 piece was, a perennial pigeonholing soon took its toll on Knetchel.
“It got me stereotyped badly, and I grew to hate it after a while,” Knetchel confessed to the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum in 2006, “[…] everybody wanted to have an original ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ treatment on their song, but it was the song, it wasn’t the treatment.” He would confess, however, that despite the fatigue with the song professionally, its power was never truly lost on him: ”I got kind of burned out on that a bit, and I happened to be in a supermarket about ten years ago; it played, and I thought, ‘This ain’t bad!’”
The Recording Academy agreed, naming Knetchel as one of five from the team to take home the Grammy Award for ‘Best Arrangement, Instrumental and Vocals’ in 1971.
