Why did Simon and Garfunkel initially split after their debut album?
It’s hard to imagine a world where Simon and Garfunkel aren’t almost universally adored, and considering the popularity of some of their albums, such as Bookends and Bridge Over Troubled Water, you’d have a hard time imagining there ever having been a period where they weren’t a fully-formed and exquisitely polished folk rock duo. By the end of their short-lived career together, they were producing flawless records that compelled audiences and were simply too exceptional to ignore.
However, everyone has to start somewhere, and in the pair’s case, they began with an underwhelming album in 1964 called Wednesday Morning, 3AM. Half filled with original compositions and padded out with traditional folk tunes and covers of the likes of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, the album was nowhere near as well received as their later efforts and is now considered in retrospect to be an underdeveloped effort from the fledgling act.
The songs on Wednesday Morning are by no means terrible, but they had adopted a style that was quickly falling out of fashion, given how Beatlemania and the larger British invasion had begun to take hold of the music industry in the US and was becoming more and more indicative of where things were heading. Even some of Simon and Garfunkel’s contemporaries were switching from traditional folk styles towards the electric guitar-oriented sound that their adversaries across the pond were producing, and by the time Columbia came to release the album, there was little demand for the style of music they were coming out with.
Their record label didn’t seem to take any notice of this change that was taking place and remained insistent on releasing this album of folk material from the duo, giving it the subtitle Exciting New Sounds in the Folk Tradition. While this did nothing to tantalise the audiences they were looking to attract, it should have been the label’s role to have their finger on the pulse and be able to identify that a cultural shift was taking place where folk was less favoured. It would also have been their prerogative to sell records, something that Wednesday Morning failed abysmally at doing.
The changing landscape meant that even their strongest original song on the record, ‘The Sound of Silence’, was met with indifference. While the song may be considered one of their best and most famous tracks now, this version didn’t resonate with audiences at the time.
Given the lack of success the record brought them, the duo went their separate ways after its release, with Paul Simon moving to London for a short while and embarking on a solo career and Art Garfunkel returning to his studies at Columbia University, pursuing his dreams of becoming an architect. It wasn’t until producer Tom Wilson decided to add electric guitars to ‘The Sound of Silence’, effectively meaning that they gained public notoriety due to a remix, that the band reunited to record their second album, Sounds of Silence, in 1965, accompanied by a full band.
On Wednesday Morning, they hadn’t fully found the sound that would characterise their later releases, and without the outside influence of Wilson having decided to reimagine a song he saw potential in, perhaps the duo would never have reconvened to record and release some of their most beloved material. It clearly did them good to have a break from writing together and gave them an opportunity to reconsider their direction, as they came back far stronger and only improved from there onwards.
