Simon & Garfunkel

Did Simon & Garfunkel Write The Jewish ‘Sgt. Pepper?’

In the late spring of 1967, the release of the Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band hit the world like a paisley paint bomb. Its psychedelic splatters were especially evident in England, where pop artists of all stripes immediately seized upon the albums heady mixture of lysergic wonder and Victorian nostalgia as a new way forward. But the albums effects could be felt even as far away as Uruguay, where a Beatles-obsessed group known as Los Shakers followed Sgt. Peppers audacious lead with a psychedelic Latin American masterpiece they called La Conferencia Secreta del Totos Bar.

Sgt. Peppers was a massive critical and commercial success in the United States, as well, but its impact on American popular music was less immediate and far more diffuse. Buffalo Springfields Broken Arrow and The Buckinghams Top 10 hit Susan  both released in late 67  each featured Pepper-esque sound collages, while The Association and The Turtles both released albums in 1968 (Birthday and The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands, respectively) that drew upon the same expanded musical and conceptual palette utilized by the Beatles.

Still, most mainstream U.S. pop seemed impervious to the albums influence, and the stateside psychedelic movement was already very much on its own trip (literally and figuratively) by the time Sgt. Peppers hit the streets. While Otis Redding was deeply obsessed with the album  which reportedly inspired his moody, introspective classic (Sittin on) The Dock of the Bay  and while some lovely soul-jazz covers (like Within You Without You by the Soulful Strings, and Wes Montgomerys rendition of A Day in the Life) emerged in its aftermath, most black artists of the day werent in any rush to add some Pepper to their grooves. And Bob Dylan, who was never really one for Lewis Carroll-style whimsy or acid-drenched studio high jinks anyway, basically ignored the whole thing; his rootsy and spare John Wesley Harding LP, released at the end of 1967, essentially sounded as if the Fab Four  much less Sgt. Peppers  had never existed.

There was one American album, however, that really took the ball from Sgt. Peppers and ran brilliantly with it  though you certainly wouldnt have guessed it to look at the two conservatively dressed Jewish guys staring glumly out from the stark black-and-white photograph on its cover. Released fifty years ago on April 3, 1968, Simon & Garfunkels Bookends has long been (rightly) hailed as a folk-rock masterpiece; the album contained some of the duos best-loved hits, including Mrs. Robinson and America, and it spent seven weeks in that unhappy spring and summer of 1968 at the top of the Billboard albums chart, not once but twice supplanting their own enormously popular soundtrack for The Graduate. (Interesting Jewish music trivia note: The duos nearly four-month dominance of Billboards No. 1 spot finally ended in the last week of July 1968; The Beat of the Brass, another easy-listening million-seller, by fellow tribe member Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass, replaced it.) But Bookends gets far less recognition than it should for being the American Sgt. Peppers  or, even more to the point, the New York Jewish Sgt. Peppers.

Which is not to say that Bookends is literally Sgt. Kishkes Lower East Side Schlub Band  Simon & Garfunkel would never have attempted such a blatant knock-off, since briefly fashionable things like sitars, sherbet-colored military uniforms and eye-popping psychedelic cover art would have been completely antithetical to their well-honed image of turtleneck-clad, angelic-sounding folk poets from the dirty cobblestones of New York City.

Nevertheless, John, Paul, George and Ringo were very much on Paul and Arties minds in October 1967, when work on their new album began in earnest. The Beatles were it, Art Garfunkel told the Guardian in 2015. When they made Rubber Soul and moved on to Revolver and Sgt. Pepper  [it was] not just a collection of songs, but the album as art form. We were terribly impressed, and that shone a light on the path that led to Bookends.

Nowhere is this more obvious than on side one of the album, a conceptual song-cycle in which tracks based upon successive stages of life are bookended by a brief musical theme. Theres also a palpable sense of musical freedom and experimentation there that had been absent from previous S&G albums; with their label, Columbia, footing the bill for the recording costs, the duo (abetted by producer John Simon) were at liberty to explore everything from multiple vocal overdubs to Moog synthesizers.

Save the Life of My Child, the most bracing and boundary-pushing track on the album, mirrors not only Sgt. Peppers musical reach, but also its pervasive sense of druggy disorientation and social disconnect. Against a dystopian urban soundscape, the songs protagonist  who might well be the boy from Bruce Jay Friedmans A Mothers Kisses, now a couple of years older and freaking out on acid in an East Village crash pad  horrifies his doting mom and tantalizes a voyeuristic crowd by dangling from the ledge of a building, but earns only a blasé shrug from an NYC patrolman, who merely mutters (in a monotone worthy of Lou Reed) about how kids got no respect for the law today. Its like a cross between Shes Leaving Home and A Day in the Life transplanted to the streets of Manhattan, and sounds like nothing S&G had ever previously attempted.

If the rest of the music on side one of Bookends is less jarringly audacious, there are still many touches  the guitar played through a Leslie speaker on America; the loose, jazzy feel of Overs; Jimmie Haskells unexpectedly jagged orchestral arrangement on Old Friends  that demonstrate a musical consciousness expanded by both hashish (Simon in particular was a big smoker at the time) and Sgt. Peppers. Lyrically, the songs feature Simons usual brand of introspection, though now with a more subtly devastating touch: from the road-trip-as-search-for-self in America, to the loveless relationship of Overs, to the quiet switchblade flick of the lines How terribly strange to be 70 and Preserve your memories / Theyre all thats left you (from Old Friends and Bookends, respectively), the first side of Bookends takes no prisoners. The Voices of Old People interlude, a heartrending collage of kvetches and recollections recorded by Garfunkel at the United Home for Aged Hebrews, further underlines both pathos of the song-cycle. If Sgt. Peppers Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite guaranteed a splendid time for all, well, take it up with the box office, ya schmuck; no one on the first half of Bookends is having anything remotely resembling a splendid time.

As justifiably proud as he was of side one of Bookends, Simon had severe misgivings about the flip side, which was mostly made up of stray singles with the recordings dated as far back as September 1966. Bookends is really the one side, he told Rolling Stone in 1972. With the exception of Mrs. Robinson, which was recorded at the same time as the songs on the Bookends side, those other four  they didnt mean a lot. They werent well recorded. They just didnt have it.

But even if the five songs on side two dont necessarily fit thematically with their side one counterparts, they still work well within the overall context of the album, serving as a lighter (and more rocking) counterweight to the existential crises of the Bookends song cycle, much in the way that Getting Better and Good Morning Good Morning blew some needed fresh air into the incense-choked chambers of Sgt. Peppers. The Beatles connections are present in the first three songs as well: Fakin It, recorded in June 67, begins with a percussive stomp strikingly similar to the outro of Good Morning Good Morning, while Punkys Dilemma (recorded in October 67) and GMGM were both inspired by Kelloggs Corn Flakes  and the Im a Citizens for Boysenberry Jam fan line from Punkys stands as one of the most cringe-inducingly McCartney-esque lyrics to ever drip from Simons pen. And then, of course, theres the koo-koo-ka-choo interjection in Mrs. Robinson  a wink and a nod to the Beatles I Am the Walrus, a post-Pepper recording that had recently appeared on the flip side of Hello, Goodbye.

The last two songs on Bookends, A Hazy Shade of Winter and At the Zoo, are the real orphans of the record, having been recorded in September 1966 and January 1967, respectively. But Hazy Shade  the closest S&G ever got to garage rock  more than justifies its inclusion, with a stomping 12-string riff and with lyrics that pair strikingly well with the human uncertainties of side one, while At the Zoo describes a visit to the Central Park Zoo in whimsical and trippy terms that wouldnt have been out of place on Sgt. Peppers. At the Zoo also ends the record on an unexpected but reassuring high note: However bleak the arc of existence, however heavy the questions that plague our fitful slumbers, the song reminds us that its the little joys and amusements that make it all worthwhile  and that your memories of those ostensibly trivial things just might be as valid and sustaining as any of the others you preserve. Fifty years on, its a message that still resonates  just like the rest of Bookends.

Dan Epstein is the author of Stars and Strikes: Baseball in the Bicentennial Summer of 1976.


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