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Art Garfunkel
1990
page 3
Would you work on your harmony parts separate or together?
Together. If he was writing the song, I would start seeing, in just the sense I was saying now, the kind of record it was going to be and what the arrangement demands, and what my vocal part should be in the record. This was all emerging as the song was emerging. And we would feed off each other. I would throw back at him what progress I'm making and that would give him a sense of what he's writing.
"I Am A Rock" was your third hit?
"I Am A Rock" was third. It peaked at number three in the nation. And then we got a manager, Mort Lewis. Mort helped us in the touring area. We branched out to become touring artists. We had a nice show.
Then we tried a fourth single that was really arty.
"The Dangling Conversation"?
Yeah. We thought, "Can we take the audience where we want to go now and do a ballad?" Because ballads are tougher to have hits on. Something slow and really intellectual and literary. Let's see if they'll go for that, because then we can take them anywhere. It turned out that we couldn't. That record was not a hit.
Did that surprise you?
A little bit. It informed me that you can't exactly call your shots.
Did it change Paul's writing at all? Did he try to steer away from those kinds of songs?
I would say probably yes, a little bit. At least, you know, you start thinking of songs in two categories: singles and album cuts. An album cut can be as artful as it wants to be. A single should be under five minutes or under four minutes. There are certain things you think of in singles that you wouldn't necessarily hold yourself to for an album. You look for a more memorable, repeatable chorus in a single, a shorter length. So, certainly for singles, we knew it was best to stay away from the long, intellectual ballad. After "Dangling Conversation" we began taking albums much more seriously and doing them much more slowly and artfully as we were influenced by the Beatles. So in '66 we slowed way down for our third album. See, the second album was Sounds of Silence quickly put out because it had a hit single. Made in three weeks. But on the next album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, I think we must have spent nine months making that album, which was sort of unprecedented . But it was such a labor of love and fun, that we thought we were breaking new ground in terms of how creative an album can be.
It was something we just learned from what the Beatles were doing. So when that album came out in late '66, that gave us a certain stature in the business, which helped, because we had obviously spent more time and energy and creative powers on that album. It had that interesting "Silent Night/7 O'Clock News." And it had "Scarborough Fair," which worked great for us. That was a lot of fun to do.
That was the one song in which you and Simon shared writing credit; he said you wrote the "Canticle" section.
Well, we both wrote it. The lyric, as I said before, came from Paul's second tune, which never made any of our albums, called "On The Side Of A Hill." [ singing softly ] "On the side of a hill in a land called somewhere, a little boy lies asleep in the earth..." It's an anti-war song. "While down in the valley, a cruel war rages, and people forget what a child's life is worth..." A bit of that lyric ended up behind "Scarborough Fair" but the melody [of the "Canticle" section] I wrote. And I wrote it just to be contrapuntal, to weave and swell around the lines of "Scarborough Fair" to increase the flow of the record. So I took the writer's credit.
It's a beautiful counter-melody.
Thanks. I could write about seven of those things in an hour. Every hour I could write seven more. Supposedly that's an achievement in BMI terms for me. It's like breathing, I don't get it.
Why didn't you do more of that, then, in other songs?
He wouldn't let me. [Laughs] No, just a joke! I don't know why I didn't do more of that. There wasn't a need to do more of that. It's a specialty thing; it treats a song a little like wall-paper to be weaving in and out between the lines. It makes the song a little less than a proper song. It works in record terms.
I don't remember holding back, it just never came up that that would be the right thing to do on another. Here, for once, we were not starting with a Paul Simon song, we were starting with a traditional folk song, "Scarborough air." It's the nature of this flowing song that it could take this counter- melody. I can't think of any other Paul Simon songs that could... maybe "The Boxer" could do that. No, "The Boxer" is too busy.
With lyrics?
Yeah.
On "Scarborough Fair" did you both sing both parts?
Yes. We probably did two-part harmony on the melody and then doubled it. So that gives a kind of tubular, strong, commercial sound to the front. Then on the "Canticle" part, Paul takes some of those lines and I take the others that are higher. And we double that melody. So there's one voice unharmonized in the background but that one voice is doubled.
How did you learn techniques such as doubling voices, and did Roy Halee have much of an influence in that area?
My guess is yes, that Roy had something to do with that. We did it a lot and once we started doing it, we liked the sound. It's all over our records, doubling your voice.
Did you start punching in vocals about at that time?
I can't remember, but as you know, that's a big phrase we use a lot, punching in. The world's not supposed to know about that. [Laughs] It should seem like it's seamless. But sure, we were fixing lines right from the beginning. That's standard recording technique. As the years go by, you get a little more insecure, so you get more finicky about punching in not a line, but two words. And as years go by, you Ret Ret more local about the fixes you're making.
In "A Simple Desultory Phillipic" Simon wove your name into the song: "I've been mothered, lathered, aunt and uncled, Roy Haleed and Art Garfunkled. "
What about it?
I was wondering if you appreciated it.
I thought it was nice. I did appreciate it. I thought it was cute. Even though the sentiment is slightly negative. He's implying that he's been done to by these people. It's just a touch of a dig.
Paul is like John Lennon. They're feisty. There's a rebellious attitude. You know, that's very acceptable. It's standard rebellious attitude stuff. The public tends to like that stuff. It shows that they're feisty, that they're not busy patronizing the proper sounding, wholesome phrases of the culture.
Simon said that in terms of record making, you, he and Ray Halee had a three-way equal partnership. True?
I don't know. Yeah, I guess. We all respected each other's talents and we all fused what we did. It became, really, a mix.
Roy was very important in that we loved him so much and we pitched ideas to win him over. It was so much fun to turn him on and make him think we were great. So really, he was our audience. We were always throwing ideas with the hope that Roy would fall out of his chair with how neat that was. He was always surprising us. We'd be out with the musicians in the studio trying to show the drummer what we think he should do. And a half-hour later, we would come back and Roy would say, "Let me show you what I worked out in terms of the sound when you were out there. I want to put a reverb on the attack of the drum, but then.... " [Laughs] He'd show us what he worked out and you'd go, "What a wonderful contribution! He's just cooking away creatively on the engineering side while we're working on the arrangement." These things put wind in your sails. A lot.
Was Roy a perfectionist?
Definitely. Roy has brilliant standards. Really a fine artist. There's a difference between a Rolls-Royce and a Toyota, you know. And Roy is really a craftsman, a consummate artist. He's a bit of a misfit in the eighties. They don't do that stuff anymore.
Do you feel that Roy is out of date?
Well, he's having hits with Paul, so he's not really out of date. But that kind of care and concern is no longer cost-worthy. Talk to a record company executive and they'll go, "Yeah, well, if he wants to do it, let him turn himself on, but it doesn't mean anything commercially anymore." I'm not saying this right because I do think it means some thing. Records became much cruder in the last twenty years. Let's put it that way.
Paul said that he felt Bookends was the quintessential Simon & Garfunkel album. Would you agree?
I don't know what you mean exactly by that phrase. I think of Parsley, Sage as the first real album in doing what we do. Bookends is the one that had a theme running through the whole side one. That makes it literary and particularly interesting in that it has a theme, a theme of youth to middle age to old age. But Bridge Over Troubled Water is the one with the most successful variety. Different songs strike out in different directions with different kinds of production. So it's a kind of a showing off piece in the variety sense. It makes that album, in my mind, kind of the richest, because it goes in so many different directions.
Bookends features "Voices Of Old People" which is not really a song but a sound painting. Was that your conception?
Yeah. I wanted to set up the song "Old Friends. " And I wanted the actual sound of the old people on tape so you can feel what we're talking about before we sing something about old people. I actually wanted to get their coughs, their wheezes, their sighs. It was really going to be a collage of gutturalisms, real earthy sounds in the back of the throat. Not so much what they were saying but their vocal production, to see if I could capture older people that way.
But we had wonderful quotes from all these interviews I had done. I went to old age homes...
Did the people there know who you were?
Yes. When they were real elderly, they dimly knew and didn't care. Actually, they didn't know. The lady who ran the place knew who I was and they would accommodate my interest and give me a nice serious treatment. The actual old people I spoke to, they were pretty old, so they didn't know who I was. So it was just a case of cooperating. And I would be the sophomoric interviewer asking them about life itself But they said wonderful stuff .
Did they know you were recording it?
Yes.
Did they have any understanding why you were doing it?
Not really. No.
You said the purpose of the piece was to introduce the song "Old Friends. " When you first heard that song did you have a sense that Simon was writing not only about old age out about the old friendship between you and he?
Yes. I like that song a lot. I think he wrote a gem there. Sure, I did.
Also on that album is "Mrs Robinson." Is it true that you were the one who told Mike Nichols that Simon had a song with that title?
He was writing a song called "Mrs. Roosevelt," Paul was. And he was going nowhere and he was going to chuck it. . Paul and I were in the sound stage at Paramount or MGM in Hollywood working with Nichols on the soundtrack of The Graduate. And we had sung "Sounds of Silence"; we had to resing it to put it in the film. And we had the other thing: "Scarborough Fair" came right off the record into the film.
We still needed one uptempo tune that Paul hadn't written and Mike was struggling. And I said, "There is an uptempo song that Paul is despairing of, but it is very commercial. It's called 'Mrs. Roosevelt' but we could change 'Mrs. Roosevelt' to 'Mrs. Robinson."' And Mike loved that thought, as if he knew right away this was going to work: "Let's hear this uptempo song." [Sings] "And here's to you Mrs. Roosevelt...." And Mike knew that that was going to work. Changed it to "Robinson." Said, "Let's try to put it down and see if it works against the picture. " So you sing it against the screen. And all that existed of the song was the chorus. That's why the verses are "Doo doo doo doo..." There are no lyrics there. And it worked.
Was he writing about Eleanor Roosevelt?
Yes. The key to me was that he was chucking the song anyway, so we were free to hack it up and do whatever you want with it.
Then he wrote the rest of the song after the movie was released?
That's right. So by the time our Bookends album came out with "Mrs. Robinson" in it, a whole bunch of months later, if not a year later, now, the rest of "Mrs. Robinson" was written.
Do you have any memory of hearing "The Boxer" for the first time?
Yeah, I knew "The Boxer" was great. For one thing, it's a style that is our strong suit. Paul and Artie could sing most effectively when they were doing a Travis picking, very fluid, running-along-syllable-song like that. Whenever we did those folky, running things, the syllabication is ideal for what we had learned. We were tapping into something that went way back for us, and something we could get a blend on. So I always knew, whenever it was that kind of thing, I had a particular feel that I could do really well, and match Paul and make the whole thing ripple and articulate it just right. So just because it was in that category, I had a feeling that I could make it sound good. And the lyric is real nice. And the amount of labor in the studio was just unbelievable. That one took so many days.
Your harmony part on that one is a classic. Many people have learned how to sing harmony by imitating your part on that song.
I'm doing a bunch of different things: I'm using the classic third above Paul, an interval of a third, and then I do variations, depending on what the lyric asks. [Sings] "I am leaving, I'm leaving " Yeah.
Were there any instances of you commenting on the lyric of a song or making questions about the writing prior to making the record?
Yeah, but there's so many times, who can remember? I wrote some of the lines. Never took a writer's credit because in spirit it was really a small two percent factor. But there's some of my wanting in there. In "Punky's Dilemma, " which was written for The Graduate I wrote a verse in there [ Sings ] "Wish I was an English muffin , 'bout to make the most out of a toaster, I'd ease myself down, coming up brown " Think I wrote all that stuff
I wrote [sings] "I'm not talking about your pig-tails, talking 'bout your sex appeal " "Baby Driver," which is a song on the back of Bridge Over Troubled Water.
(continued ...)
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