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SIMON AND GARFUNKEL - “Bridge Over Troubled Water”

(#283, 28th March 1983) 

The most celebrated track on the biggest-selling album of the 1970s in Britain, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” has become a marbled standard and it’s hard to step back from that and listen to the thing. Maybe it’s useful to leave it in its immediate context and compare it to “Wan’drin Star”, especially as I’m about to give it the same mark.

Both are carefully arranged showcases for their singer. Both are slow, thoughtful records that work to capture a particular emotional frame of mind. Both dramatise that frame of mind using their arrangement: in “Star”, Lee Marvin sounds uncomfortable and impatient, keen to saddle up and be off down the trail again. In “Bridge”, the structure and arrangement hark back to earlier and ancient ways of religious comfort-giving, lending the recording the feel of a secular hymn. Oh, and both records botch it towards the end - Lee’s vocal goes completely off-track, and Simon and Garfunkel bring in the drums and love poetry, threatening to turn their austere statement of devotion into a particularly high-handed, passive-aggressive come-on.

There’s no question that “Bridge”, like “Sugar, Sugar”, is a supremely well-crafted record. The Archies track hides its craft, though, using it for the - perhaps sinister - purposes of getting you hooked on a dumb pop choon. “Bridge”’s craft is obvious in every bar. The gradual introduction, interplay and build of piano, voice bass and drum is beat-perfect, with even Garfunkel’s (yes, very beautiful) voice ultimately another component to be precisely tweezerdropped into place. If I find this delicacy wearying, or oppressive, or even cold, that’s a reflection of the gap between what the record asks of its listener - concentration and solemnity - and what I’m prepared to give it. I never liked real hymns much, either. 5

51. Chris Brown on September 30th, 2006

    I bought the album a couple of days ago (told you Popular was taking over my life) and I was thinking that relative to how successful the song was at the time you (or at least I) don’t seem to hear it on the radio much. Perhaps the increased volume at the end messes up their limiters or something. There’s also a demo version with a slightly different third verse, though the “silver girl” is still there.
    Thanks to my higher tolerance for actual hymns, I’d rise to at least a 6 - but then I’m sorely tempted to deduct a mark for Paul Simon’s moustache on that cover image. Sorry Art.

52. blount on September 30th, 2006

    that moustache > this song! i think the only moment in almost famous i halfway liked was when the mom won’t allow her son to bring a simon & garfunkel record into the house - MOM OTM!!!

53. FT's GeorgeB on September 30th, 2006

    Love this overblown monstrosity and will admit to getting a crumb of comfort from it in some shitty times - so there! I always felt people took against Paul Simon because he’s not a pop/rock product, so much as one of those guys who would have been writing songs in Tin Pan Alley, the Brill building or somewhere whatever the circumstances. Sure, people think he’s too clever and earnest for his own good, but this is great and he wrote American Tune for chrissakes.

54. FT's koganbot on October 1st, 2006

    Would like to report that cool kids were sneering at Simon & Garfunkel back in 1968, when I was in junior high school (were probably sneering at ‘em back in ‘66, but I didn’t know of S&G’s work then so would not have brought them into sneering range). Paul Simon is clearly a teacher’s pet, made skin of both hoods and freaks crawl. He also got utterly mawled, stomped on, eviscerated by Xgau in 1967, the same year that Paul Nelson panned Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme in the pages of Sing Out! (though I only saw those several years later).

    And at age 14 I absolutely loved Simon & Garfunkel. I thought “Sounds of Silence” was the greatest song ever written (well, it was either that or “Spring Hill Mine Disaster” or “A Day in the Life”). I probably would have placed “The Dangling Conversation” and “I Am a Rock” in my top twenty. I thought those songs were beautiful and thought those songs were profound. I copied out the lyrics to “I Am a Rock” and gave them to one of my teachers. I probably lied to myself and believed that I believed that “The Dangling Conversation” was better than “I Am a Rock,” but actually “Rock” rocks harder, and in my viscera I preferred it. Also, I got what Paul Simon was saying, so - contra Xgau - I know damn well that Paul wasn’t saying nothing. He was layering gobs of pseudoideas and pseudopoetry atop everything, but he had messages that were coming through loud and clear: To be smart and sensitive is to be desperately lonely; that not only is suicide an option, a way of choosing one’s fate, it’s a form of social commentary and social protest; that whether anyone understands or is understood by anyone else is something of a crap shoot; that the words and social rituals that mainstream culture bequeaths us are contaminated and dysfunctional, that something needs to break through from somewhere else (words of prophets on subway walls and all that). And of course in retrospect I don’t see Simon’s themes as being much different from those of certified cool cats like Dylan and the Velvets and the Stooges: “Heroin” is “I Am a Rock,” “Sister Ray” is “The Dangling Conversation,” albeit in less kitschy, bullshitty form.)

    I was disappointed by Bookends because it seemed so emotionally toned down. Of course later I was to realize that this was Simon’s actually becoming competent and no longer ridiculous or full of shit as a lyricist. But, for what it’s worth, I’ll stand by my original aesthetic judgment: for all the posturing and psuedointellectualism of “I Am a Rock” and “Sounds of Silence,” those are the two best things those guys ever recorded, separately or together; and this is because they’re the most deliriously emotional, the most beautiful, the ones that rock (”Sounds of Silence” being best in the hit version where Columbia simply pasted drums and guitar onto the original S&G vocal tracks. The Bloomfield-imitation guitar was by Fred Carter, Deana’s dad). I think that “Mother and Child Reunion” and “The Boxer” are great songs, but they don’t carry anything like the electric thrill of those two early S&G hits.

    OK, so, the song in question, when I heard it previewed in some Simon & Garfunkel documentary, I think in 1969. I hated it. Thought it was sentimental shit, vast empty goo goo. Couldn’t stand the melody, which reminded me of these long slow love ballads that “legitimate” singers would foist on the world. The central metaphor was dumbfounding. “Like a bridge over troubled water/I will lay me down.” What? Into the raging river? That’s sure comforting. What the fuck is he talking about? (I still can’t make heads or tails of it.) I doubt that I even noticed “Sail on silver girl” until today. It’s not so bad. It’s - I don’t know - pretty. It may not be saying much, but at least it’s not saying something stupid.

    As for what I think of the song now? Don’t really know. Still boring after all these years, maybe. Or maybe I can appreciate the beauty of the godawful ballad. I’m trying to come to terms with ballads, since Kelly and Ashlee sing ‘em, occasionally. Compared to all the indie glug I’m listening to for Paper Thin Walls, I might appreciate “Bridge”’s sonic professionalism. Or might not.

55. FT's koganbot on October 1st, 2006

    Oh, that version I linked of the Xgau article is not the full thing, and it suffers ’cause of its cuts. The Dylan section is way way better in the version that I’ve got in Jonathon Eisen’s Age of Rock anthology. And the S&G section is expanded there to take in later and less ridiculous songs like “Fakin’ It.”

56. FT's Tom on October 1st, 2006

    I have just listened to Graceland for the first time since 1986. I realised three things:

    1. I know every note of the first side thanks to it always being played at school.

    2. The boys who played it didn’t play the second side so much, and even when they did they always skipped “Homeless”.

    3. The song I was most looking forward to hearing again turns out to be “Graceland” by Boo Hewerdine and The Bible. :(

57. Chris Brown on October 1st, 2006

    Maybe part of the problem is that he doesn’t seem as uncomfortable with pop stardom as is normally assumed of a singer/songwriter type? I don’t necessarily think of him as a very likeable person, but then that’s no more the case for him than for many or even most rock stars.
    It does also have to be said that he’s not the most consistent of writers, which is thrown into sharper relief by the fact that he’s hardly prolific. But this always seemed more of a personal thing.

    Oh, and a resurrection update: I’m sure I remember Phil Cool releasing a version of this - I don’t particularly recall seeing a 45 of it, but I do remember a video where he did his famous Rolf impression.

58. FT's koganbot on October 1st, 2006

    I read it on the Interweb so it must be true:

    The line “Sail on, silver girl” is often reputed to refer to a needle (meaning the song is about heroin) but it actually refers to Simon’s girlfriend and later wife who found a few gray hairs and was upset. The lyric was meant as a joke. (thanks, Helen - York, England)

59. Mark M on October 2nd, 2006

    I know it’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and not Graceland we’re discussing, but following Mark G and Mark S’s comments above, and considering that some of the readers have been brought up in a world where Nelson Mandela is a kindly old duffer and not a revolutionary/terrorist leader, maybe it’s worth trying to explain why some folks were so angry with Paul Simon. The core ANC plan, supported by the anti-apartheid movement, was to isolate South Africa. The idea was not to make the existing South African government treat the majority population better – it was to bring down the whole system. If a company like Ford argued that they were employing black managers in the RSA, the protesters’ response was that was irrelevant: they had to pull out of South Africa all together. It was Reagan-Thatcher who argued that only by keeping the lines of communication open could change come about – “constructive engagement is Ronald Reagan’s plan” explains Joey Ramone on Sun City. In that context, whether Simon was aiding or exploiting the musicians he used on the record was entirely besides the point: by recording in South Africa he was breaking the boycott, and by doing so – if you took the argument to its extreme, which I probably did at the time – he was suggesting that he knew better that the African National Congress what the interests of the South African people were.

60. FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on October 2nd, 2006

    mark m is largely korrekt

    however the line simon’s attackers (those who were not ANC) SHOULD have taken is
    i. OK this LP is possibly GREAT and
    ii. yes he has helped these particular musicians
    — NEVERTHELESS THE CULTURAL BOYCOTT MUST BE UPHELD, even for such ostensibly good purposes

    however mostly they took the opposite line on i. AND ii., which totally muddied the position. Tactically they shd have conceded all points not relevant to the position being taken: not to do so appeared to be allowing a future get-out clause for a Great LP which Helped Black Musicians (even if Graceland wasn’t yet it to these quasi-punkers)

    (nor was ANC position as clearcut as it should have been — difft officials in fact took different positions in difft interviews) (not hugely difft but enough, again, to switch the debate from one of tactical urgency to a vague bigger question of the politics of culture — viz when does commodity art stop being “just” commodity art usw — which they were ill-equipped to prevail within, and which, frankly, they should not have ended up in)

    (a key side issue was this: should non-combatant supporters of the ANC cede all judgement on all issues to the ANC?)

61. FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on October 2nd, 2006

    one of the matters difft anc spokespeople were disagreeing about was “HAD SIMON IN FACT TECHNICALLY BROKEN THE BOYCOTT?”: difft officials in difft territories interpreted the rules differently — there was a “spirit vs letter” debate on top of this, which inflected differently depending on variant attitudes towards pop and cultural imperialism

62. Mark M on October 2nd, 2006

    (a key side issue was this: should non-combatant supporters of the ANC cede all judgement on all issues to the ANC?)

    Well, indeed: it’s always a big punt: not all self-appointed national liberation movements (Indian National Congress v Iraqi National Congress) turn out to be the real deal.

63. Lena on October 2nd, 2006

    I was too young to know about S&G’s albums (I grew up hearing them on KRLA, so I just heard the singles). In a very simple way, this is the answer, I think, to “Sounds of Silence” in many ways. Instead of the alienated ‘lonely crowd’ masses in the night, we have one person showing care and concern for another, empathy even. “I’ll take your part.” Like “Sounds” it is a nocturnal song, but now there is another to sing to, and not just darkness itself; if it a hymn, it is a hymn to this one person, and not one of praise only but of promise. I hate to bring “Reach Out I’ll Be There” back in but in many ways, it shares the same urgency and sentiments, though it is slower, and more solitary.

    “Sail on silver girl” - I always took it as a moon metaphor, the moon shining in the sky (what song is that which has the lyric about looking at the moon and seeing you?) in the singer’s darkness, full and glowing.

    I don’t think this is hysterical as much as passionate, chivalric even. (”I will lay me down” not being a literal statement, but more like throwing down one’s life for another’s - sacrificing - in order to show how serious the singer is about what he feels. It’s a lot more than putting a cape on a puddle.) The ending is the weakest part of the song, I agree, and yes, it’s brilliant technically - building and building as the singer lets more and more emotion show. It builds up to the pitch of “Soul and Inspiration” and is as bold and unironic as that song.

64. FT's Doctor Mod on October 2nd, 2006

    KRLA? KRLA! My fave radio station during the British Invasion years!!

65. FT's wwolfe on October 2nd, 2006

    Lena, I think that’s “I’ll Be Seeing You”: “I’ll be looking at the moon/But I’ll be seeing you.” One of Johnny Carson’s two favorite songs, by the way (the other being “Here’s That Rainy Day”). And your take on “Bridge” is as good a defense as the record could get, I suspect.

    Appropos not much, except the passing reference above, I’ve always wanted to hear the Troggs do “Dangling Conversation.” Musically, it’s surprisingly like their type of three-chord wonder, and perhaps only Reg Presley’s voice could do justice to the couplets about Dickinson and Frost. Reg, in my version, would add “And the silence in the stairwell/And the shadows on the wall/And the morning sun is shining/Like a red rubber ball,” followed by a general musical freak-out to end things.

66. Lena on October 3rd, 2006

    Thanks, wwolfe!

    Doctor Mod, When I lived in Los Angeles I listened to KRLA a lot, KFI too. I must have listened to some fm station, but I can’t remember which…probably the one that had Dr. Demento on Sunday nights (and for all I know, still does).

67. Doctor Casino on October 3rd, 2006

    Bravo to Lean for encapsulating what I was trying to get at praising this song. S&G’s body of work as a whole is decidedly geared towards existential-crisis-suffering, alienated collegiate bohemians in their late teens or early twenties, in the winter. Music that speaks to their anxieties can be painfully specific and smarmy (again, our favorite whipping boy “The Dangling Conversation”) and certainly will never be the bottom-line of hip. But when Simon makes things just a little bit vaguer he can capture a larger “mood of a generation” (as on, say, “Still Crazy After All These Years”) or just simple, clear moments of emotional crisis point. The supportive, interrupted-suicide-in-December vibe of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is a logical approach to this. I think Simon nails the same idea much better on the same album with “The Only Living Boy In New York,” which is more approachable, more human-scale, more vulnerable in its blend of cavernous loneliness and unbreakable friendship.

    Or something like that, anyway.

    (And thanks to all who’ve discussed the Graceland/boycott issue, which I now understand WAY, way better than ever before.)

68. FT's Doctor Mod on October 3rd, 2006

    Lena,

    KFWB was the big LA rock station in the early 60s, but it turned to an all-news format by the end of the decade after being outdone first by KRLA and then KHJ. In the early 70s, I listened to KNAC (a small progressive station out of Long Beach), KRTH, KLOS, and KROQ. I’ve been on the East Coast for the past six years, so I don’t know what the stations are like today. KRTH became an oldies station–a latter day simulacrum of KHJ in the 60s and 70s (the more things change the more they stay the same). KROQ became one of the top alternative pop/rock stations of the 80s and 90s.

69. Lena on October 4th, 2006

    Thanks Doctors Casino and Mod!

    I vaguely remember KLOS and KROQ, and I think Dr Demento was on one of them, can’t remember which one though.

70. intothefireuk on October 4th, 2006

    Jeez that was a painfully long read (the whole thread). Sticking to just this song I agree it’s difficult to analyse such an over familiar song. In its original context (ie. 1970 on the radio) it didn’t move me and sounded too staid, unexciting and indeed hymal for me. However in the intervening years I have gradually warmed to it’s charms and I can appreciate the sentiment and style a little better. Whether this is due to my search for deeper meaning in my advancing years or due to its better standing against the increasingly banal content of the singles chart is debatable though. The production is excellent and Art’s vocal is exceptional & beautifully delivered. If I listen to it now it’s usually as the last track on an S&G compilation where it seems to fit perfectly.

    To the earlier comment about hysterical men - surely we are all entitled to the whole range of human emotions.

    As regards Graceland - I can’t stand it. It’s smarminess knows no bounds. I find Simon’s use of ‘world music’ to enhance his own far less appealing than say Peter Gabriel. I don’t believe the success of the album ultimately helped African music in general (although a couple of artists did benefit).

71. FT's Doctor Mod on October 12th, 2006

    surely we are all entitled to the whole range of human emotions

    Perhaps. But the people who must bear witness to unseemly emotionality are entitled to finding it unbearable.

72. James Parke on February 1st, 2007

    There is live video footage of them recording it together. You guys are just plain fucking stupid.

73. Marcello Carlin on February 1st, 2007

    Tom, can you ban the troll please?

74. Tom on February 1st, 2007

    Random sweary googlers aren’t trolls! I’ll ban abusive types who stick around (or politely direct them to the Pink Floyd album covers thread).

75. Marcello Carlin on February 1st, 2007

    The Floyd comments boxes have their own peculiar yet entrancing magic, it has to be said.

76. Al Ewing on February 1st, 2007

    Frankly, it’s time for an article saying that Pink Floyd were Emo.