FEATURE:
Keep the Customer Satisfied
Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water at Fifty-Five
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THERE are a couple of…
good reasons to talk about Simon & Garfunkel’s fifth and final studio album, Bridge Over Trouble Water. Released on 26th January, 1970, it followed the duo’s soundtrack for The Graduate. Whilst Art Garfunkel was acting and had a role in Catch-22, Paul Simon wrote the soundtrack songs for The Graduate. Alongside producer Roy Halee, a masterpiece was released in 1970 with Bridge Over Troubled Water. Following similar musical ground to Bookends (1968), there were different genres and musical elements added. If the duo were more Folk/Folk Rock on previous albums, they introduced Rock, Pop, R&B and Gospel into their final album together. As it is coming up to its fifty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to spend some time with Bridge Over Troubled Water. With the title track, Cecilia, So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Boxer and The Only Living Boy in New York, this was a magnificent swansong for the duo. Paul Simon wrote all tracks bar Bye Bye Love (the best-known version is from the Everly Brothers). After the album came out, both artists took a more independent route. Art Garfunkel continued acting whilst Paul Simon continued songwriting. His 1972 eponymous album was the first solo release after Bridge Over Troubled Water. I will come to a feature that highlights the impact and political roots of Bridge Over Trouble Water’s title track. This feature is also worth reading. I want to start with a feature from Consequence from 2020. They write why it is one of the most poetic music farewells ever. A perfect way to sign off their recorded partnership:
“By the time Bridge Over Troubled Water arrived on January 26, 1970, Simon & Garfunkel had cemented themselves as arguably the supreme pairing in American popular music. After all, their prior four studio albums contained a multitude of enduring pieces — “A Hazy Shade of Winter”, “Bookends Theme”, “The Sounds of Silence”, “Mrs. Robinson”, and one of the chief compositions of the last century, “Scarborough Fair/Canticle “, among them —that demonstrated virtually unmatched songwriting, singing, social consciousness, and eclectic instrumentation. Although they’ve undoubtedly inspired countless proteges in their wake, there has never been and will never be another Simon & Garfunkel, and their last studio effort together is perhaps the greatest goodbye they could’ve delivered.
To be fair, they didn’t go into the studio with producer Roy Halee knowing that it’d be there swan song; still, it seemed the inevitable outcome considering how tense their partnership had become since 1968’s Bookends. A primary catalyst was Garfunkel’s role in Mike Nicholas’ adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which took longer to film than expected. As the making-of-documentary The Harmony Game reveals, Simon was a bit frustrated by that — especially since he was supposed to be in it, too — and with other creative frustrations mounting behind the scenes, it was almost inevitable that they’d break up by 1971. Nevertheless, Bridge Over Troubled Water, like many other finales from influential artists (namely, The Beatles’ Let It Be), symbolized the end of both the group and a large part of the cultural and political zeitgeists they represented.
As usual, Simon & Garfunkel enlisted plenty of noteworthy Wrecking Crew musicians to flesh out the LP, including bassist Joe Osborn, guitarist Fred Carter, Jr., drummer Hal Blaine, and keyboardist Larry Knechtel. In addition, Los Incas provided Peruvian instruments, Charlie McCoy added bass harmonica, Buddy Harman filled in other percussive roles, and Jon Faddis, Randy Brecker, Lew Soloff, and Alan Rubin bolstered some brass. Thus, Simon & Garfunkel had possibly their largest and most diverse arsenal of musicians yet to complement their already exquisite voices, complex guitar playing (at least from Simon), and internal sense of melody and structure. Together, they created an immensely varied sequence in terms of both arrangements and tonal shifts, infusing their folk-rock base with many other styles.
Honestly, there’s not much to say about the creation of Peter Powell’s front and back photos. However, there’s plenty to analyze when they’re taken in context and retrospection. Whereas the prior Simon & Garfunkel records featured the duo looking straight at the camera — and thus, at the listener — in various degrees of whimsical welcoming, Bridge Over Trouble Water finds them more world weary and disconnected. Specifically, Simon no longer looks boyish and innocent; instead, he seems more matured, unkempt, and disinterested, looking past the camera to imply that he’s already prepared to carry on with other ventures. While Garfunkel remains focused on the viewer, it’s only his eyes that convey any expression, and frankly, he looks deadly serious, if not a bit sullen. As for the imagery on the back, it’s an interesting parallel to the front of Sounds of Silence in that both feature them walking somewhere. Yet, they seem united and eager on Sounds of Silence, inviting us to tag along on their journey. On the other hand, Simon is literally slumped and pushing Garfunkel out of frame on the blue back of Bridge Over Troubled Water, perhaps implying that they’re both already “over it.”
In any case, the album was a critical and commercial triumph upon release. It peaked on nearly a dozen charts internationally — including ones in the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Norway, and Germany — and dominated as the best-selling album of 1970, 1971, and 1972. Concerning America’s Billboard 200, it hung on for nearly 100 weeks; curiously, it stayed CBS Records’ top seller for over a decade, too, only to be overthrown by Michael Jackson’s seminal Thriller in 1982. Eventually, it was awarded 8 x Platinum by the RIAA and has since sold over 30 million copies. By and large, it was received positively by the press, too, although some publications (such as Melody Maker) expressed criticism as well. It won two Grammy Awards in 1971 (for Album of the Year and Best Engineered Record), with the title track also winning for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Instrumental Arrangement of the Year, and Contemporary Song of the Year. Of course, countless major magazines have since extolled its merits, with Rolling Stone and The Times rightfully including it on their modern lists of the best albums of all time.
Speaking of Bridge Over Troubled Water’s subsequent treatment, it’s been reissued countless times over the years and across the globe. Sadly, the only way to hear one of its most famous rejected tunes, “Cuba Si, Nixon No” (a Chuck Berry-esque rocker), is through miscellaneous bootlegs. In a 2016 article for Rolling Stone, Andy Greene called it a “lighthearted take on Cuba’s political situation” before referring to an interview with Simon from 1972, in which he states, “Art didn’t want to do it … We even cut the track for it. Artie wouldn’t sing on it. And Artie wanted to do a Bach chorale thing, which I didn’t want to do.” That “Bach chorale thing” turned out to be “Feuilles-O”, a short but sweet and harmonious ode sung in French and with minimal accompaniment from acoustic guitar. Thankfully, it’s available on few newer versions of the sequence.
Unquestionably, it houses some of the pair’s most joyous and lively compositions. Its third selection, “Cecilla”, offers a hooky, bouncy, and slightly sophomoric account of romantic misbehavior that virtually all listeners can empathize with. (Reportedly, Simon also penned it about his deeper issues with the limelight and songwriting.) Its natural percussion and assorted backing vocals also point to the World music influence he’d later explore. Likewise, their take on Felice and Boudleaux Bryant’s “Bye Bye Love” is simple and tasteful, evoking The Everly Brothers’ more well-known interpretation and while calling back to their days as Tom & Jerry. Elsewhere, “Keep the Customer Satisfied” is a purposeful regression into Big Band and rockabilly that’s quite fun and light, whereas “Baby Driver” focuses its airy rock and roll atmosphere on a youth who desires sexual adventure after being raised in a conservative home. There’s even a faint Reggae edge to the carefree folk of “Why Don’t You Write me?”
As strong as those are, it’s Bridge’s ballads and more serious staples that reign supreme and cement Simon’s legacy as a master of relatable and evocative songwriting. With its gospel proclivities and focus on orchestral embellishments, sobering piano chords, and Garfunkel’s angelic lone voice, the opening title track is like their version of “Let It Be” in that it’s a hopeful yet bittersweet recognition of the enchantment they shared with fans. (Outside of that, it was inspired by Simon’s then-wife, Peggy, and the racial tensions that plagued America at the time.) It’s an absolutely gorgeous and gratifying statement whose agelessness and universality has been celebrated through covers by Fiona Apple, Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, and Willie Nelson, among others.
Fifty years later, Bridge Over Troubled Water is every bit as impactful, endearing, prophetic, and daring. It signifies everything that made Simon & Garfunkel such a special and significant act while also ranking as one of the most long-lasting and culturally resonant musical statements of its period. From its softest and emptiest segments to its most full-bodied and daring moments, Bridge Over Troubled Water still overflows with one-of-a-kind brilliance”.
Prior to moving on to a couple of reviews for the 1970 masterpiece, I want to highlight a feature from the BBC. It is about the superb and emotional title track from Bridge Over Trouble Water. It is an amazing song that many people do not talk about in terms of deeper roots. Often associated with being this ballad that is a little saccharine. Bridge Over Troubled Water deserves more:
“On the evening of 30 November 1969, the silver-haired actor Robert Ryan introduced CBS viewers in the US to a buzzkill of historic proportions: Simon and Garfunkel’s first ever TV special. “These two young men have attracted a tremendous following among the youth of America with their lyrical interpretation of the world we live in,” said Ryan, who was a genuine fan. “We think you will find the next hour both entertaining and stimulating.”
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel certainly hoped so. According to executive producer Robert Drew, Simon talked about using the primetime opportunity as a Trojan horse for “a home movie about where he thought the nation was”. Directed by actor Charles Grodin, Songs of America used the duo’s hits to soundtrack footage of riots, marches and the war in Vietnam, much to the horror of sponsors AT&T, who demanded their $600,000 investment back. Even more sympathetic viewers found the movie’s earnest sermonising hard to swallow.
We first meet Simon and Garfunkel in the back of a car. Coming off the back of four hit albums and two number one singles in four years, the 27-year-old superstars are not overburdened with humility. When Garfunkel brings up the subject of America’s imminent bicentennial, a camera-conscious Simon gazes into the distance and asks solemnly: “Think it’s gonna make it?” This mood of pensive pomposity comes to dominate the film, as Simon frets: “What’s the point of this album? The world is crumbling”, and Garfunkel less coherently ponders “the chaos of what the hell is the whole thing about”.
They did have a point. Songs of America was screened on the eve of the country’s first draft lottery since World War Two, amid the years of the My Lai massacre, the Manson murders, the Days of Rage demonstrations in Chicago and the anti-Vietnam War March Against Death in Washington DC. But the average CBS viewer didn’t want to see the world crumbling. The heaviest sequence was a dark twist on the film’s travelogue theme, juxtaposing clips of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King on the campaign trail with footage of mourners watching Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train go by. The musical accompaniment was unfamiliar: a kind of white gospel song, stately and hymn-like, building to a shattering climax as the long black train sped through America’s broken heart. One million viewers responded by turning the dial and watching the figure skating on NBC instead. Some sent hate mail. Songs of America wouldn’t be seen again for over 40 years. This was the US public’s inauspicious introduction to what would become one of the defining songs of the 1970s and beyond: Bridge Over Troubled Water.
‘My greatest song’
While writing songs for the duo’s fifth album in the spring of 1969, Simon had borrowed an old Swan Silvertones album from the musician Al Kooper. Listening to the gospel group’s version of the 19th-Century spiritual Oh Mary Don’t You Weep over and over again in his Upper East Side apartment, Simon was thunderstruck by a line improvised by lead singer Claude Jeter: “I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name.” Simon grabbed his guitar, sketched out some gospel chords, and began writing his own song around that image. (Two years later, he was introduced to Jeter and wrote him a cheque on the spot.) Actually, it didn’t feel like he was actively writing it, more that it was flowing through him. Something about the sturdy grace of the melody and the Biblical register of “I will lay me down” made it seem as if the song had been around forever.
The melody and lyrics weren’t quite right yet but Simon knew that Bridge Over Troubled Waters (as it was then called) was “exceptional” even as he wondered if the words were “too simple”. On songs such as The Sound of Silence, Mrs Robinson and America, he used characters, narratives and vividly precise imagery to map national unease onto personal anxiety. The uncharacteristically timeless, universal language of Bridge Over Troubled Water really does seem to hail from somewhere else. The celebrated New Orleans musician Allen Toussaint liked to say: “That song had two writers: Paul Simon and God.” Fortunately, God wasn’t registered with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
The opening line about feeling weary and small was personal. While Simon was in New York writing songs, Garfunkel was off in Mexico appearing in Mike Nichols’ movie Catch-22 with his new Hollywood friends, including Charles Grodin. Simon felt abandoned, taken for granted. He was therefore feeling hypersensitive when Garfunkel finally reconnected with him in Los Angeles in June and heard the demo. Paul thought that only Artie’s choirboy voice could do justice to the song but Artie liked the sound of Paul’s falsetto and hesitated before agreeing to front the song. Garfunkel meant it as a compliment; Simon took it as a snub. Such was the state of their partnership in 1969. When Robert Drew first sat down with the duo he came away thinking that the film would be “Simon and Garfunkel’s last stand”.
Recording the song began in August 1969 in Hollywood, where producer Roy Halee gathered the elite session musicians known as the Hollywood Golden Trio: drummer Hal Blaine, bassist Joe Osborn and keyboardist Larry Knechtel. It was Knechtel’s challenging job to translate the music from guitar to piano according to Simon’s paradoxical brief: “Paul wanted it to be gospel but not gospel,” he recalled. Simon imagined that Bridge Over Troubled Water would be a “little hymn” but Garfunkel and Halee insisted that the song needed to be immense. It therefore needed a third verse, which Simon dashed off in the studio. It opened with a message to his wife-to-be Peggy Harper, who had recently fretted about finding her first grey hairs: “Sail on, silver girl.”
Garfunkel wanted the song to start quietly and gradually build to a transcendent finale in the vein of Phil Spector’s work with The Righteous Brothers — “like an airplane taking off”. Simon wasn’t sure about the bombastic strings (nor the fact that arranger Ernie Freeman had paid so little attention to the lyrics that the sheet music was titled Like a Pitcher of Water) but he had to admit that it sounded undeniable. Once the music was wrapped, Garfunkel recorded his showstopping vocal in New York in November. Simon, at Garfunkel’s insistence, wasn’t in the room.
Several songs from the Bridge Over Troubled Water album were debuted on a short tour that autumn and Bridge Over Troubled Water left audiences breathless. It may feel overfamiliar now but imagine being in the crowd one night in November 1969, hearing Garfunkel say: “This is also one of our new songs. It’s called Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and then hearing that for the first time. And imagine being Paul Simon, waiting in the wings with a cigarette while the other guy got all the applause for his song. That shouldn’t have bugged him – it was his idea – but it did. “He felt like I should have done it,” Simon grumbled to Rolling Stone magazine four bitter years later. “And many times I’m sorry I didn’t do it.”
An instant classic
Despite the song’s warm reception, Simon and Garfunkel had absorbed the industry wisdom that long, stately ballads weren’t radio-friendly and proposed the jaunty Cecilia as the album’s taster single. But after the first album playback, Columbia Records president Clive Davis was adamant that this was no ordinary ballad. “I felt Cecilia would be a hit but Bridge was something more,” he told Simon’s biographer Robert Hilburn. “It was a landmark record.”
Davis was right. The song’s slow-burning arc became a virtue. Most hits made sense in snatches, overheard from a passing car radio, but Bridge Over Troubled Water held the listener spellbound: you had to hear the whole thing or else you’d miss the payoff. Released on 20 January 1970, it held the top spot for six weeks in the US and three in the UK. Hard on the single’s heels, the album was a goliath: 10 weeks at number one; six Grammy awards; 25 million sales worldwide. In the UK, it occupied the top of the charts for an astonishing 35 weeks over an 18-month period. It just kept coming back”.
I am going to round off with a couple of reviews. The first is from Pitchfork. In 2011, they reviewed a reissue of Bridge Over Troubled Water:
“This diverse album contains the roots of Paul Simon's subsequent incorporation of African and South American rhythms into astute pop songs, especially "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)". The tune is hundreds of years old, but Simon came to it via a contemporary Peruvian group called Los Incas. He wrote new English lyrics about the rural versus the urban, and he and Garfunkel sang them over the original instrumental track. Especially coming after the grandiose gospel of the title track, the song sounds both exotic and humble. Later, "Keep the Customer Satisfied" swells with gargantuan blasts of brass, "Baby Driver" revs up some R&B sax, and "Cecilia" sounds impossibly infectious with its pennywhistle solo and handclap/thighslap percussion. Despite the breadth of sound-- and despite the splintering of their relationship-- Bridge sounds like a unified statement enlivened by styles and rhythms not often heard on pop radio at the juncture of those two decades.
The album cuts on Bridge hold up arguably better than the singles-- or maybe it's just that we've all heard the title track and side-two opener "The Boxer" so many times, while songs like "Keep the Customer Satisfied" and "Baby Driver" still sound less familiar, and therefore full of surprises. Especially on this subtle remastering, Bridge reveals a surfeit of strange, exciting sonic details, as Simon, Garfunkel, and co-producer Roy Halee insert small flourishes of sound, such as the disruptive skiffle beat on "Why Don't You Write Me" or the audience rhythm section on the live version of "Bye Bye Love". The title track derives its outsize drama not only from Garfunkel's intense, measured vocals but also from the resonating percussion, which mimics the echoing crack of sound against a cathedral wall. Thanks to the echo-chambered vocals, disembodied organ, and Joe Osborn's melodically prominent bass, "The Only Living Boy in New York" sounds practically weightless, as if Manhattan were as lonely and desolate as the moon. Even after it's been Zach Braff'ed, the song still retains its considerable evocative power and remains one of the most natural and surprising juxtapositions of sonics and sentiment in Simon's catalog.
"The Only Living Boy in New York" conjures a very specific sense of melancholy abandonment, which makes it a companion to the title track's pledge of steady friendship and devotion. In some ways, Bridge sounds like a chronicle of Simon and Garfunkel's career and collaboration over the years, especially the album-ending send-off. The live "Bye Bye Love" reveals a greater kinship with the Everly Brothers than with Dylan, and an even stronger engagement with their audience; clapping a massive backbeat and yelling along with the song, that rambunctious crowd in Ames, Iowa, remains one of their most intuitive collaborators. As the noise dies down, the quiet "Song for the Asking" adds a brief epilogue that reveals their simple mission "to make you smile." It's a modest close to both the album and the musical collaboration between these two old friends.
Instead of non-album cuts from those same sessions (some of which have been compiled previously), this edition adds a DVD with a television special from 1969 and a new making-of, which emphasize the duo's social awareness and sonic innovations, respectively. Directed by Garfunkel's Catch-22 co-star Charles Grodin and airing on CBS in 1969, "Songs of America" mixes live footage with political rallies and American landscapes, depicting Bridge as a response to the heavily politicized turmoil of the preceding decade. Simon & Garfunkel ponder the ramifications of Vietnam and Woodstock, MLK and RFK, Cesar Chavez and the Poor People's March. At that time such political images were extremely controversial, especially coming from such seemingly nonthreatening folkies as Simon & Garfunkel, and the show was a commercial failure, beaten in the ratings by a Peggy Fleming ice-skating special. But today it plays as a highly instructive time capsule, offering entrée into that era and a valuable glimpse at the duo's chemistry while hinting at their conflicts.
This edition presents Bridge as an end-of-an-era document, that era being both the 1960s and their career together. Instead of acrimony, however, we get devotion and bonhomie, as Simon gives Garfunkel good songs to sing and Garfunkel sings them so well. Perhaps because it never addresses their restlessness or any particular social issue too directly, the album proves both visionary and revisionary, as the two ponder both their own and their country's past while looking ahead to new musical adventures. That Simon & Garfunkel split up shortly after recording this album only makes the sentiments more fleeting and the songs more affecting, lending them a timeless quality that transcends genre and generation”.
I will end with a review from AllMusic. One of the greatest albums of all time, it is worth considering and evaluating as it turns fifty-five on 26th January. A whole new generation should pick it up. For those who have not heard the album in a while, you need to pick it up:
“Bridge Over Troubled Water was one of the biggest-selling albums of its decade, and it hasn't fallen too far down on the list in years since. Apart from the gospel-flavored title track, which took some evolution to get to what it finally became, however, much of Bridge Over Troubled Water also constitutes a stepping back from the music that Simon & Garfunkel had made on Bookends -- this was mostly because the creative partnership that had formed the body and the motivation for the duo's four prior albums literally consumed itself in the making of Bridge Over Troubled Water. The overall effect was perhaps the most delicately textured album to close out the 1960s from any major rock act. Bridge Over Troubled Water, at its most ambitious and bold, on its title track, was a quietly reassuring album; at other times, it was personal yet soothing; and at other times, it was just plain fun. The public in 1970 -- a very unsettled time politically, socially, and culturally -- embraced it; and whatever mood they captured, the songs matched the standard of craftsmanship that had been established on the duo's two prior albums. Between the record's overall quality and its four hits, the album held the number one position for two and a half months and spent years on the charts, racking up sales in excess of five million copies. The irony was that for all of the record's and the music's appeal, the duo's partnership ended in the course of creating and completing the album”.
Recently, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel seem to have reunited. After years of silence, they appear to have built a bridge. It would be amazing if they performed together and revisited songs from their final album. Whilst some would argue Bookends is a more consistent and stronger album, there is this weight and significance to Bridge Over Troubled Water. The incredible songs on Simon & Garfunkel’s fifth and final studio album still sounds relevant and powerful…
AFTER all of these years.