Life on the Road
New albums rarely sell themselves, and the documentary shifts to Simon and Garfunkel hitting the road. We pick up with Paul Simon talking about how hard it was to look at the headlines and justify putting together an album while he felt the world was crumbling, but of course he went ahead and did it anyway.
We see the two of them wandering through a backstage area, with Art Garfunkel reciting a set list, and as the camera follows you get a sense of just how many people are involved putting on a concert. There are the backing musicians, of course, but tons more people too. Someone has to handle the wiring and lights and sound systems, set up the seats, carry the water, and who knows what else, and they all seem to be milling around. Simon and Garfunkel seem completely at ease here – all of the edginess and worry seems to have melted away.
And then they walk up to their mics and start singing Mrs. Robinson, they’re smiling, and they seem happy with each other. They’ve been singing the song with each other for years at this point, and it was all as comfortable as a properly broken in pair of shoes.
What follows is a hilarious little scene where Paul Simon is being interviewed by Charles Grodin, and Grodin, being his usual needling self, asks Simon if he’d like to be president someday. Simon plays along and says he would, trying hard to keep a straight face, and then asks Grodin why he’s smiling too, and eventually Simon gives up and just starts busting out in laughter.
Next is the selection of songs that CBS probably wished made up the entire special. We see Simon and Garfunkel in a hotel room improvising a new take of Feelin’ Groovy, the two going through the slog of travel between concerts, dubbed in with Simon singing Mystery Train.
And more! Fun live versions of For Emily Where I May Find Her, The Boxer (with a verse that never made the album), America, Homeward Bound, and The Sound of Silence.
The End
And so it ends. The music is genuinely wonderful, and because it’s live, you can almost feel yourself transported back to the closing days of the 1960s. And yet knowing what you know today, you also know how much had changed in just a few years, and how much would change in the few years to come.
Of course there were the images Charles Grodin had pushed of people who had been extinguished over such a short period of time, and the nearly incomprehensible escalation of the war in Southeast Asia. But you can also think back just five years before the documentary (just five years!) and see the first appearance of the Beatles in the US during their boy band days singing about how they wanna hold your hand.
As Simon and Garfunkel were laying down their careful harmonies and elaborate string backings in 1969, people like George Clinton and Iggy Pop were already starting to break off in completely different directions, and in five years (just five years!) The Ramones and early rap artists were going even farther.
Over a span of just ten years you went from the Beatles singing Love Me Do on the Ed Sullivan Show to Patti Smith singing Piss Factory, and right in the middle was Simon and Garfunkel. All of them great in their own way.
Songs of America closed, just like the album Bridge Over Troubled Water, with the lovely, simple Song for the Asking.
And with that, the show ended. CBS shut the door on a difficult episode, and all evidence was locked in a vault for decades. Some lovely music was buried because of some bits of footage that seem tame today, except to a cadre of hypersensitive hacks who are still at work today.
If there was any kind of uproar that AT&T and CBS feared, it doesn’t show up in any followup accounts. Grodin later spoke of being blasted before the broadcast by CBS that Southern affiliates would blow a gasket at scenes of integrated schools, but from all evidence in Southern newspapers at the time, nobody cared. A few ran wire copy from UPI noting Peggy Fleming’s special on NBC won the ratings competition. A Virginia paper ran a column using the special to argue “the beat generation” lacked strong conviction. And that was it.
I’d make a plug again to watch Songs of America at this link — it’s less than an hour, and you’ll get to a chance to revisit a slice of a maddening, exciting, interesting time.
And if you’re a fan of this kind of thing, I’d also recommend the documentary The Harmony Game, about the making of Bridge Over Troubled Water, which was released in 2011. It includes some of the footage from the 1969 documentary, as well as extensive interviews with much older and wiser versions of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, as well as studio musicians and producer Roy Hallee.
I certainly hadn’t meant to go into so much depth, but I was astonished that something like this could disappear for so long despite being such a great document of a group that is still deeply beloved today. It’s a strange, foreign thing, and yet has so many places where it connects to the world today. Hopefully, it sticks around.
…if that’s a wrap I’d just like to repeat that I really have enjoyed these…so…at the risk of taking liberties…I’d been thinking of suggesting that there’s a whole set of documentaries about the blues that have different directors & focus on different things but were “collected” under the heading “scorsese presents: the blues”…I’d offer to lend you my copy but that seemed…impractical…so I went to see how easy they were to come by &…the results are a little confusing
…apparently PBS would happily send you one for $140
https://www.pbs.org/theblues/bluesshop.html
…but someone told me they saw one in a charity shop the other day for a fiver…either way I’d be up for more of this sort of thing?
Thanks for reference. It’s the kind of thing my library would have in their AV collection so I’ll take a look.
…hope you enjoy them…I thought they were pretty great…not entirely the same sort of thing as the simon & garfunkel effort…the joni mitchell thing from the BBC I muttered about previously is probably a nearer fit for that…but they were really interesting & I don’t think there was a bum note in the box, one way or another
“charity shop for a fiver.” Excellent. I miss the UK so much.
Did I tell you [OH GOD NO] that at the poverty clinic I go to, with the revolving cast of residents, I last saw a very handsome young doc with a very beautiful British accent. I said, “You have a very beautiful accent. Where are you from, if you don’t mind telling me?” And he said, “Stoke-on-Trent, which most people just drive right by on their way to Manchester…”
So I’ve never been to Manchester but I’ve been to Stoke-on-Trent (and to Wigan; that’s an experience) and I thought, “That’s not how people in Stoke-on-Trent speak, if I’m remembering it correctly.” So blah blah, I was with the guy for two hours, and I asked, “Where did you go to medical school?” “Oxford. I gentrified myself.”
I wanted to give him a high-five because I basically did the same thing (stateside) so I thought we could bond over that but the appt. was running so long as it was. I’ll be seeing him again in a couple of weeks as a follow-up to the follow-up/post-discharge appt. we’ve already had.
…there’s a thing called “estuary english” which sort of filled the spot that used belong to “received pronunciation” around the same time it became important for oxbridge & its ilk to not look so elitist as to appear entirely out of step with the times…& the voices you heard on the BBC started to drift northward in their accents
…coincidentally it used to be that in the same way that a posh accent bought you an unconscious bias towards being taken for intelligent…a thing existed where almost the more northern your accent/dialect the more people assumed you were honest
…but I’m sure that had nothing to do with the beeb waving good bye to strict adherence to the queen’s (as was) english…perish the thought
…always wondered if there was any work done on US regional accents in a similar vein…because it sometimes seems that way to me with some of the ones most associated with the urban/rural divide…but I don’t trust my feel for it?
When I was in college I had a friend who was doing some class in linguistics and as a project he had people listen to tapes of people speaking. Simple things, like the Pledge of Allegiance. I was one of his test subjects.
So he played a tape and a woman with a thick Southern accent started speaking and when it was over he asked me what I thought about it. “She sounds likes a hillbilly. Is she allowed to vote?”
And he laughed and said, “That’s my mother, who has a Master’s from Vanderbilt.” Oops. God, I can’t believe I remember all this stuff 40 years later.
I quite like when people get obsessed with stuff and then write about it.
I wish I could have come up with a word that meant “obsessed” without the negative connotations. Thanks @bluedogcollar
Obsessed is fine here. I’d even suggest watching the doc, It’s sort of like digging up photos of your parents when they were young and trying to make sense of the people and the time.
I watched it right after you first wrote about it.
Excellent! Now you can write a 12 part reaction!
One of the little bits of trivia I picked up is that Paul Simon would often start writing songs with nonsense syllables as placeholders, and then never get around to replacing them. Mrs. Robinson is full of them, starting from the very beginning to the final hey hey hey.
🤣🤣🤣