Simon and Garfunkel- Bridge Over Troubled Water 55th- Art Garfunkel
In January 1970, America’s Simon and Garfunkel followed up the sublime Bookends and its critical and commercial success with an even bigger blockbuster, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Containing no less than four Top Ten hits, there was “Cecilia”, “The Boxer”, “Baby Driver”, the South American folk song translated from the original Spanish “El Condor Pasa”, and the award-winning timeless classic “Bridge Over Troubled Water”.
Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water swept the 1971 Grammy Awards with six, including Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year for the title song. For many years the top-seller in recorded history, this iconic album ranks as #172 on Rolling Stone magazine’s “Top 500 Albums of All Time”, considerably higher #7 on the BBC’s all time list, and has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. Yet Bridge Over Troubled Water also contained the pithy Paul Simon song “Keep the Customer Satisfied”. Even before the proliferation of the internet, Art Garfunkel made this observation to me In the Studio in the early Nineties.
“In the last twenty years we’ve seen very, very few things that are conceived as NOT commercial enterprises. The truth is that rock’n’roll became a multi-billion business, and businessmen moved in on it,” the Columbia PhD (in mathematics!) reminded us. “You have to go back to that innocent time (pre-Woodstock Festival 1969) to get a little more of an innocent thing where music was the emphasis, and the love of a great record was the reason for the existence of many a tune. These were not calculated financial bids to make a profit,” Garfunkel stressed. “They were about ‘Let’s see how great the record can be’. Sure, the kids are gonna buy it, and this is commerce, but somehow that was not the focus. And since then we’ve seen the whole thing corporatize itself, to the great loss of the spirit of what it could be…When I think of those days (of making Bridge Over Troubled Water), everything was The Record and how wonderful it could be. And the fact that The Beatles were influencing us. I guess the money was not so big as to be intrusive.”
Art Garfunkel joined me In The Studio for this very rare classic rock interview marking Bridge Over Troubled Water‘s double-nickel anniversary.-Redbeard
