I’m a fan of S&G’s music but I read somewhere, or saw somewhere, that there was a line in the song and Paul Simon didn’t like it. Apparently he loathed it so much that he hated to sing the entire song, just because of that one line.
But I don’t know which line that is. Do you know?
Google search for the lyrics ➜ lyrics sounds of silence - Google Search
I’m not sure this answers your question but it seems on point enough that you might find it interesting:
I don’t know about The Sound of Silence but I have read that Simon somewhat resented a producer’s suggestion to make Bridge Over Troubled Water a “big” song by adding echo, a full orchestra, and the “sail on, Silver Girl” third verse.
I don’t know which line that would be, but I recently saw Steven Colbert’s interview with Paul Simon in which Colbert asked if Simon could play one set of his favorite songs that he wrote, which songs would he choose? Simon’s list:
Graceland
Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard
Late in the Evening
Mother and Child Reunion
Sound of Silence
The Boxer
Still Crazy After All These Years
So apparently he didn’t hate a particular line enough to hate the song.
Here’s the interview. The question comes at about 13:06.
“Hello darkness, my old friend…” apparently sounded preposterous to the kind of people whose opinion Paul Simon really cared about; the Greenwich Village coffee house regulars.
In between sessions for the album, Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke — Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing “Hello darkness, my old friend”, for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance — though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn’t been laughing at them, specifically, he’d just had a fit of the giggles — and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan.
Okay, this is hearsay, but I’ve heard it a lot: Simon had a simmering jealousy of Garfunkel’s singing voice and his charm. If that’s true, I can imagine that he didn’t want Art to have this gem: a power ballad that was sure to become, as it did, his signature song. Like, don’t forget who wrote it, yanno?
As for SoS, never heard that he didn’t like it. But I wore out the Concert in Central Park album, back in the day, so I can still hear the faint voice in the crowd: “Sound of Silennnnnnce!” They played it, and “Ten thousand people, maybe more” got a huge cheer.
I can hear that too.
@Whack-a-Mole thanks for the article, and I found and just downloaded the old acoustic version of the song. It is hauntingly beautiful.
YouTube ➜ https://youtu.be/3ihnmAsVyLI
My OP is incomplete because while I think the lyric line is in Sound of Silence, I’m not certain that’s the song he was talking about. It might be a different song. Sorry, guys, if I’m asking for a wild goose chase. That’s what I get for composing an OP while falling asleep.
Man, I really need to jump back into that podcast. So good.
The only thing that bugs me about Sound of Silence (are you listening Paul & Arty?) is the way the word “a” is emphasized in the line “neath the halo of A street lamp”.
mmm
I don’t know, if there was something in one of my songs I didn’t like I would just change it. It’s not written in stone.
Did they not realize that the ten thousand people, maybe more are… not portrayed in a positive light, shall we say?
I thought it was just that he hated Garfunkel for riding his coat tales, sharing in the royalties for songs for which Simon was the almost exclusive creative force, and so contributing nothing but his voice/instrumentation to the hits that would bear his name alongside Simon’s forever.
Garfunkel was Ringo Starr to Simon’s rest of the Beatles.
I’ve long wondered at this. Shortly after cheering, they all got called “fools”.
First thing I thought of:
From Mr Lovenstein.
That was the same quibble Steven Sondheim had with Leonard Bernstein over the line “There’s A place for us.”
That was a pretty major contribution. Would Simon ever have succeeded in taking off without it?
By the time he went on his own he was already famous. But it was the duo together who became famous.
(I don’t expect this is actually an answerable question. We don’t have an Alternate Universes Scope.)
A recurring (for the audience) gag in Inside Llewelyn Davis is that he would not have.
And FWIW, The Beatles wouldn’t have succeeded without a drummer, either. But it’s easy to see how someone could resent doing the lion’s share of the creative work as part of a duo (or quartet), especially if their share of the revenue and the fame doesn’t reflect that mismatch, and/or if they are effectively anchored to their less industrious companion to the point that they cannot rise without him and may well fall as they do (didn’t Garfunkel, for example, want to run off and try to make it as an actor? Which was only possible in the first place due to the fame his partnership with Simon afforded him?).
Because of course while Simon did have some success on his own, it was nothing like what he had under the Simon & Garfunkel banner.
Yeah! He’s not a rock, for Pete’s sake!
I assume you meant “Garfunkel” there, not “Simon”.
No, I meant Simon.
Garfunkel is a hack. The point is, Simon was the main talent in the duo (almost all of it), and yet much of his success hinged on whether and to what extent Garfunkel was willing to be carried by him.
ETA: Come to think of it, I wonder if the song Simon can’t stand is Mrs. Robinson. Because it was originally supposed to be Mrs. Roosevelt, but then Garfunkel offered it up to the producers of The Graduate when Simon was behind on composing, and the producers insisted on re-wording it, thus making it somewhat of a jumbled mess (because WTF do all these mid-20th century icons have to do with the character of Mrs. Robinson in that movie?).
Would Garfunkel have gotten royalties? I thought Simon wrote all their material.