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Simon and Garfunkel

Ganesh

03:01 / 17.07.04

They were apparently having some sort of reunion concert in Hyde Park this evening. I looked for tickets on eBay, but seems it all happened too fast for ticket sales. Pity.

Simon and Garfunkel occupy an odd - but prominent - place in my musical firmament. My parents must've been into them during the '70s, because I remember growing up with their lyrics, almost as soon as I could understand language. The words and melody to "I'd rather be a hammer than a nail" are imprinted at some primal level. Their stuff touches me on an emotional level just sli-i-ightly beyond my powers of description. Much of it can reduce me to tears, usually happy ones.

Does anyone else feel this way about a) Simon & Garfunkel, or b) parentally-indoctrinated music?

grant

03:43 / 17.07.04

Every few years I discover some song by them I'd never heard, and realize what a great song it is.
I have a deep crush on "For Emily, Whenever I Find Her," too.

fluid_state

07:32 / 17.07.04

Heard it all my life, through my dad. Always liked "Graceland", great travelling music. Always hated Paul Simon though, probably because he was "dad's music", or maybe because he was billed with a guy named "Garfunkel"(whose name is like the German opposite of cynical hipsterism). That loathing vanished when I saw Paul Simon on the Muppet Show. Now, he's part of the modern pantheon of musical genius for me. when Floyd and Hot Lips can cover one of your songs and make it sound... grittier, you've reached a level of songwriting that vaguely approximates a Grand Unified Theory of Existence.

Spatula Clarke

10:51 / 17.07.04

Always liked "Graceland", great travelling music. Always hated Paul Simon though, probably because he was "dad's music"

Graceland is a Paul Simon album. Carbuncle wasn't anything to do with it.

Psi-L is working in hell

11:21 / 17.07.04

Damn it Ganesh...I was trying to get rid of two tickets for the concert on ebay and they didn't sell!! where were you???

ended up having to sell them to a tout on the way in for no money at all...

I actually took my dad to see this concert, which kind of answers the question above really...I've always equated their music with my father's tastes...but over the last year I've realised just how much of my music tastes have come to be the same as his, and in fact half my music collection probably resembles his from the sixties and early seventies with so much Joni Mitchell and Beatles and S and G.

So now listening to things like Graceland, which used to remind me of sitting in the back of the car going on hoilday with my parents feel part of my current life and are attached to recent memories, so have less nostalgia than they used to.

The concert btw was amazing....when they started humming the intro to 'America' I got shivers....

Psi-L is working in hell

11:24 / 17.07.04

Ok...re-reading this thread again....the concert was Thursday evening...which may explain why there were no tix on ebay!

Sax

07:38 / 19.07.04

Ganesh: Yes, yes, yes. Always loved S&G and always because they were always on the old turntable at the parental home when I was a wee shite.

And "At the Zoo", which you;ve quoted from elsewhere - sublime song. Hamsters turn on frequently indeed.

Loomis

15:29 / 22.07.04

Oh yes I adore them. My parents didn't have their albums, but they always listened to an easy listening music station which I hated while growing up but it definitely made its mark on my musical taste, from S & G to Burt Bacharach and others in between.

Too many great songs to mention really. Their "best of" is a winner from beginning to end. The tunes are ace but the intelligence of some of the lyrics which he still manages to sculpt into complex rhyming patterns still gets me. Like these gems from the Dangling Conversation: "We speak of things that matter, in words that must be said: can analysis be worthwhile? Is the theatre really dead?" Geinus. "And you read your Emily Dickinson, and I my Robert Frost, and we note our page with bookmarkers that measured what we've lost." Ah!

grant

18:31 / 22.07.04

Actually, I think what I like best is their way of doing that, then just cutting it all back to something really stark and simple.

Like, I'll every now and again stop whatever I'm doing and sing the line, "And the moon... rose... over an open field..." just because it's a great moment.

Loomis

06:57 / 23.07.04

Yeah I really like that moment as well. He's a very agile writer is our Paul, able to skip from simple to complex and back again, which I think makes him able to present such plaintive moments without being schmaltzy.

Ganesh

07:15 / 23.07.04

*sigh*

Yes, 'America', one of my favourites. I love that moment too, along with "'Kathy, I'm lost,' I said, though I knew she was sleeping".

Right, I'm gonna indulge myself in a real orgy of S&G rediscovery...

Mourne Kransky

19:17 / 23.07.04

S&G night chez nous tonight, just the biz! Wish we'd got tickets but life is full of regret. Sadly, I'm old enough to have bought their stuff when it came out first time around and my parents were still listening to Jim Reeves and the Alexander Brothers. Had my first (heterosexual) shag to "America". Still cry whenever I hear it, as I did tonight. There were times when I felt so lonesome I took some comfort there, lai la lai...

Ganesh

19:41 / 23.07.04

Erm... but that's 'The Boxer'...

Mourne Kransky

01:54 / 24.07.04

And? Your point was? What a tosser. Don't know how you guys put up with him. Life, I love you, all is groovy.

Ganesh

02:47 / 24.07.04

Xoc, you're two steps away from the cunty line...

Haus of Mystery

22:16 / 24.07.04

Yes - was just talking about how much I love S&G earlier today. Weird how many of us have experienced the Parents - Car - S&G axis in our formative years. I distinctly remember looking up at the lights along the motorway at night, driving back from some obscure relatives house with the 'Live from Central Park' album on.

iconoplast

03:36 / 25.07.04

Slightly off topic, but I had always wondered about the 'kicking along the cobblestones' line in the 59th St Bridge song - since there are no cobblestones on the 59th Street bridge.

Then, today, I drove under it.

And there they were.

Ganesh

09:16 / 25.07.04

Do the lamp-posts have flowers growing?

Jack The Bodiless

18:20 / 25.07.04

I don't relly get a), but b), how parentally indoctrinated music can hit you on a level you'd almost forgotten you had... my dad used to play Gerry Rafferty and Dire Straits a hell of a lot in the car on the way to holidays all over the country. 'Island', by the former, and 'Tunel Of Love', by the latter, can still reduce me to unreasoning smushed Jack whenever I listen to them...

Haus of Mystery

19:19 / 25.07.04

Perhaps the white noise hum of motorway driving induces a narcotic stupour in children that leaves them wide open to the influences of their parents MOR musical taste. Hence my unreasonable fondness for Richard Marx's 'Hazzard'.

Ganesh

20:01 / 25.07.04

Possibly. As a result, I know by heart the greater works of the Beach Boys, the Carpenters, the Mamas and the Papas, S&G, Neil Diamond and, erm, Boney M.

Regrettable Juvenilia

20:39 / 25.07.04

We had a thread once about the music your parents used to play in the car, and it's weird how the same names or even specific tunes tend to come up again and again. I second Del Amitri and 'Hazard', but 'cos my dad was a bit of a yuppie I unfortunately have to add some Sade and Robert Palmer. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Haus of Mystery

11:45 / 26.07.04

I don't think I've ever heard Sade OUTSIDE of a car.

Goodness Gracious Meme

22:58 / 03.08.04

ahhh, yes.

S&G. Bridge Over Troubled Water can still make me teary, and my love for them is definitely at that level you talk about, nesh.

They're just so evocative of childhood/car journeys/family life that hearing them is like being dunked in an emotion bath.... I know the words to far more S&G songs than of anything I've ever chosen to listen to myself as a teen/adult.

Mmm.

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping...

Mmm.

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you

The love survives a guy I knew at college inventing a hilarious rendition of 'Cecilia', replacing C with my name...and singing it at me for two years... arghhh.

Goodness Gracious Meme

23:06 / 03.08.04

but, just to prove it ain't all cosy memory, I too am benighted by knowing far more of the oeuvre of Boney M than is reasonable. See also Nat King Cole and Nana Mouskouri.

Show me your motion
Tra la la la la
Come on show me your motion
Tra la la la la la
Show me your motion
Tra la la la la
She looks like a sugar in a plum
Plum plum

Ganesh

09:34 / 04.08.04

That would, one assumes, be the scat version?

Sax

19:27 / 06.08.04

I don't often laugh out loud at Barbelith. Actually, I do often laugh out loud at Barbelith, but not often as loud as I just did.

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