Simon Garfunkel Sound Of Silence Album

[Recaredo Latreche]

Thisviral Facebook post (which is not the first to offer this version of the untold story behind "The Sound of Silence") gave a generally accurate overview of Garfunkel and Greenberg's friendship. The two were college roommates, Garfunkel nicknamed himself "darkness" when talking to Greenberg after Greenberg went blind, and Greenberg provided financial support to help launch Garfunkel's career. However, there area two important facts that the text did not consider: First, the song "The Sound of Silence" was written by Paul Simon, not Garfunkel. And second, while it was possible that Greenberg inspired the line, "Hello darkness, my old friend," no credible evidence proved that that was the case.

Sanford "Sandy" Greenberg is an author, inventor, philanthropist, and chair of the board of governors of the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute. In 2020, he published a biography that borrowed its title, "Hello Darkness, My Old Friend," from the hit Simon & Garfunkel song, "The Sound of Silence."

As [Greenberg] despaired in darkness at his parents' house in Buffalo, N.Y., convinced he'd never make it through Columbia without sight, Garfunkel 'flew in, turned me around and said, 'I will help you.''

As Garfunkel devoted himself to being his friend's eyes, he would sometimes call himself Darkness. 'He divorced himself from the life he'd been living, altering his own ways to conform better to mine,' says Greenberg. 'Arthur would walk in and say, 'Sanford, Darkness is going to read you The Iliad.''

As noted in the viral post, Garfunkel also once "abandoned" his friend at New York's Grand Central Terminal in an attempt to show Greenberg that he could make it home by himself despite his blindness. (Garfunkel didn't actually abandon his friend. He simply remained quiet and watched as his friend navigated the train system.) In 2016, the magazine for the duo's alma mater, Columbia Magazine, mentioned the incident in an article about the pair's friendship:

Then, one afternoon, Greenberg and Garfunkel went to Midtown. When it was time for Greenberg to go back to campus, Garfunkel said he had an appointment and couldn't accompany him. Greenberg panicked. They argued, and Garfunkel walked off, leaving Greenberg alone in Grand Central Terminal. Greenberg, bewildered, stumbled through the rush-hour crowd. He took the shuttle to Times Square, transferred to the 1 train, and got out at 116th and Broadway. At the gates, someone bumped into him.

The viral Facebook post also claimed that Greenberg gave Garfunkel roughly $400 to help record Simon & Garfunkel's debut album. This, too, was accurate. In his biography, Greenberg recounted the moment when Garfunkel talked to him about the money, writing:

While the Facebook post truly recounted memorable moments from Garfunkel and Greenberg's lifelong friendship, its claim that Greenberg inspired the line, "Hello darkness, my old friend" was unfounded.

It was indeed possible, even plausible, that a song by a band with a member who called himself "darkness" and had a close friend who was blind would reference that relationship with the lyrics. However, as far as we could tell, neither Simon nor Garfunkel have ever said that was the case. In fact, both musicians have talked about the "The Sound of Silence," explaining the meaning of the song, without referencing Greenberg.

"The Sound of Silence" was written by Simon, not Garfunkel, circa 1963 and released on the band's debut album, "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." According to Simon, the opening line of the song referenced his childhood practice of playing guitar in the bathroom in the dark. Here's an excerpt from a 1984 interview Simon did with Playboy magazine:

SIMON: Well, that's the first line. Then it drifts into some other things. I've always believed that you need a truthful first line to kick you off into a song. You have to say something emotionally true before you can let your imagination wonder.

Garfunkel, too, has commented on the song. On the back cover of "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." the duo published a letter Garfunkel had written to Simon after the studio asked Garfunkel to write song descriptions for the album.

The Sounds of Silence is a major work. We were looking for a song on a larger scale, but this was more than either of us expected. Paul had the theme and the melody set in November, but three months of frustrating attempts were necessary before the song "burst forth." On February 19, 1964, the song practically wrote itself.

Polcaro, Rafael. "Art Garfunkel's Blind Friend Who Inspired 'Sound Of Silence' Tells His Story." Rock And Roll Garage, 19 July 2020, -garfunkel-blind-friend-who-inspired-sound-of-silence-tells-his-story/.

Mute as a stone, ambiguous as Tierasian, way out of focus, Bob Dylan unfolds like a playmets from Blonde on Blonde, his Opus 7. It is a double album, four sides, fourteen new songs. Sadly, a single disc could have distilled the four or five strong cuts scattered here, though the finest, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Low-lands," commands a full side to itself. The prophet has mined much slag this trip. This is not an entirely gratifying reward for Dylan devotees who have waited out his silence faithfully, the near year since last September's release of Highway 61 Revisited, Opus 6.

The full disappointment this record brings cannot be blamed on its uneven quality; Dylan has edited badly before, notably on Times Are A-Changin', Optis 3. What is troubling now is a studied inarticulacy--a consistent deverbalization--which marks good and bad songs alike on Blonde on Blonde. Emblematic of the present wordlessness stands the cardboard jacket, filled with snapshots where past albums abounded in liner notes (often awkward but sometimes incisive). The songs themselves, by profuse blues repetitions and by overlong choruses, generally blunt the listener's attention to the language of the songs.

Let us assume one thing: It is for his language that Bob Dylan is of interest to us, not for his melodies, not for his ideology. It may be hasty to speak of his language as "poetry." So far little that he has produced can stand by itself in print (except for intoned pieces like Opus 2's "Hard Rain), but needs his performance to make clear the stresses and quantities he intends. Only with these heard can one get a "poetic" sense of language opening through his songs, the exhilarating view of sound and sense stationed in strange surroundings. This is a trivial problem. Dylan's imagination can create new contexts for given words; all he really Jacks is a system of notation. We can compensate here with hyphens, dashes, and capitals to indicate compressions, prolongations, and eccentric stresses. Dylan will not be a poet, of course, until he can choose words which announce such rhythms by themselves, without abnormal punctuation.

Blonde on Blonde, taken as a whole, marks a retreat from experiment with language. The great successes it contains gain their power from hypnotic heavy rhythms against which any words would have to struggle, in a sort of "counterpoint," not from rhythmic or imagistic interest inherent in the word-phrases themselves. Thus the chorus of "Sad Eyed Lady" has

gaining its interest from a doubling of the natural number of stresses those words demand. Earlier, in Opus 6's "Desolation Row," a typical fine lyric operated within the confines of natural speech rhythm and normal stress:

Nine-fourteenths of these songs have no merit, gain no successes by any means. The "hit" cuts released on 45's represent the worst of the garbage. "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" enumerates ad nauseam all the situations in which "They'll Stone you..." and its triple rimes get maddeningly predictable, e.g. "when you're walking on the street," and "when you're trying to keep your feet." "I Want You," after two passable stanzas, degenerates into similar rime-tagging; it also suffers from the tedious triple chorus of its title. One half-decent stanza late in the song suggests the deficiencies of the rest:

Side 3 of Blonde on Blonde bears a mother lode of vacuity, 4 of its 5 songs. "Temporary Like Achilles" adds some new verses to the great flop from Opus 6, "It Takes a Train to Cry," but it cuts out the yodel-like chorus that almost saved that earlier piece.

"Absolutely Sweet Marie" abounds with line-filler dilutions of meaning, like "well," "you see," "aw, now," and repetitions of line-fragments. It sounds improvised. It is also a coyer baring of private symbols than we've had to take in some time: here (and in "Memphis Blues Again") we get no clue to the significance of railroads though lyrics involve them obsessively. And Dylan's paranoia about petty law enforcement regresses here to the awkwardness of "Walls of Red Wing" (pre-Opus 1). What he integrated into the panoramic lists in "Chimes of Freedom," (Opus 4),

"4th Time Around" sounds like the Beatles's "Norwegian Wood." Like its model, it pushes a sitar or something into prominence, then narrates a man's seduction by some sore of Lamia, from his passive and clouded viewpoint. Once again triple rimes breed doggeral--this time in short, 3-to-a-line phrases like

The only pleasant line among the lyrics, YOu, yOu took me In, yOu loved me thEn, you nEver wAsted time, comes when the monotonous full rimes are minimized. What pleasure it thereby brings, unfortunately, is less that of normal theme-and-variation than that good feeling you get when you stop drumming your head with a hammer.

Full obituaries for all the corpees on the album would be too painful. A couple more failures may be mentioned, both of which try echoing past successes. "Obviously 5 Believers" has the word-obliterating background of "Subterranean," but has a subject less suited to chaotic rendering: a bluesy "baby, please come home" message that seems to justify the song's format, a blues repetition of each stanza's first line. But, as always, Dylan has bad luck with the blues format. The license for repetition seems to attract him to lyrics more banal than usual, when what is needed is something singularly well-chosen and repeatable. The other song, "Leopardskin Pillbox Hat," has the loose, talking-blues, shape of the "I Shall Be Free" and theirs, its jokes are mostly private or unfunny.

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