Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends (Remastered) [RePoPo] PROPER

THIS RELEASE FIXES A GLITCH THE PREVIOUS UPLOAD HAD AT THE END OF ONE TRACK*******************************************************************************

Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends (Remastered)

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Simon & Garfunkel - Bookends



01.- Bookends Theme (Instrumental) [00:32]

02.- Save The Life Of My Child [02:48]

03.- America [03:35]

04.- Overs [02:19]

05.- Voices Of Old People [02:07]

06.- Old Friends [02:35]

07.- Bookends Theme [01:24]

08.- Fakin' It [03:22]

09.- Punky's Dilemma [02:17]

10.- Mrs. Robinson [04:07]

11.- A Hazy Shade Of Winter [02:17]

12.- At The Zoo [02:32]

13.- You Don't Know Where Your Interest Lies [02:19] **

14.- Old Friends (Demo) [02:11] **

** = BONUS TRACKS, exclusive to this releaseOriginally Released on March, 1968. This remastered version, which includes two

bonus tracks was released on August 21st, 2001.



Ripped with EAC, creating a .cue/.wav audio file, preserving the CD structure,

gaps and volume levels as in the original CD.



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Album Review by Bruce Eder



In March of 1968, Robert Kennedy was still alive and offering a vision for a way

out to the America that had deeply entrenched itself in the Vietnam War. The

inner-city rebellions in 1967 had shaken the youth culture's image of their own

summer of love in that year. The beginning of America's crippling identity

crisis had begun to shudder through the culture that would erupt with the death

of Kennedy later that spring and the tragedy of the Democratic National

Convention in Chicago later that summer. Before it was all over, Martin Luther

King, Jr. had also lost his life. In pop culture, rock was exploding everywhere

in Western culture. The impact of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club

Band and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds -- both made in 1966 -- and the appearance

of Jimi Hendrix on the pop scene in 1967 had ushered in a new way of making

records, a way that not only referred to and portrayed everyday life but was

part of its acceptance for what it was before attempting to transcend it.

Earlier that spring, Simon and Garfunkel had slipped their fourth album into the

bins with a whisper, the confoundingly literary, profoundly poetic and

stunningly beautiful Bookends. Columbia Legacy has presented us S&G's entire

catalog painstakingly remastered with extra tracks. The sound on these discs --

and Bookends in particular -- is amazing. It is literally true that there are

instrumental passages and studio atmospherics that have never before been

audible. As a pair, the two were seemingly equal collaborators with producer and

engineer Roy Halee on a highly textured, multi-layered song cycle that offered

observations on everything from urban crises that were symptomatic of larger

issues, the prospect of old age and death, the loss and dislocation of those who

desperately wanted to inherit an American Dream but not the one offered to them,

surreal yet wistful reflections on youthful innocence lost forever to the cold

winds of change.



Bookends is a literary album that contains the most minimal of openings with the

theme, an acoustic guitar stating itself slowly and plaintively before erupting

into the wash of synthesizers and dissonance that is "Save the Life of My

Child." The uneasy rock & roll that carries the song through its disaster and

the revelation of "Oh my grace, I've got no hiding place," which is the mere

hint of what is to come in this wide open terrain of the previously familiar but

completely unknown. The classic "America" is next, a folk song with a lilting

soprano saxophone in the refrain and a small pipe organ painting the acoustic

guitars in the more poignant verses. The song relies on pop structures to carry

its message of hope and disillusionment as two people travel the American

landscape searching for it until it dawns on them that everyone else on the

freeway is doing the same thing. Its sweetness and sophisticated melodic

invention are toppled by the message of the song and it becomes an ellipsis, a

cipher, turned back on itself into disappearance, wondering what question to ask

next. The sound of a lit cigarette is the opening of "Overs," a balladic study

in the emptiness at the end of the relationship. The sound of inhaling and

exhaling of the smoke tells the entire story. Also woven into the mix is a

two-minute field recording of the voices of old people made by Garfunkel,

collected from nursing homes and centers for the aged. The disembodied voices

are chilling and heartbreakingly beautiful in their different observations,

entire lifetimes summed up in a few seconds. This interlude leads into "Old

Friends," which carries the message deeper as the image of two old men sitting

on a park bench in languid statements of life lived ordinarily but poetically

share not only their memories but also the commonality of their fear. A horn

section threatens to interrupt the reverie, carrying the chaos they feel, their

lack of control over current events, but is warded off as denial and the

gentleness of the melody returns and fades into the album's opening theme,

suggesting that we preserve our memories. As "Fakin' It" kicks to the fore, we

feel the separation inherent in Simon's generational view of the unconscious

separation of heart and mind. The tune is as full of hooks as a fishing boat and

Halee swipes a bit from the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and eases orchestral

layers into the mix, subtly of course, but ever-present and recognizable

nonetheless. With "Fakin' It," the depth of the album's meditation presents

itself in earnest. Synth lines and handclaps give way to snare drums and

acoustic guitars, and the first appearance of loss shows itself for what it is,

the passing of life, moment by moment, memory by memory so quickly, that

pretending is somehow preferable to the reality of everyday life. When the horn

section and strings bring the crescendos and the lyric asserts, "This feeling of

fakin' it/I still haven't shaken it/I know I'm fakin' it/I'm not really makin'

it." Even Leonard Cohen's dark prophecies never stated the case so plainly -- in

a folk-rock tune. The identity crisis inherent in the jazzy "Punky's Dilemma"

melds the loss of innocence and childhood with the cynicism of present-day

living. The final four tracks of the original album, "Mrs. Robinson," the theme

song for the film The Graduate, "A Hazy Shade of Winter," and the album's final

track, the George-influenced "At the Zoo," offer as tremblingly bleak a vision

for the future as any thing done by the Velvet Underground, but rooted in the

lives of everyday people, not in the decadent underground personages of New

York's Factory studio. But the album is also a warning that to pay attention is

to take as much control of one's fate as possible. The bonus tracks, a different

take of "Old Friends" and "You Don't Know Where Your Interest Lies" -- which

ended up as the B-side of "Hazy Shade of Winter" -- add dimension to what was

easily the most ambitious recording of Simon & Garfunkel's career. Its

problematic themes, spare yet striking arrangements, and augmented orchestral

instrumentation created a backdrop for the sounds of a generation moving through

a workaday world they no longer accepted as real, a world they never understood

in first place. That S&G never overstate the case here, never preach to the

converted but instead almost journalistically observe the questions in the

process of their being asked is a monumental achievement. That they did so in

three- and four-minute pop songs is almost inconceivable for the time.



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AllMusicGuide Track-by-track Review

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BOOKENDS THEME



Appearing twice on the Bookends album, this piece was used as a link and helps

to create a sense of unity in this classic record. The first (and very brief)

instrumental version is a simple, acoustic guitar reading of the melody, stating

its theme and feel. The second version features the vocals of Simon & Garfunkel

and has been used in countless films and television shows that are set in the

1960s. Capturing the innocence of the era perfectly, the lyrics also have the

distinction of looking back with a sense of wistful melancholy. This is most

interesting when you consider that the song was written in 1967. Simple,

effective, and wholly effecting, its one of Paul Simon's classics.



AMERICA



The pivotal use of "America" in the soundtrack to the film Almost Famous (2000)

continued a trend that was started in part by Mike Nichols' use of Simon &

Garfunkel songs as a plot device in the 1967 film The Graduate. The former film

uses "America" -- released originally on the 1968 LP song cycle Bookends -- in

the context of a young person leaving home in the restless late '60s, a

microcosm of a whole societal shift. And this is also kind of how the song

itself works, with the blank-verse lyrics open, offering small, personal

details, almost in jokes: "Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes

together/I've got some real estate here in my bag/So we bought a pack of

cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies/And we walked off to look for America/'Kathy,' I

said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh/'Michigan seems like a dream to me

now.'" It seems like a recollection of a pleasant trip taken by young lovers, an

apparently fictional trip with Simon and his girlfriend from his time in

England, Kathy Chitty ( Simon has explained that, contrary to popular myth, the

trip never occurred). But with a grandiose line like "to look for America" and

the grand-scale musical arrangement, "America" is quite obviously something more

ambitious than a personal postcard; Simon was observing the trends of his

generation -- the physical restlessness and spiritual bankruptcy that the

wanderlust signified. Simon, having received training in Brill Building

songwriting as a young demo-singer-for-hire, merges -- in the song's masterful

third verse -- his Bob Dylan-spurred ambition as an "important" songwriter with

his commercial and traditional pop songcraft: "'Kathy, I'm lost,' I said, though

I knew she was sleeping/I'm empty and aching and I don't know why/Counting the

cars on the New Jersey Turnpike/They've all gone to look for America." The first

line seems like yet another bit of innocuous dialogue between fellow travelers.

But with the next line, the song climaxes lyrically; it might simply be a tinge

that a relationship is coming to an end, but on a larger scale, Simon feels an

emptiness, realizing -- in the depressing light of the New Jersey Turnpike --

the pointlessness of his travel and his search, which is not fulfilling his

inner ache. He might even possibly be predicting a similar dead end for his

peers. But it is not just a personal disappointment; the narrator goes looking

for an America that Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac have found before him, and he

finds no such place; tritely speaking, there is no "there" there. Perhaps not

coincidentally, the cinematic song came out the year after The Graduate, a film

which explored similar themes: alienation, emptiness, disappointment, and so on.

The lyrical deftness that Simon demonstrates is almost overshadowed by the

orchestrated arrangement, a 6/2 folk rhythm that contains the lovely, lilting,

sing-song melody. It begins softly, with a rhythm, tempo, and melody that Elliot

Smith seems to have taken as a template for much of his songwriting -- though

certainly the antecedent came from the later Beatles records (especially the

drum fills). In fact, "America" can be taken as a "bookend' of the Beatles'

"She's Leaving Home," which offers a brilliant look at the

grown-child-leaving-parent paradigm from the point of view of the parents. We

imagine their daughter going off and finding happiness and success in a bigger

world than the one she shared with her parents. But that loss of innocence, an

innocence which cannot be regained, is a common theme shared with "America," as

well as other Simon songs like "Mrs. Robinson" in its lines: "Where have you

gone Joe Di Maggio?/Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you." By the time

"America" reaches the second chorus, and again for the final chorus, the

arrangement stokes up into something approximating a robust sea shanty -- with

cymbal crashes and layered harmonies -- thus forming a second template for '70s

singer/songwriters; this time one with less subtlety by Neil Diamond on songs

like his "America" and some of Billy Joel's early, folky moments, like "Piano

Man."



OVERS



A simple yet very effective track from Bookends, "Overs" continues the theme of

aging and the passage of time that fills the first side of the album. In this

case, Paul Simon is singing of a love affair on the verge of disintegration.

Some exquisite, fugue-like passages from Art Garfunkel highlight the mood and

arrangement, which is one of the most subdued and elegant on the album.

Musically, it is based in a folk-blues style, with Simon's guitar taking a few

blues explorations that allow the piece to breathe melodically. In some ways,

this song is a signpost to some of his 1970s solo work.



VOICES OF OLD PEOPLE



More of a spoken word audio collage than a "song," this piece, which was taped

at convalescent homes in Southern California, helps to underline the feeling of

aging and the passage of time, themes that are indeed paramount. Sometimes sad,

as well as comical, the voices on the record are touching, especially when you

consider the fact that they probably died a few years from the date of

recording.



OLD FRIENDS



Perfectly seguing out of "Voices of Old People," "Old Friends" -- which makes

references to "Bookends Theme" -- is a unifying link on the Bookends album. The

lyrics look into old age and the changes that may come to be. An elegant and

ornate classical string section dominates the melody along with Paul Simon's

acoustic guitar. There is also a frightening, dissonant passage, which is very

reminiscent of Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle orchestrations, which in turn were

influenced by Charles Ives. This is not the only reference to Parks on the album

(see "Punky's Dilemma").



FAKIN' IT



Easily Simon & Garfunkel's most ambitious piece of music to date (1967), "Fakin'

It" is a precursor to several other studio masterpieces that would follow,

namely "The Boxer" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water." A virtual suite, the song

opens and closes with a nod/tribute to the Beatles, with its high-pitched note

(sounding like bagpipes) backed by marching drums, which is a dead-ringer for

the end of "Strawberry Fields." The first main section of the song is built on a

jazzy- blues acoustic guitar figure from Paul Simon that leads the listener into

a casual atmosphere. The lyrics in this section are an autobiographical account

of a relationship, and Simon conceived this while in a "hashish reverie." The

buoyancy of the music neatly juxtaposes feelings of doubt and insecurity, which

is some of Simon's funkiest pop. There is a striking interlude that features the

voice of Beverly Martyn, a singer/songwriter that was befriended by the duo

during the 1967 period. Like a fantasy cameo in a film, it presents a portrait

of a man in a past life as a tailor in Europe, named " Mr. Leitch" (a reference

to Donovan). Oddly, after recording the song, Simon learned that his grandfather

-- also named Paul Simon -- was a tailor in Vienna. The song returns to the main

theme before the Beatles/ "Strawberry Fields" closing. All of this is less than

four minutes; it's one of the most striking recordings and songs of the

limit-smashing 1967/1968 period.



PUNKY'S DILEMMA



On the surface, "Punky's Dilemma" is one of the lighter, nonsensical songs on

the Bookends album. The casual, almost jazz/ bubblegum feel of the music and

arrangement is almost juvenile, but this is deceptive. Lyrically, part of the

song is about a draft dodger and his moral "