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Kooky Simon & Garfunkel ad from 1967: Art is a lion, and Paul is a panda

At the Zoo
 
I stumbled upon this fantastic image in an extremely thoughtful and well-written article by Richie Unterberger on “folk-rock findings” that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame posted a few days ago. After assessing some fascinating magazine ads featuring Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Gene Clark, and Janis Ian, Unterberger ends with a real corker, a full-page magazine ad from March 1967 promoting Simon & Garfunkel’s then-new single “At the Zoo,” off of their album Bookends, complete with cute little “panda-Paul” and cute little “lion-Art” in the foreground.

Writes Unterberger:
 

Here’s guessing Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel did not see or approve this ad before it got printed in March 1967. Maybe Garfunkel wouldn’t have minded being cast as the lion, but it’s hard to see Simon being pleased to be the panda.

 
I suppose Unterberger could have a point here, but I don’t think so. First of all, the song ain’t exactly “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” it’s “At the Zoo,” one of their more whimsical, not to mention kid-friendly, ditties. Second, Simon & Garfunkel weren’t idiots: they were and are creatures of commerce as well as of art, and they probably weren’t all that opposed to whatever approach would land them the biggest hit. (For the record, it reached #16 on the U.S. charts.)

Third, and most important, that image wasn’t limited to print advertising by any means—it was the cover of the single! Did they have no control over this image, after three successful albums and the Graduate soundtrack?
 
At the Zoo
 
Well, either way you should still read Unterberger’s article. He makes a lot of good points about the evolution of the marketing of folk-rock during that period.

Here’s a wonderful clip from the UK of S&G performing “At the Zoo” for what seems like a TV audience, but it’s obviously being performed live, not lip-synced. 
 

 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.06.2014
11:12 am
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‘Songs of America’: Simon & Garfunkel travel across a turbulent US in emotional 1969 TV special
03.03.2014
12:35 pm
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Simon and Garfunkel’s 1969 television special “Songs of America” shows the two on stage, in the studio and on a concert tour across a turbulent country. Their ambitious Bridge Over Troubled Water album had yet to be released and the glorious title song was heard here by the general public for the very first time. The program showed news clips of labor leader/activist Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, the Poor People’s Campaign’s march on Washington, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, JFK and Robert Kennedy and other events that were emblematic of the era.

“Songs of America” was originally sponsored by the Bell Telephone Company, but the execs there got cold feet when they saw what they’d paid for—legend has it that they looked at the footage of JFK, RFK and MLK during the (powerful!) “Bridge Over Troubled Water” segment (approx 12 minutes in) and asked for more Republicans! (Not assassinated Republicans, just more Republicans...you know, for balance!) The special was eventually picked up by CBS.

It was directed by the comedic actor, writer and later talk show host Charles Grodin, a friend of the duo. Grodin had already been in a bit part in Rosemary’s Baby (he was the obstetrician), but had yet to gain notoriety with his role in Catch-22.

Songs heard include “America,” “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” “Bridge over Troubled Water,” “Scarborough Fair,” “El Condor Pasa (If I Could),” “Punkys Dilemma,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “Mystery Train,” “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” “The Boxer,” “Homeward Bound,” and “The Sound of Silence.”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.03.2014
12:35 pm
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Disgraceland: Steven Van Zandt rips on Paul Simon
02.03.2014
12:48 pm
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Little Steven
Little Steven at a press conference where Coretta Scott King accepted the first $50,000 check (on behalf of The Africa Fund) from Artists United Against Apartheid, 1985
 
Perhaps one of my least punk predilections is a weakness for Paul Simon, and the album Graceland, specifically. It’s not that I have any compunction about liking “mom rock,” (moms are awesome, and my love for Carole King is also well-documented), but Graceland is steeped in some pretty nasty history. For one, I’m inclined to believe Los Lobos, who appear on the last track, “All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints,” when they say Simon should have given them a writing credit. The album made bank, and he certainly could have stood to give them credit and a little compensation.

But the most well-known controversy of Graceland is Simon’s refusal to cooperate with the cultural boycott of Apartheid—most of the album was recorded in South Africa, but Simon apparently considered himself exempt from the politics of the situation, since he had been invited by South African musicians and didn’t play live shows in the country. I’ll be the first to admit that cultural boycotts can be difficult to understand. From an artist’s perspective, no one wants to be told to avoid an audience or a musical collaboration because their governing body is corrupt. But Paul Simon pulled what we refer to in radical political circles as a “total dick move.”

If he was really committed to solidarity with South Africans (which he insists, to this day, that he was), it would have been incredibly easy for him to just ask the African National Congress if it was cool for him to visit, just to make sure that he wasn’t, ya know… undermining the struggle for liberation of a long-suffering people. He was even explicitly advised by Harry Belafonte to do just that, (and when Harry Belafonte gives you civil rights advice, you’d best just listen). Simon decided he was just going to go, and upon his arrival, he was treated to protests, with signs demanding, “Yankee Go Home” and “Go Back Simon.”

And here’s the thing—he still hasn’t fucking apologized. I’m not sure if it’s because the album was incredibly successful or because it broke South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo to a larger audience, but he seems to think the legacy of Graceland completely excuses his totally politically unconscionable transgression. In Under African Skies, the 2012 documentary on the album, he’s still a smug dick about it.

And this is why I love Steven Van Zandt. In addition to being a truly brilliant musician, a dedicated and studious curator of rock ‘n’ roll history, and Silvio Dante, Little Steven is down with the people, and a committed activist. In a recent interview with rock critic Dave Marsh on his Sirius/XM radio program Kick Out The Jams with Dave Marsh, he discussed his work with Artists United Against Apartheid. The whole thing was fascinating, but the very best part is Van Zandt hilariously calling out Paul Simon.

Picking up from the point where Little Steven tells the armed resistance movement, the Azanian People’s Organisation, not to just fucking assassinate Paul Simon for his bullshit…
 

Dave Marsh: I was with you the first time you saw Paul and talked to him about this, at [entertainment attorney] Peter Parcher’s 60th birthday party.

Van Zandt: That’s right, that’s right, that’s right! I’m glad you were a witness, because wait’ll you hear the latest on that. Anyway, I said to them, “Listen, this is not gonna help anybody if you knock off Paul Simon. Trust me on this, alright? Let’s put that aside for the moment. Give me a year or so, you know, six months,” whatever I asked for, “to try and do this a different way. I’m trying to actually unify the music community around this, which may or may not include Paul Simon, but I don’t want it to be a distraction. I just don’t need that distraction right now; I gotta keep my eye on the ball.” And I took him off that assassination list, I took Paul Simon off the U.N. blacklist, trying to…

You mean you convinced them to take him off…

Yeah, because this was a serious thing…

Because this was gonna eat up the attention that the movement itself needed.

Yes, and the European unions were serious about this stuff, man. You were on that [U.N. blacklist], you did not work, okay? Not like America, which was so-so about this stuff, man. Over there, they were serious about this stuff, you know? Anyway, so yeah, this was in spite of Paul Simon approaching me at that party saying, “What are you doing, defending this communist?!”

What he said was, “Ah, the ANC [African National Congress, the organization of which Mandela was President at the time of his arrest and imprisonment], that’s just the Russians.” And he mentioned the group that [murdered black South African activist Steven Biko] had been in, which was not AZAPO…

Was he PAC [Pan-Africanist Congress]?

It doesn’t matter [for this story], but [Paul Simon] said, “That’s just the Chinese communists.”

Yeah, yeah. And he says, “What are you doing defending this guy Mandela?! He’s obviously a communist. My friend Henry Kissinger told me about where all of the money’s coming from,” and all of this. I was, like, all due respect, Paul…

I remember it very vividly, because it was aimed at everybody standing in the general direction.

Yeah, but mostly he was telling me.

Well, yeah, you were the one… Everybody knew who to get mad at first. [laughter]

He knew more than me, he knew more than Mandela, he knew more than the South African people. His famous line, of course, was, “Art transcends politics.” And I said to him, “All due respect, Paulie, but not only does art not transcend politics… art is politics. And I’m telling you right now, you and Henry Kissinger, your buddy, go fuck yourselves.” Or whatever I said. But he had that attitude, and he knowingly and consciously violated the boycott to publicize his record.

Well, to make his record. That’s the violation of the boycott — to make his record.

Yeah, and he actually had the nerve to say, “Well, I paid everybody double-scale.” Remember that one? Oh, that’s nice… no arrogance in that statement, huh? [laughter]

Now, the punchline. Cut to 30 years later, or whatever it is. He asked me to be in his movie [Under African Skies, the documentary on the making of Graceland, included as a DVD in the album’s 25th anniversary boxed edition]. I said, “Alright, I’ll be in your movie, if you don’t edit me. You ready to tell it like it is?”

He says, “Yep.”

“Are you, like, uh, apologizing in this movie?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. I’m not gonna be a sore winner. I’ll talk to you.”

I did an interview. They show me the footage. Of course, they edited the hell out of it to some little statement where I’m saying something positive about Paul. [laughter] And I see the rest of the footage, where he’s supposedly apologizing, with Dali Tambo [founder of Artists Against Apartheid and son of late ANC leaders Adelaide and Oliver Tambo]. He says, “I’m sorry if I made it inconvenient for you.” That was his apology.

In other words, he still thinks he’s right, all these years later!

You’re the only person who’s ever met Paul twice who thinks that’s surprising. [laughter]

I mean, at this point, you still think you were right?! Meanwhile, that big “communist,” as soon as he got out of jail, I see who took the first picture with him. There’s Paul Simon and Mandela, good buddies. I’m watchin’ CNN the other day. Mandela dies, on comes a statement by Bono and the second statement’s by Paul Simon. I’m like oh, just make me throw up. You know, I like the guy in a lot of ways, I do; and I respect his work, of course. He’s a wonderful, wonderful artist, but when it comes to this subject, he just will not admit he was wrong. Y’know, just mea culpa. Come on, you won! He made twenty, thirty million dollars at least, okay? Take the money and apologize, okay? I mean, say “Listen, maybe I was wrong about this a little bit.” No.

Well…unfortunately we live in a country where the money means you don’t have to apologize, and let’s leave that there.

 

 
Via Backstreets

Posted by Amber Frost
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02.03.2014
12:48 pm
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Simon & Garfunkel in Quad: Why won’t the record labels give the people what they want?
08.04.2010
12:14 am
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image
 
God bless Tara for putting up with me because when I get obsessed about a certain artist, I can play the shit out of their albums. As I have previously written about, my darling, smart, funny gorgeous wife has put up with an ultra intense reggae jag (the soundtrack to the first two years of our marriage was Big Youth, Alton Ellis, Joe Higgs and King Tubby), as well as additional “phases” (that’s what she calls them) where In the past six months, I’ve practically worn out CDs of the second Faust album, Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes set, various Zappa, Kinks, Joni Mitchell records and scores of things from lesser-known bands that I won’t bother to list. I’m one of those idiots who can play the same album ten times in a row for ten days in a row. I wrestle it to the ground and pin it. Suffice to say, my girl has the patience of a saint and a very open mind about music!

For the past week, I’ve been playing a lot of ‘70s Paul Simon and Simon & Garfunkel albums.  I don’t feel like that’s so much of a hardship on Tara because, hey, practically everyone likes Simon & Garfunkel and 70s Paul Simon, don’t they? (And if they don’t they’re idiots and they can go fuck themselves! And if you want to know how I really feel…).

The two things I’ve been listening to the most are the Quadraphonic versions of Bridge Over Troubled Water and Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years. Both albums are justifiably considered classics and to hear them in a surround sound mix is simply stunning. Mind you, you can’t exactly pick these up in stores.

As I posted about last year when I was guest blogger at Boing Boing, there is a coterie of professional and amateur audiophiles who have been, um, liberating the quadraphonic mixes heard on 8-track and reel to reel releases in the mid ‘70s. They get pristine copies on Ebay (reel to reel tapes are obviously more desirable than 8-tracks for these purposes), play them on refurbished decks capable of handling split tracks, then take the tracks into ProTools and clean them up. Then they take those files into a DVD authoring software and create (often professional looking) menus. Then ISO files are made and uploaded to torrent trackers. All you have to do is download them, burn the files in Toast and now you have a multi-channel DVD-A discs you can play in your DVD player.

This is music that in many cases is literally being lost to time and technological change. Some classic rock albums that came out in the quad format have been put out as legit DVD-A releases (Tubular Bells and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid come to mind) but not most of them. These underground music enthusiasts who are recreating these buried treasures are doing a tremendous favor for deep fanboys and audiophiles, allowing them us to hear some truly incredible things that would have otherwise been trapped in obsolete formats.

Hearing Bridge Over Troubled Water in quad is something akin to a peak religious experience. I stand in the middle of the room—the “sweet spot”—and I CRANK IT UP. Soaking up the intense beauty of that song—and Art Garfunkel’s angelic voice—coming at you from all directions is almost overpowering. So gorgeous. So amazing.

Art Garfunkel must have the most comforting voice I’ve ever heard. Every time I get sick—I mean really sick, puking, feeling like you are going to die and feeling really, really sorry for yourself sick—I usually reach for Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (and for whatever Freudian reason a bowl of “Life” cereal). Only Neil Young’s Harvest or Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks have the same calming effect on me. I can’t think of a single singer whose talents rival the purity of Garfunkel’s tenor voice. You can’t top him. He’s the very best of the very best. Paul Simon’s songs are great—some of the greatest American musical treasures—but they are much, much greater because of what Garfunkel brings to the table. Paul Simon is wonderful on his own, don’t get me wrong, but with Artie in the mix his music becomes transcendent.

Take My Little Town.  If you’re reading this far(!) then chances are you’re probably planning to track this stuff down on the Internet. DO look out for the quad version of Still Crazy After All These Years. Obviously, this is a classic album, every track is a gem, with no filler at all. But… the BEST track is My LIttle Town. When Garfunkel is around Simon is just better and even in the stellar setting of this classic album, My Little Town proves the point. And it’s mind-blowing heard in surround sound.

When I was a kid, wanting desperately to be someplace where things were happening and where I’d meet interesting people, My Little Town spoke to me. No one wanted to get out of their town the way that I did. I have loved this song since I was 10-years-old, but man, lemme tell you, the multichannel mix of this song a powerful revelation. 

Having “new” versions of these classic albums helped me get into them again and appreciate them anew. Why hasn’t Columbia or Warners ever reissued BOTW or SCAATY as a surround sound DVD-A releases? Because no one would buy them?!? BOTW was only a number one album in every country in the free world, selling over 25 million copies! SCAATY won a Grammy for best album. These multichannel versions obviously exist in their vaults. It seems crazy to me that the labels wouldn’t jump on the fact that—based on the evidence found on torrent trackers—fans would love to hear these. It’s just leaving money on the table, but even more importantly, most music fans won’t get to experience these Simon & Garfunkel classics as they can best be appreciated on modern sound systems.

From Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 TV special sponsored by Kraft, here’s a great version of Patterns:
 

 
And I had to include this, too. Witness Simon and an extremely cute—and highly exuberant—little girl on Sesame Street duetting on Me & Julio Down by the Schoolyard. Like I say, Simon’s at his best with Artie, but he’s aces with little Linda here, too! “It’s against the law!”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.04.2010
12:14 am
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