Entertainment For Lively Minds
Why do I love "The Boxer" so much?
Last night "The Boxer" by Simon & Garfunkel popped up on my ipod. Walking home from the tube in the dark I hit repeat to listen to it three times and wonder why I loved it so much.
It's one of the biggest sounds in popular music but mostly it's made by very few instruments: a couple of acoustic guitars, a bass harmonica, bass and drums. The strings are thrown in near the end but by then the job has been done.
I love the way it uses such pre-rock and roll language. Squandered my resistance...disregards the rest...asking only workman's wages...carries the reminder of ev'ry glove. (And I looked on the original lyrics. It it "ev'ry" not "every".)
I think what clinches it is that after forty years of hearing it - and every time it comes on the radio or the iPod I turn it up and let it play, which I don't do with many wonderful records - is that I still don't know what it means. I do however know what it feels like.
P.S. It could that last thing that makes it so satisfying. The refrain is just a placeholder. It has no hidden meaning. It's *not* complete.
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Paul Simon
is someone I've sort of known and sort of not known all this time. I'm 43 now and I must have first been aware of something like "Mrs Robinson" when I was 5.
I think I may have been guilty of being dismissive of him somehow. Simon and Garfunkel is one of those sounds you grow up with and is all around you but you don't really "hear". Yes, you have S&G records, and Paul Simon ones too - and you play them and like them, But it's not Joni, not the Dan, not Van. Not "Exile" or Blood on the Tracks is it?
Then one day back in the summer, I played "America" and it - literally - made me sit down and listen to it - over and over.
Simple and vast. Aching and optimistic. Big picture and small time.
He is - quite possibly - the best songwriter there has ever been. I suddenly realised.
The best kind of hidden treasure is the stuff that's right there all the time. Has been - all this time.
Paul Simon..
...has made one album that you could say was weak (though even "One Trick Pony" has its supporters). Every other Paul Simon album is better than most people's best album.
Douglas Adams
I seem to remember Douglas Adams dedicating one of the Dirk Gently books to Paul Simon as he played OTP constantly during its writing.
funnily enough
I was looking at this last night-just after the BBC4 rebroadcast of the Omnibus tribute programme. It's actually the 2nd (I think) Hitch-hiker book.
If there's a weak PS album I'd say it isn't OTP. It'd have to be one of the v recent ones, after Rhythm of the Saints which I'd nominate as one of the best albums ever from anyone.
Apart from
The Capeman, which is pretty dull.
Weak???
I honestly reckon One Trick Pony is superb indeed! I far prefer it to any other solo album of his.
Agreed
Have a vote.
Sound advice
I took your advice, had a vote, and it turns out I was right.
Absolutely...
it's my favourite solo record of his along with Still Crazy After All These Years.
And that gives me a good excuse (if any were needed) to post this clip of the great Steve Gadd...
Paul Simon
is excellent though I have a bit of a problem with 'The Boxer' badly sung at one too many sing-songs I think.
But 'America'....... is as near to perfect as it is possible to get.
The opening line 'Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together. I've got some real-estate here in my bag' is so economical, poignant.
I mean damn it every word is perfect
'Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why'
She was gazing out
of the window, pretending to be asleep so that she didn't have to listen to any more atrociously corny and pretentious lyrics, for Gawd's sake!
Alone again
or...(again). Hyperbole perhaps ? Reasonable enough song about a struggling skint horny pugilist. Pleasant, nothing more.
In terms of sound
it reminds me of The Beatles on No Reply, and also reminds me of that 80s music review cliche about cathedrals of sound.
Both tracks sound like a choir in a church, and that sound I think stirs something in us. I'm not religious but send me back to Wales and put me in a church with the voices massing and it's one of the most moving things I know.
Funny though or maybe not, those massed rent a choirs that people put on records these days don't sound anywhere as good...
In his superb
series How Music Works, Howard Goodall uses BOTW as the final song in the first episode on melody
and talks about how well PS synthesised so many musical traditions in one song. I think both the Boxer and America are even better but I think he's right about BOTW as a model song ...
...plus it has a catchy
la-la-la bit.
Pavlov's tube station
It's probably because you'd just got off the underground. Back in the day you couldn't move for buskers doing The Boxer.
badly.
It's Great but is it better than
Bridge Over Troubled Water ? discuss
Yes.
BOTW - great as it is - is a bit much really.
I grew up with S&G and I used to think his songs had been around forever.
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boxer
It's a nice little piece on the recording of the tune. Not really surprising to find such a simple sounding track was actually not that simple in the recording stage, nor to find that in part it was actually recorded in a chapel - probably the voices for the acoustics a chapel can offer...
Underestimate
Art Garfunkel's contributon at your peril! I think his voice carries a lot of weight in these great songs as it does with non-Simon numbers that he has recorded.
Exhibit A
can't decide which I prefer...
A pocketful of mumbles
"The Boxer" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" each have among the best crescendos and decrescendos in popular music - amazingly controlled and absolutely in sync with the emotions of the song.
I'm a huge Dylan fan and all that, but Paul Simon affects me more.
I remember the first time
I listened to Live Rhymin's pan-pipetastic version of the tune and how surprised I was when the missing verse appeared
"Now the years are rolling by me
They are rocking evenly
And I am older than I once was
And younger than I'll be, but that's not unusual.
No, it isn't strange
After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same
After changes we are more or less the same"
He still plays the song with this verse today so I wonder why he cut it?
I'd say 'The Capeman' album is the weakest in the PS canon. "You're The One" and "Surprise" have enough going on most of the time to keep me interested. (Darling Lorraine off 'You're The One' is up tehre with his best)
That's interesting
Not having heard LR I'd guessed that the extra verse had been added much later-it was used in S&G Central Park concert for example.
It's about persistence
in the face of terrible odds; it's about being alive.
And it's got a mournful horn, which always works...
S&G - genius. I prefer them to Dylan - and I love Dylan.
Filmic
Real poetry that stands on it's own.
The gentle voices and picked guitars put you right by the shoulder the sorry ex-pugilist as he's "laying out his winter clothes", while the vast reverb'd snare gives a sense of scale to the New York City winter without clogging up the intimate close-up sound.
I especially love the sumptous scanning of "I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome I sought some comfort there" which just lets the words flow naturally, and puts a touching stress on the word "so".
Incidentally, the "big snare in the distance" trick is used again on Bridge Over Troubled Water, just as we are anticipating the voluptuous harmonies of "Sail on Silver Bird" we hear Hal Blaine bangin' away in the next studio while Joe Osborn's bass holds the foreground.
I never got the bit about the horse on 7th ave. though...
Come home!
I was 11 when I was hooked to my brother's S&G Collection album. I thought for years the line was "Just a 'come home from the wars on 7th avenue' " as if someone was sending him letters to come home.
Everybody loves the sound of a snare in the distance
Didn't they hang the drummer over a lift shaft to get that reverb?
Bit of anecdote inflation there
They were recording at CBS in New York. Roy Halee was fond of going round the building, clapping his hands in search of the best echo. His favourite was in the hall of the 6th floor, just opposite the lift. Hal Blaine set up his snare there and played with headphones on a long lead. On one occasion when he was playing the lift door opened to reveal a very puzzled passenger.
Inflation
I'm devastated. I'd always believed the "drummer played at the bottom of a lift shaft" version of the story.
I have great sympathy with guys like Hal Blaine...
...because it's got to the point where the truth is a disappointment. I got this from a very detailed conversation between Blaine and Steve Ecscobar.
hang the talent
however an exasperated engineer (Emerick ?) apparently really did say that they could have got the sound on Tomorrow Never Knows just as easily by suspending Lennon from the roof and rotating him rapidly ...
Is it every GLOVE?
Oh, I'd always thought it was LOVE, which makes both more and less sense - I've been wrong for well over 30 years...
It is called The Boxer :-)
More pedantry for ye, I think the line is 'I *took* some comfort there'
& as wonderful as The Boxer is, I prefer this.
every blow
the mishearing that fascinates me is "blow that laid him low", which is what I thought he sang-and is how Dylan sang it in his cover.
Humans vs cruel fate ... you choose
So beautiful I nearly cried
I have loved 'Only Living Boy in New York' ever since I first heard it back around 1975-76, though I didn't know what it was about for many years. I know it isn't as great a song as BOTW or The Boxer, and that America is the best, but this is my favourite. I don't understand all the Zach Braff stuff in the video though.
Coming from a household where 'pop' music was frowned upon, the first record I bought was S&G's Greatest Hits at the age of 15 and then all the Paul Simon stuff. It's so good and I've known it for longer than any other popular music that now I tend to take it for granted and it takes a thread like this to remember what a genius Paul Simon was.
By the way 'One Trick Pony' though not Simon's best album does have some great songs on it: 'Late in the Evening', 'One Trick Pony', 'How the Heart approaches what it yearns' and 'Long, long day'.
OTP's 'God Bless The Absentee'
gets my vote (erm, if we're voting).
Its the excellent Garden State
the song features
Thanks for that
Apart from the pleasure of seeing Natalie Portman, it was good to read the history of that tune, which was the first song by S&G that made me realise they were something else (ie not just BOTW, Mrs R, and lie-la-lie, good though those songs are). Here's nice recent intimate live solo version of it.
Is that....
...John Prescott sings Paul Simon?
Truly, the internet is miraculous.
There's a theory...
... that The Boxer is an elaborate pisstake of Bob Dylan's wandering minstrel shtick. Columbia's offices were on 7th Avenue, y'see. The fact that S&G were also signed to Columbia makes the theory less credible.
I feel like Chris from The Sopranos when he spots Scorsese and says "Hey, Marty! Kundun - I liked it!", but I really, really like 'Songs from the Capeman'.
he'd done his Dylan parody a few years
earlier though hadn't he ... on "A simple desultory philippic" ?
... which contains the
... which contains the brilliant rhyme 'I been Ayn Randed, even branded communist, 'cause I'm left handed, that's the hand I use, well never mind'.
That's a pastiche, whereas the theory I read about The Boxer was that it was a sly dig. Hence Dylan's massacring of The Boxer on Self Portrait. Not convinced? Neither am I, but I like the idea.
for years
as a teenager I used to wonder what Iron randed meant ...
Albert
I dropped my harmonica
'One Trick Pony' has always, always been unfairly maligned
primarily because the film of the same name was so awful. For me it is up there with his very best work, both lyrically and in terms of the playing.
The OGWT film at the time of rehearsals for the tour was fantastic, and provided a legendary moment of TV gold when Annie Nightingale asked him how he found writing on his own after all those years of having Art's input. My recollection is that even after he explained that he had written all the S&G songs himself she persisted, asking if he thought people knew that, to which he replied 'Eveyone but you!' Fair play to La Nightingale that she allowed it to go out.
Back to The Boxer
I always loved the sound of the solo that begins at around 1:45 but could never decide what instrument it was. Years later on some radio feature I discovered that it was originally a pedal steel guitar but that after hearing 'All you need is Love, Paul Simon wanted a piccolo trumpet. So, what we hear is both played in absolute precise unison and sounding like no instrument before or since. I just wonder how many hours it took that poor trumpet player to get it so right.
I'd always thought it was an early synth
as there is some synthy-sounding stuff later on as well iirc.
(now wondering if what I thought was the synth was the bass harmonica that DH mentions)
Goes on a bit though ...
... doesn't it.
It's a nice song but the production and length make it seem more than a little overblown.
I tend to agree
I really prefer their older stuff - I Am A Rock, Hazy Shade Of Winter and Homeward Bound, Sound of Silence especially. When the sixties influences were more prevalent. I'm not really keen on the sound on the BOTW album. Bit over refined, if that makes sense. Overdone.
do you like the sparse solo versions
on the PS Songbook ? Appearance of this on CD was a happy day for me
Not heard them
but will have a listen. I suppose this should be the ideal way for the songs to be performed, but I do like the electrification too, the jingly jangliness. Good thing is you can have both.
Err, can I put in a word for "Sound of Silence"
which I think eclipses both BOTW and The Boxer. I think the reason I've always loved the latter, though, is towards the end when he sings - so savagely, to mirror the lyric - "Of ev'ry glove that laid him down / And CUT him till he cried out..." And then there's something romantic or doomed loser or just plain never giving up about, " 'I am leaving, I am leaving' / But the fighter still remains." Brilliant.
Sounds of a bodge job
It seems amazing, in these days of digital precision, that this ever got released in this form.
S&G had already recorded and mixed S of S for their debut 1966 album, and then someone (A & R / Producer Tom Wilson), without reference our heroes, decided it needed bass, drums and electric guitar.
Now there is a very good reason why multitrack recordings always start with the drum track and this recording is the explanation.
The drummer after a confident start into v.2, struggles as we go into v.3 and although he gets it back by the end of the verse, he is at odds with the acoustic guitar again at several points later. The electric guitar with its odd bluesy additions has it's own take on the tempo, and compounds the confusion. A pristine version with neither drums nor electric guitars, and vocals panned quaintly left and right can be found on the 2007? compilation "The Collection"
All this notwithstanding, it was this very atmospheric waxing which catapulted the New York balladeers to fame, and into our current lexical deliberations.
Overdubbing Sounds of Silence
I worked at CBS in the early to mid-70s, and the story there was that it was Reg Warburton (by then Studio Manager at the Whitfield Street Studios) who took it on himself to augment Paul's vocal and acoustic guitar recordings. As such, Reg was credited with 'breaking' Paul Simon in the UK.
What undermines this story somewhat is that Reg had been A&R manager at Oriole Records (which became CBS). If he was responsible for breaking an artist as significant as Paul Simon, why was he replaced and shuffled off to run the studio?
Still, no-one there contradicted the story, and there were some very notable people around who backed it up. I think it was Zombies drummer Hugh Grundy who first clued me up to Reg's contribution (by 1973, two of the Zombies were staffers at CBS - Hugh and Paul Atkinson; Chris White was a favoured producer; and Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone were signed as artists).
Sorry, going a little off piste there...back to Paul Simon!
So Long, Frank LLoyd Wright!
PS - great songwriter, up there with the best, he was really in a purple patch when he wrote The Boxer and the rest of BOTW.
America
Not a huge S&G fan. Last Autumn broght her indoors (who is) to see Art Garfunkel - probably one of the worst gigs I was ever at. The whitest performer I have ever seen - 100% grove free.
With that off my chest think America is one of the most evocative songs I know. Came out when I was still in school and it evoked the bigger wider world.
Reminds me of an interview with the "Boss" probably on OGWT and probably with Mr. Hepworth, where the was totally against Music Videos as they spoilt the individual images every one had of songs which had no video baggage.
Think of your fav. classic songs and the images they evoke.
Unfortunately "The Boxer" is spoilt forever reminds me of many too many drunken parties and sessions.
that would be grove
as in the wonderful pronunciation of Britt Ekland in her Star Special
on R1 decades ago, would it ?
I recall her talking about a single that they all loved so much that they "wore out the groves" ...
(edit: sounds like you may have felt rather as my SO did when I (misguidedly) took her to see Judy Collins do a valentine's day gig in Aspen. I think fact we are still together 15 years later has a lot to do with agreeing to differ on certain types of music ... and I think folk-rock would top the list ...
I saw garfunkel myself in france about 12 years ago - but I am a fan - it's all about the voice for me ...
and he can act a bit, if you want passive aggressive ...
)
"This is my boyfriend Sage ..."
Roy Halee
They always worked with the best people to get a brilliant sound in the studio. Roy Halee's production and engineering work was world class. Joe Osborn, Fred Carter Jr, Larry Knetchel, Hal Blaine, Charlie McCoy - class acts one and all.
Am I the only one
who thinks the big drum/cannon noise slightly ruins it? I mean it's a fantastic song but i much prefer the acoustic version
The same goes for Bridge Over Troubled Water as well...
Laura Barton
The divine Miss Barton wrote a splendid piece on Paul Simon in her Hail Hail Rock n Roll column a little while back :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/nov/21/simonandgarfunkel-popandrock
The Boxer
I put it on the iPod on my journey home after this thread. I had listened to it a couple of months ago, but it's also one of those songs that you just...know in your head without needing to hear it.
I was a little surprised to hear how lush it sounded. But I also thought it sounded a little Christmassy. Which was worrying. Either it really does sound like Christmas, or I associate it with Christmas. Maybe because my dad was listening to it at Christmas once or something.
I'm also a little concerned that it reminds me of Chris De Burgh's Spaceman Came Travelling....
los lobos and lack of grace
For mine Graceland was a stunning album and I always rejected the naysayers re a cultural boycott.
However Los Lobos's claims that Simon had few ideas and stole thier riffs unattributed has always disturbed me.
Was this issue ever resolved ?
He's done some great duets in his time ...
I'm not a huge PS fan,
but - for what it's worth - I think I prefer that version of Here Comes The Sun to the original (which I love).
Thank you, Steven.
and
thanks to him for the Conchords - I think Roeg would crack a smile at that one
George and Paul...
that was great. Never seen it before... they sounded really good together.
Was this very slightly naughty of PS?
given the supposed subject matter (according to a friend)?
Artistic Differences
You couldn't make this up:
-- Wikipedia
Cuba Si, Nixon No
You can hear a live version of this on the Songs For The Asking boot, probably available at one of your favourite torrents.
On this evidence I think Paul should have bowed to Artie and gone with the Bach chorale.
American Tune
Thanks.
in a way, whenever I hear him sing "many times I've been mistaken, and many times confused" on American Tune, I feel he eventually did anyway ...just not sung by Artie ...
Do you happen to know if the (live ?) version of AT that was on the Greatest Hits Etc LP is on CD somewhere-it's not on iTunes in that version as far as I can tell, and I am used to its stately pace ?
(edit: looks like a need to track down a (deleted) CD -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Hits,_Etc.
)
and about 3 weeks later
the US greatest hits etc CD is with me-same magnificently dowdy package as the original-and ripped to my iPod etc-thanks for the stimulus
The End
The ending of 'The Boxer' is fabulous and, when it used to get played on the radio more regularly, I was always amazed if the DJ cut into it.
Without every second of that fade out there never seemed much point in playing it in the first place!
Don't like 'DJ's' at the best of times but that used to drive me nuts.
Incidentally, on the subject of DJ's, wasn't the Smiths' compilation last year going to be called 'Hang The DJ'?
I'm sure I saw an advert with that title only for it to limp out a month later as 'Greatest Hits' or something.
Were the group/label censored on it?
Did the record industry think it would encourage the hanging of DJ's?
If so, a great opportunity missed.....
Ending
Yes, to underline David's original point about the strings - 'by then they've done their work' - I think it's fantastic the way they fade out and the song ends how it began, with the solo acoustic guitar.
There was quite a strong support for Paul Simon in this thread, to which I added my tuppence-worth:
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/cleverest-rhymes-song
Funny...
I've just re-read a Rolling Stone interview from 1970 in which Paul Simon says of The Boxer : "I think that's one of the best things that we ever did, although I thought the fade-out ending was too long. Aside from that, I like the song a lot..."
By the way
Paul Simon can play guitar.
Sure can
I love his playing. His first solo album has a fantastic acoustic guitar sound and I always think of it as a real guitar album.
I always liked Billy Braggs' story
that for his school homework one day they had to write a poem, and he decided to just transcribe the lyrics of a S&G song. He got 7/10.
must try harder
up there with those writers who submitted work for competitions parodying themselves, and came 2nd-I am trying to think of the famous case-anyone ?
Didn't he also (ahem) 'transcribe'
the opening lines of 'A New England'from Paul Simon's 'Leaves That Are Green'?
Mr Bragg
He did take those lines form Paul Simon. He also famously, had written and asked permission, which was granted by PS.
Graham Greene I believe
The Boxer on headphones
I played it on my way home tonight. This was the first time I've ever heard it on headphones and I was struck by the huge amount of sibilance. It was really distracting and it's something that I've never noticed before. I don't think it is anything to do with my Sennheiser phones either. I have the Paul Simon Anthology on my MP3 player. Whether it has anything to do with the remastering is something I've no idea about. When BOTW came up a couple of tracks later it was nowhere near as bad. I paid particular attention when it got to "Sail on silver girl..." and it was nowhere near as bad.
It was remastered on CD a few years back
The original CD was pretty dire. The Paul Simon Anthology was released in 1993 and chances are it was from the same master. There's a more recent (2001) remastering of BOTW now that's a distinct improvement and you can get it for less than a fiver http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bridge-Troubled-Water-Simon-Garfunkel/dp/B00005M...
Vinyl
I listened to my vinyl copy through the headphones. The sibilance was nowhere near as prominent. However, a bit like the squeaky bass drum pedal on Since I've Been Loving You, once heard it's hard to ignore altogether.
Boxer
is remarkably rich in uses of the letter S, now that you mention it though ;-) (amazing what one learns on this site, I find )
Listened to my own rip [192 kbits MP3]. It's off "The Definitive Simon and Garfunkel" which although 1991-and thus not the 2001 remaster that was mentioned above-didn't seem to be too bad.
the patron saint of lost souls
David H's point, about not really needing to go deeper into the meaning of the song but still feeling it, is true of a lot Paul Simon's songs. He's written so many great songs in different styles. You know, if you go and see him live, that you will probably know every song, and most of the lyrics. How many other people can you say that about?
True
He has amazing 'ears' - always wondered how many small time Tin Pan Alley hustlers from Queens ended up on the English folk scene? He had all that access to lyrical ideas, melodies, tunings - the other US 'folk' groups didn't end up sounding like that so it must have been his own synthesis. It seems amazing listening to something as gently English and folky in style like "For Emily Wherever I May Find Her" now and thinking that half the population of the West would have known it at the time.
Its always hard to get past your own experience of a recording or a band and just hear it for what it is. I have had a wonderful few weeks with the "Beatles At The BBC" very loud in the car - Macca was right you know, it all starts from them being a great rock'n'roll band. Whoops - Beatles - wrong thread...
Access all areas
have been trying to work out which Bach Chorale American Tune reminds me of, and realised it's "O Sacred Head Sore Wounded", best known from the St Matthew Passion:
(compare :
)
Amusingly, like the great Chorales in Cantatas 80 and 140 it is another Lutheran hymn (this time by Gerhardt), and here its melody is actually by someone (Hassler) other than the hymn writer, and a secular love song:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Sacred_Head,_Now_Wounded
So we have a New York Jewish song writer linking two popular eras about 400 years apart, via the Protestant Reformation, with lyrics written in the shadow of Watergate. Kind of makes me want to see a TV series that's a cross between Goodall and Burke's "Connections" ...
...That's entertainment folks.
PS seems he *did* eventually sing it with Artie:
http://knifetricks.blogspot.com/2007/12/christmas-break-and-american-tun...
and
[skip to 1:53]
Both versions of American Tune
have an appeal, but the one with Art is just stunning.
great clips
oh and thanks for all the clips people. The duet with George was great
Just go back from New York
and there were no whores on 7th avenue. Must have moved somewhere else. On a serious note I really think the S&G songs stand the test of time. Timeless perfection indeed. Someone else stole my thunder re Darling Lorraine from You're the one - I remember on release listening to this song over and over again - it has a poignancy that few can emulate.
As much as I love the S&G stuff Simon solo wins it for me with the entire Still Crazy album and Graceland.
Just think of 'Diamonds on the soles of her shoes' and the line 'empty as a pocket. Genius.
A cheer for the idiots who belittled One Trick Pony.
Thanks to you my dad found a copy for 99p in the bargain bin at the Co-op and brought it home one Saturday morning late in 1980 after the weekly shop.
I was home for the weekend, and was amused to find that my dad had bought an LP which, listening revealed, included a fantastic little song with the line, 'I stepped outside to smoke myself a j'.
It's a brilliant album, I taped it immediately, and it's been with me ever since. So cheers.
Cuba Si, Nixon No
I have been reading about the track Cuba Si, Nixon No (left off Bridge Over Troubled Water) for over 20 years. This week, thanks to youtube, I've heard it.
Clip one has some awesome in-car S&G tension and footage from a studio session for the track...
And Here is the song itself, in concert...
thanks for that Frasier-esque moment
priceless in all senses of the word :-) For anyone else wondering, as I was, seems that clip is from Songs of America TV special, which can be "sourced" on the web-some bits are officially released on the "Old Friends Live on Stage" DVD as extras.
S&G collectors
may be pleased to know that Songs of America is included on DVD in the 3 disc reissue of Bridge. This also includes a 1969 concert which is quite stunning-largely acoustic, sparsely employed band, superbly recorded-and includes the rapturous response of the crowd to "Bridge" itself, unreleased at that point.
Columbia's heritage programme doing S&G the same sort of service they did with Kind of Blue and Ellington at Newport.
All the fun of the Harmony Game
Working out harmonies is such an intense and painstaking process, you'd have to be a bunch of Gregorian monks to get through it without friction. Case studies: Simon and Garfunkel, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys...
the HJH and the Brothers Finn
might be good evidence as well I guess-with Because as sort of the semi-exception that proves the rule.
From the same Songs of America TV special I was also taken with this:
who's the yawning guy in the Sonny Bono jacket ?
I see it is Paul's younger brother, Eddie
http://www.thedreamerofmusic.org/BIOGRAPHY/BROTHER/03.htm