It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “The Sounds of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel
January 26, 1966
“The Sounds of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100, January 1-7 & 22-28, 1966
By the time Simon & Garfunkel’s debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., was released in October 1964, the folk music revival was on the wane. The college students who had stockpiled their Kingston Trio and Joan Baez LPs found their interest in rock ‘n’ roll reignited by the Beatles, and a new genre, folk-rock, waited just around the corner. Wednesday Morning, with its minimal acoustic guitar and upright bass accompaniment, its delicate, intricate harmonies between Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and its heavy dependence on cover versions, was a relic of a moment already passed. The album felt like a last gasp not only for the folk revival, but for the duo themselves. After the album flopped, the pair went their separate ways: Garfunkel to graduate school, studying math at Columbia; Simon to England, where he released his solo debut, The Paul Simon Songbook, in 1965.
Nestled at the end of side 1 of Wednesday Morning, however, was one song that refused to be overlooked. Like many of the tracks on its album, “The Sounds of Silence” (later renamed “The Sound of Silence”) is a protest song; the difference is that its object is personal, not political. The duo struggles to establish a connection to the world around them, singing in tight harmony as a protest against the “songs that voices never shared.” It’s a protest doomed to fail: by its nature, a plea against indifference will be met with a shrug, if it’s heard at all. The futility of the pair’s cause diffuses some of potential preachiness, letting a line like “hear my words that I might teach you” read as desperate instead of self-righteous. No matter how passionately the duo pleads to be heard, the end of each verse finds them met only with “the sound of silence.”
Nearly a year after Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. faded into obscurity, the album’s producer, Tom Wilson, enlisted session musicians to overdub “The Sounds of Silence” with electric guitar, bass and drums. Wilson, who had also produced Bob Dylan’s pioneering folk-rock records Bringing It All Back Home and “Like a Rolling Stone,” sought to update an unfairly overlooked album track into a potential new hit. To anyone familiar with the original, the electric backing on the new “Sounds of Silence” sounds like an obvious cut-and-paste job, lacking the loose give-and-take of Dylan’s band and the melodiousness of folk-rock trailblazers the Byrds. Inadvertently or not, though, this unvarying plodding strikes at the heart of the song: as the duo’s cries to be heard grow more and more desperate, the uncaring world ignores them and trudges on.
The electrified “Sounds of Silence,” released without Simon & Garfunkel’s knowledge, became a surprise hit at the very end of 1965, over a year after Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. had come and gone. Part of its success could be attributed to the overall popularity of folk rock, but at least as crucial was the sense of alienation coursing through the song. The teenagers who embraced rock ‘n’ roll in the ’50s had grown into young adults uncertain of what lay in store for their futures, and Simon & Garfunkel’s pensive, deliberate music struck a chord. (Little wonder that “The Sounds of Silence” became the recurring theme of the 1967 film The Graduate, that tribute to post-adolescent angst.) “The Sounds of Silence” reinforced the message underlying the Beatles’ and Dylan’s most experimental and ambitious work of the period: that there was room for rock ‘n’ roll to mature, that it could be respectable without sacrificing its power.
The success of “The Sounds of Silence” forced Simon & Garfunkel to quickly reunite and cobble together a new album, largely out of new versions of songs that had Simon had featured on his recent solo album, as well as a couple of leftover tracks the duo had recorded before their split. Released between its title track’s two non-consecutive weeks atop the Hot 100, Sounds of Silence would eventually go triple platinum and spawn another Top 5 hit, “I Am a Rock.” Suddenly, Simon & Garfunkel weren’t just commercially viable musicians; they were one of the most successful acts of the decade, releasing three more multi-platinum albums and 12 more Top 40 US hits (including two further #1s) before breaking up in 1970. After a slow start, the duo’s quiet plea to be heard had been answered.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
