‘Like a bridge over troubled water’

You see, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel are mellow. Really, really mellow. In fact, they are so deeply, intensely, and determinedly mellow that if you listen to them for too long, you run the risk of ripening or rotting, to paraphrase Woody Allen, who, in an early sendup of the duo, cast Simon in the role of a sleazy, much-too-relaxed record producer in Annie Hall.

But I digress. I neither ripened nor rotted while listening to such classic records as Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Bookends, and their final album and masterpiece, Bridge Over Troubled Water, which was released 50 years ago. To the contrary, I found myself bursting at the seams with serenity, feeling our quite serious differences (between, say, those furious at the police and those furious at rioting and looting) start to melt away.

I am keenly aware that it is possible to “weaponize” Simon and Garfunkel. Four years ago, Bernie Sanders’s campaign decided that the soothing, patriotic-but-not-too-patriotic sounds of the song “America” were the ideal soundtrack for a campaign ad meant to suggest a sort of prairie socialism, with images of hay being moved around in a barn and a child carrying a calf.

Setting aside the inconvenient fact that “America” makes no reference to farm life, I grant that the song was useful to Sanders supporters. It was surely intended as a leftist answer to another song about our fair land, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Familiar to watchers of Trump rallies, that song takes rousing stock of the physical splendor of the country and its official hero class. “America,” by contrast, is more rascally, channeling the spirit not of the Marine Corps but of Jack Kerouac.

Nonetheless, the appeal of Simon and Garfunkel is largely apolitical. Sure, there are a few politically charged missteps from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, including the unsuccessful “A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission”). But their best songs, the songs for which we remember them, are small, simple masterpieces of sentiment that attend to such universal topics as yearning for a girlfriend (“Kathy’s Song”) or maintaining a lifelong friendship (the compellingly orchestral “Old Friends”). Sometimes, I think that every Simon and Garfunkel song could, or should, be called “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her.”

If you don’t believe me, just compare Simon and Garfunkel to their predecessors in folk, such as Pete Seeger or Peter, Paul, and Mary. Even when Seeger was a young man, he had the countenance of a senior citizen, of an eccentric uncle who regales his nieces and nephews with tales of hammering laborers and young girls picking flowers. Peter, Paul, and Mary? Well, the youngest member of that trio, Peter Yarrow, was born in 1938, making him about three years older than Simon and Garfunkel. But the group feels like an anachronism: a bunch of pre-baby boomers rather desperately seeking communion with the youth.

Simon and Garfunkel were focused on a more universal condition: post-adolescent angst. Is it any wonder that “The Dangling Conversation” references those perennial favorites of weepy teens, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost? Or that Mike Nichols, when casting about for music to use in The Graduate, settled on their songs? When you next watch that movie, be sure to listen just as closely to the music: “Mrs. Robinson” really does capture the propulsive, forward-driving energy of youth, while “The Sound of Silence” really does evoke the hollowed-out emptiness of a couple starting a life together without a plan.

If the duo was not immune to excess (see the overproduced “A Hazy Shade of Winter” and “Save the Life of My Child”), they were never better than on the album with which they closed out their career, Bridge Over Troubled Water. The title song is a fervent, earnest hymn to the lasting bonds of friendship, while “Cecilia” is genuinely stirring: the only truly foot-tapping music they ever made.

Of course, making fun of Simon and/or Garfunkel has been a sport since at least Annie Hall. Then, in 1987, came Elaine May’s Ishtar, in which Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman play singer-songwriters unburdened by talent who slavishly emulate their heroes, Simon and Garfunkel. “‘Dangerous Business’ is as good as ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ any day of the week,” the Hoffman character says, confirming his character’s utter square-ness. Who, in 1987, was listening to that treacle?

Yet here we are in 2020, and Simon and Garfunkel are still speaking to us. After the duo wrapped up their partnership in 1970, they proceeded on separate if parallel tracks. Simon progressed to solo records; so did Garfunkel, rather less successfully. For his part, Garfunkel turned out to be a really good movie actor, co-starring with Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge before Simon gave it a go as a leading man in the (rather less successful) One-Trick Pony. Simon has said some snarky things about Garfunkel — “Oh, he always gets on my nerves,” he said in a 1982 appearance on David Letterman — but, even so, they keep reviving their collaboration. Just a year before that Letterman appearance, the two had teamed for their much-lauded Central Park reunion concert. Many have followed.

Simon and Garfunkel can’t give each other up. We can’t leave them alone, either, certainly not now. Give a listen sometime to one of their best songs from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme: “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” which, as surely as Chet Baker’s “Look for the Silver Lining,” manages to express the rejuvenation of beginning a new day. Listening to the words and music, we picture the sun waking us up and the birds coming alive. Still feeling low? C’mon, get goin’. Start feelin’ groovy.

Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.