The Sounds of Silence

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Forty–five years ago this month, "The Sounds of Silence" was released as a single — and the commercially successful careers of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were launched.

They had been playing clubs in New York for a few years, but "The Sounds of Silence" brought them the exposure that made them major figures in the increasingly popular folk rock movement of that time.

It was one of my mother's favorite songs. As a child, I recall that Mom had a fairly extensive collection of Simon and Garfunkel's 45–rpm singles. "The Sounds of Silence" may have been the first song of theirs that I ever heard, although I'm not completely certain of that. Mom may well have waited to buy it until she had heard more of Simon and Garfunkel's work.

So, while I remember hearing "The Sounds of Silence" around my home when I was small, it may not have been the first Simon and Garfunkel single that Mom brought into the house. That could have been "I Am A Rock" or "Scarborough Fair" or "Homeward Bound."

And, even if it wasn't, that doesn't mean I didn't hear it first somewhere else. My father was a college professor, and, when my brother and I were little, my parents often left us with his students when they went out. On one of those occasions, I might have heard "The Sounds of Silence" playing on a radio or a turntable. Although my parents were receptive to many of the artistic developments of their time, I got much of my exposure to the music of that time from those students.

Now, I'm not a student of musical genres, just a garden–variety fan who appreciates many kinds of music, and I don't think it would be accurate to call Simon and Garfunkel the innovators of what has come to be called folk rock. It probably would be more appropriate to bestow that particular title on the Byrds or Bob Dylan.

But I'm equally sure that anyone who remembers those days would agree that Simon and Garfunkel were certainly among the pioneers of that genre that blended folk music and rock music so well in the 1960s and 1970s.

And "The Sounds of Silence" was certainly a part of that popular movement. "Bridge Over Troubled Water" ultimately became their signature song, but "The Sounds of Silence" was the kind of popular breakthrough that Simon and Garfunkel craved early in their careers.

"We were looking for a song on a larger scale," Garfunkel said, "but this is more than either of us expected."

As I always heard it, the music was just about done when Simon began working on the lyrics after President Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. He struggled with the lyrics for awhile, but everything came together by February of 1964, and Simon and Garfunkel started playing the song at clubs.

The song was well received, and, about 18 months later, it was recorded by Columbia Records. It climbed to the top of the charts by New Year's Day 1966.

For me, it has always been a song that I associated with the '60s. I enjoyed listening to it as a teenager. I still enjoy listening to it today. But I can't really say it has a "timeless" quality the way other songs do.

I can listen to some songs today that were recorded 30, 40, even 50 years ago, and they still sound fresh and new to me. But there are other songs, like "The Sounds of Silence," that always remind me of the times when they were popular.

Perhaps that is because "The Sounds of Silence" was one of the songs featured in "The Graduate," a film that actually used themes that are relevant to every generation but cast them with the general angst of the '60s as the backdrop.

So I guess it's only natural that the song is inextricably linked to that turbulent decade. It is appropriate, then, that it would have a special relevance for people who were young in the '60s — and even for such as me, who were only old enough to remember part of the '60s.

Well, maybe that is a little esoteric. But I still think the song was great — even if Blender magazine thought it was one of the 50 worst songs of all time.

We Built This City

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I come from a small family.

My mother was an only child, and my father had a sister who was six years older. Based on what I know of my aunt, she was something of a prodigy. I heard, for example, that she graduated from high school when she was about 16 and that she finished college before she was 20. Some time after that, she married a man who worked for General Electric, and she apparently devoted herself to her home and her three children.

My cousins were all older than I was, and, until I was about 10 or 11, they lived in the Netherlands. So I never saw them when I was a child.

They returned to the United States when I was about 12, but GE didn't send my uncle to Texas, where my grandmother still lived, or somewhere else in the South. Instead, GE sent them to Schenectady, N.Y. — more than 1,400 miles from Dallas and more than 1,100 miles from my hometown of Conway, Ark.

Even though we were finally on the same continent, it seemed to me that I might grow up without knowing that side of my family. But my parents were planning a trip to Vermont one summer to visit some old friends, and it was decided that we would stop in Schenectady and visit my aunt and uncle and the cousins while we were in that part of the country.

And so we did.

The youngest of my cousins was about five or six years older than I was so all three were around college age then. There were two boys and one girl. I think the girl was the youngest, and she may have still been in high school. I don't recall seeing the oldest — he may have been out of college by that time, might even have been married and living somewhere else.

But the middle son was there. As I recall, he had been away from home most of that summer and had just returned home. I even remember seeing his bags in the hallway. Maybe he had been taking summer classes at the college where he was enrolled. Anyway, our visit came during a period between the end of summer school and the beginning of the fall semester, and I remember my uncle teasing my cousin about missing the smell of cigarette smoke around the house while he was gone.

I have a memory of all of us sitting in my aunt's living room and talking, and I recall my aunt and uncle telling us that my cousin Cathy had just had her wisdom teeth extracted. That gave my father the opportunity to recall when my aunt had her wisdom teeth extracted. "She made sure we all knew about it," my father said.

Somewhere around that time, Cathy got up, excused herself and went to the back of the house, where her room was, and put a record on her turntable. And I could hear the familiar songs of Jefferson Airplane — "Somebody to Love," "Volunteers" and "White Rabbit," among others.

Those are the songs that I always associate with Jefferson Airplane. The group disbanded around the time of our visit to Schenectady and was soon replaced by Jefferson Starship, which later dropped the "Jefferson" part and just went by the name of Starship.

I always felt that was a corporate sellout, considering that Jefferson Airplane always seemed like the embodiment of the left–wing counterculture. Starship just seemed too commercial.

But when Jefferson Airplane crashed, Jefferson Starship rose from the ashes in its place. At first, there seemed to be little difference between the two. Grace Slick was still singing for the band, and it was churning out hits like "Miracles" and "Jane."

Initially, I suppose, I didn't realize just how commercial Starship really was. The parting of the ways, for me, came 25 years ago tomorrow, when Starship released "We Built This City."

I felt at the time that it was a perfectly horrid song — and that opinion was confirmed nearly 20 years later, when Blender magazine named it the worst song ever.

Now, that probably requires a disclaimer. Six years ago, Blender put together a list of what it called the 50 worst songs of all time, which was inspired by a VH1 special called "The 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs ... Ever."

I'm sure you can think of at least one song — probably many more — that could fairly be said to be worse than "We Built This City." And that brings us to the catch.

In order to qualify for the list, the song had to be a hit at some point. It didn't have to reach #1 on the Billboard chart, but it had to be popular enough that it sold fairly well and got decent airplay.

Astonishingly, though, "We Built This City" actually did reach #1 on Billboard's chart about 2½ months after it was released as a single. So it qualified for inclusion in the list. People liked it. They really liked it. But I didn't.

The issues I have with "We Built This City" are too numerous to discuss here. But I've always been irritated by the lyrics. I guess I owe that to my training as a journalist and my experience as a copy editor. I can — and have — put up with a lot. But "We Built This City" was the straw that broke this camel's back.

Early in the song, for example, it refers to Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi playing the mamba. Mamba is the name of the species and subspecies of a deadly snake. My guess is that the writer of the song, Bernie Taupin, meant mambo, which is a dance. Poetic license?

I guess I expected better from Taupin. He wrote so many of the really fine songs that made Elton John a star. But words have meaning, and, when a lyricist uses a word simply because it rhymes with something else and not because it has a relevant meaning, that's just wrong.

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Well, I suppose even the best song writers can come up with a clinker now and then.

Paul McCartney, for example, was half of the greatest song writing team in popular music history when he and John Lennon were composing songs for the Beatles. Then, after the Beatles broke up, McCartney went on to a very successful career as first the leader of the group Wings and then as a solo artist, writing several very good songs.

But he took his lumps from Blender — and justifiably so — for his collaboration with Stevie Wonder on the dreadful "Ebony and Ivory" and his participation in the Beatles' "Ob–La–Di, Ob–La–Da."

I don't have an argument with either of those selections, but I would include a third song, for which McCartney was responsible — "Let 'Em In," which was released 34 years ago.

It would be hard to beat the jejune quality of the chorus — "Someone's knocking on the door/Somebody's ringing the bell/Someone's knocking on the door/Somebody's ringing the bell/Do me a favor/Open the door/And let 'em in."

But I suppose it redeems itself, to a degree, by having lyrics that have some meaning — even if the meaning is an inside joke.

The song recites a list of names, which, as I learned later in my life, actually refer to real people. Well, most of them do:

• "Sister Suzy" was McCartney's first wife, Linda.


• "Brother John" is Linda's brother, John.


• "Martin Luther" has never been made clear, but it probably isn't a reference to Martin Luther King, as might seem obvious. More likely, I have been told, it is a reference to Lennon, who was called "Martin Luther Lennon" by McCartney and the Beatles.


• "Phil and Don" are the Everly Brothers.


• "Brother Michael" is McCartney's brother.


• "Auntie Jin" was McCartney's aunt.

And there is more. Later in the song, "Brother Michael" is replaced by "Uncle Ernie," which is a reference to the Who's Keith Moon, who played the character of Uncle Ernie in the film version of the Who's "Tommy."

"Auntie Jin" was replaced by "Uncle Ian" — whoever he is/was.

If Blender wants to come up with a revised list, I don't object to keeping "We Built This City" in the top spot. And most of the songs on the original list certainly deserved to be there.

But I wouldn't mind if "Let 'Em In" was in the Top 50.