written by Paul Simon , performed by Simon & Garfunkel

The first year I was in secondary school it was 1963. My school was in a leafy suburb on the outskirts of North London and was a Grammar School, so you had to pass an exam called the eleven-plus to get there. In my class was a really nice guy called Howard Leftovitch. One day he came into school and said, ‘I’ve got a new name’. I was very surprised and asked him, ‘Aren’t you called Howard anymore?’ ‘Of course I am ’, he said, ‘I’m still called Howard, but my surname is now Lethridge.’ ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know’, he said, ‘My parents told me over the weekend but I’ve no idea why’.

A couple of weeks later I asked Howard if he had any idea yet why his name had been changed, he said he still didn’t know, but I got the impression he did, but just didn’t want to talk about it, so I left it at that. Some years later, I was watching a film about immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in New York from Eastern Europe, and if they had long surnames the officials couldn’t be bothered to write the whole thing out on their paperwork so they’d just take the first part of the surname and use that, so Adamczyk became Adams and Lukaszewicz became Lukas. Interestingly, this laziness made in easier for the children of immigrants who had arrived in America to progress in society and I wondered if that could have been the reason Howard’s parents had changed Leftovitch to Lethridge?

Howard’s family, as you may have guessed were Jewish, not something I had realised at all.  At school, in our uniform, we were all just ‘the class’. Some had dark hair, some were blond, some had white skin others were darker skinned. Boys were called by their surnames, girls by their first names. The desks were in rows and we sat in alphabetical order. The only discrimination or segregation was between boys and girls, but as we didn’t want anything to do with each other, that was fine. At lunch time the girls stood in  groups and gossiped whilst we played football, and to ensure we all stayed focused during classes, each boy was sat next to a girl.

History lessons for us stopped before the outbreak of World War Two (1939). Our parents had fought in the war, we’d been brought up on war films and war comics rather than any explanation of what had happened, so I knew nothing of the Holocaust, the death camps, the attempted extermination of the Jewish people until I was well into my teens. It was a profound shock, one that has stayed with me forever. By then, I had many Jewish friends. They all belonged to regular ‘middle class’ families. Before I had become aware of their history , I had no reason to think of them as any different to any other families I knew, which was of course what they wanted. History had shown them that to be different, to stick out as an ethnic group, could lead to hatred by others, and part of the way in which you could be less visible, was to change your name and drop endings such as ‘stein’ or ‘vitch’, as Howard’s parents had done.

Two young Jewish boys met in Queens School in New York in 1953 when they were both eleven years old. One of them was a really good guitarist and the other possessed the voice of an angel so they decided to play and sing together. For all the reasons I’ve explained above they decided not to use their real names and called themselves Tom & Jerry.  In those early years their influences were the ‘doo-wop’ groups in New York and as with many others the vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers. By coincidence, in 1963, at the same time that Howard’s parents were changing their surname to be less Jewish, Tom & Jerry decided that they were happy with who they were and would go by their own names of Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel.

Simon & Garfunkel were categorised as a folk group. Now in the U.S. in the early 1960s that was not the same as we would think of a folk group in the U.K. Here, musicians were delving back into the archives to find traditional songs that had been handed down through generations, maybe right back to medieval times. They were then singing these un-accompanied or putting their own arrangements to them using traditional instruments such as fiddles and concertinas. But not in the U.S. There on TV and radio, folk groups and artists such as the New Christy Minstrels and Burl Ives sang jolly songs about an idyllic past accompanied by banjos – good wholesome family entertainment. Meanwhile, in coffee bars singers such as Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul & Mary and Bob Dylan, influenced by the radical songs of Woody Guthrie and political tensions sang such songs as ‘The Times They Are A Changin’, ‘We Shall Overcome’, ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’. These protest singers as they were referred to sold plenty of records, and so it was into this context that Columbia Records signed Simon & Garfunkel in 1963, believing that they could appeal to both audiences.

Initially, nobody was very excited about S&G. Their first album, ‘Wednesday Morning 3 A.M.’ only sold 3,000 copies and so disillusioned they went their separate ways, Art Garfunkel returning to university to do a masters degree and Paul Simon coming to England, where he started to play on the folk club circuit. Paul is a gifted songwriter, but unlike many pop writers at the time he was not churning material out like a hit factory, however he did put together enough material to release a solo album ‘The Paul Simon Songbook’.

As with many successful artists there is often a key moment and in S&G’s case it was the song,  ‘The Sound Of Silence’. Bob Dylan had initially been a folk singer, but in 1965 he had added electric guitar, bass and drums accompaniment giving him what we now view as a ‘rock’ line-up, broadening his appeal and producing hit albums. Buoyed by this success, Columbia decided to do the same thing with Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound Of Silence’, using session musicians to remix the original folk recording into a rock track. It topped the U.S. charts in January 1966, selling over a million copies.

A second album not surprisingly named ‘Sounds of Silence’ was rushed out and two further re-mixed singles ‘I Am A Rock’ and ‘Homeward Bound’ were also top ten hits. Back together again, S&G now started a nationwide tour including headline shows at universities, and, appeared on prime time TV shows including Ed Sullivan.

It took the duo nine months to complete their follow-up album ‘Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme’, a long time when most artists released two or even three albums a year, but this was  primarily because they took control of the production, which allowed them to work with engineer Roy Halee to produce what became their distinctive sound.

Having heard their material, film director Mike Nichols approached Columbia to see if he could licence some of their songs to use in his new film ‘The Graduate’. The record company saw this as an opportunity to sell a soundtrack album, a good commercial project, however, Paul Simon wasn’t really that keen, seeing it as ‘selling-out’. Nicholls met with Simon and gave him a copy of the script which fired up Paul’s creativity and lead to him writing new songs for the movie, amongst which was ‘Mrs Robinson’.

Now if you haven’t seen  ‘The Graduate’ I must tell you that the next piece is a spolier, so look away now. It stars Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross and Anne Bancroft, and when released in December 1967 was the highest grossing box office film that year, receiving seven nominations at the subsequent Oscars, with Mike Nichols collecting the Best Director Award.  Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) has graduated and is trying to decide what to do with the rest of his life. His parents and their friends think he should take a high powered job but all he does is lie around all day doing nothing, that is until he starts a secret affair with one of his parent’s friends, Mrs Robinson (Bancroft). After a while even this becomes boring for Benjamin but things take an unexpected turn when much to Mrs Robinson’s disgust Ben goes on an arranged date with her daughter Elaine (Ross). Despite Ben’s best efforts to put off Elaine they hit it off, but the relationship is thwarted when her mother tells her about the affair but lies saying Ben raped her. In the final scene of the movie, Elaine is about to get married to someone else when Ben arrives at the church, he halts the service and she realises the truth, that she wants to be with him and they run out of the church together, boarding a passing bus, and we leave them happy and smiling sitting on the rear seat of the bus. Paul Simon worked with David Grusin on the soundtrack of the film which features various Simon & Garfunkel tracks including ‘The Sound Of Silence’ and snippets of what would become ‘Mrs Robinson’, but not the final version.

The 1968 release ‘Bookends’, Simon & Garfunkel’s fourth album, took a significant amount of studio time to record and featured a whole host of additional musicians including strings, brass and percussionists. The attention to detail and perfectionism of the production team meant that vocal parts were often overdubbed several times until they were happy with the finished version. Due to the success of the film and the inclusion of four tracks that had already been released as singles; ‘A Hazy Shade of Winter’, ‘Fakin’ It’, ‘At The Zoo’, and ‘Mrs Robinson’ the album was certified gold before release on pre-orders alone, went to the number one spot and stayed there for seven weeks.

Bookends has the full version of ‘Mrs Robinson’, and it also has the track ‘America’. To me, this has always been the story of what happened to Ben and Elaine afterwards. It’s opening line is ‘Let us be lovers we’ll marry our fortunes together’. It then simply documents their bus journey to the big city and their future life together, but alongside the jokes they are telling each other there is also the fear of the future, and wondering if everything will work out for them. Lines such as ‘I’m Lost, ‘I’m aching and I don’t know why’ and the repeated ‘I’ve come to look for America’ will resonate with everyone who has left their parent’s home and is making their own way in the world.

For me, moving out of my parent’s house was a great relief. It felt as if the chains holding my life back had been removed and I was free. I had a job in a record shop that paid reasonably well and I was already self sufficient in that I bought my own clothes, and did my own cooking and washing. For some of my friends it was a more difficult adjustment. Not just in practical ways – taking their washing home or turning up for Sunday lunch, but also in emotional ways, and in financial support when things don’t work out the way you planned.  Personally, I only ever had one period of about a month when I had to ‘sofa surf’ when my landlord was also my employer and I lost both my job and my home at the same time. After all these years I still feel bad about that but I can’t begin to imagine what it would have been like if I’d had a family then.

Going back to Ben and Elaine though, how would it have been for them? Conjecture about what happened after a film ended is always interesting, which is why there have been so many sequels, but let’s look at the facts. On the downside I can’t see them going home to their parent’s houses for Sunday lunch, but, on the upside, people seemed to be fighting to give Ben a job so they weren’t going to starve, and they’d be together.

Simon & Garfunkel Greatest Hits

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