Released in 1965 in the UK, for too many years this album was a buried treasure in the Paul Simon back catalogue. The previous year the debut Simon & Garfunkel LP ‘Wednesday Morning 3AM’ had been issued in America and had failed to establish the duo on either the folk or pop scenes. This was largely thanks to a lack of real identity pushing that album’s head above the blossoming acoustic song writing movement of 1964. Less than half the record was made up of original material and its fair to say that the stand-out originals did not see enough exposure to make a strong case for Simon’s gifts as a composer. The pair were so pessimistic about their prospects of a career in music by the end of 1964 that Art Garfunkel had returned to Columbia University and Paul Simon had even enlisted into law school.
Fortunately, 1964 had also seen Simon developing a parallel career as a solo folk performer, primarily across the folk club circuit in the UK. He was building up such a reputation around the British Isles that he opted to return at every available opportunity, even quitting law school before the end of the year. If he needed further inducement to be in England, it was there in the shape of a serious love affair he had begun with an English girl called Kathy. He had also come to the attention of Judith Piepe, a social worker for the homeless people of Soho and a sincere champion of emerging talent around the London folk clubs. For Judith, Paul Simon was a songwriter of considerable potential and so she utilised her position as a presenter on BBC Radio’s religious segment called Five To Ten. At her behest, Paul recorded his songs for a radio session which Piepe broadcast during her show every night for a week in March 1965.
The encouraging positive response to those radio sessions would lead to the CBS offer for Paul to record a solo album, exclusively of his own original material, released in the summer of 1965 in the UK as ‘The Paul Simon Song Book’. Of course, before the year was over, Simon had returned to the US, summoned by the breakthrough chart success of a jangly folk-rock remake of ‘Sounds Of Silence’ from the previous years Simon & Garfunkel debut LP. That solo career would have to wait, although it has always been stated that the sales from the ‘Paul Simon Song Book’ were disappointing anyway. I often wonder if it was more the case that the mainstream late ’65 impact of Simon & Garfunkel simply eclipsed it; speaking as someone who has had an involvement with second-hand vinyl for the past thirty years, the original album is no way as scarce as people used to think, so its sales must have been fairly respectable.
My own appreciation of the album does have a personal angle that I should declare. As a 13/14-year-old in the mid-1980s, my obsession with music did incline towards artists like Paul Simon. To my eyes and ears, if a performer could write and play an instrument as well as perform, they were of a better calibre than the typical eighties pop star. I did not know anything about Paul Simon, but I loved ‘Graceland’ and discovered that my parents had this incredibly old record by him (all of 21 years) in their record collection. When I played it and quietly claimed ownership of it, my Dad informed me I was now listening to folk music. This was not a music genre I had dabbled in before. I also had a wonderful raconteur of a drama teacher at my Essex school called Peter Hall (not that one). He picked up on my interest in Paul Simon and recalled how he had actually booked Paul to play his folk club in the sixties. On that occasion, the singer approached Peter and asked, “is it OK if my mate sings with me tonight?” And so it was that he managed to capture on tape one of the earliest UK performances of Simon & Garfunkel. I kept in touch with Peter over the years and heard that later, whilst on a UK tour, Paul Simon had contacted him on a mission to locate old recordings from that era. I do not know if he ever located the cassette, I suspect he would have told me, before his passing it was always the thing I would predictably enquire about.
So, my love of this album is connected with it being the moment I began to identify as someone who was into folk music. It set me on a path. But l do not believe this personal detail alone inflates the qualities it contains, neither should it distract from the unique position the record holds within the canon of Paul Simon. He would soon earn a reputation as a meticulous craftsman, an artist whose recordings were refined and constructed with the finest brush strokes and intense attention to detail. He was an innovator too, always in pursuit of new sounds, combinations of rhythm and texture and always open to fresh ideas. Which is why an LP that was recorded in a single day, with only his acoustic guitar for accompaniment, is such a big deal. He never did this again but you really do listen to these recordings and have to wonder why; Paul was a stylish vocalist and had a masterful touch as a guitarist. Listen closely and you can pick out both bass, rhythm and lead parts played together within the same tune. Furthermore, by 1965 he had written enduring songs; the majority of the material on ‘Song Book’ would go on to be legendary Simon & Garfunkel tracks.
When describing his time in England, Simon once referred to how everything seemed smaller and more manageable than in the US. Revisiting the record today I am struck by the uncluttered simplicity of the times, how the purity of the artists creative lifestyle reflects back at you. He literally was spending those days in England with Kathy before catching trains from gig to gig, carrying his guitar around and filling every spare moment away from her developing songs and lyrics. Anyone trying that today would have a thousand distractions jostling for those free moments through mobile phones, apps and such like. Paul Simon had his guitar case and possibly a notepad. The lyrics open the window on this a little, like on ‘Kathy’s Song’ where he sings “and the song I was writing is left undone, I don’t know why I spend my time writing songs I can’t believe, with word that tear and strain to rhyme”. His perpetual analytical nature is alluded to as well, even if some have questioned whether the “shades of mediocrity” of those words coming back to bite him was truly articulated in song on the Widnes train station platform. There is a counter-argument in circulation that he arrived at the station that day running to catch the train, leaving no time available to actually sit and write a song.
In the eighties when Simon & Garfunkel attempted to make a new album together the project eventually morphed into a Simon solo record called ‘Hearts And Bones’. Simon claimed that at a certain point in the process, he no longer wished to have Art paint on his picture. Maybe in some way, he was thinking back to his earliest days with ‘The Paul Simon Songbook’ because I would argue that there is nothing here that was later improved under the Simon & Garfunkel umbrella. ‘Patterns’ is a dark meditation on how we cannot hope to control our fates, ‘Kathy’s Song’ the most personable of tender love letters and while Garfunkel’s rendition of ‘April Come She Will’ later in 1965 is admittedly beautiful you cannot ignore that it is entirely based on Simon’s performance of the song on this earlier solo work. Art Garfunkel’s strength was how he could soften and sweeten the darkest of Paul Simon’s introspective lyrics; when the duo worked best it was when juxtaposed alongside each other’s opposing gravitational pull such as the classic ‘The Boxer’. But something like ‘Leaves That Are Green’ as it is played here needed no embellishment, a forlorn acceptance of times relentless passing that left zero room for improvement, Simon got it right the first time in England.
Recording technology evolved fast in the sixties and so the creation of an entire album in a single day became highly unusual. You can fully appreciate the motivation to take time and get something designed to last forever exactly right. That said, those collections that simply capture an artist going through their live repertoire in a no-frills manner can stand out as vital audio documents today. Check out some of those last Big Bill Broonzy long players where he seems to be deciding what he is going to play on the spot. Or even the first Beatles album, where that quartets unadorned raw energy is the very thing that is celebrated about it today. On ‘I Am A Rock’ here Paul Simon is letting the rough edges bleed through in a way that he would never repeat on record. The way he thrashes that acoustic guitar so rhythmically is a lesson in song dynamics, the song sounds like it wants to actually rock!
The version of ‘The Sound Of Silence’ on this album has always remained the definitive one for me. It is just that little bit looser and a little bit darker. The song’s writer maybe senses that it is one of his greatest compositions thus far and there remains an audible frisson of delight in singing those wonderful words. In this performance, Paul is selling his piece to the listener, just as he would have been in the folk clubs of England during that halcyon summer of 1965. And yet, as he so prophetically predicted on this record, the patterns of his life were both unpredictable and uncontrollable. Fate swiftly took Paul Simon off down another path but that hardly means the road not travelled would have been wrong. On the contrary, everything about ‘The Paul Simon Song Book’ and the man who made it was indisputably, something so right.
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