Songs I've Liked #4 & #5

I was heading across town tonight when the Sirius satellite radio station I was listening to started plugging a temporary "Simon and Garfunkel Channel" over on channel 38. This brought back a wealth of memories, and I immediately tuned it in.

The first LP I ever bought was Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence". Got it at the little Hutzlers Westview record department down on the basement level, by the escalator. It probably set me back about $2.50. I remarked to my friend at the time "At these prices, I probably won't be buying many more of these." HA! Hundreds of LPs, hundreds of CDs, and now hundreds of MP3 downloads later, here I am.

Anyhow, I have a pretty good memory from every S&G single that was released, so I am picking a couple of their "mid period" tunes as my favorites here. In both cases, I bought the 45 single, then got them again in the "album" format.

"At the Zoo" was released in 1967 and reached number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was pretty typical Paul Simon lyrics for the time; full of metaphorical animal imagery. Sort of an "Animal Farm" set to music and full of political allegory that shot right over my head. I always thought the tune was pretty catchy, regardless of the cleverness of Mr. Simon's wordplay, starting jazzily around a major seventh, and building toward the last verse where the animals are described, one by one.

I was babysitting my sister the night after I bought the single, and I recall playing the song continuously, maybe twelve times.

Then there is "A Hazy Shade of Winter", with that common, catchy, declining chord progression, and a bit of the ol' Simon angst as he wonders what's become of himself as time passes on. Catchy tune, making it to number 13 on the charts in 1966, and, much later, covered more edgily by the Bangles, who took it right up to number two. And again, there was Paul singing about how those leaves that were green turned to brown, time marches inexorably on, etc.

These two songs are memorable to me, but they are probably not even my favorite S&G tune. That would most lilely be "The Boxer", one of their last efforts as a working duo. But they are the two that came to my mind first as I was flipping over to the S&G channel just in time to catch, of all things, "Hey School Girl", a very early effort that was a regional hit in New York City, when those two teenagers called themselves "Tom and Jerry", and their extraordinary careers (Paul Simon's continues with a new release sometime soon) were just taking off.