My Mother’s Records
I should probably call this post Everybody’s Mother’s Records because I think Simon & Garfunkel’s final album was bought by every single one of them when it came out, in the UK it spent 41 weeks at number one and was the best-selling album of both 1970 and 1971. It was part of the furniture when I was growing up, not just in our house but there must have been a copy of it sitting on a shelf in every other one we visited too, that sleeve as ubiquitous in early 70s homes as a spider plant and a G-Plan sofa.
Though Paul and Art rode to success on the back of the 1960s folk boom and the younger-generation angst of The Graduate they were never angry or confrontational and came across more as nice, quiet boys sitting in a coffee shop reading The New Yorker instead of throwing rocks at riot police on the streets of Paris. Maybe I’m just looking at them through the lens of my own memories but I never thought of them as being part of the great Youthquake of that decade like The Beatles and Dylan because, well, my mum liked them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course, especially when the songs are as good as Paul Simon’s.
It’s always good to go out with a bang and Bridge Over Troubled Water is easily their best album in my ‘umble opinion, it’s also their slickest and prettiest so no wonder it sold by the lorry-load. The epic title track is so well-known and played that it has become sort of aural wallpaper that I don’t listen to much anymore and when I was a kid I preferred perky numbers like this anyway, and still do today.
Download: Keep The Customer Satisfied – Simon & Garfunkel (mp3)
Buy: Bridge Over Troubled Water (40th Anniversary Edition) (album)
I like the ‘Only Living Boy in New York’. It makes me think of being in New York where you’re surrounded by people, but still on your own.
Hello!
When my mother was killed I got her album collection. She had some Simon and Garfunkel in there but not this particular album. I thought of her right away when I saw your post.
Haha… i’m an 80s kid…
But still the scene is almost exactly as described. perhaps my parents were just stick in the muds :)
I still have this LP, somewhere in a stack, in a box, waiting for my long awaited move out of the family home to come through. Mother dearest didn’t want her analogue copy (long since having got the CD – so long in fact that the silver disc could be considered a fusty antique of its own, giving way to an mp3 instead), or the turntable, so I’m taking them instead, to be given a very occasional and careful spin inamongst all the other old vinyls, until the grooves should wear through or I can no longer get fresh belts, needles and random discrete electronic parts.
The title track still brings her to tears, all the same, and even I must admit to sometimes welling up. Everybody had a copy – or at least, had a copy or was involved with someone who had one – because it is a beautiful record and is deserving of the popularity. Back when pop could still be artistic and could still move you, rather than music having separated out into chart fluff and things of a deeper but less popular bent.
David … I wonder if there’s a best of in there which includes BOTW… and if it moves you in the same way, and to think of her, when you play it.