Musicians: Paul Simon--lead guitar, vocals; Art Garfunkel--vocals, harmonica; Barry Kornfeld--second guitar; Bill Lee--acoustic bass. There seems to be a dulcimer in the recording of “Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream,” but I do not know who is playing it.

The original 1964 LP only contained the first 12 tracks, the first 6 on Side One and the other 6 on Side Two. The extra demos were added when Columbia re-released the CD in 2004 as part of the box set Simon & Garfunkel: The Complete Studio Recordings 1964-1970. Only five of the original twelve songs (tracks 3, 4, 6, 7, and 12) were written by Simon, including “He Was My Brother,” which he wrote under the pseudonym Paul Kane, taken from Orson Welles’ classic film Citizen Kane (1941). The album initially flopped upon its release in the United States, but when it was re-released in 1966, it hit #30 on the Billboard charts. This first version of “The Sounds Of Silence” was picked up for airplay by radio disc jockeys around Gainesville and Cocoa Beach, Florida, and Boston, Massachusetts. When Simon & Garfunkel’s producer, Tom Wilson, found out about it, he overdubbed the track with electric guitars and drums, then re-released this “edited” version without Simon or Garfunkel’s permission in 1965. The song went to #1 on the pop charts in the last week of December 1965, catapulting the duo to fame.

My mono copy of the album dates from 1965; original copies from 1964 are predictably rare; the most identifiable way to obtain one is to search for a mono copy. Original 1964 mono copies of the LP do not have the “MONO" printed at the bottom of the label in white lettering as on the 1965 pressing, or the "360 Sound MONO 360 Sound” at the bottom of the label as was the case beginning in 1966. Instead, they have “Guaranteed High Fidelity” printed at the bottom in smaller black lettering, as was the case for all Columbia mono LPs in 1964.

The Paul Simon Song Book was recorded while Paul Simon was in England after Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. failed to sell and he and Garfunkel had essentially broken up (again). This album is the first to contain songs entirely written by him, and it was recorded at Levy’s Studio in London, UK, with just his voice and a guitar. It was only released in the UK, and was supposedly deleted about 1979 at Simon’s request, a theory that is supported by the fact that the re-release of the album on CD (in the United States and elsewhere on 23 March 2004), while of high quality, does contain a faint hissing sound, indicating that the CD was engineered from a recording other than the master. Like Wednesday Morning, the original LP contains only the first twelve songs; the other two are bonus tracks for the CD release.

Previously, it was believed that Simon recorded all the songs in about an hour in just one take, but the re-release notes indicate that this is not true; most of the songs took several takes to record the track to Simon’s satisfaction. This was not a commercial success, either, and before its re-release, the LP was only available as part of the box set Paul Simon: Collected Works, without the album cover art. The recording was very rare to find in the United States, and the LP is still difficult to obtain. I have obtained two copies of the original LP—the first in 1998 from a record dealer in California, and the second in the summer of 2004 in France. The image shown above is the original cover art. In the 1970s the album’s cover art was altered: the image of Paul and his English girlfriend in the 1960s, Kathy Chitty, was flipped horizontally, and the album title was relegated to block print along the top of the record, instead of the beautiful red script lettering of the original, seen above. In addition, the album went through two different label pressings. The label shown above is the original, identifiable by its rough texture. Smooth-textured orange labels were introduced on CBS records in the UK in 1967.

The songs on the album represent some of the first pieces of social consciousness in Simon’s music. On this LP, the lyrics to “He Was My Brother,” written in June 1963, have been altered from “this town’s gonna be your burying place” to “Mississippi’s gonna be your burying place.” This change references the death of Andrew Goodman, one of Simon’s classmates at Queens College in New York who was one of the three Civil Rights workers murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi, on 21 June 1964, while working on the Freedom Summer project to register African-Americans to vote. Likewise, “A Church Is Burning” relates the burning of a black church by white segregationists in the darkness of night. It probably also references the same event as “He Was My Brother,” because Goodman, along with James Cheney and Michael Schwerner, had gone to Neshoba County to inspect the recent burning of a black church at the time that they were killed. Perhaps unfortunately, Simon’s music has been overshadowed by more famous socially conscious folk-rock musicians of the 1960s such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Engineered by Reginald Warburton and Stanley West, neither of whom seem to have had any relationship with Simon's music other than being assigned to the job.

1. Bleecker Street
2. He Was My Brother
3. The Side of A Hill
4. Carlos Dominguez
5. Benedictus

This LP was issued by Paul Simon's music publisher, the Marks Corporation, in order to encourage covers of Simon's songs by other artists (which, once released, would earn Simon royalties). Presumably it was also distributed to radio stations to promote the cuts on the LP themselves. Paul Maclauchlan dates it from 1964, but this is impossible, sincethe cut of "The Side of A Hill" is taken from The Paul Simon Song Book, which was not even recorded until the spring of 1965. Interestingly, this LP contains the recording of "Carlos Dominguez" from the single released by Simon as Paul Kane on Tribute 128. The others are taken from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. There are five songs on this LP, all of which appear in the same order on both sides. It may be a mono/stereo copy. Apparently, it was accompanied by a 32-page book that included arrangements for piano/organ/guitar/vocal, lyrics, photos, and stories for each song. I've yet to locate a copy of it, though, and the LP is not easy to find, either.

Sounds Of Silence Live is the first in a series of bootleg recordings (most of them live concerts) that appear from Simon & Garfunkel performances given between 1966 and 1970. This one, many people believe, was recorded at Tufts University in Boston, MA, though some reports say it was recorded on 2 January 1967 in Buffalo, New York; the recording has been released on several labels under several names, including “Live In The USA.” In any case, most people believe that this CD was intended to be released by Simon & Garfunkel in the 1960s on an LP as a live recording, and apparently got as far as acetate test pressings with Columbia before the project was quashed. The CD does not have good sound quality, although it does contain dialogue between Paul and Art and the audience which in many cases is funny and unavailable on studio recordings. This set, as one may notice with the later concerts, consists essentially of material recorded first on The Paul Simon Song Book and then reinforced with the latest material that the duo was recording. In this case, that material consisted of the songs soon to appear on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme in October 1966.

1. Scarborough Fair/Canticle
2. Patterns
3. Cloudy
4. Homeward Bound
5. The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine
6. The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)
7. The Dangling Conversation
8. Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall
9. A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission)
10. For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her
11. A Poem On The Underground Wall
12. 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night
13. Patterns (Demo)
14. A Poem On The Underground Wall (Demo)

One of the most popular Simon & Garfunkel albums, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme followed up on the success of Sounds Of Silence and firmly established Simon & Garfunkel as one of the leaders of 1960s popular musical groups. The album eventually climbed to #4 on the pop charts in November 1966, one month after its release. This copy shown above is a mono copy inside a stereo sleeve, interestingly enough. In the UK, the release of this album does not contain “Homeward Bound” (see photo below), a song that was recorded with the Dylanesque electric backing in December 1965 (unlike the other tracks on this LP, which were recorded in the spring and summer of 1966). For some reason, “Homeward Bound” was instead included on the UK release of Sounds Of Silence, most of whose tracks were also recorded in December 1965. Below is the track listing from the UK release, as well as the New York Times article that appeared on the back cover in the UK, as opposed to the Ralph Gleason notes on the US cover.