Some things are hard to measure. No matter how powerful or profound they are, in many regards they cannot be gauged and cannot be captured. Into this category, I’d place things like love and hate. Sensitivity, however, is a notable exception. Sensitivity can be measured not in metres, miles or in litres but by the songs of Simon and Garfunkel. The greater the number of songs in your possession, the more sensitive a soul you clearly are. In fact, extreme sensitivity is evident where the Garfunkel quotient is skewed to an especially high level. Put simply, anyone who owns a copy of ‘Bright Eyes’ is unlikely to be able to withstand direct sunlight.
Some things are hard to measure. No matter how powerful or profound they are, in many regards they cannot be gauged and cannot be captured. Into this category, I’d place things like love and hate. Sensitivity, however, is a notable exception. Sensitivity can be measured not in metres, miles or in litres but by the songs of Simon and Garfunkel. The greater the number of songs in your possession, the more sensitive a soul you clearly are. In fact, extreme sensitivity is evident where the Garfunkel quotient is skewed to an especially high level. Put simply, anyone who owns a copy of ‘Bright Eyes’ is unlikely to be able to withstand direct sunlight.
Simon and Garfunkel have a lot to answer for. For a certain kind of person, they were the template for all it was to be young, shy and fiercely intelligent (such intelligence having been self-diagnosed). Sadly, I was certainly a certain kind of person and I regarded Simon and Garfunkel less as role models as I did my musical brothers and soul mates. My aim in life was to score as highly on the Simon and Garfunkometer as possible.
It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s also the creepiest. But despite this, between the years 1988 and 1993 I bore an uncanny resemblance to Art Garfunkel as he appeared on the ‘Bookends’ LP. Right down to the black skivvy. But if you’re serious about emulating Simon and / or Garfunkel, you need more than a mere skivvy. You need a nylon stringed acoustic guitar.
The ‘nylon’ was Simon and Garfunkel’s weapon of choice. Should you decide that the life of a misery guts is for you, the first thing you need to do is get one of these suckers. Back before learning a musical instrument was replaced by uploading pornography onto facebook, nylon stringed acoustic guitars were plentiful. These were the instruments that were gifted to plucky youngsters who dreamed of playing like Jimmy Page but ended up struggling to get through ‘Greensleeves’ without stopping, before giving up and consigning the whole exercise to the judo-bin of history. Those who persevered and who weren’t rewarded for their efforts with an electric guitar, learned to play folk songs. Folk music is often referred to as a ‘gateway’ form of music, in that it often leads on to harder, more dangerous varieties.
Indeed, as a musical snob let me say that mere folk is for lightweights, whereas Simon and Garfunkel is the very stuff of the mythical hard-core. They played folk-rock. It’s one thing to be just another jerk strumming a guitar; it’s also one thing to be a jerk strumming a guitar whilst standing in front of a drum kit. That, my friends, is ‘folk-rock’. But to execute folk rock to the standard demanded by Messrs Simon and Garfunkel, you’ve also got to be able to stare off into the middle distance. The importance of the middle distance to music is, ironically enough, often overlooked. It creates the impression that the singer may be able to see into the future. In that regard, Art Garfunkel was a blonde-afro headed flux capacitor on legs, as no one could stare into the middle distance with the same level of conviction.
Once you’ve got the fundamentals in place it’s time to start writing some songs. Here’s where the trouble really set in. Let me be the first to admit that in my late teens and early twenties, I had a chronic case of the Simon and Garfunkels. So bad was my condition that I kept a nylon stringed guitar close to me at all times in order to ensure that when the melancholy muse struck, I’d be ready. It wouldn’t take much to set me off either. At one point running out of fresh milk was a crisis of sufficient standing to prompt a song. Even when a genuine misfortune came my way, I routinely responded through music never thinking that the song I was making was far more painful that the event I was trying to document.
It goes without saying except that it would leave a nasty blank spot on the page that nearly all the songs I wrote were really about my favourite topic – myself. But whilst this was a subject of inexhaustible interest to me, it’s likely that it was – at best – of passing interest to others. At worst it was a major source of irritation. Undeterred, I went further than merely writing my songs of misery, strumming an acoustic guitar and staring off into the middle distance whilst wearing a black skivvy – I decided to do all these things in full view of the public. In many regards, I went the full-Funkel and paid a heavy price for my efforts.
I couldn’t tell you what brought me to my senses. Whether it was the indifference that greeted my best musical efforts or just growing up, I couldn’t say. Maybe it was the realization that whilst Simon and Garfunkel talked (or sang) the sensitive loser talk, their lives bore no resemblance to this at all. These guys weren’t crippled by shyness and spending their Saturday nights finger picking and staring off out of windows in the hope that the phone might right. They were highly successful musicians who’d sold millions of albums. They may have sung about sitting about reading poetry and pondering the future of the theatre, but in truth they were off filming Catch-22 and marrying Princess Leia. Perhaps it was simply the James Brown cassette someone gave me that helped me see the error of my ways. Thank goodness for that.