14. The Boxer, Simon & Garfunkel

The climax of Simon & Garfunkel’s career (see Sidebar, below), The Boxer has, in spades, everything that made one of the rock era’s two greatest duos so great: harmonies that melt your heart, folk-rock purity, insinuating rhythm, literate lyrics and an intriguing story you think you understand, but don’t, really. Humility the listener can identify with is present at the outset – “I am just a poor boy” – and is reinforced throughout, most famously in, “Asking only workman’s wages/ I come looking for a job/ But I get no offers…” The music is so sweet you don’t notice all the words until years later, but when you do there are more classic lines than one has a right to expect in a single song: “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”; and (added later) “After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same.” Who else could parse the following words into a song: “I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there.” After each heart-rending verse there is a chorus that goes something like “li-la-li, li-la-li-la-li-la-li-la, li-la-li, la-la-li-la-la-la-li-lala-lala-li.” A wonderful sing-along nonsense sound, as in Brown-Eyed Girl, except I’m convinced that the “la”s and “li”s subtly change with each repetition, in a way that conveys even deeper hidden nuances to the emotions being expressed. This is certainly the case following the verse about the “whores on Seventh Avenue,” when the refrain turns into “ooh-la-la-la-la-la.” After five verses about the tough time the singer has run into in a cold New York, Simon & Garfunkel skip the “la-la-li” and launch into a sixth, seemingly unrelated verse about…”a boxer, a fighter by his trade.” Where did he come from? What has he to do with our hero? Well, no matter how many times this boxer has been laid low and scarred and says he is quitting, “the fighter still remains.” So, after all, this is a song of defiance, a song of the spirit, a song of The Sixties. Li-la-li!

 

Sidebar: The “Sixties”

The Sixties, of course, wasn’t a decade, but a spirit embodying freedom, hope, idealism, egalitarianism, anti-materialism and ultimately, failingly, revolution. There were different manifestations: on the West Coast, think hippies and psychedelic, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. On the East Coast, think coffee shops, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. And Simon & Garfunkel, city boys, Jewish, university literate, sensitive. They announced their arrival with Sounds of Silence (and the Greenwich Village album cover). Their harmonies were achingly beautiful, with Garfunkel soaring and Simon providing a solid floor below. The lyrics echoed T.S. Eliot: “people talking without speaking/ people hearing without listening/ people writing songs that voices never shared. No one dared/ disturb the sounds of silence.” What did it mean? I don’t know. Did that matter? Of course not. Wasn’t the world meaningless, after all? The drum comes in and the song goes from a capella to crescendo, back to quiet. In the midst of the civil rights movement, this was a white man’s spiritual.

            All their songs struck some chord, none more for me, a self-professed (self-obsessed?) loner, than I Am A Rock, as I looked out my window on a “freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.” We could be happy, too, at times, despite the angst, and 57th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) captured that emotion perfectly. The movie of the Sixties, for all college-age men, was The Graduate, and who better to provide the soundtrack for Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross than S&G: “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” After The Boxer, the Sixties lost steam, lost its sense of unity, and split off into dozens of different, often destructive, directions. Simon & Garfunkel began to split, as well. Bridge Over Troubled Water was their biggest hit, but the singing was all Garfunkel – just as the Beatles’ song that followed at #1, Let It Be, was all McCartney. Later hits – Cecilia, El Condor Pasa – were pure Simon (just as Lennon began doing his own thing). The exquisite harmony of Simon & Garfunkel and the beautiful dream of The Sixties were slip, slidin’ away.

0 replies

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *