I have tended my own garden too long

I wandered empty streets down

Past the shop displays

I heard cathedral bells

Tripping down the alleyways

As I walked on..

There was a time when watching Dustin Hoffman – as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate – floating around in a swimming pool wearing shades was the height of cool. Or I thought so, anyway. The music playing in the background was pretty cool too – an extended version Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel.

What’s not to like about Simon and Garfunkel? Folky guitar, intelligent lyrics, flawless harmonies. I have all five of their original albums, plus sundry live stuff, box sets, unreleased material, even their 70’s collaboration, My Little Town. It's music I continually come back to, a bridge to my childhood, to adolescence, to the care-free days of youthful summer through to shadowy evenings of judgement.

Ignoring the false start as a teenage duo – Tom and Jerry - their career lasted about six years. Following their unsuccessful first album Wednesday Morning 6am, Paul Simon went off to England to play as a solo artist. Here he wrote (and recorded) many of his greatest songs learning from the greats of the British folk scene. But the phenomenal success of The Byrds and Mr Tambourine Man, opened up a demand for folk-rock and,unknowingly, the duo began to take off. Back in the States, their record company remixed the acoustic The Sound of Silence and added bass, drums and an electric lead and – eh viola! – a number 1 record was made.

And so followed The Sounds of Silence, Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, Bookends and finally Bridge Over Troubled Water. Add some non-album singles and that was about it. The Graduate doesn’t have new material on it not found elsewhere (apart from an abridged acoustic version of Mrs Robinson)...

For Emily (Wherever I may find her)

Some of Simon’s best imagery populate this touching love song. He generously allows Garfunkel to sing lead. And he does it well. So good is their live performance of this song that the version on the UK Great Hits album is pretty much definitive. Simon says he wrote this about an imaginary girl, an imaginary situation and the loss of hope of ever finding her. Kind of stole my idea 50 years before I had it...

April Come She Will

A deceptively simple song, using the months as a backbone to the story of a love affair that starts, grows and dies. Simon at his folkie best. 

Blessed

Oh Lord, why have you forsaken me? // I have tended my own garden too long.

The forlorn cri de coeur at the end of this stylish whinge always gets to me. About how the writer has been ignored, rejected whilst other groups (The Blessed) have been favoured in his place. In the final line there is a sort of epiphany as the writer realises that the fault lies more with him than others or Fate. 

The Sound of Silence

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again

If he wrote nothing else, Simon would be up there amongst the rock gods with this epic. Ridiculously quotable, endlessly thought-provoking, it was a major song before the illicit re-working by Tom Wilson of Columbia Records. The added beat, bass and electric guitar however, propel it to a different, higher plane. 

The Boxer

In the clearing stands a boxer

And a fighter by his trade

And he carries the reminder of every

Cut that made him cry out in pain

“I’m leaving! I’m leaving!”

But the fighter still remains.

FFS - how can other writer in the popular music sphere fight against this? Thing is, Simon could write tunes too. With his left hand he had talent, with his right abundance.

Scarborough Fair

There is some dispute about whether Simon nicked his arrangement from Martin Carthy. Maybe, maybe not. But Simon and Garfunkel's version pisses on all other versions. Yes, even Nana Mouskouri's version. If you don't like this then you have no soul. From the tune, the counter melody, the delicate acoustic guitar, the harpsichord, the close harmony - lovingly sung, this is the perfect tune to be drifting aimlessly around in a pool to in a Mike Nicholls film.

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Notable others - Overs, The Dangling Conversation, The Only Living Boy in New York, Mrs Robinson, Homeward Bound. Basically most of them. Yeah, Leaves That are Green, Bleecker Street. Loads. Old Friends. I am a Rock. Kathy's Song. Red Rubber Ball (huh? Look it up). The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine (for those who have a tendency to W).

Tim

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Between West Street and Bleecker Street

“I saw a shadow touch a shadow’s hand. On Bleecker Street.”

— Paul Simon - Bleecker Street

When I first went to New York, American Express put me up at The Marriott on West Street. After a hard day in the office I would ask my colleagues out for a beer. And sometimes they would oblige... For a beer. One beer. Before departing for New Jersey. Leaving me alone in New York.

The Marriott on West Street is down at the bottom of Manhattan Island, all skyscrapers, bustling with life during the day but dead after work. What to do? On my first trip to New York?

Letting art be my guide, I summoned a yellow taxi and told the cabbie to take me to Bleecker Street. Due to the Simon and Garfunkel song, it was the only uptown street I knew. So he took me - circuitously I found later - up to Greenwich Village.

And so I wandered around. Had some beers in 'coffee shops' where I had to get used to putting dollars on the bar before ordering my drink. Lighting up a Marlboro I thought - hey! - this is living. All my idols - Neil Diamond, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, had walked these very streets. All I lacked was my own Suzi Rotolo immortalised on The Freewheeling Bob Dylan:-

Now that image is well known. Less well known is the cover of The Paul Simon Songbook where Paul poses (influenced by Dylan, no doubt) with his then girlfriend Kathy Chitty (of Kathy's Song fame):-

The album cover above is framed and hung in my lounge.

So what does this show? Not much, in the receding view of history. A first time visitor to a great city goes somewhere mentioned in a song. But to me it was real. It was living art. All of my life - then - seemed to be an unwritten novel, a poem - a song, awaiting to be sung.

I suppose life is an ever diminishing version of that little story: The search for the new, the openness of naivety, the finding of oneself, wherever that may be. I suppose we all search for the thrill and expectation I felt during that first taxi ride between West Street and Bleecker Street.

And sometimes we find that feeling. But usually we don't. We all live in between.

Tim

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A Little Bit of Folk

When I was in service in Rosemary Lane

Other than the homegrown Lisa Stansfield concerts I went to in the mid 80's - about which I've written before - Steeleye Span at the Manchester Apollo was one of my first ever 'gigs'. Young Tim loved the folkie sound! Simon and Garkunkel have to be top five for me. I love British / American folk music. It often gets characterised as twats with beards, beer bellies, fingers in their ears singing about sailors and shady ladies!

Which is basically what Rosemary Lane is about. Actually, I had the privilege of seeing the late, great, Bert Jansch live in concert in Brighton in 1990's. He didn't do Rosemary Lane. Bastard.

I've often thought that it would make a great book or film to depict the British folk scene in the mid-60's. The scene that created Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Pentangle, John Renbourne, Jackson C Frank, Simon and Garfunkel, and loads of others. They all knew each other, played in the same places, did versions of the same songs. Nicked each other's guitar style.

So let me be your guide though some the highlights of the great folk boom of the 60's / 70's - which probably reached its apogee with Sandy Denny duetting with Led Zeppelin on The Battle of Evermore - a crossover folk rock song like no other. The mighty Zep did what they did with the blues - amped up the power, took what's best in the genre, co-opted the best female folk voice ever, and created the folk hammer of the gods.

Anyway - here's Tim's top 10 acoustic / folkie / whatever list.

Top Ten Folkie / Acoustic Music

1) Bert Jansch - Rosemary Lane (1971)

2) Fairport Convention - Who Knows Where the Time Goes

3) Steeleye Span - All Around my Hat

4) Martin Carthy - Scarborough Fair

5) Simon & Garfunkel - Bleecker Street

6) Van Morrison - Beside You

7) Gordon Lightfoot - In the Early Morning Rain

8) Pentangle - Light Flight

9) Renaissance - The Northern Lights

10) Jackson C Frank - Blues Run the Game

Number 6 also appears on my top ten songs ever. I could pick half a dozen Paul Simon songs for this list but I limited myself to one.

Extra Waffle about Bert Jansch

One of the most influential guitarists ever to come out of Britain. Solo artist, part of the folk supergroup Pentangle and then back to solo again. Jansch seems a genuinely nice, self-effacing guy, as I can recall when I saw him back in the 90's. Needle of Death, from his first album, is such a sad song, tear-jerking even now, and as empathetic a song as I've ever heard. It Don't Bother Me, from his second album, is classic Bert - folkie, intricate guitar figures, detailing love's woes. But I'll plump for Rosemary Lane. Traditional song, rendered traditionally, this was the first folk song - after Steeleye Span - to really get to me. It details the seduction of an innocent servant girl by a travelling sailor. He loves and then leaves. Jansch's version - like Dylan's House of the Rising Sun - reverses the sexes, he sings from a female point of view. Love this song. Bert Jansch - a great soul who died in 2011 - the guitarist's guitar player.

From the BBC special c.'70. Enjoy.

Renbourne left and Jansch right. Scat singing. A bit of jazz, a bit of blues, some folk and a whole lot of soul. 

The Falling Leaves...

And the leaves that are green turn to brown
And they wither with the wind
And they crumble in your hand           

Autumn is the season of endings where summer tapers into nothing, leaves fall, nights draw in and the promise of Spring lays cold in the ground. It's the end of flowers and heat and late nights, no more smells of new mown grass, double edged roses and charcoal.

And yet, I always see Autumn as a beginning. The beginning of a new term, a new year, new friends. A countdown to Christmas and parties and frivolity. Bonfire night (never Halloween) and frosty morning walks around lakes flanked by bejewelled trees of yellow and orange.

Many of my new beginnings - and there have been many - have taken place in Autumn. Some of the most vivid memories come accompanied by a soundtrack of fallen leaves, with falling temperatures and dark nights. I remember a stormy day in Brighton, so many years ago where the wind blew and the rain fell... But no, I won't go there. Not now.

So, I'll leave you with a cheer for the coming Autumn and a wish that great things, memorable things, unusual things, happen to you. As I wish it for myself.

Autumn; life's new term.

Reflectively, and yet optimistically,

Tim

* The quote is 'Leaves That Are Green' by Paul Simon