Album Reviews

Note: After this the posting of this review, Sundazed's Bob Irwin sent a correction. I've chose to leave the original review intact, prefaced by Irwin's comment:

"Yes - some of Parsley, Sage... was remixed for the boxset Old Friends that I did for Sony (and Legacy's i>Parsley, Sage... "expanded edition" CD)— but our LP was sourced from the original 2-track stereo masters, which I unearthed a few years ago (by accident) in Sony's vault. Amazing, as they were marked as being "scrapped" in the system. The reels were marked "do not use"—as many original masters were, once they were safety'd either to an analog copy or to digital. The stereo masters sounded great, not at all used up— and that was what prompted our LP edition!!!"

When Sundazed’s Bob Irwin produced Sony/Legacy’s Simon and Garfunkel recordings for CD, he found the master tapes of the first two albums in such poor condition they were unusable.

What to do? Fortunately, the original unmixed 4-track work tapes were in excellent condition, making a remix possible. Irwin literally rebuilt the original mixing suite using vintage gear procured for the project and mixed down to ¼” analog tape.

Now, years later, Sundazed gets to make use of those labors to reissue this classic Simon and Garfunkel album, which is arguably their best and their first coherent work after a confused and fitful start.

Columbia issued the folky first album,Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. in the fall of 1964. It included an acoustic version of “The Sounds of Silence” that Simon had written to express what he saw as the increasing isolation and lack of communication among people.

Imagine what he might have written had he traveled to the future instead of splitting for the U.K. before the album's release.

Garfunkel’s liner notes consist of an affected letter to Paul and equally affected song commentary. While Garfunkel was correct, his writing “The Sounds of Silence is a major work” probably should have been left to others.

The album stiffed while Simon, in the U.K., played clubs, wrote songs and recorded The Paul Simon Songbook (orange label CBS 62579). The album has a publisher’s demo-like feel about it, but it makes for fascinating listening. It will set you back at least $50 last time Iooked.

It’s just Simon playing acoustic guitar doing “I Am an Island,” “Leaves That Are Green,” “April Come She Will,” “Patterns” and many other familiar songs that even now sound remarkably mature and seemingly beyond the grasp of a 22 year old. In the liner notes Simon says he’s included some tunes he “..wouldn’t write today…” because they present evidence of his “transition.”

Among them is a lame PPM-like protest song called “A Church is Burning,” on which Paul Simon retroactively “jumps the shark.” The album also contains a solo acoustic version of “The Sounds of Silence,” the duo’s version of which had been added by spring 1965 to some AM Top 40 playlists.

With Dylan plugging in and folk rock taking hold, Simon and Garfunkel’s producer Tom Wilson (who also produced The Mothers of Invention) took the vocal track to the acoustic version of “The Sounds of Silence,” added a rock drum, bass and guitar trio backing to it and, unbeknownst to either Simon or his ex-partner Garfunkel, released it as a single. It went on to be an unlikely number one Top 40 hit.

That meant going back in the studio quickly (with Bob Johnston producing) for a follow up album that included the electrified “The Sounds of Silence” and equally electrified versions of many of the songs originally recorded for the Paul Simon Songbook, including “Leaves That Are Green,” “Kathy’s Song,” “A Most Peculiar Man,” “April Come She Will,” and “I am a rock.” Wisely not included: “A Church is Burning.” But there is a nice version of the late Davy Graham’s “Angie.”

Many great songs but a merely good album, not a great one. That had to wait for Parsely, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme also produced by Johnston, with the great Roy Halee engineering. Yes, there’s the embarrassing “7 O’clock News/ Silent Night” at the end and a few other moments of maximum pretense but precious, poetic and perhaps pedantic is where these guys were pushing. There’s no denying the classic power of “Homeward Bound,” “Cloudy,” “The 59th Street Bridge Song” (the epitome of precious) and “The Dangling Conversation,” among others and even the filler like The Everly Brothers-like “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine” and the aforementioned “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” fit where they were placed, like interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

So how does this Sundazed reissue hold up next to an original 1A Columbia pressing that I bought new when it originally was released (it still has the Sam Goody “C” Valley Stream sticker on it, with the $2.49 markdown written in pen)? Well, for one thing, when people say records wear out, I don’t know what they are talking about! Since it was first released more than forty years ago, I’ve played this record a hundred times at least, in Ithaca in my fraternity house, in Boston, in Los Angeles, in Hackensack and now and it still sounds fantastic. It’s quiet, it’s detailed, it’s three-dimensional and it still has extended, clean high frequencies.

No reissue could possibly touch an original 1A pressing of just about any Columbia title and that goes for this reissue, which is very good, but not as open, spacious, wideband, transparent and “tubey” as the original. While the reissue lacks the original’s spaciousness, extension and transparency, and is somewhat darker and less expansive overall, it offers outstanding image solidity and overall, features excellent tonal balance.

The heavyweight pressing quality is decent but not up to RTI quality (then again, Sundazed doesn’t charge $30 a record), with a bit of audible non-fill at the beginning of side one. The record definitely benefits from a good cleaning and demagnetizing. I haven’t been perusing the used record bins lately so I don’t know how scarce used Simon and Garfunkel originals are these days. If you can find a clean, reasonably priced used original 1A pressing, it’s definitely going to sound better, but if you can’t, this reissue sounds very good and you’ll not know what you’re missing.

By the way, in case you're interested in the accuracy of the remixes, they are remarkably so. For instance at the fade out of the original "Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine," the electric bass suddenly comes up in level and moves from the left channel to the center. It's identical on the remix.