Canter Bridge

This masterful album can only be called succulent. And that’s just to start with. The adjectives need to wax ever stronger in order adequately to describe the movement from one classic piece to the next in this eleven-track celebration of some of the 1970s finest music.

Like Seinfeld for the ears, Simon and Garfunkel’s music generates many of the lyrics and observations that are engraved upon the brains of us who grew up in that era and which spring almost unconsciously to the lips when circumstances beckon.

One is struck by how different each song is from the other. With its intelligent consolation (‘When evening fall so hard …’), ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ is one of the great songs of the second half of the twentieth century. Then comes ‘El Condor Pasa’, the tune that single-handedly introduced the Andean pipe into the North American musical conscience. Its tempo–somewhere between plodding and jaunty–is a universe removed from the gentle grief of ‘Bridge’.

Both are of a still different species than the unforgettable ‘Celia’, which provokes the ever-enlightening heuristic question, ‘What were these guys smokin‘?’

‘So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright’ defies classification, for it may be the only sung eulogy to an architect. It manages to provide one of the all-time most flexible mantras of meaninglessness: ‘Architects may come and architects may go, an everchanging point of view’. I find it particularly useful on very long trips.

All of which brings us to the album’s central treasure, the unsung ‘The Boxer’. I still remember the moment, thirty years ago, when I heard it for the first time, sung badly by my fellow bruised and hungry travelers on an Outward Bound expedition in Wisconsin. A part of me makes me think we should each listen to this song on the first of every January and July, merely on the premonition that it would do something good for us each time. It is inexplicable to me why this piece did not find itself a central component of our shared and popular culture in the way it appeared destined to do.

Speaking of unsung, ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ is life-as-seen-gently-from-below in the manner that would make a career for Paul Simon the songwriter. ‘Tom, get your plane-ride on time …’ is an inauspicious opener, that much is clear. But Simon is a past master at telling the little guy’s story compellingly and with an authenticity that is not harmed by occasional flashes of wit (‘My father was a prominent frogman …’ on the previous track). ‘Only Living Boy’ is an ode sing-able on every very tired night after accomplishing something worthwhile. It could never have been performed in just this way after the Simon and Garfunkel split, for Garfunkel’s very smooth tenor hanging almost mystically above the proceedings on this song is an indispensable part of its magic.

Magic may be the operative word with which to sum up the impact of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Still, the concept has its weaknesses. Magic is about smoke, mirrors, and abracadabras, impressive as all that can be. Simon and Garfunkel were about talent and a penetrating musical genious. Together only briefly, they comprised the most talented, smooth-writing duo on the face of the planet.

No one seems to know quite what happened after that.

No matter. Bridge Over Troubled Water is still with us. That’s enough for now.