Simon & Garfunkel's 1970 swan song, Bridge Over Troubled Water, was both their most effortless record and their most ambitious. The duo spent most of the 1960s as a highly regarded folk act distinguished by their intuitive harmonies and Paul Simon's articulate songwriting, yet compared to the Greenwich Village revivalists, whom they tried to emulate on songs like "A Simple Desultory Philippic" and "Bleecker Street", they were pretty square. By Bookends in 1968, they were settling into themselves, losing their folk revival pretensions and emphasizing quirky production techniques to match their soaring vocals. Two years later, Bridge did that album one better by revealing a voracious musical vocabulary that spanned gospel, rock, R&B, and even classical. As this thoughtful reissue attests, the album sounds unique even 40 years later, driven and defined entirely by their own personal musical and political obsessions.
This diverse album contains the roots of Paul Simon's subsequent incorporation of African and South American rhythms into astute pop songs, especially "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)". The tune is hundreds of years old, but Simon came to it via a contemporary Peruvian group called Los Incas. He wrote new English lyrics about the rural versus the urban, and he and Garfunkel sang them over the original instrumental track. Especially coming after the grandiose gospel of the title track, the song sounds both exotic and humble. Later, "Keep the Customer Satisfied" swells with gargantuan blasts of brass, "Baby Driver" revs up some R&B sax, and "Cecilia" sounds impossibly infectious with its pennywhistle solo and handclap/thighslap percussion. Despite the breadth of sound-- and despite the splintering of their relationship-- Bridge sounds like a unified statement enlivened by styles and rhythms not often heard on pop radio at the juncture of those two decades.
The album cuts on Bridge hold up arguably better than the singles-- or maybe it's just that we've all heard the title track and side-two opener "The Boxer" so many times, while songs like "Keep the Customer Satisfied" and "Baby Driver" still sound less familiar, and therefore full of surprises. Especially on this subtle remastering, Bridge reveals a surfeit of strange, exciting sonic details, as Simon, Garfunkel, and co-producer Roy Halee insert small flourishes of sound, such as the disruptive skiffle beat on "Why Don't You Write Me" or the audience rhythm section on the live version of "Bye Bye Love". The title track derives its outsize drama not only from Garfunkel's intense, measured vocals but also from the resonating percussion, which mimics the echoing crack of sound against a cathedral wall. Thanks to the echo-chambered vocals, disembodied organ, and Joe Osborn's melodically prominent bass, "The Only Living Boy in New York" sounds practically weightless, as if Manhattan were as lonely and desolate as the moon. Even after it's been Zach Braff'ed, the song still retains its considerable evocative power and remains one of the most natural and surprising juxtapositions of sonics and sentiment in Simon's catalog.
"The Only Living Boy in New York" conjures a very specific sense of melancholy abandonment, which makes it a companion to the title track's pledge of steady friendship and devotion. In some ways, Bridge sounds like a chronicle of Simon and Garfunkel's career and collaboration over the years, especially the album-ending send-off. The live "Bye Bye Love" reveals a greater kinship with the Everly Brothers than with Dylan, and an even stronger engagement with their audience; clapping a massive backbeat and yelling along with the song, that rambunctious crowd in Ames, Iowa, remains one of their most intuitive collaborators. As the noise dies down, the quiet "Song for the Asking" adds a brief epilogue that reveals their simple mission "to make you smile." It's a modest close to both the album and the musical collaboration between these two old friends.
Instead of non-album cuts from those same sessions (some of which have been compiled previously), this edition adds a DVD with a television special from 1969 and a new making-of, which emphasize the duo's social awareness and sonic innovations, respectively. Directed by Garfunkel's Catch-22 co-star Charles Grodin and airing on CBS in 1969, "Songs of America" mixes live footage with political rallies and American landscapes, depicting Bridge as a response to the heavily politicized turmoil of the preceding decade. Simon & Garfunkel ponder the ramifications of Vietnam and Woodstock, MLK and RFK, Cesar Chavez and the Poor People's March. At that time such political images were extremely controversial, especially coming from such seemingly nonthreatening folkies as Simon & Garfunkel, and the show was a commercial failure, beaten in the ratings by a Peggy Fleming ice-skating special. But today it plays as a highly instructive time capsule, offering entrée into that era and a valuable glimpse at the duo's chemistry while hinting at their conflicts.
This edition presents Bridge as an end-of-an-era document, that era being both the 1960s and their career together. Instead of acrimony, however, we get devotion and bonhomie, as Simon gives Garfunkel good songs to sing and Garfunkel sings them so well. Perhaps because it never addresses their restlessness or any particular social issue too directly, the album proves both visionary and revisionary, as the two ponder both their own and their country's past while looking ahead to new musical adventures. That Simon & Garfunkel split up shortly after recording this album only makes the sentiments more fleeting and the songs more affecting, lending them a timeless quality that transcends genre and generation.
