This Day in Pop Music History (1st Dylan Album: ‘Hammond’s Folly‘)

March 19, 1962—The first album by a folk singer-songwriter from Minnesota, released on this date, gave virtually no inkling that he would become part of the bedrock of his label, let alone part of the great legacy of the talent scout who signed him. Not only did Bob Dylan compose only two of the 13 tracks on his self-titled LP, but the record’s abysmal sales—less than 5,000 copies in its first year—seemed to justify the naysayers who questioned what John Hammond heard in the nasal voice of the scrawny 20-year-old in his office.

A half-century later, with Dylan having helped recoup the original investment of Columbia Records many times over, it’s easy to see why Hammond—who had discovered such jazz greats as Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Lionel Hampton, among many others—wanted to sign Dylan. “You’re a talented young man,” Dylan remembered Hammond’s conversation 40 years afterward. “If you can focus and control that talent, you’ll be fine.”

Already, Dylan was showing the same insouciant disregard for convention that would lead him to cross genres repeatedly over the next couple of decades. (After signing the contract Hammond gave him, he obeyed his new mentor’s request that he visit a studio publicist, then fed the flack a lot of biographical hooey: “I hated these kind of questions,” Dylan wrote in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume I. “Felt I could ignore them.”) But even he sensed the immensity of what Hammond had done for him:

“Columbia was one of the first and foremost labels in the country and for me to even get my foot in the door was serious. For starters, folk music was considered junky, second rate and only released on small labels. Big-time record companies were strictly for the elite, for music that was sanitized and pasteurized. Someone like myself would never be allowed in except under extraordinary circumstances. But John was an extraordinary man. He didn’t make schoolboy records or record schoolboy artists. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts and had faith in the things to come.”

Hammond would need that faith, and then some. When other Columbia execs heard the album—recorded by Hammond himself for only $400—they put up such a stink that they ended up delaying its release till four months after it was originally taped. Hammond hadn’t been able to hold onto Joan Baez, they sneered, and now he had signed this? No obvious singles sprang out at David Kapralik, Hammond’s boss.

Eventually, Hammond appealed to CBS president Goddard Lieberson to get the album released. Lieberson agreed, but his support didn’t make much of a difference in the album’s sales, anyway: With just about no advertising or promotion, the LP was virtually dead on arrival.

Several years later, Dylan would sing that “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” but it came to him rather swiftly later that year. Within a month after the release of Dylan’s album, another folksinger, Gil Turner, would perform a new song by his friend at Gerde’s Folk City, and that summer Dylan would record it himself for his next LP. A year later, Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” made him, whether he liked it or not, the voice of the younger generation. Except for a couple of years in the Seventies, he has remained at Columbia Records ever since.

As for Hammond, having survived tough in-fighting at the label, he went on to sign other non-jazz musicians who would only further burnish his reputation as an uncanny judge of talent, including Stevie Ray Vaughn, Aretha Franklin and a twentysomething singer-songwriter from New Jersey that many hailed as the “New Dylan,” Bruce Springsteen. A year before his death in 1987, Hammond was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Fame of Fame for his contributions to the industry.

This Day in Rock History (“Bridge Over Troubled Water” Hits #1)

March 7, 1970—“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the title track of Simon and Garfunkel’s latest studio album, hit #1 on the U.S. charts. The critical and popular acclaim for the song and LP (for the title tune alone, 85 weeks on the U.S. charts and five Grammys) justified the duo’s desire to be permitted more time and creative freedom by their studio.

But Columbia Records could only feel limited joy in the biggest-selling LP in its history, because their two perfectionist musicians had turned from finding fault with their work to finding fault with each other. In bruised feelings and fan heartache, their breakup was only exceeded that year by that of the Beatles.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel are as close as brothers…and, just as often, capable of driving each other crazy as only brothers can. Their mutual admiration for each other’s abilities had gotten them through much, but it had also introduced additional tensions that eventually proved difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. Garfunkel, an astonishingly inveterate reader, had just completed Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. The title could have stood for the feelings the two men had about continuing their professional relationship.

I can’t trace the full course of their love-hate relationship—I don’t have all day, and I’m not trained as a psychiatrist. The period immediately before the creation of the LP is enough to narrate.

Of late, Garfunkel had taken to exploring another career option. No, not architecture and mathematics, which is what he studied at Columbia University between his “Tom and Jerry” period with Paul and their later spectacular success starting with “The Sounds of Silence.” No, I mean acting.

Director Mike Nichols, who used the pair’s work to such brilliant effect in the soundtrack for The Graduate, had cast Artie in his adaptation of Joseph Heller’s anti-war satire, Catch-22. In another year, Art would snag one of the two principal male roles in Jules Feiffer’s saga of sexual exploitation, incompatibility, and neurosis, Carnal Knowledge (or, as Edith Bunker termed it in one of the more brilliant malapropisms in TV history, “Cardinal Knowledge”).

Columbia Records had gotten in the habit of pestering the boys for product churned out constantly. Simon & Garfunkel had been hard-pressed enough already to meet that demanding production schedule. It wasn’t helped now by the months-long delay while Artie shot Catch-22. And Paul, already chafing over the slowdown, surely felt his pride bruised when his walk-on role in the same film was cut.

Then what are often euphemistically termed “creative differences” emerged. As New York DJ Pete Fornatale notes in Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends, the two were unable to agree on the 12th cut that musicians usually had in those pre-CD days. Simon looked askance at Garfunkel’s choice of a Bach chorale (a tune that Artie later recycled and rearranged for his first solo LP, Angel Clare).

If Simon disputed Garfunkel’s sense of what would fly with the public, his partner disputed the songwriter’s common sense. Garfunkel was not averse to politically tinged songs per se (see the pair’s “Seven O’Clock News/Silent Night,” a Vietnam protest song on Parsley Sage Rosemary & Thyme). But he drew the line at one of the most overtly political songs of the rock era, “Cuba Si, Nixon No.”

Naked political sloganeering in song seldom proves of enduring value (how many requests does the band Chicago get these days for their Nixon-era “Song for Richard and His Friends”?). Simon would not have won much cachet (except, perhaps, with the far left) with such lines in “Cuba Si, Nixon No” as “You know the Spanish-speaking people got a different way of running the show” (many Cubans, of course, had become—and would continue to become—refugees because the Castro dictatorship insisted that its “different way of running the show” was the only one in town).

Simon’s simplistic lyrics reflected the kind of binary politics that has made the cultural wars so fraught in this country. (Why did it have to be “Cuba Si, Nixon No” or “Cuba No, Nixon Si”? Why couldn’t it be “Cuba No, Nixon No”?). He was on far firmer footing later with the less explicit, more majestic “American Tune” which achieved a kind of grandeur in evoking “the age’s most uncertain hour.”

Sometimes a collaborator not only spurs you to greater creativity, but saves you from serious mistakes. The addition of “Cuba Si, Nixon No” would have added nothing artistically to Simon and Garfunkel’s fifth—and, it turned out, final—studio album and would only have attracted needless controversy. Its deletion allowed the audience to concentrate on perhaps the greatest of Simon and Garfunkel songs, as well as other tunes from the LP that have gained a deserved following of their own over the years (including “The Boxer,” “El Condor Pasa,” “Cecilia,” and “The Only Living Boy in New York”).

Why did the Paul Simon-penned tune become such an enormous hit? Over the years, several explanations have been offered. I don’t think this is a case of one rationale accounting for everything (though the last cause—one that relates to zeitgeist, or the spirit of the age—seems indispensable to me, at least):

* It was the product of laborious studio craftsmanship. Most fans of know of Simon and Garfunkel’s original formative influence as a singing duo, the Everly Brothers. Less well-known is that they looked to more direct contemporaries in planning the sound for their tribute to friendship: the Righteous Brothers’ version of the Hammerstein-Kern standard from Show Boat, “Ol’ Man River.”

Alfred Kazin once bemoaned that Ernest Hemingway “brought a major art to a minor vision of life,” bemoaning Papa’s fixation on bullfighting, hunting, and fishing. It must have crossed the mind of more than one rock-‘n'-roll producer in the Sixties and Seventies that the same thing applied to Phil Spector, the “Wall of Sound” producer responsible for the Righteous Brothers’ smash hit, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” (See my prior post about the evolution of that song.) Most of Spector’s work involved grandiose, almost operatic-level arrangements surrounding teen-dream lyrics.

But Simon and Garfunkel, along with co-producer Roy Halee, saw what Spector had done with Hammerstein and Kern’s certified pop epic. In an interview with music journalist Rush Evans for Goldmine, Garfunkel recalls how "Bridge Over Troubled Water" emulated the build-up of “Ol’ Man River.” Just as Righteous Brother Bill Medley sang nearly all of the song alone before being joined by Bobby Hatfield and every instrument Spector could muster together for the dramatic finale, so Garfunkel sang over simple piano accompaniment through the first two verses, only to be joined by Simon and thunderous accompaniment in the third and final verse.

* The studio got behind the record in a big way. Does Clive Davis have the golden touch that so many in the industry believe? Depends on whom you ask. Eric Carmen, for one, might beg to differ. Davis tried to pigeonhole Carmen as another Barry Manilow after the success of Carmen’s first solo, pop-oriented LP. And, in a previous post on Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, I related how Davis was decidedly ambivalent about the LP that stands at the center of the entire Cash discography.

But it is also indisputably true that if Davis really, really liked you, you might as well take a rocket to the moon. Such was the case with Whitney Houston in the mid-1980s, and such was the fate of Simon and Garfunkel nearly 15 years before. He made sure "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was the title of the album, its first song, and its first single. The strategy worked, indisputably.

* The song caught the baby-boomer yearning for spiritual transcendence. Like another pop tune from a musical partnership on the skids that year, the Lennon-McCartney composition “Let It Be,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water” became a metaphor for refuge in an age of turbulence. The Vietnam War was only the most obvious divisive issue of the day. The pace of change had grown so fast—and the reaction against it so hard—that everyone desperately wanted a breather. Though not explicitly religious, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Let It Be” convey such a desire for release from pain that they have been interpreted over the years by gospel singers.

Both Simon and Garfunkel were so insecure in their own ways—and so annoyed with each other’s idiosyncrasies—that, except for a few short reunion appearances and one magnificent single (“My Little Town”), their breather from each other has turned out to be permanent. But the two musicians—now, like the two “Old Friends” in their song, on the park bench, contemplating how “memory brushes the same years”—ended their full-time partnership with an out-and-out pop masterpiece.