It’s been 50 years since Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” topped Billboard magazine’s pop singles chart. But it’s been almost 52 years since the song was first recorded. What happened in that interval made all the difference.
If Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson hadn’t taken the initiative, without the singers’ knowledge, to dub a rock rhythm section over their folk rendition, the song never would have become a cultural touchstone—a generation’s shorthand for alienation—nor the duo a going concern, let alone an exemplar of early folk-rock music.
The two, friends from boyhood in New York City, had had a modest hit single (“Hey, Schoolgirl”) as Tom & Jerry in 1957. They parted, then reunited as Kane & Garr and played a few club dates. Garfunkel was studying at Columbia University in the winter of 1963-64 when Simon got in touch: “Paul only had about five songs at this time,” Garfunkel recalls, “but he called and said, ‘Artie, I just wrote my best song.’ He drove over from Queens and played it for me in the kitchen amongst the roaches.”
Most great songs also have a great backstory—but the tragic or funny or drug-fueled origin stories surrounding these rock classics simply aren’t true.
1. “LOVE ROLLERCOASTER”
The Legend: Known as the “Ohio Slayers” rumor, the faint scream heard midway through the song “Love Rollercoaster” was the cover model from the Ohio Players’s Honey album being stabbed to death in the studio (or being burned by heated honey).
The Truth: That particular vocalization was keyboard player Billy Beck trying to hit a Minnie Riperton-style high note. The model in question, Ester Cordet, was a former Playmate of the Month who was provocatively drizzling honey into her mouth on the album cover. She is reportedly alive and well and has been married for many years to motivational guru Robert Ringer (whom she met at a party at the Playboy Mansion).
2. “IN THE AIR TONIGHT”
The Legend: The haunting 1981 hit was written by Phil Collins after he witnessed a man drowning. He was too far away to offer assistance, but he saw another man sitting idly by on the shore. The man could have easily reached the swimmer, but didn’t even try to help. Years later, after some clever detective work, Collins located the bystander and invited him to a concert, giving him a front row seat. He then had a spotlight shine on him when he performed this song to publicly humiliate him.
The Truth: Collins wrote “In the Air Tonight,” and many of the other songs on his first solo album, Face Value, while alternately depressed and angry over his disintegrating marriage. His first wife, Andrea, was reportedly fed up with his constant touring and had taken the couple’s two children and fled back to her native Canada, where she eventually filed for divorce.
Music is a splendid thing. It can cheer you up when you’re sad, make you dance like a fool, and allow you to drown out the world when you need to. But music has its scientific uses, too. The documentary Alive Inside details how dementia patients react positively when given iPods filled with their old favorite songs. The music seems to help them “come alive” again. While listening to familiar songs, many of the documentary’s patients can sing along, answer questions about their past, and even carry on brief conversations with others.
“Music imprints itself on the brain deeper than any other human experience,” says neurologist Oliver Sacks, who appears in the film. “Music evokes emotion, and emotion can bring with it memory.”
The documentary follows recent studies showing that music can improve the memories of dementia patients, and even help them develop new memories.
Here, a look at some other things music has been known to “cure”:
1. Low Birth Weight
Babies born too early often require extended stays in the hospital to help them gain weight and strength. To help facilitate this process, many hospitals turn to music. A team of Canadian researchers found that playing music to preemies reduced their pain levels and encouraged better feeding habits, which in turn helped with weight-gain. Hospitals use musical instruments to mimic the sounds of a mother’s heartbeat and womb to lull premature babies to sleep. Researchers also say that playing calming Mozart to premature infants significantly reduces the amount of energy they expend, which allows them gain weight.
It “makes you wonder whether neonatal intensive care units should consider music exposure as standard practice for at-risk infants,” says Dr. Nestor Lopez-Duran at child-psych.org.
2. Droopy Plants
If music helps babies grow, can it do the same thing for plants? Dorothy Retallack says yes. She wrote a book in 1973 called The Sound of Music and Plants, which detailed the effects of music on plant growth. Retallack played rock music to one group of plants and easy listening music to another, identical group. At the end of the study, the ‘easy listening’ plants were uniform in size, full and green, and were even leaning toward the source of the music. The rock music plants had grown tall, but they were droopy, with faded leaves, and were leaning away from the radio.
The refreshingly unguarded Adele reveals her rap skills, love for the Spice Girls, and the fact that she played drums on her hit “Hello” while joining James Corden for a ride around London on a recent installment of his Carpool Karaoke.
Given country music’s current state of relative stagnation, when a hundred bro-country clones churn out assembly-line anthems to beer, ladies in tight jeans, and the dubious unrefined charms of rural life, it’s hard to imagine there was a time it was all so different, so diverse, and so fun.
From the mid-1980’s to the early 1990’s country music introduced us to such iconoclastic acts as Lyle Lovett, Alison Krauss, Dwight Yoakam, The Mavericks, k.d. lang, Los Lobos, Steve Earle…and a Tex-Mex supergroup who blended country with rootsy Texas rock and blues as well as Mexican folk and conjunto, mashing it all seamlessly, effortlessly into one great party.
Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers had previously worked together in the Sir Douglas Quintet, whose band name was chosen in the hopes of competing for live bookings at the height of 60’s British Invasion Anglomania.
Freddie Fender made a living recording Spanish-language versions of American hits, then penning a few of his own, including “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” which was a breakthrough #1 pop hit in America in 1975.
Flaco Jimenez took the mantle of conjunto accordion king from his father Santiago, at first enjoying regional success in and around his native San Antonio before breaking through to wider success, appearing on records by Buck Owens, Ry Cooder, the Rolling Stones and others.
In something of a parallel to another supergroup, the Traveling Wilburys (who’d released their first album just a year previous) the individual careers of all four had cooled off when they joined forces for the first time in 1989. Their self-titled debut, released the following year, was a resounding critical success and performed well on the country charts despite the lack of a single to propel sales.
Though some of the songs had seen previous release by the Sir Douglas Quintet or Augie Meyers, none had enjoyed major-label nationwide distribution, so when Reprise released Texas Tornados it may as well had been an album comprised of newly-written originals. The band released a Spanish-language version of their debut album as well.
Zone of Our Own, their 1991 follow-up, continues the same glorious collision of Tex-Mex styles with nearly equal success. From song to song, whether bandleader Sahm takes the lead, or Fender, or Meyers, and whether it’s a Texas blues rave-up or soulful ballad or accordion workout, an unabating party atmosphere pervades.
The Texas Tornados are no more, and with the death of Doug Sahm in 1999 it’s assured that one of music’s most original and distinctive bands ever is lost for good.
But their exuberant, celebratory mashup of styles is preserved on two albums that transport one to a musical border town whose magic stems from the fact that it is really a town without borders.
“I Think I Love You” outsold the Beatles’ “Let it Be” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in 1970 for a very good reason: it too was a great song.
The Partridge Family brought not only high-quality bubblegum music into American households in the early 70’s, but plenty of moral lessons (“You can’t expect to go through life having things given to you, you have to work for what you really want”, “We never quite outgrow making mistakes”, “Almost everything we know is learned by trial an error”, “Tracy, don’t put that drumstick up your nose!”)
Enjoy the stories of the hits, the misses (that kid who played Chris for one season) the bloopers, the singers behind the singers, and the family behind the family.
There was nothing better than being together–until the network puts you in a Saturday evening time slot opposite All in the Family and chokes out your ratings…
Every Moment Has A Song 
