Simon & Garfunkel – Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966)

“Simon & Garfunkel’s first masterpiece, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was also the first album on which the duo, in tandem with engineer Roy Halee, exerted total control from beginning to end, right down to the mixing, and it is an achievement akin to the Beatles’ Revolver or the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album, and just as personal and pointed as either of those records at their respective bests. After the frantic rush to put together an LP in just three weeks that characterized the Sounds of Silence album early in 1966, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme came together over a longer gestation period of about three months, an uncommonly extended period of recording in those days, but it gave the duo a chance to develop and shape the songs the way they wanted them. The album opens with one of the last vestiges of Paul Simon’s stay in England, ‘Scarborough Fair/Canticle’ — the latter was the duo’s adaptation of a centuries-old English folk song in an arrangement that Simon had learned from Martin Carthy. … The sonic results were startling on their face, a record that was every bit as challenging in its way as ‘Good Vibrations,’ but the subliminal effect was even more profound, mixing a hauntingly beautiful antique melody, and a song about love in a peaceful, domestic setting, with a message about war and death; Simon & Garfunkel were never as political as, say, Peter, Paul & Mary or Joan Baez, but on this record they did bring the Vietnam war home. Two of the most beautiful songs ever written about the simple joys of living, the languid ‘Cloudy’ and bouncy ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),’ were no less seductive, and the album also included ‘Homeward Bound,’ their Top Five hit follow-up to ‘The Sound of Silence,’ which had actually been recorded at the sessions for that LP. … No Simon & Garfunkel song elicits more difference of opinion than ‘The Dangling Conversation,’ making its LP debut here — one camp regards it as hopelessly pretentious and precious in its literary name-dropping and rich string orchestra accompaniment, while another holds it as a finely articulate account of a couple grown distant and disconnected through their intellectual pretensions; emotionally, it is definitely the precursor to the more highly regarded ‘Overs’ off the next album, and it resonated well on college campuses at the time, evoking images of graduate school couples drifting apart, but for all the beauty of the singing and the arrangement, it also seemed far removed from the experience of teenagers or any listeners not living a life surrounded by literature (‘couplets out of rhyme’ indeed!), and understandably only made the Top 30 on AM radio. …”
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YouTube: Homeward Bound (from The Concert in Central Park), Scarborough Fair (from The Concert in Central Park), The Dangling Conversation live Granada TV
YouTube: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (Full album) 12 videos