Simon and Garfunkel - Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (1964)

The blurb in between the title and artist identification on the cover of Simon and Garfunkel's debut album - "exciting new sounds in the folk tradition by" - is in a small-print, dark purple font against a black backdrop, making it barely legible on first glance.  Perhaps that's because Columbia Records realized that the contents of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. were, for the most part, neither exciting nor new.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had tasted success in the record business as Tom and Jerry (Simon was Jerry) with the minor pop-rock hit "Hey Schoolgirl" in 1957, but when they started performing the more cerebral music of the New York folk scene, it took awhile for them to find their voices as performers and for Simon to find his voice as a songwriter.  Their first album, released in 1964, features splices of their future greatness, but it's mostly the standard, acoustic guitar-based, harmonic folk music that had already been going on in Greenwich Village for quite some time.  There's little here that artists such as Peter, Paul and Mary hadn't already done, and the arrival of the British Invasion bands at the same time of this LP's release made much of Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. sound staid and dull by comparison.

On the positive side, the album is arranged in a tasteful, low-keyed way - just Simon's guitar and his and Garfunkel's precise harmonies - with a clean, crisp sound courtesy of producer Tom Wilson, but the tracks are either predictable traditional songs such as "Peggy-O" or Simon's scant, early attempts at parables; blatant symbolism in songs such as "Bleeker Street" and "Sparrow" stands out like sore thumbs.  Yet the album contains buds of Simon's talent, which would mainly blossom later.  The title track, about a young man who steals away from his lover in the dead of night after robbing a liquor store, is haunting, and "He Was My Brother," written by Simon under the pseudonym "Paul Kane" about his friend Andrew Goodman (one of the three civil rights workers killed near Philadelphia, Mississippi), is driven by spirited indignation.  The crown jewel of the record, of course, is "The Sound Of Silence," presented here in its original, acoustic form.  No overdubbed electric band. It's just Simon and Garfunkel harmonizing over a quietly strident guitar on Simon's observations of lack of communication, isolated from everything, its arrangement perfectly complementing the loneliness in the lyrics.  The last note echoes like a fallen object in a well.  The astonishing effect of this track's isolated, muted nature, though, couldn't be sustained on the entire album, and so Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. was a commercial disappointment.  Simon and Garfunkel would split before re-teaming over a year earlier in response to the success of "The Sound of Silence" in electric form.  (I already wrote about that here.)