151) Simon & Garfunkel – “The Sounds of Silence”

(Note: Though the song is usually referred to as “The Sound of Silence” (singular), the original single is listed as “The Sounds of Silence” (plural) both on the record label and in Billboard, and thus is the title used here.)

Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 debut album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. is a typical relic of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Accompanied only by acoustic guitar and upright bass, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel harmonize through versions of old spirituals and contemporary folk standards with an emphasis on protest songs: Ed McCurdy’s “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Simon’s own “He Was My Brother.” Wednesday Morning had the misfortune of arriving at the tail end of the folk revival, in the wake of the British Invasion, and sold accordingly. The duo split, and the album seemed destined to be forgotten. Nestled at the end of side 1, though, was one song that stood out, hinting at a possible future for popular folk music.

“The Sounds of Silence” feels like a protest song, but its object is personal, not political. Think of it as the dispirited flipside to Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” where the bustle of the crowds is the cause of loneliness instead of the cure. The duo struggle to establish a connection to the world around them, singing in tight harmony as a protest against the “songs that voices never shared.” It’s a protest doomed to fail: by its nature, a plea against indifference will be met with a shrug, if it’s heard at all. The futility of the struggle diffuses some of the potential for preachiness: a line like “hear my words that I might teach you” comes across more desperate than self-righteous. No matter how passionately they struggle to be heard, the end of each verse finds them met only with “the sound of silence.”

Nearly a year after Wednesday Morning faded into obscurity, producer Tom Wilson enlisted session musicians to overdub “The Sounds of Silence” with electric guitar, bass and drums in hopes of riding the gathering tide of folk rock.* This additional accompaniment is perfunctory and repetitious, lacking either the melodiousness of The Byrds or the loose give-and-take of Dylan’s band. Inadvertently or not, though, this unvarying plodding strikes at the heart of the song: as the duo’s cries to be heard grow more and more desperate, the uncaring world ignores them and trudges on. Ultimately the song peters out, returning to the same drip-drop guitar pattern the song opened with (echoing their “words, as silent raindrops, fell”), as the duo submits to the silence they’d battled in vain.**

The electrified “Sounds of Silence,” released without Simon & Garfunkel’s knowledge, became a surprise hit. Part of its success could be attributed to the overall popularity of folk rock, but at least as crucial was the sense of alienation coursing through the song. The teenagers who embraced rock and roll in the ’50s had grown into post-adolescents uncertain of what their futures had in store, and Simon & Garfunkel’s pensive, deliberate music struck a chord.*** “The Sounds of Silence” reinforced the message underlying The Beatles’ and Dylan’s most experimental and ambitious work of the period: that there was room for rock and roll to mature, that it could be respectable without sacrificing its power. 8

*Wilson was no mere opportunist, though. In December 1964, inspired by the recent success of The Animals’ version of “The House of the Rising Sun,” he began experimenting with adding rock overdubs to some of Bob Dylan’s earliest recordings (including the version of “The House of the Rising Sun” from his 1962 debut). One month later, Wilson escorted Dylan into his electric phase with Bringing It All Back Home. The overdubs on “The Sounds of Silence” were recorded on June 15, 1965, after Wilson wrapped the first day’s sessions for Dylan’s next single: “Like a Rolling Stone.”

**“I Am a Rock” is the sequel, then, where they have learned to embrace isolation as self-protection.

***No coincidence that the duo’s music recurs throughout The Graduate, the ne plus ultra of ’60s post-adolescent angst, or that director Mike Nichols chose “The Sounds of Silence” to soundtrack the film’s title sequence.

Hit #1 on January 1, 1966 for 1 week; repeaked on January 22, 1966 for 1 week; total of 2 weeks at #1
151 of 1015 #1′s reviewed; 14.88% through the Hot 100

150) The Dave Clark Five – “Over and Over”

The Dave Clark Five were the first UK group to challenge The Beatles’ dominance of the US pop charts, launching “Glad All Over” into the Top 10 in March 1964. Nearly two years and 12 singles later (all but one of which went Top 40), the group finally scored their only number-one hit. Their solid chart run befits a band who built their career on steady quality and moderate talent rather than on surprise or innovation. They could sometimes bust out a great hook like the “DUN DUN” in the chorus of “Glad All Over,” or break out in a thrash as on “Bits and Pieces.” But even with their trademark “big beat” (not for nothing was the band named after the drummer), the group’s genial blandness always kept them a step or two below the thrilling highs of bands like The Beatles or the Stones.

In a way, The Dave Clark Five were the quintessential British Invasion group, schooled in vocal harmonies and Lennon-McCartney chord changes but without the distinctive personality and arty streak of the more enduring acts. Yet there was also a certain retro quality that set the band apart from the rest of the Invasion. While their peers were starting out in afterschool skiffle or blues bands, the group then known as The Dave Clark Quintet toured London-area military bases, playing lite jazz and dance pop in officer’s clubs. Even after the band switched to beat music, their prominent use of saxophone and commitment to unambitious rock and roll tied them to the ’50s long after most of their compatriots retired their Chuck Berry covers.

Fittingly, the group’s sole US number-one was a cover of a song first released in 1958, the flipside of Bobby Day’s hit “Rockin’ Robin.” The Dave Clark Five’s “Over and Over” sticks relatively close to the original, apart from adding a harmonica break and changing Day’s line “everybody went stag” to the stupid-brilliant “everybody there was there.” Instead of boogie bounce and Day’s nuanced delivery, though, their version emphasizes the bash of Clark’s drums and the blast of Mike Smith’s voice. What this take on “Over and Over” gains in rock and roll power, it loses in personality. Which, contradictory as it may seem, makes it the ideal choice for The Dave Clark Five’s number-one: it’s a perfectly competent, somewhat unexciting record by a perfectly competent, somewhat unexciting band.

With “Over and Over,” The Dave Clark Five became the last of the original run of British Invasion groups to score a number-one. Meanwhile, American garage bands were reclaiming the movement’s back-to-basics approach, while the more ambitious UK acts began expanding into harder, folkier or psychedelic strains of rock. Even as “Over and Over” became a hit, it also felt vaguely like an anachronism. The Dave Clark Five wouldn’t return to the Top 10 for another year and a half, scoring one last big hit with “You Got What It Takes” (another ’50s cover) before disappearing from the US charts altogether. Like the other British Invasion acts who wouldn’t or couldn’t keep up with the decade’s rapidly-shifting tastes, The Dave Clark Five found themselves left behind by the ’60s rock culture they had helped create. 5

Hit #1 on December 25, 1965; total of 1 week at #1
150 of 1015 #1′s reviewed; 14.78% through the Hot 100

149) The Byrds – “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)”

After the success of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” The Byrds stuck to the Bob Dylan songbook, releasing  “All I Really Want to Do” as their second single and covering “Spanish Harlem Incident” and “Chimes of Freedom” on the Mr. Tambourine Man LP. To allay charges that they leaned too heavily on Dylan for material, they scrapped plans to release “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” as their third single. Instead, they replaced it with a song penned by folk revival patriarch Pete Seeger, whose “The Bells of Rhymney” had also appeared on the band’s debut album. “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)” became an even bigger hit than “Mr. Tambourine Man,” swept along by the gathering momentum of the folk-rock boom that The Byrds themselves had launched. The record’s flowery 12-string guitar, campfire vocals and gentle optimism (“a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late”) offered an appealing alternative to Barry McGuire’s apocalyptic Vietnam nightmare, even as the line “a time for war and a time for peace” implied the necessity of both states.

“Turn! Turn! Turn!” finds The Byrds fully settled in their element, polishing and embellishing the genre hybrid of “Mr. Tambourine Man” into a seamless, finely-wrought piece of musical craftsmanship. (It helps that the whole band are playing their instruments this time around.) The biblically-derived lyrics share the vague mystical profundity of Dylan’s work, but their comparative straightforwardness avoids competing with the band’s ornate arrangement. The extended length (nearly four minutes) allows more space for the song to unwind, giving it the shape and direction of a complete statement rather than the forced brevity of their debut.

But as with their earlier singles, there’s a formality to the band’s pristine vocals and unmussed instrumentation that renders it opaque, holding the listener at arm’s length. It isn’t that The Byrds were incapable of genuine feeling – look at anything Gene Clark wrote – but that they often prioritized aesthetics over emotion. This wasn’t always the case: the melancholy of the band’s next single, “Set You Free This Time,” would be the first ripple the tranquil pond, while the disparity between the exquisite harmonies and searing guitar in “Eight Miles High” resulted in one of the decade’s greatest records. But “Turn! Turn! Turn!” remains a masterpiece in a different sense: a piece of art you can appreciate for its skill and admire for its beauty, even if you can never quite make your own. 7

Hit #1 on December 4, 1965; total of 3 weeks at #1
149 of 1015 #1′s reviewed; 14.68% through the Hot 100