Simon & Garfunkel Wednesday Morning,3AM][Mp3@320kbs][Hectorbusinspector][H33t]

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Simon & Garfunkel - Wednesday Morning, 3am (Remastered + Bonus Tracks) (1964)

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Tracklist:



01.- You Can Tell The World [02:49]



02.- Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream [02:13]



03.- Bleecker Street [02:47]



04.- Sparrow [02:51]



05.- Benedictus [02:41]



06.- The Sound Of Silence [03:09]



07.- He Was My Brother [02:52]



08.- Peggy-O [02:28]



09.- Go Tell It On The Mountain [02:09]



10.- The Sun Is Burning [02:50]



11.- The Times They Are A-Changin' [02:55]



12.- Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. [02:23]



13.- Bleecker Street (Demo) [02:46] **



14.- He Was My Brother (Alternate Take 1) [02:52] **



15.- The Sun Is Burning (Alternate Take 12) [02:46] **



** = BONUS TRACKS, exclusive to this release



Originally Released on 1964. This remastered version, which includes three

bonus tracks was Released on August 21st, 2001



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Album Review by Bruce Eder



Wednesday Morning, 3 AM doesn't resemble any other Simon & Garfunkel album,

because the Simon & Garfunkel sound here was different from that of the

chart-topping duo that emerged a year later. Their first record together since

their days as the teen duo of Tom & Jerry, the album was cut in March 1964 and,

in keeping with their own sincere interests at the time, it was a folk-revival

album. Paul Simon was just spreading his wings as a serious songwriter and

shares space with other composers as well as a pair of traditional songs,

including a beautifully harmonized rendition of "Peggy-O." The album opens with

a spirited (if somewhat arch) rendition of Gibson and Camp's gospel/folk piece

"You Can Tell the World." Also present is Ian Campbell's "The Sun Is Burning,"

which Simon heard on his first visit to England as an itinerant folksinger,

which would later yield such works as "Anji" and "Scarborough Fair." But the

dominant outside personality on the album is that of Bob Dylan -- his "Times

They Are A-Changing" is covered, but his influence is manifest on the oldest of

the Simon originals here, "He Was My Brother." Simon's first serious, topical

song, it was what first interested Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson in Simon

& Garfunkel. He'd written it before the event, but Simon later identified the

song closely with the fate of his Queens College classmate Andrew Goodman, one

of three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964. By the time the

album was recorded, however, Simon had evolved beyond Dylan as an inspiration

and developed a unique songwriting voice of his own in the title track, a

beautifully sung, half-lovely song (that also shows his limitations, employing

the phrase "hard liquor store" because he needed the extra syllable); "Sparrow"

and "Bleecker Street," spritely, mystical, and mysterious, and innocently

poignant observations on life; and "The Sounds of Silence" in its original

all-acoustic version, a heartfelt and defiant statement about the human

condition and the shape of the world. Art Garfunkel's makes his own contribution

on the creative side with a beautiful arrangement of "Benedictus." It's

surprisingly ambitious but also somewhat disjointed, mostly because the

non-original material, apart from "Peggy-O" and "The Sun Is Burning," comes off

so arch. The seeds of their future success were here, however, and took root

when the version of "The Sounds of Silence" on this album started getting played

on the radio, in Boston and Florida, respectively.



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AllMusicGuide Track-by-track Review

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YOU CAN TELL THE WORLD



A minor coffeehouse favorite from the early '60s opened up the debut Simon &

Garfunkel album with a bang. A furiously strummed acoustic guitar and bass are

the only backing on this, but the singers' voices fill up the tape with an

infectious atmosphere. Bob Gibson's trademark Dixieland bounce is evident here,

and a strong gospel feel in both the lyrics and music conveys a sense of

positive, life-affirming virtue that was indeed a big part of Simon &

Garfunkel's appeal.



LAST NIGHT I HAD THE STRANGEST DREAM



Written by one of the founding fathers of modern folk music, this Ed McCurdy

ballad is almost a precursor to John Sebastian's "I Had Dream," with its dream

of eternal peace, however difficult that may be to achieve. A waltz-time rhythm

and tempo carry the song, which also features some excellent (and uncredited)

banjo work. Although Simon & Garfunkel would certainly gain a stronger artistic

footing very soon, this early recording has a strong period charm and also shows

off their unique and tight harmony vocals.



BLEECKER STREET



Written by Paul Simon in England in the Summer of 1963, "Bleeker Street" is

about a very real and famous street in New York's Greenwich Village where both

he and Arthur Garfunkel (and hundreds of other struggling folkies) had worked in

the 1960s. A sense of desperation and depression for the street artist/musician

imbibes the song, and the stark imagery is extremely effective. Written in a

gentle, fingerpicked acoustic guitar style, it's not unlike Gordon Lightfoot's

"Early Morning Rain." This song is also one of the few on the duo's debut album

that retains some similarity with their classic, later-day work.



SPARROW



Written by Paul Simon in the summer of 1963, "Sparrow" was written after an

amusing incident where Simon found himself walking down a street in a fit of

self-doubt, which was followed by an unfortunate accident when a sparrow

defecated on him from atop a building. Although the incident is not recounted in

the song, the feeling of being lost is certainly at the core of the fine lyrics,

which also draw on biblical imagery. Musically, the song is a neo-classical

exercise in minor-key folk balladry and features some excellent fingerpicking

guitar and subtle acoustic bass. According to Art Garfunkel, this was the first

song of Simon's that he arranged, and following, at a New York city folk club,

the two re-ignited their musical partnership.



BENEDICTUS



One of the earliest Simon & Garfunkel collaborations, "Benedicts" dates back to

spring of 1964, when Arthur Garfunkel was a college student. One of the courses

he took was on 16th century music, and following some library research he came

up with the idea of updating this classic Latin hymn. Almost a cappella in style

(with just a few guitar chord flourishes), it's a wonderfully intricate two-part

harmony reading. The syncopated style achieved on this arrangement would later

be revisited by the duo, specifically on "Scarborough Fair." The song was

originally arranged by an Italian, Orlando de Lasso.



THE SOUND OF SILENCE



Paul Simon was a Brill Building demo singer as a teenager and, like the Beatles,

was heavily under the spell of the famous harmonies of the Everly Brothers.

Simon and his high school buddy, the classically trained musician Art Garfunkel,

even formed a teenage duo, Tom and Jerry, that was modeled after the Everlys.

But like a lot of other ambitious songwriters in the '60s, Simon soon fell sway

to the remarkable abilities of Bob Dylan. And again, like the Beatles, Simon

sought to merge his Brill-trained classic rock & roll and pop tendencies to the

newly wide-open lyrical scope of Dylan. And Dylan himself met the popsters

halfway, famously going electric soon after seeing the Fab Four and watching the

Byrds score even bigger hits than he did with electrified versions of his songs.

It was a heady era for pop music; soon anything and everything was fair game for

subject matter and rock & roll songwriters were starting to be taken seriously

as artists.



While we all would agree that this was mostly a good thing, the charts soon

became littered with overly ambitious and ill-informed protest songs and

self-consciously "literate" clunkers that fell short of the mark. While "Sound

of Silence" is ultimately saved from being among the latter, Simon does seem to

be reaching like a college freshman English major with "hey, look at me!" lines

like, "the words of the prophets were written on the subway walls," and "but my

words, like silent raindrops fell." Simon seems to desire the same prophetic

voice of authority that Dylan confidently exhibited in songs like "A Hard Rain's

A-Gonna Fall." But as a great song should, "Sound of Silence" starts with the

microcosmic world of a relationship and the inability for two to communicate,

and in the larger context of the tumultuous '60s takes on a greater

significance. The lyric, while a bit sophomoric at times, showed the promise of

a writer with talent that would develop over time. And certainly the narrator as

the lone voice of reason and understanding and the alienated cry in the urban

wilderness are themes that Simon would later refine with more subtlety and

greater depth on songs like "The Boxer."



The original recording was from the pair's debut, Wednesday, 3 AM (1964), an

album they recorded for Columbia after they first felt the influence of the

burgeoning folk revival movement. The two were aware of what they had, Garfunkel

noting in the album's liner notes that the song "...is a major work. We were

looking for a song on a larger scale, but this was more than either of us

expected." They recorded it with just the voices and a lone acoustic guitar,

and, after little interest was shown in the record, disbanded while Garfunkel

attended Columbia University and Simon went off to live in London, where he

recorded and released a solo record and toured European coffeehouses and pubs.

Meanwhile, the song started to find a modest amount of radio play. Columbia

Records, experiencing success with Dylan's electric-acoustic forays, employed

Dylan's producer, Tom Wilson, to give "Sound of Silence" a similarly electrified

treatment -- employing the same band from the Dylan sessions -- never bothering

to consult Simon and/or Garfunkel. According to Patrick Humphries' biography of

Simon, The Boy in the Bubble (1988), the singer/songwriter was on tour in

Denmark when he happened upon a copy of Billboard and saw that the song was

charting. Humphries notes that Columbia mailed Simon a copy of the electrified

version and that Simon was "horrified when he first heard it. In fact, if you

listen to that original version, you can hear the rhythm section slow down at

one point so that Paul and Artie's voices can catch up." But it went to number

one in 1966. The duo agreed that it was time to regroup. They quickly went into

the studio with a few more songs, some from Simon's solo record, to record a

full album ( Sounds of Silence, 1966) to capitalize. As Simon recounted --

quoted on the Simon & Garfunkel website ( /http://www. medialab. chalmers.

se/guitar/index. tml#S&G): "I had just come back from England, and Art was still

living at home, he was still at college and we were sitting in my car...smoking,

and "Sound of Silence" came on and they said: 'Number one record, "Sound of

Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel,' we were just sitting there at night, we hadn't

anything to do, and Artie turned to me and he said: 'those guys must be having

so much fun!'."



The duo harmonizes sweetly on the incredibly haunting melody, over a driving,

minor-key acoustic guitar rhythm, also indebted to the Everly Brothers, singing

images of urban apathy and desensitization. Even the acoustic original starts

with the soft, dark introduction and grows more intense and harder, with the

wispy voices gaining an edge and wavering with emotion while Simon abandons the

fingerpicking style and goes for the Everlys' strum. In an interview in Playboy,

Simon recounted the germination of the song: "The main thing about playing the

guitar, though, was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream. And I

was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the bathroom, because the

bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber. I'd turn on the faucet so

that water would run -- I like that sound, it's very soothing to me -- and I'd

play. In the dark. 'Hello darkness, my old friend/I've come to talk with you

again'. I've always believed that you need a truthful first line to kick you off

into a song. You have to say something emotionally true before you can let your

imagination wander."



The electrified version is the one most are familiar with, from the hit single

and its crucial and influential role on the soundtrack to the 1967 film The

Graduate. The added musicians don't pound as hard as they often do on those

Dylan records, instead opting for a more jangling West Coast folk-rock

treatment. The soundtrack makes great use of the song's plaintive opening

arpeggios and first line. The song gives voice to the film's frustrated, Holden

Caulfield-esque hero, Benjamin Braddock.



HE WAS MY BROTHER



Written by Paul Simon in June of 1963 under the pseudonym P. Kane. A song of

loss, it was later rewritten to make reference to an ex-classmate of Simon's,

Andrew Goodman, who was one of the students murdered in Mississippi during a

civil rights demonstration in 1964. Like the classic "He Was a Friend of Mine"

(cut by both Bob Dylan and the Byrds), the feeling of loss is captured in a

beautiful atmosphere of subtle, poetic style, avoiding overstatement. One of

Simon's finest early lyrics, it's backed by a minor-key folk progression with a

vaguely country rhythm. The song was released two other times (other than Simon

& Garfunkel's version), once as a solo single by Simon under the name " Jerry

Landis."



PEGGY-O



A light, sweet tempo and engaging overall feel in the vocal arrangement, this

traditional coffeehouse folky favorite is an excellent showcase for Simon &

Garfunkel's fabulous two-part harmonies. Although this song is a bit out of

context compared to most of the duo's later, more ambitious work, there is a

strong period charm here, and it lightens up the Wednesday Mo