Wednesday Listening

Abby Rosebruch — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 23:00:00 -0500

For four years I was a teenaged feminist living alone with my Republican father in a South Carolina suburb. What made this setup particularly difficult were the constant disagreements over everything from organized religion to weekend curfew. Our current friendship evolved amid heated arguments and sustained periods of frustration with one another. Hashing out our differences was second nature; finding common ground was a rare and beautiful circumstance. In the past few years, I’ve learned my father and I have the following things in common: we are both pro-choice, we both need to kick our caffeine addictions, and we both deeply love the music of Simon and Garfunkel.

Besides the New York vacation I got for Christmas in the seventh grade and the guitar for my eighteenth birthday (named “Mrs. Robinson”), the most valuable gift my father ever gave me was a box-set of Simon and Garfunkel’s Columbia Studio Recordings (1964 to 1970). Since Christmas of 2003, I’ve listened to at least one of the five albums every day. To pick a favorite would be the blasphemous equivalent of saying I like Simon better than Garfunkel or vice versa, but I will acknowledge that the album that I feel most emotionally connected to is Wednesday Morning, 3 AM (1964).

One can find numerous anecdotes about the production of this comparatively unpopular record, and more negative criticism exists for it than any other Simon and Garfunkel album. This is the first of the Columbia recordings, and it’s no surprise that the duo sounds less confident than usual. They have a good time with these early songs, but they still make the music with an audibly conscientious approach.

That vulnerability is what makes Wednesday’s music so relevant as I make my nervous transition toward living in this foreign and marvelous city of New York. Wednesday—with the exception of its title track about a man who robbed a liquor store—is my life’s sound track.

Wednesday’s tone is heavily political, appealing to my inner activist. “Sparrow,” “He Was My Brother,” “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” and the Bob Dylan classic “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” are among the most socially conscious pieces on the album. The duo’s profoundly human interpretations of antiwar folk anthems, especially “The Sun is Burning,” and “Peggy-O,” are poignant rather than pathetic, insightful rather than blindly radical.

“Bleeker Street” speaks of Paul Simon’s creative genius more than any other track on the album; it is, along with “The Sound of Silence,” the first of his truly literary compositions. You don’t have to look any further than Wednesday to realize that he is one of the best lyricists in rock history. “Benedictus,” which Garfunkel based on an archive of sacred music that he found at Columbia, rivals “Bleeker Street” as the most lovingly worn-out track on my copy of Wednesday.

I once asked my dad if he knew why Simon and Garfunkel split up. He lowered his head and said, “I don’t want to think about it; it makes me sad.” You really won’t find many fans as emotionally invested in the music of Simon and Garfunkel as my father is. Despite the different directions we’ve taken, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, at one time or another, has provided a sound track for both of our lives. When my dad and I visit Bleeker Street over Parents’ Weekend this fall, the same verses will run through both our minds for the same reasons, and there will be another silent and mutual realization that we are no longer rivals but rather old friends. ��

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Wednesday Listening