Simon & Garfunkel
Bookends

Bookends is the story of ordinary people. It's the story of a lesser America. It's about living not by looking, but by seeing. Reality painted with broad strokes that are neither too heavy nor too light. These are the impressions of two young men who are growing up, who are becoming famous when they least expected it and who respond to the world with a whisper. Simon & Garfunkel, a moniker, or simply a name and last name, of two simple guys. Two voices, two waves, that alternate between dark bitter swells and frothy denouncements of dissatisfaction. They move among women coming home with groceries, tired and without time to stop, to think about what they really desire. Men who smoke in the cold walking along the boulevards near Sunset Boulevard, zig-zagging through pains and seeking a bit of hope at the end of hard, monotonous urban days.

While Bob Dylan wants to break the world and the Beatles want to build a new one, Simon & Garfunkel close themselves in their little universe, trying to save what good remains. It's with seemingly innocent and insecure eyes that they look at us from the sparse, wonderful cover. Perhaps they don't need poses and attitudes, perhaps they already have the image of their horizons before them. It's a search for the pure, the genuine, the true, stronger feelings, and finally with a maturity and awareness that was lacking in their earlier (still interesting) works. The concrete illusion, the fleeting trust that everyday life, after all, has what we were looking for. But what were we looking for? Something good, the mythology of the ordinary revested with extraordinariness, making faces from a bus, staying to talk with the elderly, listening to what they have to offer us, stories of husbands dead in distant wars, yellowed loves from which we want to learn magic and mistakes. Reflecting by the window, marveling at the beauty of a flower, getting lost inside a zoo, smiling because of a woman, and joking with the animals. There is no air of revolution, but of reform. And so, for now, they don't renounce the faithful folk in the raw manner of an Highway 61, but instead embellish it with delicate, gentle, sometimes frantic adornments. The percussion of Mrs. Robinson will set a precedent, in that air of excitement where we are no longer good boys but not too loud rebels either.

The choice of songs by the duo for the successful soundtrack of the epochal "The Graduate" by Mike Nichols (1967) proves to be spot-on. The film is perhaps the perfect cinematic transposition of the same atmosphere, of the same personalities we were talking about: Dustin Hoffman's character is almost an alter-ego of Paul Simon and the heroes that animate his sensitive stories. These are not the visionary and quirky youths of "Easy Rider," nor the troubled and drifting ones like Jack Nicholson in, for instance, "Five Easy Pieces": they are petty-bourgeois poets who need to find an ideal, a value, a woman to sacrifice for, they want to believe and lose themselves in something that can last, they are hunters and lovers of time. They want to give a future to the children about to be born, save the past of the grandparents, their wisdom as an elixir of long happiness. They record the sounds of life to recover them and to value what would be a "simple" song. Which thus becomes a three-dimensional body. Within this short dozen stories, we can hear testimonies, doors slammed in faces, hand claps and deafening choruses, laughter, bottles and glasses clinking, whistles, cigarettes lit before starting to sing...and to reassure us between a new discovery and another, many blues-rock'n'roll sugar cubes served on silver plates just to make us feel we are still close to home, safe, in the most sincere America, that questions itself just mildly frowning, but (to the delight of the dreamers) also knows how to give itself a sweet, decisive answer.