Over the hills and everywhere

[venta]

On Fridays this year, we ask...

What's in the Box?

The Box in question is the glovebox of my car, home to my extremely motley tape collection. By the time I owned a car with a tape player tapes were on the way out and most of my music was in CD format. However, charity shops were practically giving tapes away, which meant that I bought rapaciously and eclectically. A half-remembered 80s band who once released a single I'd liked a little ? A band I'd vaguely heard of ? An unknown group with good cover art ? Bring them on.

Of course, the net result is that I've ended up with a tape collection which any music-lover would be slightly ashamed of. There was a relatively narrow window (late 70s to later 80s) when tapes were big news, and my horde represents that. However, in amongst the terrible pop I've found some gems and I reckon its time to come clean about my guilty musical secrets.

In The Box this week we have:

Simon & Garfunkel - Wednesday Morning 3am

The Box would like to apologise for is recent silence. I wasn't well enough to rummage last week, and the previous week was up a hill in Cumbria.

Walking along Bleecker Street in New York a few years ago, I was cheerfully warbling to myself: "I met a boy on Bleecker Street, who stole my heart". I was quite surprised recently to discover that Helen Love wasn't the only person to write a song about Bleecker Street. Simon & Garfunkel did it earlier, and very probably more famously.

Simon & Garfunkel are one of those bands like the Beatles where you think you only know one song, then listen to an album and discover that nearly every track is an old friend. I bought Wednesday Morning 3am, and was surprised to find any number of tracks I knew on it, including two that were regulars at junior school assembly. It also has a cover of Times They Are A-Changin', a song which is incredibly famous but which I'd managed never actually to hear.

In terms of the Simon & Garfunkel 'big hits', I think only Sound of Silence would really count, and I find it an oddly lumpy album, lurching about between different styles of content in a fog of inconsistency. It does, however, have a couple of songs I'm really pleased to know, and this is one of them:

Simon & Garfunkel - Bleecker Street

[Poll #1165690]

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Good, though I don't like it as much as Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme or Sounds of Silence (which is a strange, dark little album).

Bleeker Street always reminds me of the traditional song 'New York Girls' (you'll have heard it, Steeleye Span did a version, though I know the version with the Tiffany earrings in best). It's the one with the chorus "Oh! You New York girls / can't you dance the polka".

"As I walked down through Chatham Street
a fair maid I did meet,
She asked me to see her home--
she lived in Bleecker Street."

[venta.livejournal.com]

I do know the song, though I don't know the Steeleye Span version. So I expect it to be:

"As I walked down the Broadway
One evening in July,
I met a maid, who asked my trade,
I'm a Sailor Jack, said I".

(He takes her to Tiffany's in that one, too - apparently he didn't mind the expense.)

So being on Broadway made me sing that. NYC is a beggar for that, pretty much every major street name set me off singing something.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

*nods* There seem to be two principal versions - one where he gets drugged/beaten up and robbed, and one where the girl just ditches him after he's bought her the Tiffany earrings ("My flashman he's a Yankee, with his hair cut close behind" - so you'd better beat it before he gets home!).

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Good, though I don't like it as much as...

It was their first album, recorded when they were pretty young, and seems to me like a fairly random mix of miscellaneous stuff they presumably liked performing.

But I think back in 1964 albums were mostly pretty incoherent collections: look at the Beatles' early ones.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I like some of the tracks on it a lot, I'm just not sure it holds together that well as an album. Sounds of Silence is still probably my favourite, if a bit heavy on the suicide songs (A Most Peculiar Man, Richard Corey).

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

To be fair they were young but had already had some success as Everlys style singers as Tom & Jerry, and many of the songs on the first two S&G albums had appeared earlier on The Paul Simon Songbook (Sound Of Silence, the neglected but gorgeous A Church is Burning, etc.)