What a Gas!

As you get older, you think better--up to the age of 22, that is. If you're a jerk at 22, you're always going to be stupid. If you're a genius, somewhere at 22 it's there.

--Paul Simon

If the young were not so cocksure, it would be easier to appreciate them. In the case of Simon & Garfunkel, however, no amount of cockiness can obscure the fact that what was there at 22--when they began--is still there four years later, and in widening dimensions. The latest to discover this are those who have heard S. & G. sing the sound-track themes from Mike Nichols' The Graduate. To their sur prise, they have found that rock can be enjoyed without the fever required to fly with the Jefferson Airplane, slam with the Doors, or whip with the Cream.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, both 26, are cool. Their restrained vocal style is a lot closer to the madrigalists of the 16th century than to the 20th century pop shouters, and their songs are intelligent, poetic, melodically ingenious. They are, in short, the ultimate urban folksingers.

Floatin' Cornflake. Unlike Sonny & Cher, they did not drop out of school; unlike Bob Dylan, they did not run away from home. They are New York City-bred college graduates who see their philosophy as basically opposed to that of the hippies. "Why is it I feel compelled to write about this pain I see?" says Simon, who is responsible for all the lyrics and most of the music. "I could split and be free and do whatever I want. I said to myself, well, why don't I? Because I'm here, that's why."

Like so many rock troubadours, S. & G. see pain in the affluent society--in alienation, lack of communication, insincerity, mindless cocktail-hour chatter--but they succeed with these tattered themes by understating them rather than by reviling them. In Punky's Dilemma, in their latest album, Bookends, they even take up the subject of draft evasion, but gently, gently. The song begins innocently: "Wish I was a Kellogg's Cornflake floatin' in my bowl takin' movies/ Relaxin' awhile, livin' in style, talkin' to a raisin who 'casion'ly plays L.A." And it ends on a note of tolerant satire: "Old Roger draft-dodger leavin' by the basement door/ Everybody knows what he's tippy-toeing down there for."

Heard & Understood. But what the fans seem to like as much as the social commentary is S. & G.'s whimsical ability to poeticize about the commonplace. In Bookends, they dote wackily on one ordinary aspect of urban life in At the Zoo:

It's a light and tumble journey from the East Side to the park;

Just a fine and fancy ramble to the zoo . . .

The monkeys stand for honesty, giraffes are insincere,

And the elephants are kindly but they're dumb . . .

What a gas! You gotta come and see at the zoo.

S. & G. spend weekends traveling the campus circuits and seven days a week fighting the notion that they are spokesmen for their age group. "Nobody is talking for this generation," says Simon. "Nobody says, 'If you want to know what I think talk to Simon & Garfunkel.' Everybody has got his own ideas. I don't consider myself a poet. I'm a songwriter. I'm not interested in puzzling people for the sake of puzzlement. I like what I say to be heard and understood."

Obviously, it is. Their record albums have sold 3,000,000 copies in a little over three years, and their Graduate sound track, released in March, shot quickly to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart, where it sits stubbornly in happy alienation from its competitors.

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