• AllMyVinyl #108
• Band: Simon & Garfunkel
• Album Title: Greatest Hits
• Release Date: 14 Jun 1972
• Date purchased: Unknown
• Location purchased: Unknown
• Color of vinyl: black
• Number of discs: 1
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

This is one I have to say right from the start I have no idea where it came from.  I know I never bought it, and I thought it was one I picked up when my wife’s father passed, and we got some of the family stuff.  But I checked with my wife, and she doesn’t remember bringing it from there.  She never would have bought vinyl herself, so unless I bought this in the early 80’s somewhere and 100% forgot about it, how it came to be in my possession is 100% lost on me.  The pressing seems to be a 1972 original, which would likely mean I didn’t buy it, as I wasn’t buying vinyl in 1972 (I was less than 10 years old then).

One thing about this one vs some other albums I have is I’m hyper familiar with nearly every track on here.  There’s a couple I’m not recalling by name, but nearly everything on this compilation is a banger.  For a person who is a metal head at heart, and has his rock tastes lean heavy, this is a little bit of an outlier in that it doesn’t fit stylistically with most everything in my collection.  However, there’s no denying the music on here.  Wall to wall awesome shit on this compilation.   I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that so much of this was always played on FM radio when I was young, and it was seared into my memory around this time.

It’s not really S&G related – but I always loved that Paul Simon was never afraid to make fun of himself.  He would appear over the decades on Saturday Night Live, going all the way back to the OG version in 1975.   He would get up on stage and play songs and be dressed like a turkey – loved he saw humor in thus stuff, and went with it.

My wife also has the same compilation on CD, and it gets played in the car a lot that way.  But yeah, I’m definitely puzzled where this vinyl came from.  It’s likely that I bought it way back when and just forgot – or perhaps it was one of my mother’s records that slipped in here by accident – not impossible – her tastes leaned more towards things like Simon & Garfunkel (she LOVED Janis Ian).  But however it got here to Texas in 2025, it’s here now, and I’m about to have some pleasant sounds fill my office for the better part of an hour, of that there’s no doubt.

I think as I write this before I play the music that most of these I’m not going to have a to to say, because I can probably say the same thing about nearly every track..  “This was freakin’ awesome – loved this track, remember it well from the radio in the 70’s and 80’s”.  haha.  Hopefully I have a little more to say than that.  Here goes…

Mrs. Robinson – When I was younger, I remember hearing this song and wondering who Mrs. Robinson actually was.  My favorite part was the verse that talked about Joe DiMaggio, I geeked out at the “real life” baseball reference.  I also read somewhere along the line the usage of “coo-coo-ca-cho” was a Beatles reference (The Walrus).  The song also reminds me of course of the movie “The Graduate” because it was created for that.  I’ve never actually seen the movie, but for me personally the song reminds me also of the TV show Dallas – that’s because the famous legs on the movie poster were Linda Gray, well known as Sue Ellen Ewing from Dallas, so I see Sue Ellen when I hear the song. :)

For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her – One of the tracks I didn’t recall from looking at the cover.  This is one of the live tracks on the album (overall the album is a mix of studio and live – mostly studio though).  One of the few songs sung solely by Art Garfunkel on his own.  It’s a very light song – has a kind of etherial sound, like you can imagine Art floating through the clouds as he’s singing it.  Probably why I didn’t remember it – I didn’t tend to care for the Garfunkel led songs as much.

The Boxer – This is my wife’s fav S&G song by far.  While I don’t love it as much as her, it is a great track for sure.   Oddly this one of those songs where the second half is the same line of lyric over and over and over again (Lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie, lie-lie-lie-lie-lie), but in this song it doesn’t matter a bit.  It’s an awesome track even with the same line of lyric over and over.  Has an awesome slow vibe that doesn’t build to a higher plane, it just starts at this level, keeps going, and works at that level, it doesn’t need anything else as the track just works.  By definition I shouldn’t like it, but it’s darned good – perhaps not top of the pedestal as my wife likes it, but yeah, it always gets played once or twice when I spin this album.  As a side note, when I saw Heart in 2019, they did The Boxer live – I knew the set list before I went, so my wife asked me to record that for her.  I did – that video  is embedded below (if you’re reading this on my blog).

The 59th St Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy – live) – Another live track. If there’s one thing I’ve always felt about this song is that it’s too short.  On this album it’s only 1:50, and I believe the studio version is marginally shorter.  It’s got a great groove, a song I’ve always loved.  Unfortunately it’s over right after it starts.  As i sit here listening to it, I’m reminded of the Muppets for some reason. Did the Muppets / Sesame Street ever do something with this song that’s wedged in a dark recess of my memory?  I stand by my original statement – this should have been longer.

The Sound of Silence – Black Sabbath has Paranoid, Deep Purple has Smoke on the Water, Simon & Garfunkel have The Sound of Silence.  Even people that don’t like this kind of music know this song.  Its’ GOT to be their most well known song.  This song took a slightly different meaning for me in 2023 when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer (I’m in remission now – YAY!).  This is specifically the bit about “silence like a cancer grows” – I heard this song within the first couple of days of my original diagnosis when I was stupid emotional about all of that, so it didn’t help hearing that.  I also love that lyrics from this were later picked up and used by Rush in “The Spirit of Radio”.

And of course I couldn’t mention this song without talking about the band Disturbed.  They crafted what I consider to be the perfect cover song.  There’s two ways you can go with a cover song. You can change it all around so it bears little resemblance to the original, or you can clone the original.  This one does neither.  They do their own thing with it, yet still remained the majority of the original that it’s recognized by anyone who knows the original.  It sounds like their own thing and the Simon & Garfunkel original at the same time.  It also ends up with a massive amount of power and metal in the final verse – something that the S&G original had none of.  It’s the #1 song on my “Metal covers of non metal songs” playlist.  The best part of this is that both my mother (now 81) and my grandmother (now 100) both have said they’ve liked this cover of the song.  Which surprises me, as neither of them likes hard rock or metal at all.  I’ve read somewhere that Paul Simon (who wrote the original) quite loves this cover too.

It’s a bit of a hot take, but I prefer the Disturbed version to the Simon & Garfunkel original.

I am a Rock – I don’t have a ton of memories of this one, beyond saying that I enjoy the song – but it doesn’t hold any special memory for me.  It sounds like something the Monkees would do, actually – has that kind of vibe to it.  A lot of S&G songs are slower, this is not one of them.

Scarborough Fair / Canticle – I had an ex girlfriend who was into all this Renaissance Fair type stuff.  For that reason this song doesn’t do a lot for me.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.  It’s got some great vocal harmonizing.  But for me personally, I generally skip over it due to the personal connection mentioned above. I have to imagine Ritchie Blackmore did this with Blackmore’s Knight.

Homeward Bound – This one is live, but I think I prefer the studio version.  A song filled with a bunch of great harmonizing.  It’s basically the two of them with a single accostic guitar.  It’s about as pure as you can get music wise.  The kind of song that I think would be dependent on what kind of control one has over their voice.  Because the harmonizing is the main driver here.  I get the feeling I’ve heard this in a movie somewhere, but I can’t place it now.

Bridge over Troubled Water – Another one of their hyper classics.  Right there with Silence.  Probably the best thing sung solo by Art Garfunkel.  It’s got a piano sound that’s almost an orchestration on its own.  Art’s vocals work very well here.  I particularly love the slower cadence and the power behind “LIKE.  A.  BRIDGE.  OVER.  TROUBLED WATERS!!” towards the end – it’s easily my favorite moment of the entire song.  As I mentioned earlier, I’m not a huge fan of Garfunkel led songs, but this one knocks it out of the park.  It’s a killer track.

America – Lyrically, it’s interesting that this came out in 1968 and speaks of “a literal and physical America that seems to have disappeared, along with the country’s beauty and ideals”.  That’s a concept we keep hearing over and over as time passes – culminating in today’s political discourse – but never mind on that.  It’s got a bit of a galloping sound musically.  It was covered (rearranged?) by the band Yes in 1972.  For this one I think I prefer the original.  The vocals are nice – and it has a sound that you’d think would get into that “soaring high in the sky” range, but it doesn’t quite go there.  That’s not bad, just didn’t go where I thought it would.

Kathy’s Song – Another one I didn’t know by name when I read the songs here.  This is a song that is technically a S&G cover of a Paul Simon (solo) track, originally from 1965.  I don’t have an opinion here.  Don’t know it hardly at all.  Doesn’t ring a bell as I sit here and listen to it.  It’s just kind of there – doesn’t do much for me.

El Condor Pasa (If I Could) – This is technically a reworking of a Peruvian song from 1913.  The lyrics here are written by Paul Simon, but the music here was by a band called “Los Incas” (an Andean folk music group).  The slightly different sound appeals to me as my wife and I were big fans of another Peruvian band called “Wayanay Inka”.  I mean it really sounds like them.  It’s kind of hard to describe this kind of music – if you want to check out Wayanay, check out their song “Coral“.  But the S&G song sounds cool too.  It was the source of a lawsuit, which is written about on Wikipedia a little.

Bookends – Named well, it feels like a bridge song – a small minute and a half instrumental piece to go between one song and another.   Unlike Feelin’ Groovy earlier which is a sub 2 min song, this does nothing for me.

Cecelia – This is a good way to go out on the album.  It’s a faster vibe – and since a lot of S&G’s music is slow acoustic stuff, this one sticks out.  It also sounds like it would fit on Paul’s later solo album Graceland.  It has the same kind of vibe as some of the stuff there.  This was one when I looked at the track listing before listening, I did recall.  But what I didn’t recall was the infectious groove the song has.  I had forgotten that.  For my personal musical tastes, it’s probably the thing that’s the catchiest on this album (perhaps not in general, but on this specific compilation – yeah).  I had to play this again, I really liked it.

When I looked over the list of songs at the start of this, I was like “Hang on, where’s Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard”, and then I have to remember that song is a “Paul Simon” song not a S&G song.  His earliest solo work sounds a lot like S&G anyway, I would get them confused a lot in the past.  To some extent they’re interchangeable insofar as my music listening habits (at least the early stuff).  I know that will probably upset some S&G purists, but when S&G is mostly song by Paul, and then Paul continues to write songs and sing them, they’re gonna sound familiar to some extent.

I had to go pick up my wife from work in the middle of listening to this, and when I did, I had the Boxer on for her, as I know how much she loves the song.  There’s a lot to really love there, and while yeah – not metal.  Not everything can be that.  This is an excellent compilation.  Much to love.

I just wish I could remember where this particular vinyl came from.