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Simon & Garfunkel: Wednesday Morning, 3 AM

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Columbia Records
Released: 1964.10.19
Time:
 40:28
Category: Folk
Producer(s): Tom Wilson, Bob Irwin
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.simonandgarfunkel.com
Appears with: Paul Simon
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] You Can Tell the World (B.Gibson/B.Camp) – 2:47
[2] Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream (E.McCurdy) – 2:11
[3] Bleecker Street (P.Simon) – 2:44
[4] Sparrow (P.Simon) – 2:49
[5] Benedictus (trad., arr. Simon & Garfunkel) – 2:38
[6] The Sound of Silence (P.Simon) – 3:08
[7] He Was My Brother (P.Kane) – 2:48
[8] Peggy-O (trad.) – 2:26
[9] Go Tell It on the Mountain (trad.) – 2:06
[10] The Sun Is Burning (I.Campbell) – 2:49
[11] The Times They Are a-Changin' (B.Dylan) – 2:52
[12] Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (P.Simon) – 2:13
          Bonus tracks:
[13] Bleecker Street [demo] (P.Simon) - 2:46
[14] He Was My Brother [alternative take 1] (P.Kane) - 2:52
[15] The Sun Is Burning [alternative take 12] (I.Campbell) - 2:47

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Paul Simon - Acoustic Guitar, Vocals, Banjo on [2]
Art Garfunkel - Vocals, Arrangement, Original Liner Notes, Photo Courtesy

Barry Kornfeld - Acoustic Guitar
Bill Lee - Acoustic Bass

Tom Wilson - Producer
Bob Irwin - Producer
Vic Anesini - Mastering, Mixing

Mark Feldman - Project Director
Björn Ramberg - Design
Angela Skouras - Art Direction
Lily Lew - Packaging Manager
Hank Parker - Photography
Bud Scoppa - Liner Notes
Darren Salmieri - A&R
Steve Berkowitz - A&R
Patti Metheny - A&R
Kyle Wofford - A&R

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Wednesday Morning, 3 AM doesn't resemble any other Simon & Garfunkel album, mostly because their sound here was fundamentally different from that of the chart-topping duo that emerged a year later. Their first record together since their days as the teen harmony duo Tom & Jerry, the album was cut in March 1964, at a time when both Simon and Garfunkel were under the spell of folk music. As it had in 1957 with "Hey, Schoolgirl," their harmonizing here came out of the Everly Brothers' playbook, but some new wrinkles had developed - Paul Simon was just spreading his wings as a serious songwriter and shares space with other contemporary composers. The album opens with a spirited (if somewhat arch) rendition of Gibson and Camp's gospel/folk piece "You Can Tell the World," on which the duo's joyous harmonizing overcomes the intrinsic awkwardness of two Jewish guys from Queens, New York doing this repertory. Also present is Ian Campbell's "The Sun Is Burning," a topical song about nuclear annihilation that Simon heard on his first visit to England as an itinerant folksinger the year before. But the dominant outside personality on the album is that of Bob Dylan - his "Times They Are A-Changing" is covered, but his influence is obvious on the oldest of the Simon originals here, "He Was My Brother." Simon's first serious, topical song, dealing with the death of a freedom rider - and dedicated to Simon's slain Queens College classmate Andrew Jacobs - it was what first interested Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson in Simon & Garfunkel. By the time the album was recorded, however, Simon had evolved beyond Dylan's orbit and developed a unique songwriting voice of his own, though he still had some distance to go. His other originals betray the artifice of an English major at work, sometimes for better, as on "Sparrow" and the original, all-acoustic release of "The Sound of Silence," and at times for worse, on the half-beautiful but too-precious title song (which he would re-write more successfully as "Somewhere They Can't Find Me"). There are also a pair of traditional songs, a beautifully harmonized rendition of "Peggy-O" - which they probably picked up in Greenwich Village, or from recordings by Dylan or Joan Baez - and "Go Tell It On the Mountain," both of which fit well into the zeitgeist of the folk revival. The record didn't sell on its original release, however, appearing too late in the folk revival to attract much attention - Bob Dylan was already taking that audience to new places by adding electric instruments to his sound. But the seeds of the duo's future success were planted when, months after the album had been given up for dead - and the duo had split up - the all-acoustic rendition of "The Sound of Silence" started getting radio play on its own in some key markets, which possessed to producer Wilson to try and adapt it to the new sound, overdubbing an electric band.

Bruce Eder - All Music Guide



‘Wednesday Morning, 3 AM’ arrived as Simon and Garfunkel were still finding their inner voice, if not their actual ones. Their debut album, released in October 1964, is perhaps best known for including the original, acoustic version of ‘The Sound of Silence’ — and then for nearly ending what turned out to be a hall-of-fame partnership.

Completed in early 1964, the pretty, if largely unsubstantial ‘Wednesday Morning 3 AM,’ found Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sticking close to an acoustic-focused sound that, by the time the album was issued in 1964, had been rendered utterly passe by the arrival of the Beatles. Columbia Records, completely misunderstanding the rising zeitgeist, actually subtitled the project “Exciting New Sounds in the Folk Tradition.” Not exactly. So thunderous was their opening flop that Simon and Garfunkel effectively split up. It would be another year before the album’s enterprising producer, Tom Wilson, decided — in a stroke of career-saving genius — to add electric guitars and drums to the existing version of ‘The Sound of Silence,’ hurtling Simon and Garfunkel up the charts during an era in which artists like Bob Dylan reshaped rock ‘n’ roll after also abandoning folk music.

Dylan’s acoustic songs, in fact, had a noticeable influence on ‘Wednesday Morning, 3 AM.’ Simon and Garfunkel offered a tame version of ‘Times They Are a-Changing,’ and also included ‘Peggy-O,’ which Dylan regularly covered during his early days. Moreover, Simon’s ‘He Was My Brother‘ owes no small debt to the his influence. But Dylan had moved on, and Simon and Garfunkel needed to as well. Instead, ‘Wednesday Morning, 3 AM’ veered into too-precious reductions of Everly Brothers-style harmonizing, without the fully formed literary weight that marked their later successes. And their choice of source material didn’t help. An album-opening take on the gospel-folk song ‘You Can Tell the World‘ is more energetic than it is emotionally resonant. ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain‘ was just as ubiquitous at this point, at the tail-end of the folk-revival era, as it was uninteresting.

That said, in moments like ‘The Sun Is Burning‘ (Ian Campbell’s dark warning of the dangers of nuclear war), ‘He Was My Brother’ (in which Simon focuses on the fate of a slain freedom rider) and the ageless ‘The Sound of Silence,’ we see obvious hints as to what initially piqued producer Wilson’s interest in Simon and Garfunkel — and the first outlines of a road map for where they’d go, once the wreckage of ‘Wednesday Morning, 3 AM’ had been cleared away.

Simon and Garfunkel hastily reunited after the rocked-out update of ‘The Sound of Silence’ went to No. 1 in 1965. Perhaps coming to understand the embryonic nature of their debut, Simon later rewrote the title song as ‘Somewhere They Can’t Find Me‘ on their belated follow-up. By then, Simon and Garfunkel had become stars, and ‘Wednesday Morning, 3 AM’ was enough of a curio, that — after the album’s re-release in January 1966 — it eventually went platinum. Simon and Garfunkel followed Wilson’s lead, recording the ‘Sounds of Silence’ album with a rock back backing them up.

Nick DeRiso - October 20, 2014
ultimateclassicrock.com



Wednesday Morning, 3 AM is the debut album by folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel, released October 19, 1964. It was produced by Tom Wilson and engineered by Roy Halee. The cover and the label include the subtitle exciting new sounds in the folk tradition.

The album was initially unsuccessful, having been released in the shadow of The Beatles' arrival on the scene. This resulted in Paul Simon's move to England and Art Garfunkel's resumption of his university studies at Columbia University in New York City.

Wednesday Morning, 3 AM was re-released in January 1966 (to capitalize on their newly found radio success with a later re-mixed electric/acoustic version of the song "The Sound of Silence"), reaching number 30 on the Billboard album chart. It was belatedly released in the UK in 1968 in both mono and stereo formats.

The album is also included in its entirety as part of the Simon & Garfunkel box sets Collected Works and The Columbia Studio Recordings (1964–1970).

The album's cover photo was shot at the Fifth Avenue / 53rd Street subway station in New York City. In several concerts, Art Garfunkel related that during the photo session, several hundred pictures were taken that were unusable due to the "old familiar suggestion" on the wall in the background, which inspired Paul Simon to write the song "A Poem on the Underground Wall" for the duo's later Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album.

"He Was My Brother", was dedicated to Andrew Goodman, who was their friend and a classmate of Simon's at Queens College. Andrew Goodman was one of the three civil rights workers murdered in the Mississippi civil rights workers' murders.

Wikipedia.org
 

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