Before Simon & Garfunkel, two Queens teenagers had a minor hit as Tom & Jerry
At 15, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel paid $25 to record a song called Hey, Schoolgirl in a Manhattan studio. Billed as Tom & Jerry, they sold more than 100,000 copies and played American Bandstand, then spent years stalling before The Sound of Silence finally broke through.
They grew up three blocks apart in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, and went through the same schools. Simon first noticed Garfunkel singing at a fourth-grade talent show and concluded that singing was a good way to impress girls; the two became friends in 1953 during a sixth-grade Alice in Wonderland. Their stage names were private jokes: Garfunkel became Tom Graph because he loved mathematics, and Simon became Jerry Landis after a girl he had dated. Promoter Sid Prosen slipped the DJ Alan Freed $200 to spin the single, and although it reached number 49, the boys split only about $4,000.
College came next, with Simon reading English at Queens College and Garfunkel moving from architecture to art history at Columbia. In late 1963, billed as Kane & Garr, they played Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village, caught the ear of Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson, and got a contract. Their debut, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., sold just 3,000 copies. Simon drifted to England, playing folk clubs and falling for Kathy Chitty, who turns up in Kathy's Song and America, while Garfunkel returned to Columbia for a master's in mathematics.
Then a late-night Boston DJ played The Sound of Silence, college listeners took to it, and Wilson, fresh from electrifying Bob Dylan on Like a Rolling Stone, overdubbed studio musicians onto the track without telling either singer. Simon was horrified on first hearing it. By January 1966 it topped the Hot 100 and had sold over a million copies, and Simon came home. Mike Nichols built their songs into The Graduate in 1967, and Mrs. Robinson and Bridge over Troubled Water both won the Grammy for Record of the Year.
The partnership was brittle. Garfunkel had never quite forgiven a solo single Simon released behind his back in the early days, and the duo split in 1970, the year Bridge over Troubled Water became one of the best-selling albums anywhere. Simon went on to Graceland; Garfunkel scored Britain's top single of 1979 with Bright Eyes. A 1981 reunion in Central Park may have drawn more than 500,000 people, and their record sales exceed 100 million.
Source: Simon & Garfunkel
