3. Simon & GarfunkelRichard Cory
My family is ethnic and on my dad’s side they all used to send me money for my birthday and I’d become attached to music before that. By the time I was two-and-a-half it was something that I responded to, and my mom was always playing music and she always worried about me touching the record player, so she got me one of these Mickey Mouse tiny little record players. I basically looted her 60s record collection and one of those records was Sounds Of Silence.
I didn’t like ‘The Sound Of Silence’, but what I liked was side B of the album, which are all these songs that are so dark, and out of those songs I really like ‘Richard Cory’. ‘A Most Peculiar Man’ is really great, too, and it’s about this guy who doesn’t talk to anybody – he lives in this tiny little world with his books and that was fine by him, but nobody knew that he died in that tiny little room which is the way he wanted it because he was this most peculiar man.
‘Richard Cory’ has this story about this guy who has everything in the world. He’s like a City of London banker or one of these Russian guys; you’re always reading about him and he owns a football team and he has parties in Monaco and he owns a yacht and you wish you were like him and then you read the paper one day and he’s blown his brains out. I just love that flip around! It’s little bit lefty, this song, obviously, but it’s good poetry and it’s a good story and it’s that culmination of folk-rock that I really like. The way they overdubbed that stuff with Glen Campbell really kicked butt. And those guys’ harmonies are just untouchable – in ’65 those guys were kicking butt for pop music.
