James Lileks dug this up, and now it's you who must suffer

simon and the bitch

Increasingly these days, I’ve been listening to the music collection stored on my iPhone more than I do Sirrius XM, and it turns out that I have a lot of old Simon and Garfunkel on it. And I’ve discovered that I hate it. Paul Simon was a great, great songwriter, and his Rhythm of the Saints is still an incredible breakthrough from what was going on in music at the time, but the juvenile, pretentious lyrics of his S&G days, wrapped in Garfunkel’s sing-songy, high, saccharine tenor are unlistenable to, and I dive for the skip button when one pops up on random shuffle.

In fact, I think this video perfectly captures the essence of the duo, and Lilek’s comments are uncalled for.

On the other hand, those comments are very funny.

Now and then you see something that cannot be paused, lest you discover it's not real, a hallucination. You have to keep watching.

So: the Young Folk, as far as I can tell, were a creation confined to the Red Skelton show. They were wholesome and clean-cut, and reassured the audience that the peculiar and annoying pop music of the day could be tamed and sweetened, and served up in a familiar way. The song was two years old, so it hadn't started any revolutions. Since it could be seen as folk instead of rock, it was safe; folk was the last pop-music fad the ’68 Red Skelton demographic probably accepted. Most of them had a Kingston Trio record in the cabinet.

Since it’s 1968, though, the network brass (they're always brass, never any other metal) are worried about alienating the youth demo, or at least alienating critics in the New York papers who would slag the show for plowing old furrows. Get with it, man! So we have the lurid colors and happy flowers to symbolize an understanding and appreciation of the new ideas. The set decorator was thrilled to get this assignment. Oh, finally!

(That flower design, by the way, would end up as an iconic graphic symbol of the late 60s and early 70s.)

The problem, of course, is that the Red Skelton demographic is old, and they hate the hippies. At least the men do. The wives like the Young Folk, because the Wives like to think of themselves as more open-minded and friendly to young ideas. So assume the men took this opportunity to get up from the Barcolounger in search of the head, or get another beer, and it’s just the Wife. What might make this special for her?

Libby.

The girls take his arm and say he’s going to be a flower child. If the Wife’s old crush could be one, well, so could she, right? Not that she would be interested in any of those . . . things they do, no. She’s going to vote for Humphrey (Bob doesn’t know, won’t ask) but she doesn’t like all those hairy young people angry about things. When she was their age it was the Depression and then the war and it’s just not like that now, at all. But it would be fun to be a flower child with Liberace! They would be better flower children. Wiser.

….

You wonder what Red thought. Well, that was special, I guess. God bless.

It’s typical in its strenuously mannered inauthenticity, and it's one of 2,324,034 reasons I don't look back on this era with indulgence. It's cringetopia.