It could have almost been a line out of Richard Corey. Hearing the news on the radio, Garfunkel turned to Simon and remarked, ironically, “That Simon & Garfunkel – they must be having a really great time”. (When he later heard the new version, however, he would be horrified by the instrumentation and how it had screwed up his gentle, introspective song.)Īccording to musical legend, when The Sound of Silence finally hit the No 1 spot, in 1966, Simon and Garfunkel were sitting in a parked car in New York, smoking grass. He happened to pick up a copy of a music magazine and discovered that his song had become a huge hit. Paul Simon himself was in Denmark at the time, performing at a small club. This remixed version of the song quickly skyrocketed to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Thus Simon & Garfunkel’s simple folk melody was transformed into one of the greatest folk-rock songs of all time.
So he called in a couple of Dylan’s backing musicians and asked them to overdub the track with rock instrumentation. To capitalise on this, Wilson decided – without telling Simon or Garfunkel – to re-mix the track, and give it a more contemporary feel, along the lines of recent hits like the Byrd’ s Turn, Turn, Turn and Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone. And thus, it seemed, Simon & Garfunkel were dead at birth.īut, in 1965, the song’s producer, Tom Wilson, detected a curious little trend: The song seemed to have inexplicably caught on in small pockets of the US, like Florida and Harvard. Simon went off to England, and Garfunkel went back to college. But the album was an instant flop when released in October 1964 – to the extent that the duo, believing they had no future, split up. Simon & Garfunkel first recorded The Sound of Silence (originally titled Sounds of Silence) in March 1964 for their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM.
On July 25th, Redditor beet111 submitted the video to the /r/videos subreddit, where it received more than 5,700 upvotes (89% upvoted) and 700 comments in two months. In four months, the video gained over 1.2 million views and 580 comments. On May 1st, YouTuber TeamZoo uploaded a video of a man appearing expressionless while riding a reverse bungee thrill ride with "The Sound of Silence" playing in the background (shown below, right). On March 14th, YouTuber rockwillor uploaded footage of feminist protester Chanty Binx with "The Sound of Silence" verse playing at the end of the clip (shown below, left). On February 7th, the /r/TheSoundofSilence subreddit was launched, featuring various YouTube videos with the song edited into the background audio. The same lyric was subsequently used in a page on the humor site DankMayMays featuring the Gnome Child with "The Sound of Silence" playing in the background (shown below). On January 27th, 2015, Redditor larperdoodle submitted a post titled "Hello dankness my old friend" followed by the phrase "I've come to browse your memes again" to the /r/dankmemes subreddit.