ART GARFUNKEL – "I Only Have Eyes For You"

Thanks, Rosie. I was about to jump on and complain about the popism-bordering-on-rockism that could claim the Flamingos as the undying version; it was a well-beloved standard with many versions both graceful and kicky long before, and long after, they flattened it out and steroided it up for the doo-wop market. The Flamingos were riding on the coattails of the song, not the other way round.

Sorry. As a (younger) American, I bristle at the revisionism implicit in the boomer-centric American Graffitis of the world, which suggest that pop music only started in 1956 because that’s as far back as George Lucas can remember. But what’s far worse is when people believe it.

Reluctant as I am to bring politics back into Popular, saying “Franco stood down” makes the old bastard sound a lot more gracious than he was – he had less than a month left to live and Franco’s people deemed it less dangerous to pass power to the King-to-be, Juan Carlos, than to wait for a power vacuum to arise as Franco wheezed his last. Little did Franco realise that he had been royally (ha!) played by his protege, who in good time restored democracy and built a land fit for Pedro Almodovar.

LondonLee – it’s not American Graffiti in itself that I have a problem with (I haven’t seen it either), it’s the way that film and similar cultural touchstones have (at least in the US) come to stand in for a generational experience as blinkered, self-congratulatory, and ultimately false as any Woodstock-era mythologizing. I know a necessary attribute of pop is to figuratively destroy whatever has come before it, but too many people take the figurative for the literal.

The UK experience, and cultural memory, of the 1950s were so entirely different that I’m not sure any of this can mean anything to most here. Apologies for having taken up so much space on poor Art’s moment in the sun; I really need to go listen to his version now.

I live in the States too and know what you mean about the Boomer generation’s belief that the world and history revolve around their memories. But you know, ‘American Graffiti’ is set when it’s set, that’s the music teenagers listened too, and the movie is too naturalistic and simple in style for Lucas to be making any grand claims about it.

‘The Big Chill’ is a far more egregious exercise in Boomer smugness if you want an annoying film.

LondonLee: Franco and the Yorkshire Ripper have nothing to do with this song, per se, nor have they anything much to do with Art Garfunkel (although given a chance I could probably find some kind of convoluted link.) But I mention them because they are part of the social context of the times, and that is the third element, in addition to song and performance, that makes a number one hit. One ending, opening up new horizons; one beginning which may not have impacted London much but those of us working in Leeds in the late 70s/early 80s felt the chill in the streets when the sun went down.

Anyway, social context is what I do. Others do the musicology.

marcello’s post suddenly made me wonder if graceland isn’t a kind of (unconscious) “answer record” to this: it too luxuriates in a vanished eerily gorgeous non-downtown-wiseguy sound (heard from afar long ago), with mbaqanga substituted for doowop — it also depends for its effect on a trust in an irreality (ok so does all pop probably, but specifically one based on the ghostly materiality of a particular vocal sound)

could also naughtily argue: graceland is actually secretly about how much paul simon misses the ghostly materiality of GARFUNKEL’S particular vocal sound — but he’d rather not admit this even to himself

haha relevant also (now) to any Context of Art: the films angelic-choirboy AG made bracketing this decade viz CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (1971) and BAD TIMING (1980)

Of course, I’d forgotten that this came from ‘Dames’, but then again, any musical that also features ‘The Lullaby of Broadway’, ‘Alls Fair In Love & War’, ‘Spin A Little Web of Dreams’ and ‘Hooray For Hollywood’ wasn’t exactly short of stand-out songs!

That reading is as maximalist as Scott Wood’s is concise, 9 glorious minutes of it dilating and rippling ever further out, incorporating passers-by and a chorus line.

Not long after this, the original Winifred Shaw ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ was rereleased and nearly got into the top 40.

You really ought to seek out the amazing ‘Lullaby of Broadway – Busby Berkeley at Warner Brothers’ compilation while you’re picking up all of these versions, Tom.

We are overlooking the Ray Conniff disco mashup version. (I’m serious about that description.)

Btw, until this morning I’d had no idea that there ever was any version of this song other than the Flamingos’, which I suppose is some kind of support for the idea that the Flamingos’ version is canonical among people born in the U.S. smack dab in the middle of the baby boom (me, b. 1954). That said, and thinking that Jonathan is more or less on the right track, I don’t think “baby boom” is that useful a shorthand for what he’s trying to say – at any rate, it needs elaboration. For one thing, if you take the baby boom (people born between 1946 and 1964), then it’s likely that people born in 1947 will have more of an impact as a whole than people born in 1942, and people born in 1963 will have more impact as a whole than people born in 1968, simply because there are more of them. But I’d hardly expect people born in 1963 to have more in common with people born in 1947 than with people born in 1968 – in fact, I’d expect the opposite.

And music itself is its own story, not in sync with the other arts. You don’t get “nothing exists before 1956 (or ’51 or ’48)” in movies or novels. In fact, it was the college film societies in the late ’60s and throughout the ’70s that played a huge role in the critical upgrading of the old Hollywood films, putting Casablanca and the Marx Brothers into the top echelon and getting the average student to take gangster films and screwball comedies seriously. Music is its strange story here: for better or worse you get the overthrow of classical music as the music of the intelligentsia, and you for a while you do get “the world begins in February 1964 and rock ‘n’ roll (beginning with Orioles in ’48 or ‘Rocket 88’ in ’51 or Elvis in ’54 or ’56) is just precursor, and anything else is ancien regime. And strangely, as for the (supposedly) sure-thing canonized Great Artists, the Beatles-Stones-Dylan plus whoever you add on, they don’t cover a swath of 18 years as you’d expect but come all concentrated in the mid to late ’60s. And even though near contemporaries (and even predecessors) like Carole King and Simon & Garfunkel and Fleetwood Mac and Elton John far outsell them in the ’70s (and it’s boomers whom they’re selling to) those performers don’t get the kneejerk citation as “Great Artists” that the Beatles do. And the critics and musicians who get the process going whereby now it’s standard to look beyond the rock canon to years before and genres despised were baby boomers themselves. (The stereotyped baby boom culture wasn’t made by baby boomers themselves, just consumed by them. Not baby boomers: Dylan, Lennon, Jagger. Baby boomers: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Sonic Youth.) And presumably a lot of the people buying Basie and Armstrong box sets these days were born in the baby boom. So size of the demographic and its supposed self-centeredness aren’t in themselves enough to tell what’s going on. There was something about the circumstances and the ’60s hero story that was compelling, too, and probably remains so.

I thought it was the French who played the major role in giving critical respect to old Hollywood movies.

This is where dates and generational labels start to mean nothing, if you could be a Boomer born as late as 1964 (are you sure about that?) that would mean I’m one and all the punks were.

obviously you don’t need “record clubs” to listen to records together — but the rise of a large-scale student-directed press devoted to discussing singles and LPs, to sharing the news and the discussion, coincides with innovation in the print industry which mean that good-looking nicely printed full-colour magazines — as opposed to crabbed little fanzines, or specialist journals like downbeat, or trade news sheets like billboard — were suddenly widely available and widely affordable, on a qualititively different scale… which is where crawdaddy and rolling stone and creem came in (the uk equivs were a little late starting): anyway, the point is that a combo of a new medium of transmission AND a new medium of discussion was a bit of an unstoppable force

(also of course teens had more disposable income and were being consciously targeted as a distinct market blah blah)

13th Gen has Gen X starting in ’61 and going to ’75, for what it’s worth.

Now there, Mark, is the rub! The post-war experience in Britain and America is different because the experiences of the war were totally different, and naturally the experiences of the consequences of the war were different – America, where no bombs fell, experiencing a sharp rise in prosperity while a shattered Britain, and Europe in general, picked up the pieces and began to rebuild. It was a long process – rationing didn’t end in Britain until 1954, the year that I was born. Britain did have the welfare state in this period, and that alone would have made a big difference (growing up on welfare orange juice – yum! When was that withdrawn?). A new generation grew up with a guaranteed school meal made to nutritional standards – they may not have been the kind of nutritional standards we’d approve of today but it was universal, and the first time a whole generation of children had eaten properly.

Where do things change? To some extent it’s all lines in the sand but there are times when you can point to significant points in history that changed everything. 1945 was one obvious such point – not only the end of the war but also the year of Hiroshima, Nagasaki (already alluded to recently) and yes, Dresden. The seismic shift in the nature of the charts around 1962/63 surely didn’t happen in isolation; it was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (the Cold War affected Britain much less than it did America until this point); the Kennedy assassination; Vietnam; but also the Chatterley trial and – most significant of all perhaps – the contraceptive pill. If you were sixteen in 1963 you were born in – 1947. Hmmm…

And then comes the mid 70s. The oil crisis which began in 1973 was really beginning to bite by 1975 and the properity that had hitherto been taken for granted now began to fall apart. 1975 is also the year of Jaws, which began a new era of mainstream Hollywood film production. I’d venture to suggest that the average age of the buyer of singles had come down too, and if you were just entering your teens in 1975 you would have been born in – 1962/63!

By the way, my favourite Baby Boom film, which is perhaps more liminal and illustrative of the transition rather than full-blown Babybooming, is Peter Bogdanovitch’s The Last Picture Show. The soundtrack to that features names from the very early days of Popular – Jo Stafford, Eddie Fisher, Tony Bennett…

I thought I didn’t know this but – having now YouTubed – of course I do. It’s nagging at me, though. This has been sampled, hasn’t it? Stupid question, given the all-embracing reach of sampling, but if anyone can place it, I’d be grateful.

Also YT-ed the Flamingos take on it, which has a dreamy poise that Art doesn’t quite manage. I like Art’s version all the same.

TOTP depicted Art ducking in and out of London taxis as a backdrop to this excellent piece. Garfunkel tackles an old standard and does it well. I was delighted when it hit the top (as Paul Gambichinni assured us it would) as by then I could bore for England (Private Frazer: “And Scotland!”) with regards Paul and Art thanks to my brother false feeding me everything from “Wednesday Morning 3AM” right up to when they parted company following “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, an album which is undoubtedly one of pop/rock’s masterpieces. Paul Simon was by this time well into his own solo career and had already released “Still Crazy After All These Years”, yet another remarkable body of work. In the meantime, in nipped Artie to achieve what Paul never did and score a solo UK number one. He was to return to the top later, Garfunkel, with that bloody (spoiler) bunny song, which on reflection made me feel far less guilty for having written “Boxing Day Bobby” back in 1974.

A very groovy coincidence:

I post at a “Buffy” web site called The Cross and Stake, where we are re-viewing all 144 episodes in chronological order (a project not totally unlike what’s happening here with singles). This very day, we’re discussing – you guessed it – “I Only Have Eyes For You.” Rest assured I pointed out your site and this entry to my fellow “Buffy” lovers.

I love this phrase: “this big fuzzy oven glove of sound.” That’s perfect. And I’m happy to see you feel the same about the Flamingos’ version.

I’ve only heard this record a couple of times in my life, including the time when McAlmont & Butler chose it on Ken Bruce’s show… but the bunny won’t let me tell you what they said then.

I quite like it, but even now the one bit I don’t totally grasp is how it managed to do so well. That’s in no way a criticism, but it intrigues me that it could do so well when other versions had failed (commercially) and Art wasn’t a consistently popular singles act.

Bread for your teeth!

Greatest sentence EVER posted in Popular Comments!

I don’t do piss taking or sending up here, Erithian – it’s a great sentence whatever its genesis.

Also my first language is Italian so I know perfectly well what she meant.

Oh yes, I have courage. But not it seems a particularly courageous requesting an opinion about Paul Simon at BAM (not that you gave me).
There will be perhaps a little snobbish? (If you know what it means). However thanks to the attention that have dedicated and for the welcome

er, fugees

I much prefer Dick Powell’s original chatty version in Dames. Later versions tend to either omit the first pair of couplets:

My love must be a kind of blind love
I can’t see anyone but you
And dear, I wonder if you find love
An optical illusion, too?

altogether, or worse, as here and with the Flamingos, use the first couplet but not the second, and weirdly just vamp for a few bars to make up the difference. (See Powell do the biz. here.)

If you leave out the optical illusion line then the song’s main conceit and especially its final lines:

Maybe millions of people go by
But they all disappear from view
And I only have eyes for you

come across just as hyperbole. Keep the optical illusion line *in* and have someone to sing *to* and who can react – Ruby Keeler nods her assent to Powell’s question and lays her head on his shoulder – and the rest of the song becomes not a lover’s hyperbole but a sophisticated dramatization of aspects of a provocative thesis: that love is a shared/joint optical illusion. The underlying objecctive reality might be just neediness, territoriality, mate-selection etc. but the lovers are constituted as lovers by sharing a perpective from which there’s something more than that going on, something quasi-magical that makes everything else drop away. (In fact the movie makes funs with a slightly different visual notion – we see from Powell’s POV lots of women in advertisements morph into his lover’s face…and there are cool tricks with masks that Michel Gondry stole for his ‘brilliant video for ‘let forever be’.)

I hate to be a prig about my basic point, but this is absolutely a case in which a fascinating song lost a lot of its meaning (and literally at least a couple of lines) by being wrenched out of its dramatic context and turned into a you-can-sing-it-anywhere standard. Also, if you flatten the song out to hyperbole, the placement of the ‘only’s far away from the ‘you’s they must modify just grates as ungrammatical I find. If you keep the illusions question-couplet and subsequent assent in place, however, then the ‘I only’s make additional sense as the special mutually constituting subjects of the joint illusion.

Dick Powell’s version of the song was played by android Gigolo Joe in the Spielberg-Kubrick movie A.I. (2001) – a pretty interesting flick about what sorts of shared illusions love involves and whether robots we can always unplug/turn off can nonetheless partcipate in those affective/subjective shared realities. Spielberg-Kubrick chose the right version of the song for their project. The less interesting song that standards-merchants all sing wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.

I LOVE GOD HE IS MY SAVIOR I AM ONLY 9 MY NAME IS SHANTEL I LOVE THE LORD VERY MUCH AND I HOPE EVERY ONE ELSE DOES TO THANKYOU ALL BY GOD BLESS YOU

SHNATEL

GARCIA