On a New York subway platform at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street, two young men posed for a photograph that would become the cover of their first record. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, the folk duo Simon & Garfunkel, had just finished recording Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., their debut album for Columbia Records. The shoot produced hundreds of frames, but every one proved unusable because of a slogan scrawled on the wall behind them. The graffiti would later inspire a Paul Simon song, but in the autumn of 1964 the duo had a more immediate problem: nobody was buying the album. Simon & Garfunkel released Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. on October 19, 1964.
Twelve songs for Columbia
The record arrived on 19 October 1964 with a subtitle promising 'exciting new sounds in the folk tradition'. Twelve songs ran just over thirty-one minutes, produced by Tom Wilson at Columbia's 30th Street studio. Before this, Simon and Garfunkel had been known as Tom and Jerry, a rock-and-roll act, and Columbia had signed them only in late 1963. Now they were reborn as earnest folk revivalists, covering Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are a-Changin'' and arranging traditional material such as 'Peggy-O' and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain'.
The album's own songs were delicate and literary. 'Bleecker Street' and the title track were written by Simon and recorded in March 1964, while 'Sparrow' closed the sessions at the end of that month. 'The Sounds of Silence' sat among them, an acoustic piece Simon had cut on 10 March. Art Garfunkel wrote the liner notes, framing the record as a statement of intent. But the marketplace had other plans. Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. came out in the shadow of the British Invasion, and it sank.
Tom Wilson's electric remix
The failure split the pair. Simon moved to London and made a solo record, while Garfunkel stayed in New York to continue his studies at Columbia University. That could have been the end of Simon & Garfunkel. Instead, producer Tom Wilson made a decision that neither man knew about. In June 1965 he took the acoustic track 'The Sound of Silence' and added electric guitar, bass and drums. The new version caught fire on the radio.
In June 1965 he took the acoustic track 'The Sound of Silence' and added electric guitar, bass and drums.
Columbia acted quickly, reissuing the debut album in January 1966 to ride that unexpected success. The record that had vanished two years earlier climbed to number 30 on the Billboard 200. In Britain the album did not appear until 1968, where it reached number 24 and eventually earned a silver certification. The duo, who had reunited in late 1965, now had an audience waiting for whatever came next.
What makes Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. worth returning to is how much of Simon & Garfunkel's later identity was already there. The two-voice arrangements, the borrowed folk forms, the social unease in 'He Was My Brother' and the Dylan cover, the careful guitar work of Barry Kornfeld and Bill Lee's double bass. The subway cover, with its unusable graffiti, now looks like a clue: the record was always more restless than its quiet folk surface suggested.
The album that almost disappeared became the foundation of a catalogue that would define the duo's decade. It sits complete in the box sets Collected Works and The Columbia Studio Recordings (1964–1970), and since 2001 a CD edition has added three bonus tracks: a demo of 'Bleecker Street' and alternate takes of 'He Was My Brother' and 'The Sun Is Burning'. Sixty-two years after its release, the record still exists in vinyl and streaming, a debut that needed a second chance to be heard.