Bookends

Bookends was recorded in fits and starts over eighteen months, mostly from late 1967. Clive Davis brought in John Simon to help from June 1967, starting with Fakin' It, and Paul Simon was struggling with writer's block. Punky's Dilemma took more than 50 hours in the studio. Side one is a suite about growing old, and side two collects singles and shorter songs. Richard Avedon took the cover photograph, and his reflection can be seen in Simon's eyes.

Simon planned the concept before he began writing, telling Garfunkel he wanted a cycle of songs that began with youth and ended with old age. Side two collected material left over from The Graduate and earlier singles. The film's director Mike Nichols had asked Clive Davis to license the duo's music, and Simon agreed to write a song or two, returning with Punky's Dilemma and Overs, which Nichols did not warm to. A third, unfinished song became Mrs. Robinson. Voices of Old People is a sound collage that Garfunkel taped at the United Home for Aged Hebrews in New Rochelle, New York, and the California Home for the Aged at Reseda. John Simon built the bassline of Save the Life of My Child on a Moog synthesizer with help from Robert Moog, and Jimmie Haskell conducted the orchestral arrangement for Old Friends.

After John Simon left Columbia early in 1968, the duo and Roy Halee finished the record themselves. America was recorded on 1 February, the final Mrs. Robinson on 2 February, and Old Friends and the closing Bookends Theme on 8 March. Fakin' It, issued as a single in 1967, was labelled 2:74 on the 45 so that radio programmers would treat it as under three minutes.

It was released on 3 April 1968, a day before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It entered the Billboard chart in the issue dated 27 April and topped it for seven non-consecutive weeks, staying on for 66. It also reached number one in Britain and number three in Australia and France. Columbia could apply for certification before copies had left the warehouse. Combined with the soundtrack to The Graduate, released ten weeks earlier, initial sales passed five million units. Mrs. Robinson was the first rock and roll song to win Record of the Year, at the Grammy Awards in 1969. Bookends was the last Simon and Garfunkel album mixed separately in mono and stereo.

AllMusic's Thom Jurek gave it five stars. Melody Maker called it a thoughtful, clever and well-produced album. In Rolling Stone on 25 May 1968, Arthur Schmidt found the music slick and the strings on Old Friends excessive, but praised the horn arrangement on America and called the lyrics a surprise and fine. Pitchfork's Stephen M. Deusner wrote that the duo were losing their folk revival pretensions, and The A.V. Club called it their most musically and conceptually daring album. Simon told Playboy in 1984 that it was their first serious piece of work. Paul Simon later called it the quintessential Simon and Garfunkel album, according to a review of Pete Fornatale's 2007 book about the record.