The unusual story behind Simon and Garfunkel's 'The Boxer'

5 hours ago

6 min read

This song was written to silence the critics with possibly the loudest drum snare ever put in a folk song. And a chorus that has no words. Aaaand it was recorded partly in an elevator shaft, for some reason. Oh, and it’s not about boxing.

It’s a weird story. For one, I wasn't aware Simon and Garfunkel ever received much criticism, but apparently there was a time when they did.

Brief bit of backstory: Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel met in school in Queens New York in the 50s, and discovered they had the amazing harmonizing abilities that would carry them through their career. Operating under the name 'Tom & Jerry', they started building their song writing skills.

Simon quickly built up a fantastic storytelling approach to his song writing, which would be perfectly showcased in the Boxer.

But their early career was not exactly successful. They had some modest success with Hey Schoolgirl in ‘57, but then went to different colleges and pressed pause on their music.

When they reformed afterwards and released their first album in 1964, it didn’t sell well, and they split again.

Simon focussed on a solo career, and Art went back to Uni.

Thankfully for us they got back together and did The Sounds of Silence in 1966, which did much better and obviously had the single, Sound of Silence, which I personally think is one of the best story telling songs ever written.

The single was a No. 1 hit, and the album did well both in America and the UK. I didn’t know this before, but that was actually the remix - they’d done an acoustic version before, and redubbed this version with electric guitars.

And they didn’t even know it was being redone until it was released! When it hit No.1, that's when they thought they’d better get back together and write the album. Good thing they did.

After Sound of Silence they really took off. Their next two albums went to No.4 and then finally No.1 with Bookends in 1968. By now they had hits like Mrs Robinson, I Am a Rock, and Homeward Bound. They were one of the biggest folk rock bands out there.

Despite their success, they had come under criticism from a changing folk scene. Some felt like they were too polished and over produced, where folk is meant to be raw and accessible. Rivals like Bob Dylan still sounded like a bloke with a guitar by the fire. Plus, the rock side of the scene was changing.

The Beatles had completely changed the game, and you had guys like the Rolling Stones putting their bluesy dirty swagger on it. Jimmy Hendrix was pushing the boundaries of what could physically be done with a guitar. Compared to that, Mrs Robinson was getting a bit of a hard rap.

And Simon in particular took this personally. He told Playboy in 1984:

“By that time we had encountered our first criticism. For the first few years, it was just pure praise. It took two or three years for people to realize that we weren’t strange creatures that emerged from England but just two guys from Queens who used to sing rock and roll. And maybe we weren’t real folkies at all!”

So he began crafting a song with a narrative around a young boxer navigating his way through the school of hard knocks.

The song follows a young man going through poverty, discovering prostitutes, and wishing for a better life that doesn’t seem to be coming any time soon. Simon explained in the same interview:

“I think I was reading the Bible around that time. That’s where I think phrases such as ‘workman’s wages’ came from, and ‘seeking out the poorer quarters’. That was biblical. I think the song was about me: everybody’s beating me up, and I’m telling you now I’m going to go away if you don’t stop.”

Simon and Garfunkel performing live in Rotterdam / Public domain

If you sit and listen to the song that really is the theme: Poor me, life is going nowhere.

And for some reason it works. The whole song works because he’s so good at telling a story, you can see this kid walking down the street.

It makes you wonder why such a good lyricist didn’t sing any words for the chorus. Well, the 'lie la lie' thing was just a placeholder while he was writing the song, he didn’t have any lyrics. And it just kind of stuck.

Some people think it’s him saying the story is a lie, but it isn’t. He just hadn’t come up with anything and then didn’t. He’s even said in interviews he found that part embarrassing to sing.

Another part of the song people put their own spin on is that the whole thing is a jab at folk Bob Dylan. Dylan did train as a boxer and people think the 'lie la lie' chorus is Simon saying that Dylan's music and stories are a lie. Simon has since refuted all of these claims.

The irony of all this is that Simon himself never lived any type of life that he describes in the song. He wasn’t a boxer, he had a middle class upbringing.

Now one of the most striking parts of this song is the massive sounding snare drum at about 2 minutes in.

Why on earth did they put such a massive snare in a folk song?

Well people have said it was because the snare represents the boxer's punch.

What is for sure is that they were looking for a massive ‘punchy’ sound, and also trying to get as much natural reverb as possible. They found an unconventional way to get it.

Watch this clip from 2.19 of Hal Blaine - their drummer - describing how they got the sound.

They had Hal beat the life out of his drums trying to nail this explosion sound, right in front of the elevator shaft because it had the best reverb

As he was doing so on one particular take, the elevator doors opened to reveal an elderly security guard who had the life scared out of him. The doors closed and they never sae him again.

There’s some rumours that they played it at the bottom of the shaft and had to mic all the way up at the top, but I can't find any reliable mention of that. It sounds like they just recorded it in the hallway, next to the elevator.

Anyway, that drum sound is as much a part of the chorus as the lie la lie. It’s iconic.

This song took around 100 hours to produce. Partly because they recorded in lots of different locations. The hallway, for one, obviously.

The vocal for the chorus was recorded in a chapel at Columbia university to get the best ambience. The early sessions were done at Columbia studios in New York, and the main bulk of the instrument section was done at Columbia studios in Nashville.

And let's talk about instruments. They had so many layers of instruments that they were having to come up with new ways to get them all in there. They were filling up all 8 available tracks on their console, and having to mix multiple instruments into one.

And then they were still running out of room, so they had to repeat it with different tape machines, and for the final product have them all playing at once. The vocals were separate again, something engineer Roy Halee called ‘wild tracking’.

Of course with all this going on you get problems with timing. The actual heat of the tape machines themselves would make the strings go out of sync with the vocals, which took constant editing. It was like sonic juggling.

Halee told Analog Planet in 2005:

“If that had to be mixed today, nobody could do it, guaranteed-and that includes me!”

When they got to that big instrumental section near the middle, they just kept on adding things. They’d got a guy in to record a pedal steel guitar solo, and then a month later decided that actually maybe they should use a wind instrument, so they got in a piccolo trumpet. Which is a sort of high pitched trumpet.

But then they couldn’t decide on which to use, so Roy managed to blend the two together. Genius stuff.

And all of this came out of Paul Simon feeling mildly snubbed by some critics.

But obviously, this one wasn’t a flop. The Boxer was No.1 in multiple countries and top 5 across the world. Its parents album Bridge over Troubled Water was even more successful, it was basically No.1 across the board. It stayed No.1 in the UK for 33 weeks!

And obviously, has gone down in folk music history. Probably the only reason The Boxer isn’t their biggest hit is because that album had Bridge Over Troubled Water on it.