Columbia 3180
Producer: Teo Macero
Track listing: Sounds of Silence / The Singleman Foxtrot / Mrs. Robinson (Version 1 as heard in film) / Sunporch Cha-Cha-Cha / Scarborough Fair/Canticle (Interlude) / On the Strip / April Come She Will / The Folks / Scarborough Fair / Canticle / A Great Effect / The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine / Whew / Mrs. Robinson (Version 2 as heard in film) / Sounds of Silence
April 6, 1968
9 weeks (nonconsecutive)
The Graduate was the album that made Simon & Garfunkel superstars, but it wasn’t just a Simon & Garfunkel album. Six of the album’s 14 tracks were instrumentals performed and written by jazz pianist Dave Grusin. His compositions would be overshadowed the songs of Simon & Garfunkel, particularly a new tune called “Mrs. Robinson.”
Prior to the spring of 1968, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had already enjoyed considerable success. The boyhood friends, who met in sixth grade at New York City elementary school, first performed together as Tom & Jerry in 1957. Nearly a decade later, the duo found success using their surnames, scoring three consecutive top five hits in 1965: the Number One single “The Sounds of Silence,” “Homeward Sound,” and “I Am a Rock.” The duo’s highest-charting album prior to The Graduate was Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, which climbed to number four in December 1966.
The Graduate was Mike Nichols’s second film. After earning recognition as a comedian and Broadway theater director, Nichols made his big-screen debut with the film adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. He thought a Simon & Garfunkel score would be perfect for The Graduate, a coming-of-age story starring Dustin Hoffman as Ben Braddock and Anne Bancroft as the seductive Mrs. Robinson, the mother of Ben’s girlfriend.
“We were working on Bookends at the time and staying at the Beverly Wilshire,” recalls Art Garfunkel. “Mike would pick us up in his Hertz rental car bring us down to the soundstage.”
While Nichols was waiting for the duo to deliver some new material, he temporarily placed existing Simon & Garfunkel songs “The Sounds of Silence” and “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” into the film.
“Mike was beginning to love it just as is,” adds Garfunkel. “So he really was fixing on the one new tune he needed to keep the chug-chug rhythm thing going while Dustin’s character is racing from Berkeley to Southern California. I knew that Paul was in the middle of writing an up-tempo song, and I was guessing that he wasn’t very big on it and it wouldn’t get finished, because to Paul it was simple, but I thought it was very appropriate. It was called ‘Mrs. Roosevelt.’ I said, ‘Mrs. Roosevelt’ could easily be ‘Mrs. Robinson.'”
With the score all but complete, Grusin was a little perplexed about his involvement in the project. “The hilarious part about The Graduate album for me is that I wasn’t sure why I was hired,” he says. “I got there and Paul had been working on new songs for some time, but Mike almost had the picture cut with existing Simon & Garfunkel material. The few things that I wrote were little source-music pieces.”
Grusin knew album producer Teo Macero, from his work with jazz great Miles Davis. When Macero called one day asking him to compile his material for a soundtrack album he was shocked.
“I said, ‘There isn’t an album there.’ I had barely enough stuff, and most of the Simon & Garfunkel stuff had been previously released.” (In those days, soundtracks were usually comprised of new material.) “So I sent all this stuff and it was a joke,” adds Grusin. “When I heard it, it was still a joke, but it went through the roof. I couldn’t believe it.”
The Graduate hit Number One in its fourth week on the chart and would stay at the top for seven consecutive weeks before being temporarily displaced by Simon & Garfunkel’s own Bookends.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of April 6, 1968
1. The Graduate, Soundtrack
2. Blooming Hits, Paul Mauriat & His Orchestra
3. Lady Soul, Aretha Franklin
4. John Wesley Harding, Bob Dylan
5. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, Simon & Garfunkel