When I was growing up, my father would listen to Simon And Garfunkel. He had the cassette version of the concert in Central Park, and this would be dutifully pushed into the van's stereo system, and two weedy speakers would begin to pump Simon And Garfunkel's music into the front cab. I didn't like it.
Looking back, I don't know what possessed me. For some reason I had recorded my 48k and, later, my 128k Spectrum onto cassette and I would listen to the music from Xevious, Alchemist or Auf Wiedersehen Monty for hours. Gremlin's Blood Brothers fascinated me, and somehow I failed to notice Mrs. Robinson or The Boxer.
I sit here now, the lie-la-lie and pounding, thumping drum (If you've heard it, you know the sound I mean...) echoing around me, and I have this urge to ring my father up and tell him that he was right, somewhere along the line: You were right, dad, you can't hear the words they're singing in all this modern music, and it is all just electronics. They do all push a button somewhere, and nobody at all, certainly not the genius drummer Hal Blaine, has taken a large chain into a concrete-floored storage closet and recorded themselves banging all hell out of a bit of metal for one, all-encompassing sound. It takes you back to the days of Joe Meek, of The Beatles' Revolution 9. The finger-picked guitars are exquisite here, as Paul Simon's melodies are exquisitely performed by Fred Carter, Jr. and the whole thing may well be one of the most 'produced' Simon And Garfunkel songs, apparently taking over one hundred hours to record, but it's pretty damn perfect as a result.
You can hear 'The Boxer' on the last ever Simon And Garfunkel studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, in its role as a follow-up to the esteemed Mrs Robinson. Note, too, that the song originally had another verse, missing from the album version. "Now the years are rolling by me,
They are rocking evenly,
And I am older than I once was,
And younger than I'll be, but that's not unusual.
No, it isn't strange,
After changes upon changes,
We are more or less the same,
After changes we are more or less the same." was performed on their 1969 tour, and if you can catch Paul Simon performing the song live, he usually squeezes it in there, too.
I'm a big fan of 'The Boxer'. If you're not, trip along to iTunes, and find out why you're wrong.