BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY
credit: Getty Images
Fifty years ago this week, “Saturday Night Live” debuted. It was quite an experiment: a live, 90-minute sketch comedy show featuring musical guests and starting at 11:30 p.m. The experiment proved a success beyond everyone’s imagination. I don’t think even creator Lorne Michaels believed it would last five decades while maintaining its place in the cultural zeitgeist.
To celebrate SNL’s unprecedented achievement and anniversary, we thought we would highlight their second-ever musical guests, Simon & Garfunkel. Paul Simon was also the host.
Simon and Art Garfunkel were already folk-rock royalty when they appeared on SNL in 1975, having been one of the best-selling musical groups of the 1960s.
The two met for the first time at their Queens, New York elementary school in 1953. They quickly discovered harmonization and Simon began to write songs for the duo. But it wasn’t until 1965 that they hit it big when a remix of “The Sound of Silence” reached No. 1 on the pop charts.
In spite of their spectacular success, the two had a notoriously stormy relationship and broke up in 1970, only to stage several reunions over the years. Their SNL appearance was one of them.
The only video we could find of their 1975 SNL performance lives on Facebook. In order to view it you need to be a member of Facebook. For those of you who are, I encourage you to click on this link to see them sing their hit, “The Boxer,” on the show.
As you can imagine, there is no shortage of Simon & Garfunkel recordings. Here is an edited version of “The Boxer” from their 1981 Central Park concert, attended by 500,000 people and their 2009 reunion at Madison Square Garden. No membership necessary.
NYA Thanks Dan Rather and Team Steady!