Yes, it’s technically called The 59th Street Bridge Song, but that’s a silly title. The song is pretty silly too, though, and so is the video. What makes it particularly silly is the contrast with the other songs on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme. With tracks like The Dangling Conversation, A Simple Desultory Philippic and Scarborough Fair/Canticle it wasn’t hard to tell how Simon & Garfunkel wanted to position themselves, image-wise. They were book-smart university types, with big vocabularies and poor taste in clothing. Their songs were meant to evoke the smell of coffee-shops and libraries. I’m not sure if that still came off cool in 1966. I think they would have come off hipper in an earlier time, like the fifties, when sweater vests and tomes still had mystique. Feelin’ Groovy, I suspect, was their offering towards the blossoming flower-power market. It’s totally a hippie song, a stoner song, what with the wandering about talking to lampposts thing. In the video the boys’ utterly square appearance is hilariously at odds with the countercultural overtones of the song. When you hear it, with it’s dreamy refrain and gentle harmony, you naturally visualize some long-haired but still wholesome enough not to be scary hippies, someone along the lines of The Mama & The Papas. What you get is two nerdy dudes in sweaters, and then at the end, two even nerdier dudes in even worse sweaters. But maybe they were uncool in an ironic way?
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