Garfunkel

It's no secret that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel didn't end their partnership on the friendliest terms. Despite a brief reunion every decade or so – most notably in the fall of 1981 at The Concert in Central Park – Simon & Garfunkel were notorious for not speaking to each other, so their reunion at the 2002 Grammy Awards, opening the show with "The Sound of Silence," was a big deal. It was a good performance, too, whetting the appetites of an audience eager for a full-fledged reunion tour, which the duo delivered in 2003 and into 2004…

This album has had over three decades to make an impact, and it says something for its staying power that, in the face of more recent, more generously programmed, and better mastered compilations of the duo's work, it remains one of the most popular parts of the Simon & Garfunkel catalog – which doesn't mean it isn't fraught with frustrations for anyone buying it. Its very existence is something of a fluke – in the spring of 1972, the five original Simon & Garfunkel albums, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, Sounds of Silence, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, Bookends and Bridge Over Troubled Water, were still selling almost as well as they had in the 1960s; indeed, Bridge Over Troubled Water had carved out a seemingly permanent place for itself on the charts for years; and between the continued radio play of the duo's biggest hits, and the inevitable discovery of their catalog by successive new waves of junior high and high school students, those five LPs stood among the most profitable parts of the Columbia Records back catalog, rivaling Bob Dylan's much larger library in sheer numbers.

The soundtrack to Mike Nichols' The Graduate remains a key musical document of the late '60s, although truth be told, its impact was much less artistic than commercial (and, for that matter, more negative than positive).

This is a three classic albums CD box set with the original artworked 'mini LP' CD wallets in deluxe packaging. It contains the albums "Sounds Of Silence", "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme" and "Bookends".

Simon & Garfunkel's first masterpiece, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was also the first album on which the duo, in tandem with engineer Roy Halee, exerted total control from beginning to end, right down to the mixing, and it is an achievement akin to the Beatles' Revolver or the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album, and just as personal and pointed as either of those records at their respective bests…