It was the 50th anniversary of not only the most enduring but the most popular TV entertainment program of our lives, Saturday Night Live. The show opened with Paul Simon and Sabrina Carpenter signing Simon’s “Homeward Bound,” the Simon & Garfunkel hit from 1966. An opening exchange between Simon and the Garfunkel substitute ensured we would recognize the age of the song, and the songwriter, as Ms. Carpenter noted that she hadn’t been born yet when the song was released, then, “nor were my parents.” The show ended with Paul McCartney’s medley from the Beetles’ 1969 Abbey Road album, “Golden Slumbers,” “Carry That Weight,” and most appropriately, “The End,” which voices McCartney’s succinct, enduring lyric, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
The voices of the octogenarians showed signs of decades of strain, but that hardly detracted from the audience’s appreciation of two of our most prolific and brilliant songwriters ever. As well, the bookend performances not only commented on the history of Saturday Night Live, it reflected the endurance of the music of the singer songwriter era, or what we then called “folk rock.” From a dress shop in Siracusa, Sicily to a barroom in Sacramento, you will still hear the songs of Paul Simon, Lenin and McCartney, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, and on and on. No music since the American Songbook can lay claim to such longevity and no music has captured and captivated us more over the past 50 years.
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