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Long Beach Arena rules made close-ups of the performances in 1969 challenging,
but the distant pair are easily recognizable to fans as the folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel. (Tom Shaw / File photo)

HOMEWARD SOUNDS: One of 2008’s more pleasant recordings slipped onto racks fairly unnoticed - not that much is noticed on record racks these days. Let’s say “Simon & Garfunkel: Live 1969″ tumbled through the pipes and conduits of the Internets with less fanfare than one might’ve expected from one of the most revered duos in folk-rock (or folk-roll as one of our “with-it” writers termed the genre way back before, even, 1969).

For Long Beachers, “Live 1969″ is of note because with its release you can add Simon & Garfunkel to the list of legends (Leon Russell and Led Zeppelin pop most immediately to mind) who have come out with recordings from concerts at the Long Beach Arena.

Not all of the 17-song set was recorded in Long Beach. The set was edited to sound like one concert, but it includes bits from a half-dozen venues, including five from an oft-bootlegged show in Carbondale, Ill. The group’s Nov. 15 Long Beach show is well represented, though, and the sewn-together concert that is “Live 1969″ kicks the Arena version of “Homeward Bound,” which was also the song with which they opened the Long Beach set.

“Without introduction, the pair swung into `Homeward Bound,’ and the applause quickly died,” wrote the reviewer from the Long Beach Independent, Press-Telegram after the show. The cause of the applause’s death was not disappointment but rather reverence.

“Had it been a concert by a popular electronic rock group, the fans might have been boisterous,” wrote our reviewer. “But the poetic lyrics of Paul Simon most often speak of moods and feelings everyone has known, so much of the audience seemed casually restrained.”The newspaper had the review on the front of its local section, accompanied by one of our favorite concert photos, especially given the constraints put on our photog Tom Shaw to shoot only from upper levels. Taken from afar, with only a pair of spotlights setting half of the duo’s wispy hedge of hair aflame, the subject is immediately recognizable as Simon & Garfunkel.

The Long Beach show went on for a bit under an hour, and by accounts was a hit with the 14,039 folkies and rockers and folk-rollers - an attendance record for the Arena at the time - who paid as much as $6.50 for a great seat.

Other tunes from that show included on the “Live 1969″ set are “Song for the Asking,” Gene Autry’s “That Silver- Haired Daddy of Mine,” “Why Don’t You Write Me?” and a single that had been released that spring, “The Boxer.”

JAZZ NOTES: Even after all these years, we keep columnizing about jazz, even though jazz and us, well, we haven’t really been on speaking/listening terms since we fell all gung-ho into it back in the days of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and that godawful Jean-Luc Ponty (jazz fiddle; what were we not thinking?). And even though we found it strangely compelling, there was that evening when we saw Keith Jarrett doing the improv thing by climbing into his grand piano and bonking around in there with the strings and the soundboard. After a while, we just had too much. We grabbed an armload of Louis Armstrong and maybe a Chet Baker and fled the whole crazy scene.