- published: 09 Oct 2012
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"At the Zoo" was one of Simon's and Garfunkel's single releases in 1967.
The song is one of Paul Simon's many tributes to his hometown of New York City. The narrative tells the story of a trip to the Central Park Zoo; when the singer reaches the zoo, he anthropomorphizes the animals in various amusing ways, with a resulting cynical eye towards human life. Such statements as "elephants are kindly, but they're dumb," "antelopes are missionaries" and "pigeons plot in secrecy" reflect more about man than they do about the menagerie. The song was licensed in advertisements for the Bronx Zoo and the San Francisco Zoo in the late 1970s.
"At the Zoo" was first released as a single in 1967, reaching #16 on the Billboard Hot 100. After that, it was released on the following albums:
The song was also performed live by Simon and Garfunkel in the Old Friends: Live on Stage album in 2004, as part of a medley with "Baby Driver".
An alternate version with almost completely different lyrics is available on the bootleg The Alternate Bookends. These lyrics have nothing to do with a zoo, but rather speak of a musician's girlfriend having changed while he was on the road. The song begins, "Something tells me things have changed since I've been gone"; "Something tells me" is one of the few phrases that is still present in the released version.
The Zoo is a one-act comic opera, with music by Arthur Sullivan and a libretto by B. C. Stephenson, writing under the pen name of Bolton Rowe. It premiered on 5 June 1875 at the St. James's Theatre in London (as an afterpiece to W. S. Gilbert's Tom Cobb), concluding its run five weeks later, on 9 July 1875, at the Haymarket Theatre. There were brief revivals in late 1875, and again in 1879, before the opera was shelved.
The farcical story concerns two pairs of lovers. First, a nobleman, who goes to the zoo to woo the girl who sells snacks there. He tries to impress her by buying and eating all of the food. The other couple is a young chemist who believes that he has poisoned his beloved by mixing up her father's prescription with peppermint that he had meant for her.
The score was not published in Sullivan's lifetime, and it lay dormant until Terence Rees purchased the composer's autograph at auction in 1966 and arranged for publication. The opera is in one act without spoken dialogue, running about 40 minutes. Like Trial by Jury and Cox and Box, it has been staged as a curtain-raiser to the shorter Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Triple-bills of Sullivan's three one-act operas have also proved successful.