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Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon met backstage in a school production of Alice In Wonderland but even before that Simon was intrigued by this tall, curly headed kid who could impress the girls with the sweetest and smoothest of singing voices. They teamed up as teens and at that tender age rehearsed like professionals, developing a miraculous precision and harmonic blend. To hide the ethnicity of their names, the record company named them Tom & Jerry, and they entered the world of rock and roll at fifteen with a song they wrote together and recorded called "Hey Schoolgirl." The song was a hit and the duo began to live out their dreams while still dreaming them, appearing on Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" as high schoolers.
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Q: Did you write "Hey Schoolgirl" together?

Art: Yes. "Hey Schoolgirl" with its phrase "Woo-bop- a-loo-chi-ba" somewhat taken from "Be Bopa Lula," Gene Vincent's hit, was our attempt to remember an Everly Brothers song that we had both heard one summer. We were apart, Paul and I, in different places for the summer and at the end of the summer we had both remembered this great record by the Everlys and we were trying to reconstruct it. . . and we were getting it wrong! We were, in fact, writing [laughs] our own song, "Hey Schoolgirl, " in an attempt to remember this Everly Brothers song. When we heard the real Everlys song we realized, "Well, that ain't it, so the thing we were groping towards... is ours!" So we finished writing it and made a demo of it, and signed a contract with a small record company on the strength of it, because the guy was in the waiting room of the demo place, and we actually recorded it. It sold 150,000 copies.