The Sound of Silence
"Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." had been a commercial failure before producer Tom Wilson was alerted that radio stations had begun to play "The Sound of Silence" in spring 1965. A late-night disc jockey at WBZ in Boston began to spin "The Sound of Silence" overnight, where it found a college demographic. Students at Harvard and Tufts University responded well, and the song made its way down the East Coast pretty much "overnight", "all the way to Cocoa Beach, Florida, where it caught the students coming down for spring break." A promotional executive for Columbia went to give away free albums of new artists, and beach-goers were interested only in the artists behind "The Sound of Silence". He phoned the home office in New York, alerting them of its appeal. An alternate version of the story states that Wilson attended Columbia's July 1965 convention in Miami, where the head of the local sales branch raved about the song's airplay.