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ART Garfunkel makes no bones about his job description. He is, as the title of his new compilation album says, The Singer – and he’s justifiably proud of it.
Garfunkel is, after all, the voice of pop hymns such as Bridge over Troubled Water (1970) and El Condor Pasa (1970), as well as pop hits such as I Am a Rock (1966), Mrs. Robinson (1967), The Boxer (1970) and All I Know (1973). With Paul Simon, his boyhood friend and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame partner, he made some of the most seminal music of the 1960s and, working on his own, Garfunkel has until recently maintained a virtually peerless standard of vocal quality.
“If I can sum up my position in a nutshell, I’m very unjaded about my pride and my life’s body of work, with all these good singing performances and all this great fortune I’ve had in the recording studio,” the 71-yearold Garfunkel says, speaking by telephone from his Manhattan apartment. “When it’s collected and put together in a sequence, with and without Mr Simon, it’s a life’s body of work that I’m enormously proud of. So for me it’s time to say, ‘Here’s what I did. I sang well.”’ That’s all the truer coming at a time when doing so has become a struggle for Garfunkel.
In 2010, in the midst of one of his periodic reunion tours with Simon, Garfunkel was struck with vocal-cord paresis, a paralytic condition that rendered him unable to sing and forced the cancellation of a planned North American tour with Simon as well as some solo dates. He immediately entered treatment, but couldn’t help fearing that his days as a singer were over.
“I didn’t count on anything like the voice coming back,” Garfunkel admits. “I counted on nothing. I was just kind of depressed over, ‘How come I can’t sing, man?’ The doctors would say ‘The direction is toward mending,’ and I could fall to my knees with gratefulness to God for allowing the verb ‘mending’ to be part of the picture.
“But, gee, the slowness was hard.” The treatments did take, however.
The Singer features a pair of brand-new songs, Lena and Long Way Home, both produced by Garfunkel’s friend and occasional performing partner Maia Sharp.
“She won me over with a lovely, inthe- studio sense of ‘I know what I’m doing,”’ Garfunkel says. “She had me on the mic doing my best, nervously returning to doing vocals – with great frustration when you get back to trying to be a precise artist, but with great joy too.” Emboldened by that studio success, Garfunkel returned to the stage as well, booking a handful of solo shows for late summer, both in the United States and overseas.
“I told the manager that I want to create the groove of working again,” he says. “I thought that, if I can get back into that routine, maybe routine helps singing.” It was not meant to be, however. Five weeks into his tour, Garfunkel was a no-show for a pair of late-September shows in Sweden. In early October he announced the cancellation of all his remaining dates, issuing a statement that, “I had such hopes of being finally ready to perform. How painful to try and not be quite there yet.” John Scher, his manager, added that Garfunkel has no intentions of quitting and would “come back stronger than ever.” The Singer provides a convincing testimony to Garfunkel’s love of singing, which he says dates back to when he was 5, growing up in Forest Hills, New York, and emulating the doo-wop songs he heard on the radio.
“The fact that I could do it and it was a delight ... I just fell in love with that ability,” he recalls. “I was developing my singing as a serious gift that I respected all through my childhood.
The singing became a crucial part of my identity at a young age.” He did that most successfully with Simon, whom he met in sixth grade when both were in a school production of Alice in Wonderland. As teenagers they performed together as Tom & Jerry, even releasing a single called Hey, Schoolgirl (1957), before going their separate ways in 1962. Garfunkel attended Columbia University in Manhattan, singing as part of the Columbia Kingsmen while getting a bachelor’s degree in art history and a master’s degree in mathematics.
Those studies paled, however, before the success he had with Simon & Garfunkel. The duo first formed under that name for a brief time in 1963, then resumed full-time in 1965, scoring their first big hit with The Sounds of Silence (1965). Still well known for the songs they recorded for Mike Nichols’ classic film The Graduate (1967), Simon & Garfunkel released five studio albums before splitting in 1970 to pursue solo careers. They have reunited occasionally through the years, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
“What clicked is that we were good,” Garfunkel says. “Those harmonies that we worked on ... (It) was quite appealing.
We had a sound. We were very close. We sang with our noses quite close to each other in rehearsal, so that we were inside of each other’s breathing and soundmaking.
“And we were very, very close,” he continues.
“You could call it love. Paul Simon was my only buddy, I was his only buddy. We could be outcasts, but we had each other.” For many fans the highlight of their partnership was Bridge over Troubled Water (1970). The album of the same name won seven Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and the song kicks off The Singer. Four decades later, it still makes Garfunkel gush.
“Ah, what a song,” he says. “Paul showed it to me at his East End apartment one day ... and I fell for it like everybody did, right away. ‘Killer song,’ I said.” Unlike most Simon & Garfunkel songs, Bridge over Troubled Water is a solo. Garfunkel’s soaring performance is unforgettable – which makes it hard to believe that the singer himself tried to convince Simon to sing it. The songwriter wouldn’t hear of it, though, insisting that he had composed it specifically for Garfunkel’s voice.
“It was like two guys trying to grab the check, simple as that,” Garfunkel recalls. “But once he said, ‘I wrote it for you,’ I said, ‘I’ll take it!’ It’s one of those songs that is a tenor’s steak. That sounds awful, but I mean it’s a rich piece of material for a singer to sing.” In later years the two sometimes have sung the song as a duet, trading solos from verse to verse.
The album Bridge over Troubled Water sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, representing a high-water mark for Simon & Garfunkel. It also foreshadowed the duo’s breakup, however, in songs such as So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright and The Only Living Boy in New York, widely acknowledged to be about the distance Simon was beginning to feel from his partner, especially after Garfunkel launched an acting career with a role in Nichols’ Catch-22 (1970). “If you want to know the truth, I never wanted Simon & Garfunkel to split up,” says the twice-married Garfunkel, who has two sons with his second wife, Kim. “They split up because Paul couldn’t abide by my acting thing. But I never chose to say, ‘Let’s split up the group,’ so it’s not me who broke up Simon & Garfunkel. And nobody ever told me that the group’s over.” The two would reunite occasionally in the course of the next four decades, but each man moved ahead with his solo career. Garfunkel continued to act, making such films as Carnal Knowledge (1971), Bad Timing (1980), Good to Go (1986), Boxing Helena (1993) and The Rebound (2009), but also launched a solo musical career, beginning with his debut album, Angel Clare (1973).
“I wanted Artie to show that the Simon & Garfunkel albums were largely about Garfunkel’s production style,” explains Garfunkel, who worked on that album with longtime Simon & Garfunkel producer Roy Halee. “I felt that wasn’t so clear to the audience, and to this day they don’t see the producer’s hat that I wore. I didn’t have the power of Paul’s harmony with me, and I didn’t have his songs, but I felt I had a lot to do with crafting records and making them swing and sound rich and interesting.
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