The first live album by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, The Concert in Central Park, happened mostly due to a flop beforehand.
PEOPLE reports that in the MGM+ documentary, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, Simon reveals that he was on the fence about the performance. But, a not-so-stellar album before talks of doing the iconic concert led him to pursue it.
Simon, who's now 82, recounts the NYC show by saying, “Because [his 1980 album] One-Trick Pony was a flop, when they asked me to do a concert in Central Park, I thought, ‘Well, I just had this big flop, maybe I should ask Artie to come and sing some songs on this.'”
Prior to this, the duo was broken up. They released their final album in 197o titled Bridge Over Troubled Water. The concert was their first time performing together for a full show in a decade.
And the show went very well. Better than expected.
Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel perform in Central Park
It was supposed to be a small benefit concert. However, that was anything but the case. Approximately half a million people showed up to watch the popular icons performed by the Great Lawn in Central Park. They performed popular hits like Mrs. Robinson, Me and Julio, The Boxer, and more.
The show went so well that Paul thought the group should continue forward.
“After the concert in Central Park with Simon & Garfunkel was so big — it was such a big hit — and then that sort of forced us into…forced me into putting the group back together again and doing a tour,” Simon said.
He added, “We were famously antagonistic, but I thought, ‘You know what? I am going to put that all aside and have a good reunited tour with Artie.'”
However, things changed. The duo wasn't precisely on the same page with creative differences and more.
Simon & Garfunkel were not seeing eye-to-eye
“The way we used to work is, I would write songs, and we would work out the harmonies and sing them together,” he continued. “We were friends, we were hanging out. But, by the time we were doing Hearts and Bones [a new Simon & Garfunkel album after the Central Park concert], Artie's idea was, ‘Give me the songs, and I am going to go to Switzerland and walk and make up the harmonies.'”
The concept of doing this didn't jive too well with the Kodachrome singer.
“It was a recapitulation of he's in Mexico making a movie,” he added. “Well, now he wanted to smoke and walk through Switzerland and make up harmonies to these songs, and then he would send them back, and we would look at it and say, ‘What is this?' It didn't sound like the old Simon & Garfunkel. And I just said, ‘I can't work this way.'”
Check out In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon on MGM+.
Follow Us
Subscribe