Paul Simonis explaining what went wrong withSimon & Garfunkel.
In part one of the new documentaryIn Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon— which premiered on Sunday — the 82-year-old singer details the events that led to the breakup of the hitmaking duo in 1970.
“We were really best friends up untilBridge over Troubled Water,” Simon says about his former bandmate and friend since elementary schoolArt Garfunkel, 82. “[Afterwards], it didn’t have the harmony of the friendship… that was broken.”
After wrapping the score for the 1967 filmThe Graduate, Garfunkel was given the opportunity to appear in the movieCatch-22, and his accepting the role was the catalyst for the rift. “Artie said, ‘Yeah, the way it’s going to be is that I will do movies for six months, then I’ll come back, you’ll have written the songs, and we will do the album,’ and I thought, ‘Yeah? Actually, no. That’s not gonna happen. I am not gonna do that,’” Simon recalls.
According to the singer-songwriter, the duo had an “uneven partnership,” even before the creation of their fifth and final studio album. “We had an uneven partnership because I was writing all of the songs and basically running the sessions because I would say, ‘This is how it goes, and this is the guitar part, and you should be playing that on drums, and the bass should be doing this’,” he says, adding, “Artie would be in the control room with [producer] Roy [Halee], and he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s good, let’s do that,’ but it was an uneven balance of power.”
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel performing in New York City in January 1990.Larry Busacca/Getty Images
Although Simon always did the writing, he says during the documentary that Garfunkel leaving for “half ofBridge over Troubled Water” to star in a movie was different. “We were always sort of together. It wasn’t like he came back and said, ‘What’s the collection of new songs you wrote over these last six months?’ As I was writing a song, I’d say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ The main thing that we were interested in — we shared.”
Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon in 1957.James Kriegsmann/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album cover.Simon and Garfunkel
When they performed the song “Bridge over Troubled Water” live, Simon remembers that people “leapt up” to applaud Garfunkel’s singing, to which his immediate thought was, “I wrote that song.”
Whether it was weariness over his relationship with Garfunkel or the “Freudian trauma” of his mother once saying, “You have a good voice, Paul, but Arthur has a fine voice,” Simon was done. “This is my oldest friend, and we experienced anonymity, and then great fame and success, and those things have their own pressure,” he says.
Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon at the 1971 Grammys.Bettmann Archive
In the documentary, a recording of an old interview with Garfunkel is played, in which he says, “Am I the one who broke up Simon & Garfunkel or is Paul the one who failed to accommodate Garfunkel’s enriching of his own career? It takes two people to make a group. It takes two people to be jerks.”
At the end of the first episode Simon says, “That was a good friendship. That was a real first friendship of somebody that got it. For me, to turn into a person that I hope I never see again — that’s a long way.”
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Part one ofIn Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simonis available to stream on MGM+. Part two premieres on Sunday, March 24.
source: people.com
