Simon & Garfunkel and the battle of Central Park: inside the concert that tore them apart

In the summer of 1981, Paul Simon received a call from the Long Island concert promoter Ron Delsener. The 44-year old Tristate impresario was speaking on behalf of the Central Park Conservancy, a well-heeled not-for-profit organisation that sought to restore Midtown Manhattan’s 843-acre jewel to the primacy it enjoyed before New York City became bywords for urban decline.

As a means of signaling that the neighbourhood was back in the game, the singer was asked to play a free concert on the park’s Great Lawn. He was told that the event would rival the happening staged by Barbra Streisand on the same site, in 1967. The idea was double handy for Paul Simon, who kept an apartment that overlooked Central Park. The days of catching the 7 train back to his childhood home in Kew Gardens Hills, in Queens, were many years behind him.

He placed a call to Arthur ‘Art’ Garfunkel, who was holidaying in Switzerland. The singer was invited to join his old partner onstage in New York for 10 songs toward the end of the show. Garfunkel agreed, only for Paul Simon to realise that this would mean that his own solo performance would essentially serve as the warm-up turn for the duo with which he made his name.

“It didn’t seem right to either of us that Paul should be the opening act for Simon & Garfunkel, and for him to follow Simon & Garfunkel didn’t make show-business sense,” said Art Garfunkel of the first impasse of the pair’s difficult second act. Paul Simon ceded ground. “I thought, ‘What the hell, let’s just do the whole concert’,” he said.

In the 11-years that had elapsed since Simon & Garfunkel had last appeared before a paying audience, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, the New York music scene had changed beyond recognition. Downtown, clubs such as CBGB and Max’s Kansas City had helped foster the city’s nascent punk scene. Uptown, in the South Bronx, MCs working the crowds at block parties had given birth to hip-hop, the city’s second musical revolution.

Gotham itself had also changed. In a speech to the National Press Club, in 1975, the refusal by President Gerald Ford to grant the Five Boroughs a federal bailout inspired the Daily News headline ‘Ford To City: Drop Dead’. New York had endured blackouts, riots, the Son of Sam, and, most startling of all, disco. Just a month before reconvening with Paul Simon, in August 1981 Art Garfunkel sang about “looking down on Central Park, where they say you should not wander after dark”.

But the notion that Simon & Garfunkel would prove out of step with a grittier city overlooked the genius that lay at the fingertips of Paul Simon, not to mention the unique dynamic of the two singers. This was not a return by natives such as The Mamas and the Papas, The Lovin’ Spoonful, or any other sun-kissed artist whose wistful ditties recalled an apparently happier past.

Over the course of the pair’s five albums, Simon’s songs had delivered more than their share of dislocation and unease. Promises held in standards such as I Am A Rock and The Boxer were explosive.

Eight days before the open-air concert, on September 11, Paul Simon told the New York Times that he and his partner were “back from the boulevard of broken duos”. Away from prying eyes, things were funnier still. While a stage measuring a 160-feet was built in Central Park at a cost of three quarters of a million dollars, in private the two singers quarreled over whether or not to wear hairpieces. Simon said yes, Garfunkel said no; Simon won.

“If you went into their trailer between rehearsals, you might have found the four of them together: Paul and Artie in their chairs bracketed by wardrobe busts, one wearing Paul’s dark crown and the other Artie’s woolly coronet,” wrote Peter Ames Carlin in his book Homeward Bound: The Life Of Paul Simon.

The decision by Paul Simon to return to the bosom of Simon & Garfunkel came in the wake of a professional setback. Released in 1980, the album One Trick Pony had been the first of his solo LPs for 15-years to miss the US top 10. The soundtrack to the film of the same name, in which the singer played the lead role, the picture registered less than a million dollars at the box office. In more than one city it was screened as a double-bill alongside Bad Timing, starring Art Garfunkel.

Forever wedded in the minds of the public, in New York tensions between the pair rose to the surface. As the city readied itself for the biggest concert in its history, rehearsals at the Beacon Theatre, on West 47th Street, were punctuated by quarrels. The pair disagreed about which songs to include in the 80-minute set. They argued about which musicians to use, or whether to use them at all. Garfunkel believed the two men should appear unaccompanied, a notion that Simon regarded – correctly, as it goes – as insane.

“Don’t be misled by this revival,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve resolved anything. I don’t know if these problems can truly be resolved. But they can be put aside temporarily.”

As dawn broke over a turbid New York sky, on the morning of September 19 people began gathering on the Grand Lawn of Central Park. By the time the city’s mayor, Ed Koch – who as a younger man had marveled at the music of Simon & Garfunkel in his apartment in Greenwich Village – introduced the performers onto a stage that resembled an outer-borough skyline, an estimated half a million people had convened to watch what Paul Simon smilingly referred to as “a neighbourhood concert”.

The pair began their night with Mrs. Robinson, Homeward Bound, and a rendition of America that to my mind is the song’s definitive version. Beat that for an opening triumvirate. “I’m so in the mood,” Art Garfunkel told the crowd as behind him Paul Simon affected to count the musicians into In The Mood, by Glenn Miller. The show concluded with an ethereal The Sound Of Silence, the reverie of which was punctured only by eight staccato guitar chords that merely hinted at the violence that lurks at its core.

Despite a reception that carried all the way to Yonkers, Simon & Garfunkel left the stage with feelings of dejection. “Our first reaction was, I think, one of disappointment,” said Paul Simon. “Arthur’s more than mine. He thought he didn’t sing well. I didn’t get what had happened, how big it was, until I went home, turned on the television and saw it all on the news; and, later that night, on the front pages of all the newspapers. Then I got it.”

By any measure, the evening was a success. The broadcast rights were purchased by HBO for a million dollars. The inevitable live album, The Concert In Central Park, sold more than four million copies. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were so taken with the attention that they did the one thing their turbulent history suggested they must not – they pushed their luck.

“We just sort of got swept away,” Simon said. “There was a lot of pressure. I don’t mean record company pressure because that’s pretty insignificant. I don’t mean money pressure. But there seemed to be all this other pressure. People kept asking, ‘Well, are you going to make an album together?’ or, ‘God, it would be great if you made an album together.’”

The pair decided to record a new studio album, Think Too Much, their first since the blockbusting Bridge Over Troubled Water, from 1970. An intermittent world tour, spanning 17-months, began at the Osaka Stadium, in Japan, on May 7 1982. Ferried across the globe by a crew numbering more than a hundred, by the time the One Summer Night caravan visited the enormodomes of North America, in the summer of 1983, the cracks in the fa?ade were beginning to show.

Writing in the Washington Post, the critic Richard Harrington said of the performance at the Laurel Race Course, in Maryland, that “the singers don’t seem to like each other. They hardly exchanged glances during the program… In their heyday, Simon & Garfunkel suggested shared dreams and experiences, a serial that never ended except in the stages of growth. This time round, it was painfully obvious that they were just passing through a one-night stand.”

Two days later, on 15 August 1983, Paul Simon married Carrie Fisher, his on-off partner of six years, at a private ceremony at his New York apartment. With the comedy impresario Lorne Michaels as his best man, and the film director Penny Marshall as a bridesmaid, it was the sealing of a union that appeared doomed from the start. “Not only do I not like you, I don’t like you personally!” the bride told her husband on their honeymoon. Within two years, the pair were divorced.

“What was I thinking?” Simon would later ask of himself.

“Poor Paul,” wrote Fisher in her memoir Wishful Drinking. “He had to put up with a lot with me. I think ultimately I fell under the heading of: Good Anecdote, Bad Reality. I was really good for material, but when it came to day-to-day living, I was more than he could take.”

But if Paul Simon married in haste, Think Too Much was being recorded at leisure. The finger of blame was pointed in the direction of Art Garfunkel. The singer would arrive late to the studio, and, offering around a joint, would talk about the colour and shape of each song. A heavy smoker, he was sent home early from recording sessions with his voice in pieces.

Garfunkel planned to write his vocal harmonies while walking for 10-days from his home in New York City. To give the singer his due, while striding west he listened to his partner’s songs and made detailed notes about his contributions to the record. But on his return, Paul Simon didn’t much care for his friend’s ideas. In response, Art Garfunkel dug up the ghosts of grievances from the days when the pair were known as Tom & Jerry, a quarter of a century ago.

“On a certain level, not too far from the surface, he doesn’t like me,” Simon said. “I don’t even know if Arthur admits that. The same goes for me… You have to remember that there’s something quite powerful between us. This is a friendship that is now 30-years old. And the feeling of understanding and love parallels the feeling of abuse.”

In one of the more passive-aggressive examples of musical tyranny, as the album’s co-producer Paul Simon allowed his partner to record his vocal parts before secretly removing them from the finished record. As part of this process, the title Think Too Much was changed to Hearts And Bones. In New York City, Simon met with Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker, from Warner Bros. Records, and told the pair that their surefire Simon & Garfunkel banker was now a Paul Simon solo record.

“He unloaded on us,” recalled Ostin. “He was very, very emotional as he told us what he had been going through… Suddenly it hit me. Paul was asking our permission. He wanted Hearts And Bones to be a solo album. I had never had an artist do that before, and I was touched… In the end you have to give the artist the freedom to do what he wants, so we gave Paul our permission.”

Released on November 4 1983, Hearts And Bones stalled at the box office. Despite a bevy of quietly resplendent songs – of which the sublime Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War is the best – the 10-track set was bracketed by a brittle production and hampered by the absence of a hit single. Debuting at number 35 on the American chart, it was the first of the author’s album for 18-years to fail to earn at least a gold disc.

“This was just one record,” said Mo Ostin. “I knew there were lots of others ahead.”

But at first glance, this appeared to be an optimistic take. In the first week of 1984, Paul Simon found himself thumbing through the US music trade paper Billboard. Its cover story asked radio programmers in key US cities what kinds of music would be played in the coming year. Each agreed that listeners were in the market for new voices. One said, “We’re not going to play Paul Simon any more”.

Reading this, Paul Simon thought, “‘Okay… [so] now what?’” With his stock at Warner Bros. Records at a buyer’s price, and with the tastemakers of American radio threatening a blackout of his music – not to mention the emergence of MTV, on which the singer’s face had yet to appear –  unnoticed, Simon quietly turned his dependably restless ear to the forbidden sounds of a distant country. South Africa.

The story of Paul Simon's trip to South Africa, and the making of Graceland, will be published next Wednesday (June 10)