Paul Simon Details ‘Broken’ Friendship with Art Garfunkel in New Documentary: ‘We Had an Uneven Partnership’

Paul Simon explains what went wrong with Simon & Garfunkel.

In the first part of the new documentary In restless dreams: The music of Paul Simon — which premiered 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 until A bridge over troubled water,” Simon says of his former bandmate and elementary school friend Art Garfunkel (82).”[Afterwards]there was no harmony of friendship… that was broken.”

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Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon in 1957. James Kriegsmann/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

After wrapping the music for the 1967 film BachelorGarfunkel got the chance to appear in the film Catch-22, and his acceptance of the role was the catalyst for the rift. “Artie said, ‘Yeah, it’s going to be like, I’ll do movies for six months, then I’ll come back, you’ll write the songs, and we’ll make an album,’ and I thought, ‘Yeah? Actually no. That won’t happen. I’m not going to do it,’ 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 wrote all the songs and basically ran the sessions because I’d say, ‘This is how it goes, and this is the guitar part, and you should be playing that on the drums, and the bass should be doing this,'” he says, adding , “Artie would be in the control room with [producer] Roy [Halee]and he would say, ‘Yeah, that’s good, let’s do it,’ but it was an uneven balance of power.”

Although Simon has always written, he says during the documentary that Garfunkel goes “halfway A bridge over troubled water” acting in a movie was different. “We’ve always been together somehow. It wasn’t like he came back and said, ‘What’s the collection of new songs you’ve written in the last six months?’ When I was writing the song, I’d say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ The main thing we were interested in — we shared.”

Bridge Over Troubled Water album cover by Simon and Garfunkel. Simon and Garfunkel Paul Simon tried to stop Frank Sinatra from covering one of his songs: ‘I said, he can’t do it’

While Garfunkel was only supposed to record for six weeks, the shoot extended, which strained their relationship. “The film has passed. ‘You have to go back.’ ‘No, I can’t because we have to film this week in Mexico. Send me down what you did and I’ll give you a list,” “No, that’s not good. You have to change this and this.’ It was like — everything went haywire,” explains Simon. “It was a recipe for breaking up Simon & Garfunkel.”

When they performed “Bridge over Troubled Water” live, Simon remembers people “jumping up” to clap along to Garfunkel’s singing, to which he immediately thought, “I wrote that song.”

Whether it was fatigue from his relationship with Garfunkel or the “Freudian trauma” of his mother who once said, “You’ve got a good voice, Paul, but Arthur’s got a nice voice,” Simon was done. “This is my oldest friend, we have experienced anonymity, then great fame and success, and these things have their own pressure,” he says.

Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon at the 1971 Grammy Awards Bettmann Archive The Life of Paul Simon in Photos

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 it Paul who didn’t accept Garfunkel’s enrichment of his own career? Two people are required for the group. It takes two people to be jerks.”

At the end of the first episode, Simon says: “It was a good friendship. It was the real first friendship of someone who got it. For me, turning into a person I hope I never see again — that’s a long way.”

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The first part of In restless dreams: The music of Paul Simon is available to stream on MGM+. Premiere of the second part on Sunday, March 24.

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Source: HIS Education