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By PAUL ZOLLO
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 ld Friends." It starts so softly, two quiet chords taking turns, and then Simon alone singing "old friends sat on their park bench like bookends. . ." before he's joined in harmony by his oldest of friends, Art Garfunkel, on the tune, "Lost in their overcoats waiting for the sunset. . ." Later Garfunkel takes his turn, and sings alone "Can you imagine us years from today sharing a park bench quietly?" From Simon and Garfunkel's landmark Bookends album, "old friends" is a song, like most of their work, which continues to reverberate long after the record is over, like an echo without end.
Art Garfunkel first experimented with echo when he was a kid, singing in the synagogue and the halls of his school. From an early age he recognized the almost holy quality of his own voice: an angelic, ethereal sound that excited his own ears before the rest of the world ever heard it.
"I learned how to sing with Artie, " Paul Simon told us. "My voice was the one that went with that voice." That Simon and Garfunkel grew up only blocks from each other in Queens, New York, and attended the same school is one of those enormously lucky twists of fate; lucky not only for the two of them, providing each with a counterpart in harmony both musical and personal, but for the world at large, who have been blessed by the magical sound of these two voices together .
Inspired by the Everly Brothers, Paul and Artie's voices blended as if they were brothers; listen today to "Scarborough Fair, " "The Boxer," "Homeward Bound" or any of their other classic duets, and experience a sensation that was especially soothing in the turmoil of the sixties, and resonates today every bit as powerfully, the sound of two voices singing from a shared soul. It's a sound that their engineer and producer Roy Halee said couldn't be achieved when they separately overdubbed their vocal parts onto tape. But when Simon & Garfunkel sang together at the same time, it was magic. They met backstage in a school production of Alice In Wonderland but even before that Simon was intrigued by this tall, curly headed kid who could impress the girls with the sweetest and smoothest of singing voices. They teamed up as teens and at that tender age rehearsed like professionals, developing a miraculous precision and harmonic blend. To hide the ethnicity of their names, they adopted the names of cartoon characters instead, Tom & Jerry, and entered the world of rock and roll at fifteen with a song they wrote together and recorded called "Hey Schoolgirl." The song was a hit and the duo began to live out their dreams while still dreaming them, appearing on Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" as high schoolers. When their next song failed to fly, the duo broke up for the first of many times, and Tom became Artie again, and returned to the idea of a career in teaching.
In a different world, Art Garfunkel might have gone on to become a professor of Mathematics, quietly and contentedly aiming his enthusiasm for numbers at a classroom blackboard instead of at the Hit Parade. But through a series of twists and turns, most of which are detailed in the ensuing interview, Garfunkel teamed up many more times with his childhood friend, and made some music that changed the world. Though he was never really comfortable performing in front of people, he recognized that in the recording studio he could bring his voice to a state of pure grace, a kind of perfection preserved forever in his spiritual singing on "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and so many others.
The partnership of Simon and Garfunkel, despite well- known accounts of their squabbles and differences, stands today as evidence of the power of real friendship; Garfunkel's perfect harmonies added a depth and richness to Simon's songs, while Simon continued to grow in his writing and provide Garfunkel with the greatest material a singer could ask for. When their time came to an end, and Artie was away in Mexico shooting Catch-22, the songs that Simon wrote reflected the sadness of their separation, two of the sweetest and most enduring songs of friendship ever written, "The Only Living Boy In New York" and "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright." As a solo artist, Garfunkel turned to the songs of some of the other great writers of our time, including Randy Newman and Jimmy Webb. Webb wrote "All I Know", a soaring love song rooted in the gospel passion of the Baptist church ideal for Garfunkel's angelic voice. It was the first hit from his debut album Angel Clare, which also featured an impassioned interpretation of Randy Newman's "Old Man." Garfunkel's entire Watermark album was devoted to Jimmy Webb songs new and old, and it's a treasure, featuring a heartbreaking rendering of Webb's "Wooden Planes".
Garfunkel is also a man of many other talents, as I was reminded more than once in our interview. Besides his acting in films from Carnal Knowledge through Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing, A Sensual Obsession, he's also a poet, having written a book of 84 prose poems called Still Water, which was published by E.P. Dutton (now New American Library) in September of 1989.
He possesses a rare voice that seems only to be growing richer as he grows older. On his most recent album, Lefty, his version of "When A Man Loves A Woman" could bring warmth to even the coldest of hearts; it's one of the most gracefully romantic records ever made, a hopeful and healing reminder that tenderness still exists in these turbulent times.
"I have to warn you," he told me in advance of our interview, "Simon and Garfunkel was twenty years ago. I may not remember that much about my old group." Given that, it was a happy surprise to discover that not only did Garfunkel remember the Simon and Garfunkel years, he remembered with them with vivid clarity, and with much humor and love.
BLUERAILROAD: You have one of the most amazing voices in music today. Was your voice a natural occurrence or did you work to develop it?
ART GARFUNKEL: Well, it's a God-given talent and I observed that I had it at a very young age, maybe five or so. My parents both sang very casually around the house. My family bought a wire recorder in the forties when I grew up, and they would sing a little into the wire recorder. Not seriously but just to make music around the house, and I must have liked the pleasing sound and their harmony. There was a little singing in my childhood and I could do that myself, I realized. The next thing I knew is, with a little bit of practice walking to school - You know how when you're walking on the pavement and you hit the cracks, you can get a song going to your walking step? - Well, I used to sing and when there was no one around, I could sing pretty loudly, and I thought I had a nice voice. So I would sing a song and then start again at the top and push the key a whole tone higher. I remember doing this as a young child. I must have been training. Taking this serious attitude. What then happened was I fell in love with echo chambers. All the kids would be let out of school and you'd be at the back of the line. And you'd be humming something to yourself and the kids would go ahead, and you'd be in the stairwell with all those tiles and I'd start singing and it would sound really nice in the tiles. So everybody would go home and I would linger. And sing for about an hour or so. And I remember thinking, [laughs] "This is a really nice voice coming out of my throat. " I was really digging the tiles but I did have a lucky thing going on there in my throat.
What would you sing to the tiles ?
Songs I had heard on the radio. This was the Perry Coma era. Schmaltzy ballads. Plus there were certain inspirational songs that would get to me: "You'll Never Walk Alone" from Carousel. Stuff with the goose-bumps used to get to me. And I would sing those.
And then I would sing a little in the synagogue. See, if you're a singer, you love to turn your own ears on. You look for those rooms where the reverb is great. I remember the synagogue had a lot of wood and it was a great room. And it was a captive audience and you could sing these minor key songs and make them cry, and that was a thrill.
Then I would sing in grade-school when I was about eight. I bitched onto Nat King Cole's hit, "Too Young." [Sings] "They tried to tell us we're too young. . . " That was my song and I was totally identified with that. I sang it in the school talent show and got popular with the girls that way.
That got me a little into stage experience. They cast me in a play about Stephen Foster. I played Stephen Foster and sang "I Dream Of Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair" and some other Stephen Foster tunes.
I remember singing, [sings] "...a beautiful sight, we're happy tonight..." [ "Winter Wonderland"] They cast me in some Christmas thing so I sang that. When I was in the sixth grade, Paul Simon, who grew up three blocks from me but I didn't know him (he knew me, though), said, "I would see you in these talent shows in the 4th Grade. " So by the sixth grade we met each other because we were both cast in the school graduation program, Alice In Wonderland. And he was the White Rabbit and I was the Cheshire Cat. There was no singing in that play but there was a lot of [laughs] humor and joking around and a really fast new friendship between the two of us backstage. So we became best buddies.
From what I understand, Simon was impressed by your ability to attract schoolgirls with your singing, and he wanted a part of that action.
Yes, it was a means to popularity. That was the way you got to be known and he thought it was cool. And he'd seen me in the hall. "There's that guy who sings." And I would sing sometimes at the Jewish High Holiday services.
You would sing in Hebrew?
Yes.
The Kol Nidre?
Not exactly that one, but you've got the picture. It had all that embellishment stuff. Kvetches, as we call them.
Did you ever want to be a cantor?
Yes. I did. Not as a real profession, but as something I might do around the Jewish New Year, the High Holy Days. Something I might do on a regular basis every year, I used to consider that.
Did you ever return to that?
No. Not really. At Passover, I'll get up over the wine and do a little thing.
When you began hanging out with Simon, did you hear him sing as well?
Yes. When Paul and I were first friends, starting in the sixth grade and seventh grade, we would sing a little together and we would make up radio shows and become disc jockeys on our home wire recorder. And then came rock and roll. The very phrase was born through the mouth of Alan Freed as we were junior high schoolers. And when we listened to that subversive, dirty, rhythm and blues music on the radio, we know that was the cool stuff. It was the only thing in American society, aside from baseball, that had real genuine appeal and was not hype-y. So we emulated the songs and practiced sounding like them and we tried to have our own record, and we knew we were going to try to get on a label, and we would work on our harmonies. And then we got remarkably serious in our rehearsals . We would have sessions that were so much about accuracy and patience and repetition and study. I would sit and examine exactly how Paul says his 'T's at the end of words Like 'start.' And where would the tongue hit the palette exactly. And we would be real masters of precision, figuring this would be the way to make it sound slick and tight and professional.
Were you driving force behind that precision?
I would say yes. As a rehearsal freak, yes. Paul is a very creative artist but I'm more that thorough, meticulous, disciplined nut.
When you began singing with him, did you help him develop his voice?
Well, "help him" sounds too much like spoon-feeding. I can't really say it was that way. We were both copying what we heard on the radio. I wasn't really teaching him anything. He was copying what I was doing a little. His tone got some of the mellow, airy sound that I had. I think he intuitively developed his style along my lines because I jumped in on it first. But it was all his doing and not my doing any teaching or anything.
Were the two of you able to harmonize together easily from the start?
Yes, it came pretty naturally. I'm the kind of person who can hear that stuff. If you sing along to the radio and you're not going to sing unison with the melody, but find the harmony, I find that pretty easy to do. Then came the magic words "Everly Brothers." When they hit the radio with "Bye Bye Love, " we were really off and away. They killed us and we thought that was the coolest sound. We used to wait for their records to come out. So I think you can hear that they were a tremendous influence on us and on so many people. This nation should prize them as one of the great treasures of our musical history. Those guys were extraordinary. Not only because they were so damn good. but they were so cool; their sound was so neat, and so unlike anyone else.
In your early songs with Simon, you often sang melody and he would sing a lower harmony. How did you develop that idea?
The song seems to ask for the harmony. You do two things: You try not to repeat yourself shake up the formula and observe what the song and the lyric and the arrangement seems to call for. We do that, for example, on "Sounds of Silence." I sing the melody. We pitched the song fairly high because I'm a tenor. That left Paul below me, looking for a harmony part. I don't know how we originally come up with these things...
Do you recall constructing that harmony part with him? Would you do it together?
We were in my kitchen in my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, uptown in Manhattan, when I was a student at Columbia College, actually, in the Architecture school. Paul would drive in from Queens, showing me these new songs. And that was the sixth song he had written, "Sound of Silence." And he showed it to me in my kitchen and I went crazy for how cool it was. Then, I don't remember us saying, "Who'll do melody?" It could be he said, "I have you in mind for melody," I don't know... which necessitated it being fairly high. No, I can't remember us working it out.
Since you mentioned studying architecture, I wanted to ask you about some of the Simon and Garfunkel myths to see if they are true. One myth is that when you went by the name of Tom and Jerry that your pseudonym was Tom Graph because you loved doing graphs, and you were really into math.
That's right. I used to chart the records. I used to listen to Martin Block's "Make Believe Bathroom" on Saturday mornings and put down the Hit Parade. I was in love with the Hit Parade for its own sake. Yes, I loved music but I [laughs] loved the Hit Parade. I loved the rise and fall of the records with their numbers. Records that went from eleven to four. It killed me because of the numbers. And I had my graph chart of all these things. And I was very mathematical, and I guess I chose tat name the way adolescents will do. G-r-a-p-h.
Math was a strength you had that Simon didn't share?
That's true, yeah. I used to tutor it, and made my money to go to college on, from that kind of stuff.
Were you actually planning to be an architect?
I was going to architecture school, yes, but I did three and a half years in the architecture school with no real love or feel for it. I think I was foolish enough to be involved with the concept of myself as an architect rather than with designing and buildings, and [laughs] you know, architecture itself. And after quite a while I realized I don't like to pick up a pen and freely sketch and let my imagination run towards structures. And if I don't have that natural desire, what am I doing here? How did I let this illusion go on so long?
Back in the days of Tom and Jerry, I understand that you and Simon would write he songs together.
That's right.
Did you write "Hey Schoolgirl" together?
Yes. "Hey Schoolgirl" with its phrase "Woo-bop- a-loo-chi-ba" somewhat taken from "Be Bopa Lula," Gene Vincent's hit, was our attempt to remember an Everly Brothers song that we had both heard one summer. We were apart, Paul and I, in different places for the summer and at the end of the summer we had both remembered this great record by the Everlys and we were trying to reconstruct it. . . and we were getting it wrong! We were, in fact, writing [laughs] our own song, "Hey Schoolgirl, " in an attempt to remember this Everly Brothers song. When we heard the real Everlys song we realized, "Well, that ain't it, so the thing we were groping towards... is ours!" So we finished writing it and made a demo of it, and signed a contract with a small record company on the strength of it, because the guy was in the waiting room of the demo place, and we actually recorded it. It sold 150,000 copies.
(continued ...)
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