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'Uneven Partnership': Paul Simon Reflects On 'Broken' Friendship with Art Garfunkel in New Documentary
Paul Simon opened up about what went wrong with his musical partnership with Art Garfunkel and their broken friendship in new documentary In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.
MGM+'s new documentary In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon focuses on Paul Simon, who details a lot of important milestones of his career, including his recent album Seven Pslams. However, one of the most important things he talked about was how his friendship with Art Garfunkel, who was the other half of the hitmaking duo Simon & Garfunkel, withered over time.
Paul Simon talked about the duo’s “uneven partnership”
"We were really best friends up until Bridge over Troubled Water. (Afterwards), it didn’t have the harmony of the friendship... that was broken,” the 82-year-old singer spoke about his former friend and bandmate. He also pointed out some of the other events that took place, eventually leading to the duo calling it quits in 1970.
One of the main events that caused the rift between them was Garfunkel accepting a role in the movie Catch-22 after they wrapped up The Graduate. Simon spoke about the matter, saying, “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.’”
According to Paul, the two of them have had an uneven partnership for a long time, and it just came to a head with their final studio album, Bridge over Troubled Water. “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.’ Artie would be in the control room with Roy (producer Roy Halee), and he’d say, ‘Yeah, that's good, let’s do that,’ but it was an uneven balance of power,” Simon recalled.
And even though he did most of the writing for the duo, Simon felt that Garfunkel leaving for almost half of their last album for a movie felt unfair. “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,” he said in the documentary. “The movie ran over. ‘You have to come back.' ‘No, I can’t because we have to shoot this week in Mexico. Send me down what you did, and I’ll give it a list. ‘No, that’s no good. You have to change this and this.’ It was like — everything got disrupted. It was a recipe for the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel,” he explained, elaborating on how this became the main reason behind the duo finally breaking up for good in 1970, even after delivering hits after hits.
Simon also talked about his own insecurities during that time
Paul also recalled the time when they sang Bridge Over Troubled Water live for the first time and the audience “leapt up” to applaud Garfunkel’s part and how his first thought was, “I wrote that song.” Another reason behind him feeling this way was because of his mother, who told him, “You have a good voice, Paul, but Arthur has a fine voice.”
Between his own trauma and feeling sidelined in Art’s life, Paul figured out that he had to get out of the situation. "This is my oldest friend, and we experienced anonymity and then great fame and success, and those things have their own pressure," he says in the documentary. An old clip from an old interview with Garfunkel was shown during the documentary where he said, “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.”
By the end of the first episode of In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, Paul says that his friendship with Art was “a good friendship. That was a real first friendship of somebody that I got it. For me, to turn into a person that I hope I never see again — that’s a long way.” The second and final episode of the documentary will be available to stream on MGM+ on March 24th.
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