Art Garfunkel turns 85 in November but is still very much an active artist. Back in 2024 he released an album with his son Art Jr, called, well, Father and Son, and next month he heads out on another world tour.
He’s also given an extensive interview with the Guardian, which covers his long career and, of course, his relationship with Paul Simon.
The pair, of course, go way back to high school. Garfunkel describes them at the time as “really tight, laughing all the time”, and recalls recording their harmonies in the basement of his parents’ home in Queens, New York, on a wire recorder. “This is before tape. We’d record our harmonies and then put another layer on top. We were very young, but learning to produce.”
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They were both just 16 when, billed as Tom & Jerry, they had their first hit with Hey, Schoolgirl and performed on American Bandstand. “We followed Jerry Lee Lewis, who did Great Balls of Fire,” Garfunkel says.
“He was a wild man. I remember going to the urinal before going on. One of the dancers asked: ‘Who have we got on today?’ And someone else said: ‘Some jerks calling themselves Tom & Jerry.’ I just stood there, saying nothing.”
The duo’s career only took off in the mid-’60s when The Sound of Silence became their first US Number One. For Garfunkel, the 1960s were “wonderful…. He remembers “social evenings with each of the four Beatles. George Harrison took me to his castle, which had a four-storey papier-mache model of the Alps in the back yard. I think the person he’d bought the place from was a bit eccentric.”
The singer says that back then he was “a workaholic who lived in the studio”. Indeed, for Bridge Over Troubled Water he recorded no less than 300 takes: “Whatever you do, you gotta do it well. Why not try to be the best in the world, just for the fun of it?”
What about the current state of his relationship with Simon? Well, the friends met over dinner in 2024 and made plans to catch up again soon after. “That was about a year ago, and I haven’t seen him in the last year,” says Garfunkel.
“But yes, we got together. Who knows what the future will bring? Life is a surprise. I don’t know what happens next month. I don’t know what happens after we die.”
