When I saw that this was on at my local art house cinema I needed no persuasion to book to see it. The sound system in cinemas makes them the ideal way to appreciate a music documentary. Paul Simon has been a performer for longer than I had been alive. He started with Art Garfunkel as a duo called Tom and Jerry in 1957, and they remained connected with each other even when Paul Simon performed solo as he had done, periodically, from 1965 onward.
When I sat down to watch this three hour forty minute documentary I realised how little I knew very little about the career of Simon and Garfunkel and that I knew even less about Paul Simon. The most I could say about him was that he rarely did television interviews, did few print based interviews in music magazines, and in the years that he chose to be a celebrity he was uncomfortable with it. As the documentary showed, his marriage to Carrie Fisher at the height of her fame for her being in the Star Wars films was a short lived and quite intense disaster, one of a series of projects that Paul Simon undertook that misfired with the public.
But to begin nearer the beginning, the people the public know as Simon and Garfunkel have been friends since about the year 1950. The names Simon and Garfunkel are anglicisation, well maybe Americanisation, of the names of two young Jewish men with a vocal talent that rivalled The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Along with, in the person of Paul Simon, a skill with writing tunes that maybe bests, Brian Wilson. But where Brian was a great tunesmith who had access to vocal harmonies that were miraculous, who Capital called a genius which in inflated his ego and fame to infinity only for it to crash after, Paul Simon only set out on Simon and Garfunkel properly after he had studied law including music business law, and allowed Art Garfunkel to arrange the songs Paul Simon wrote after Simon presented them to Garfunkel, and Garfunkel got no fee and had no legal hold on the work he arranged. In private Paul Simon was, ahem, more controlling of his material than was apparent in the incurious interviews with the two of them together in the 1960's.
'The Graduate' was the film that cohered Simon and Garfunkel as an act. Their soundtrack to that immensely popular film made sure that they would never be anonymous or poor again. It would also give them a live audience to tour and play to that would eventually create the pressure that split them up. From The Sound of Silence (1966) to Bridge Over Troubled Water' the trajectory and pressure was upwards, upwards and further into the fame trap in such a way that they could not see the exit. In popular music today journalists wearily talk about 'the album/tour/rest/album/tour/rest cycle. It was seen as 'rest' for Art Garfunkel when he was offered acting roles in the films 'Catch 22' and 'Carnal Knowledge', he did not need to be with Paul Simon when Paul wrote the songs. But for the sake of balancing the duo and of creative input Art Garfunkel had to be with Paul when the songs were written to create the vocal harmonies that kept the duo together. So when Art Garfunkel could not leave the film set of Catch 22 because the film was taking longer to make than was originally stated it would Art arrived in the studio with Roy Halle to find that his parts had been arranged but something that was core to duo's unity had cracked, broken. They toured 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', rested but when Art wanted to be the first to hear the songs for the next album he was told 'No, you went away and did not come back to do the vocal arrangements for the last album.'. There proved to be other complications for the duo too, that made splitting inevitable, not the least of which was that there were no lyrics for Art Garfunkel to create vocal harmony arrangements for, for them both to sing. End of part one of the documentary. The footage of Simon and Garfunkel is wonderful, visually it was a reminder of a lost innocence, and all immaculately edited too. See the documentary for the first half alone, if you want to.
The second half of the film heavily features Paul Simon in his Texas home studio and a local church making 'Seven Psalms', his latest album made as a sprightly eighty something year old, whilst surveying his solo career from the first record 'Paul Simon' recorded from 1970 onward, and released in 1972 through to the 1990 album 'The Rhythm Of The Saints'. I really enjoyed the studio footage of Simon grooving with Toots and the Maytals for the song 'Mother and Child Reunion'. Likewise the footage of the creation and touring of the 1986 album 'Graceland' showed a normally reserved white man seeking to reach new horizons and find space for his lyrics in the joyous rhythms he least expected to be including as part of his music. There were other career troughs and peaks to explore, including what led to the 1981 Simon and Garfunkel reunion concert in Central Park, New York, and the subsequent tour. All of this became interspersed between footage of Paul Simon in his Texas studio working through Covid and the sudden onset of deafness in his left ear first, but alternating between both ears later. Again I thought of Brian Wilson who has had hearing in only one ear since 1964. The footage of Paul Simon struggling against the aural equivalent of tunnel vision was almost existential.
But I felt that having made that point in the film, the director could have shaved ten minutes off the end of the film. That or the time could have been used to mention the musical he wrote 'Capeman', or the five studio albums he has released between 'The Rhythm of The Saints' (1990) and 'Seven Psalms' (2023), none of which got a word said about them. But maybe they deserved a ninety minute long documentary of their own.
Lastly, in the past my view of American music was often informed by the wonky live harmonies of The Grateful Dead, where as Jerry, Bob, and Brent reached for a particular harmony part in a song the listener was taken aback at how close they got to the harmony they were aiming for, and yet how far from the harmony the end result remained. The perfectionism in Paul Simon remains an acquired taste for me, but the more he adopted world music the more interesting his music became.
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