The vicious feud that derailed the careers of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel
The duo has always been an interesting case in pop music. As opposed to a power trio or an entire band dynamic, pairs like Hall and Oates and The Everly Brothers have made their name off of turning in some of the best music of their career between just two people. However, when there are only two egos in the group, it’s easy for the egos to get a little out of proportion, like in Simon and Garfunkel, for example.
While the humble folk act began life playing in New York City, their initial turns as folkies didn’t gain that much traction in a world dominated by the militant poetry of Bob Dylan. When things were looking dire, the first mistake came when Paul Simon cut a few solo songs without telling Art Garfunkel about it, leaving their folk duo, Tom and Jerry, behind.
Since Simon was the main songwriter, Garfunkel had nowhere else to go, which gave Simon a real power imbalance at the start of their career. Although the pair were convinced to get back together to record Simon’s ‘The Sound of Silence’, it didn’t catch on until a few months after the album bombed, by which time Simon and Garfunkel had gone through another split.
As the single picked up steam, Simon and Garfunkel were quickly becoming popular – and with great fame came great wealth. Between their turns writing music for The Graduate, Simon was falling apart behind the scenes. Always insecure, Simon would go to therapy to concentrate on his insecurities, which he thought were magnified by Garfunkel.
In an interview later, Simon said: “I remember during a photo session Artie said, ‘No matter what happens, I’ll always be taller than you.’ Did that hurt? I guess it hurt enough for me to remember 60 years later”. As their star continued to rise, their manager Mort Lewis noticed a pattern between their moods.
Did Simon and Garfunkel resent each other’s talents?
As Lewis tells it: “They both envied the other’s place in the team. Paul often thought the audience saw Artie as the star because he was the featured singer, and some people probably thought Artie even wrote the songs. But Artie knew Paul wrote the songs and thus controlled the future of the pair”.
By the time Simon heard about Garfunkel making the movie Carnal Knowledge, his resentment grew into hostility, remembering, “He later told me he didn’t see why it was such a big deal to me – he would make the movie for six months, and I could write the songs for the next album. I thought, ‘Fuck you, I’m not going to do that’. I think if Artie had become a big movie star he would have left. And this made me think about how I could still be the guy who wrote songs and sing them”.
After soldiering on through the album Bridge Over Troubled Water, the duo finally called it a day following a show in New York. Though the pair eventually played shows off and on throughout the next few decades, the hostility hadn’t subsided. As the duo were set to play a gig in 2018, Garfunkel had to opt out due to vocal issues, Simon grew even colder on what he thought was Garfunkel’s lack of honesty with him.
Although Garfunkel has called Simon an idiot for breaking up the folk duo, Simon is content with putting the nail in the coffin, explaining, “He let us all down. I was tired of all the drama. I didn’t feel I could trust him any more”.