In a new two-part documentary for MGM+, legendary musician Paul Simon reflects on his career, including details behind the breakup and falling out with his long-time musical partner, Art Garfunkel.
“We were really best friends up until Bridge over Troubled Water,” Simon said (per People) in Part 1 of the doc, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, which premiered on Sunday, March 17. “[Afterwards], it didn’t have the harmony of the friendship… that was broken.”
The popular multi-time Grammy-winning folk duo grew up as high school friends in Forest Hills, New York, and rose to fame in the 1960s, recording countless hit singles and best-selling albums. However, by the late ’60s, the pair began drifting apart and officially broke up the band in 1970.
Simon said Garkunfel’s transition into acting put a strain on their relationship, particularly when the former accepted a role in the movie Catch-22.
“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,’” Simon recalled
But even more Garfunkel’s movie career took off, Simon said the duo had an “uneven partnership because I was writing all of the songs and basically running the sessions.”
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He continued, “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 [producer] Roy [Halee], and he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s good, let’s do that,’ but it was an uneven balance of power.”
The final straw came when Garfunkel left for “half of Bridge over Troubled Water” (the duo’s final album) to star in a movie.
Simon explained, “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 listen,’ ‘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 also admitted some jealousy when the duo performed “Bridge over Troubled Water” live, as he remembered people leaping up to applaud Garfunkel’s singing. All Simon could think at the time was, “I wrote that song.”
Garfunkel does not appear in the documentary, but the episode included an old interview clip, where the singer says, “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.”
Reflecting at the end of Part 1, Simon said of his relationship with Garfunkel, “That was a good friendship. That was a real first friendship of somebody that got it. For me, to turn into a person that I hope I never see again — that’s a long way.”
In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, Part 2, Streaming, Sunday, March 24, MGM+
