(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 5 December 2025 19:15, UK
Of all the strengths that Paul Simon has displayed throughout his career, showmanship was never at the top of that list.
He was the one who would be very mild-mannered about his gifts, and even when playing some of the greatest songs to come out of the rock canon, he would forever be linked to the acoustic guitar whenever he took to the stage. Then again, not everyone needs to be dancing around like Elvis Presley to entertain an audience.
Throughout Simon’s career, a lot of the greatest onstage moments tended to come from the musicians that he had around him half the time. When he first started working on Graceland, for instance, the jubilation onstage often came from seeing what the rest of the South African musicians were doing around his songs half the time. Not all of them were exactly rock and roll, but you could easily get swept in the pure love of music that everyone seemed to have the minute that they walked onstage.
If you compare that to Simon and Garfunkel, though, it’s like night and day. For all of the great folk-rock backing tracks that were thrown onto ‘The Sound of Silence’, they were still a singing duo with guitar and voice. Bob Dylan may have made that okay circa 1964, but when seeing them perform live, a lot of their strength came from those quieter sections of their songs where you could hear a pin drop during their performances.
Getting the full band treatment on a song like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ was a must, but it was also important for them to remind everyone why they were so great after having been broken up for years. No one simply has a musical reunion just for the hell of it, and when the band hit those landmark shows at Central Park, they practically rewrote their musical legacies in one short set.
The show itself is far from the most exciting evening of all time, but what makes it work is the audience being used as a second instrument half the time. Simon and Garfunkel’s harmonies soar throughout every tune, but the thought of the both of them singing live does have the same impression as thousands of people singing along to ‘The Sound of Silence’ when that opening guitar figure starts.
For all of the spellbinding performances that night, though, Simon remembered that there were some mixed feelings coming off the stage, saying, “We came back in 1981 in Central Park. [That was] one of the most extraordinary evenings of our lives, but as we finished the last song, I turned to Artie and said how we did and he said, ‘disaster’. Overview was never really our strong suit.”
Then again, it’s hard to really judge when coming off the stage. There’s a good chance that everyone from The Beatles playing at Shea Stadium to Kurt Cobain performing at MTV Unplugged didn’t look back fondly on every element of the set, but there’s something about listening to artists bouncing off each other when they’re onstage that is far more mesmerising than if they had hit everything right on the money every time they played.
So while that show might not be looked at that fondly by the rest of the band, it’s easy to see why the rest of the world found merit in it. This was a moment in time that was most likely never going to happen again, and while Simon and Garfunkel did eventually find time to play together again, it was worth it to see them rediscover their genuine love of playing music in the middle of Manhattan.
Related Topics