Paul Simon opens up about what created ‘recipe for the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel’

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Paul Simon has defined what led to the break-up of people duo Simon & Garfunkel, saying inventive tensions and Art Garfunkel’s performing profession created the “recipe for the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel”.

Simon, 82, was talking in a brand new MGM+ documentary collection: In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.

The first episode coated Simon and Garfunkel’s assembly at elementary faculty in Queens, New York City, the launch of their debut album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. in 1964 and their eventual break-up after the launch of their bestselling fifth and remaining file Bridge over Troubled Water in 1970.

“We were really best friends up until Bridge over Troubled Water,” Simon says in the documentary. “[Afterwards], it didn’t have the harmony of the friendship… that was broken.”

Fractures of their friendship started to emerge after they completed recording the rating for the 1967 movie The Graduate and Garfunkel took a task in the film 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,’,” Simon recollects. “And I thought, ‘Yeah? Actually, no. That’s not gonna happen. I am not gonna do that.’”

The duo’s working relationship was apparently by no means on an equal footing, as Simon was accountable for all the songwriting.

“We had an uneven partnership because I was writing all of the songs and basically running the sessions because 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’,” he says.

“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.”

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Although Simon was writing and arranging the songs, he felt let down when Garfunkel left to behave in Catch-22. Initially filming was solely imagined to final six weeks, however the shoot ended up taking for much longer.

“The movie ran over,” explains Simon. “‘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.”

The first episode of the docuseries ends with Simon sadly lamenting the finish of their friendship, in addition to their working musical relationship. “That was a good friendship,” Simon says. “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.”

Earlier this week, Simon shared an replace on his listening to after struggling a near-total loss in his left ear again in 2023.

During a premiere for the docuseries, the singer-songwriter revealed that it has now come again to “enough of a degree that I’m comfortably singing and playing guitar and playing a few other instruments”.