Posted on 05/25/2015 3:35:19 PM PDT by rickmichaels
Art Garfunkel has stunned fans by revealing he only became friends with longtime partner Paul Simon, because he felt sorry for him.
In one of his most candid interviews, the Bright Eyes singer tells Britain's Sunday Telegraph he initially quit Simon & Garfunkel and turned his back on showbusiness to become a teacher because he could no longer work with his sidekick Simon.
He says, "I don'€™t want to say any anti Paul Simon things, but it seems very perverse to not enjoy the glory and walk away from it instead. Crazy... (But) he was getting on my nerves. The jokes had run dry.
"A rest of a year was all I needed. I said, 'I'€™m not married yet. I want to jump on a BMW motorbike and tour round Europe chasing ladies'."
But it's his candid remarks about the start of his friendship with Simon, which led the duo to a recording deal as teenage act Tom & Jerry, that will surprise fans the most.
He admits he felt sorry for the singer/songwriter because he was so short, and adds, "That compensation gesture has created a monster.
"George (Harrison) came up to me at a party once and said, 'My Paul is to me what your Paul is to you'. He meant that, psychologically, they had the same effect on us - the Pauls sidelined us. I think George felt suppressed by Paul (McCartney) and I think that'€™s what he saw with me and my Paul.
"Here's the truth: McCartney was a helluva music man who gave the band its energy, but he also ran away with a lot of the glory."
During his interview with the Telegraph, Garfunkel also calls Simon a "jerk" and agrees with the interviewer that the You Can Call Me Al singer has a Napoleon complex, linked to short people hooked on power.
Despite his comments, Garfunkel, who last toured with Simon in 2010, is open to another Simon & Garfunkel tour: "Will I do another tour with Paul? Well, that's quite do-able. As far as this half is concerned, why not?"
No, No; working well with "difficult people" is recognized as a positive attribute on your resume. If you're going to work in the media, at any level, you have to learn how to handle "difficult people." Or leave.
RE: Film vs Digital - You can still buy film and get it processed through many of the big mail order webstores (B&H, Adarama, etc). For that matter, I can travel 10 or so miles from my house and take a $700 course in wet plate photography. I can also re-create the look of virtually any film or process in Photoshop, no muss, no fuss. With film you had the choice of shooting fine-grained but slow ( ISO 25) or fast & grainy (ISO 400)). Cost per image over a dollar each by the time all is said and done. Back in the 50’s I'm told that an 8x10 dye transfer print could be more than a few hundred dollars with a high degree of uncertainty of success in processing.
Today you can shoot a few hundred images in an afternoon and get a passable image at ISO 800 and even ISO 1600 and get gallery quality 16x20 prints at Sam's Club for under $7.00 each. IMHO we live in a golden age of photography with wonders yet to come (computational imaging for one)!
Must be the hair.
“When I look back on all the cr^p I learned in High School” quite fitting for Highland High school, Albuquerque NM, which I believe Paul attended; also the butt of many Beavis & Butthead scenarios.
Let Garfunkel in peace and enjoy 'em both, because both Simon and Garfunkel made pretty nice things to listen to. Music does have the power to soothe the soul; these guys knew how to make it do that.
I know the words to many, many Paul Simon songs. In his younger days at least, he was one of the only poets whose work I've ever enjoyed. "It's carbon and monoxide, that ol' Detroit perfume. It hangs on the highways in the morning, and lays you down by noon. Ah, Papa Hobo, you can see that I'm dressed like a schoolboy, but I feel like a clown -- it's a natural reaction I learned in this basketball town."
Exactly! The guy wasn’t a reporter, he was a rabble-rouser, an aggravator, aiming to vex the subject. Maybe in political reporting that’s a good thing, but this seems just kinda petty and small on the part of the interviewer. It’s like a betrayal of confidence.
Oh yes...such a high ASA combined with brilliant snow would definitely be a problem.
I see your point and agree.
I got my Nikon DSLR at a yard sale for 40 bucks. When i got it home and put some batteries in it, the menu was in Spanish! I got the maintenance man at my apt complex to change it to Ingles and now i have a beautiful, like-new camera. Gosh...I love Yard sales!
I got me some of that too, on my FXR.
That's true, but a skilled, driven, and/or devious interviewer can do just about anything with people in interviews, especially an artless, credible kind of guy (no pun intended) of the type Garfunkel may very well be. Sure, Art should have been smart enough to see the trap, but then again, we don't know how that interview really went and how far apart in time those quotes transpired in the actual conversation.
It's perfectly believable, to me, that Garfunkel was a sitting duck for a manipulative melodramatic writer/interviewer. I came away with contempt for the "reporter," not for Garfunkel.
I loved my old Pentax K1000. Totally manual.
Odd that he would give them the free advertising, if that was the case!
I have a Lumix “point and shoot”
and a Nikon Coolpix L1000 that I got at a yard sale.
When I was a little girl (9) I used to load my dad’s Speed Graphic plates (huge negatives) and stack them in a carrying case for weddings.
Then he would shoot the wedding, and we would unload and develope the negatives, print up a set of proofs, and the bride would make her selection. Then we would print them up as 8 x 10s, assemble the albums together and Dad’s weekend job (added to his “day job” at the phone company, helped support us (6 kids).
I really MISS the smell of the chemicals. Digital just isn’t the same.
I developed many rolls of Ektachrome in my kitchen sink in the early 80s. Kodachrome had to be sent off to a lab.
I took twenty years off...re photography.
DIgital smells so much better...
Photographic chemicals DO have a funky smell, but they remind me of my dad!
The really nasty stuff was stop bath....especially before diluting!
I hope you covered up the windows real good! :-)
You are right on the mark regarding where the talent was in that duo. I totally agree that although Garfunkel has a great voice, better than Simon’s, Arthur would not have hit it big without Paul.
I give him credit for beautiful singing on his cover of ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’, but airing this dirty laundry publicly betrays some deep jealousy. It reminds me of his character in the movie Carnal Knowledge, with Jack Nicholson. I think his character envied the coolness of Nicholson. Good movie.
And comparing his situation with Simon to George Harrison and Paul McCartney doesn’t hold up well, either. Harrison had a magnificent career for years on his own after the Beatles. Garfunkel on his own, not so much.
Dad and i used to go to the “Lab” for special stuff. It was in a really bad area of Boston, now totally gentrified!
My dad too had a darkroom.... down in the basement... when I was a kid, and I remember “growing up “ with that smell.
he claimed that the chemicals had stunted his ability to smell anything,,,
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