Art Garfunkel turns 85 today, and his calendar says he has a show tomorrow. The What a Wonderful World tour has him booked at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, New Jersey, on November 6, which is a fairly stubborn way to spend the morning after a birthday.
It hasn't been a smooth year for him. Last month he had to postpone all four of his UK concerts after being diagnosed with a respiratory infection. "My heart is broken that I must postpone these performances," he said. Those shows now run in March 2027, and the tour itself is a return he plainly wasn't sure he would get. In April 2023 he canceled his remaining dates and said he wouldn't be back on the road for the foreseeable future.
Then this spring came a press release containing the line "My voice is a gift from God." I'd roll my eyes at that from most singers. From someone who has lost that voice and clawed it back more than once, I'm inclined to let it go.
A kid in a Queens stairwell
Garfunkel was born on November 5, 1941, in Forest Hills, Queens. He was singing in the school stairwell by first grade, and his father bought him a wire recorder. At his bar mitzvah in 1954 he sang as a hazzan for more than four hours, which sounds like a long morning for everyone involved.
He met Paul Simon in sixth grade at PS 164, when both were cast in a graduation production of Alice in Wonderland. By 1956 they had a record contract as Tom & Jerry, and "Hey, Schoolgirl" reached number 49 in 1957. Plenty of teenage acts would have called that a career. These two went to college.
Garfunkel took a bachelor's in art history at Columbia in 1965 and a master's in mathematics education at Teachers College in 1967, and he started a doctorate that the pop charts interrupted. It's still one of my favorite details in rock history that the man singing "The Sounds of Silence" could have ended up teaching algebra.
The harmony years, and the split
Simon & Garfunkel hit the top of the Billboard chart on the first day of 1966 with "The Sounds of Silence," a version remixed with electric instruments without the duo's say-so. The four years after that are the ones everyone knows. In 1968 they put "Old Friends" on Bookends, a song that imagines what being seventy might feel like. Garfunkel was 26.
Bridge over Troubled Water arrived in 1970 and took Album of the Year and Record of the Year at the Grammys the following March. By then the partnership was finished. Part of the strain came from film, because Garfunkel had gone off to act in Mike Nichols's Catch-22. He followed it with Carnal Knowledge in 1971, and a Golden Globe nomination came with it. Simon, meanwhile, wrote the songs and watched the other guy sing the big one. Neither of them has ever really finished talking about that.
A solo career that mostly happened in Britain
The US remembers Garfunkel as half of a duo. British listeners have a different picture. "I Only Have Eyes for You" went to number one there in 1975, and "Bright Eyes," written by Mike Batt for the animated Watership Down, did the same in 1979. A generation of British children learned about mortality from cartoon rabbits with that voice playing over the top. I'm told they have mostly recovered.
The reunions came and went. There was the Central Park concert in September 1981, in front of a crowd reported at around half a million, and there was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. They last performed together in 2010.
He walked. A lot.
If you want to understand Garfunkel, skip the awards and look at the walking. Between 1983 and 1997 he walked across the United States, from New York City to the Oregon coast, in 40 separate trips. He picked up each time where he had left off. In May 1998 he started on Europe, and he finished in Istanbul in 2015, after 17 years of it. He had already walked across Japan in the early 1980s.
Nobody made him do this, and nobody was filming it for a streaming service. In a business full of people who need an audience at all times, I find that the most interesting thing about him.
The voice, the lunch and the son
The trouble began in January 2010, when he choked briefly on a piece of lobster and damaged his vocal cords. Simon & Garfunkel's tour was canceled that June. More cancellations followed in 2012 before he got back on stage in 2014, and by most accounts the voice he brought back was thinner and more careful than the old one.
In late 2024 he told The Sun about a lunch with Simon, the first in years, and called it "very, very warm and wonderful." There were tears on his side, he said, because he felt he had hurt his old friend. A few days after the interview ran he released Father and Son, a duets album with Art Garfunkel Jr., with a new recording of "Old Friends" on it. That's a tidy bit of timing I wouldn't dare put in a novel.
Where to catch him, and where to start
If you had tickets to Watford, Wolverhampton, London or Manchester, the new dates are March 8, 11, 14 and 17 in that order, with the Royal Albert Hall on March 14, and his website has the ticketing details. He's also booked for Paris on March 3. At 85 and just over an infection, plans can shift, so check before you travel.
New to the solo records? Start with "All I Know," then "Bright Eyes," and save "Old Friends" for last. It sounds different now that he's fifteen years past the age it imagines.
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