Concert In Central Park, The - Simon & Garfunkel

I don’t know whether there were exactly 10,000 in the audience at Central Park, NYC, on the night of 19 September 1981. But I’m sure they weren’t talking without speaking, or indeed hearing without listening. And I'm not the only one to be glad that the show they went to see, an all-too-brief reunion of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, was captured for posterity.

There are live albums and live albums. Some are of defining ...
...quick shoddy way of completing an artist’s contract. If this one doesn’t quite fulfil that first criteria, it’s certainly no mere perfunctory on-stage greatest hits jamboree. Nearly all the 20 songs featured can also be found as studio recordings on their other albums and CDs, but there are enough little differences to make this an essential or almost-essential acquisition.

The show opens with ‘Mrs Robinson’. ... more

I don’t know whether there were exactly 10,000 in the audience at Central Park, NYC, on the night of 19 September 1981. But I’m sure they weren’t talking without speaking, or indeed hearing without listening. And I'm not the only one to be glad that the show they went to see, an all-too-brief reunion of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, was captured for posterity.

There are live albums and live albums. Some are of defining moments in an act’s career, while others are just a quick shoddy way of completing an artist’s contract. If this one doesn’t quite fulfil that first criteria, it’s certainly no mere perfunctory on-stage greatest hits jamboree. Nearly all the 20 songs featured can also be found as studio recordings on their other albums and CDs, but there are enough little differences to make this an essential or almost-essential acquisition.

The show opens with ‘Mrs Robinson’. Brisker and about a minute shorter than the original recording, it breezes along effortlessly with unobtrusive electric piano and a hint of saxophone behind the acoustic guitar and drums. In fact the piano features quite strongly on several other songs, giving them a little more backbone than they had before yet without overpowering them. ‘Homeward Bound’, which follows, is back to the early sound – two uncannily perfect voices harmonizing to Paul’s guitar. Such music is generally better suited to the intimacy of a folk club than an arena stage, but it hardly matters – it sounds flawless.

A few words of welcome from Paul precede ‘America’. Differing a little in arrangement from the original, there’s a more sturdy lead guitar making its presence felt, especially on a solo near the end – but nothing disturbs the slow, waltz-time serenity of the original song.

Just as you wonder whether it’s going to be a parade of S & G oldies, along comes one of Paul’s solo hits, the lively ‘Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard’. Always an infectious tune, here it benefits from the more upfront brass work. After that it’s back to the voices and acoustic guitar for ‘Scarborough Fair’ and ‘April Come She Will’.

If you’re familiar with their version of the Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’, a cover version of ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ will come as no surprise. There could hardly be a greater contrast between this and the mournful, languid ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’, which must be the closest Paul ever got to jazz in his solo career, and with some superb sax work. Three more of his solo numbers follow, the beautiful ‘American Tune’, the more funky, brass shuffle of ‘Late In The Evening’, and the wistful ‘Slip Slidin’ Away’.

After that, Art gets a chance to say a few words at last and introduce a song from what was then his forthcoming solo project, the Gallagher-Lyle composition ‘A Heart In New York’. It’s an interesting thought that at one stage the Scottish duo were probably the closest we in the UK ever had to our own Simon & Garfunkel. A brisk change in tempo follows with a medley of Paul’s 1973 minor hit ‘Kodachrome’ and Chuck Berry’s first-ever hit, ‘Maybellene’. These songs go together like a hand in glove – they might have been made for each other.

One of the songs they couldn’t leave out teases the audience a little. You might not recognize it from the opening bars on piano, different (in notes, if not in mood) from the time-honoured studio version. In fact, when Art starts to sing the first verse, “When you’re weary, feeling small,” you’d expect an ecstatic cry of recognition from the crowd. You don’t – maybe they were totally mesmerized by the beauty of what has long since been one of the best-loved songs of its kind, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. Minus strings, once again the arrangement at the end is something of a departure from the version everyone knows, but those voices couldn’t possibly be those of anyone else.

’50 Ways To Leave Your Lover’ is again a more rousing performance than the original, with the electric piano and brass driving it much more. If the punters were bemused by ‘BOTW’, they weren’t taken unawares by ‘The Boxer’, which begins to a howl of delight. This performance is unique to the album in that there’s a totally new verse, evidently Paul confronting the ageing process, beginning “Now the years are rolling by me, They are rocking evenly, I am older than I once was…”

A swift nod to the acoustic pieces ‘Old Friends’ (for me, always one of their less interesting numbers), and the lighthearted ‘59th Street Bridge Song’ (‘Feelin’ Groovy’), bring us to the final item. Apologizing for the lack of actual fireworks, Paul tells the crowd that “We’ll have to make some fireworks of our own.” Which is where we came in – on the title above, at least – for an exquisite ‘The Sound Of Silence’. Surely the most familiar of their early songs, this performance is reassuringly close to the original which originally gave them that breakthrough in 1965.

So there we have it. A few neat little twists and turns on some of the songs, two cover versions (or one and a half) that you won’t find in their studio output, and perhaps one of the few live albums that really merits a place in any comprehensive collection. It’s also worth noting that this originally appeared on a double vinyl album, and with a total playing time of nearly 76 minutes, it’s far better value for money than most of the extremely short studio records. That it spent 43 weeks on the UK album chart, peaking at No. 6, suggests that it wasn’t merely one for a select handful of diehard fans and completists. Even if you do have one of the several ‘Greatest Hits’ or ‘Best Of’ compilations, I’d still recommend this.

In fact, the only downer about this album is that it failed to presage the more lasting reunion between both sparring partners that had been promised. Soon after its release, Paul and Art went into the studio and completed their first full-length studio project as a duo since ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, the album ‘Think Too Much’. Personal and musical differences between them when it was in the can led to its being scrapped and partly re-recorded as the next Paul Simon solo album, ‘Hearts And Minds’. Shame.
 

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