On September 26, 2017, Penguin/Random House published a wordy, aloof, and self-indulgent pseudo-memoir called “What Is It All But Luminous (Notes From An Underground Man).” The tome described itself as a product of “the golden-haired, curly-headed half of Simon & Garfunkel;” an “artful, moving, lyrical” history of the “making of a musician; the evolution of a man; [and] a portrait of a life-long friendship and collaboration that became one of the most successful singing duos of [all] time.”
Michael Granberry of the Dallas Morning News found the non-memoir “captivating.” He noted of the author: “Even before he met Simon, he found his voice—and not just any voice. It is perhaps one of the most magical, alluring voices in music history…”
But who was he? Most of the world knows him as a bashful angel counterpart to a strumming bardling — both of troubled souls and gentle harmony. Many may know him as a sage and humbled artiste; a thoughtful, complex, and literary soloist. And then, there are those who know him at his core: a shy mathlete who found confidence, ego, and celebrity while under the employ of a perpetually-dissatisfied and obsessive auteur.
And so—without any further adieu—ladies and gentlemen…
I present to you… Simon,
And Garfunkel:
Life in the Shadow of the Bard
— Chapter I —
Tom & Jerry
Arthur Ira Garfunkel was born November 5, 1941, in the Queens borough of New York City. He was preceded by a brother “Jules” and followed by “Jerome,” to the happily-wed Rose and Jacob “Jack” Garfunkel. She tended the home while Jack worked as a traveling salesman. Prior to having children, Jack was employed as an actor in Dayton, Ohio—the birthplace of aviation and, forty years later, the birthplace of the atom bomb’s trigger mechanism.
Jack Garfunkel’s parents had emigrated from Romania and settled in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, where a predominant Jewish demographic granted them a semblance of community almost as soon as they arrived. After marrying Rose Pearlman, Jack Garfunkel moved a mile south to the Kew Gardens neighborhood—east of the lush Forest Park (with its carousel, golf course, and eight cemeteries), north of the Jamaica rail station, and south of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, site of the 1939/1940 and 1964/1965 New York World's Fairs.
The southern tip of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is punctuated by a complex pentagramal interchange—a gordian knot of cement pillars and asphalt tracks—consisting of Interstate 678, Queens Boulevard, Grand Central Pkwy, Jackie Robinson Pkwy, and Union Turnpike. This interchange has the distinction of being midway between the airports LaGuardia (opened 1939 as NY Municipal) and JFK (opened 1948 as NY International).
LaGuardia is the busiest domestic airport in the United States, whereas JFK is the busiest international gateway-by-air to the North American continent. The tread-shorn paths of their frenzied and weary migrants find juncture at Kew Gardens. Eight subway lines split the neighborhood in half, servicing Manhattan to the northwest and the vast extremities of Long Island to the east. It was outside this rail station, in 1964, that 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was murdered and raped, in that order.
The sunny Italian girl with a crop of black hair had been stabbed in the back with a hunting knife, courtesy of a local burglar who moonlighted as a necrophile. Kitty fought him off and ran down the neighborhood block, pounding on doors for help. Thirty-eight people heard her screaming, yet none of them intervened. The “bystander effect” was coined by sociologists in the wake of this event, referring to a person’s aversion to involvement when not summoned singly.
In postwar urbana, apathy and self-imposed estrangement grew to levels never before seen in American communities. Civic indifference became standard in the anxious atomic era, as neighborhoods fragmented demographics, erecting housing with haste and cleaving cultures via redistricting. Apathy spread outward, into the suburbs, through the hearts of the next generation, leaving metropolitan areas densely-populated with icy, isolated individuals.
Such were the stomping grounds of young Arthur Garfunkel. Born and raised beside a five-way interchange—the heart of commotion in New York City’s largest borough—Artie was often intimidated by the inescapable, racing urban energy. He was a quiet and shy boy, though his parents preferred words such as “introspective” and “astute.” He retreated inward through much of his youth, finding solace in critical thinking and mathematics, shooting free-throws from the painted key, and—above all else—singing.
This singular mode of expression was a byproduct of his shyness. In the first grade, Art later said, “When we were lined up in size order, and after everyone else had left, I'd stay behind and enjoy the echo sound of the stairwell tiles and sing ‘Unchained Melody’ and ‘You'll Never Walk Alone,’ learning to love this goosebumps song from the tender age of five.” Jack Garfunkel caught wind of his son’s secret passion and encouraged him. He purchased a wire recorder, and young Art spent every afternoon thereafter singing to it and playing the tape back, listening for imperfections and practicing his corrections. “That got me into music more than anything else,” he said; “singing and being able to record it.”
The Garfunkel parentage had an elitist taste in music. On their old Victrola, they’d play thirty-year-old vinyl recordings of operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, who delivered “some of the most artistic singing in plaintive minor” ever heard. Art became infatuated with the tonal qualities of the minor key. “I was five years old, and already I knew that I loved melody and the drama of high notes.” He took his vocal instrument to practice—in Hebrew—at the local synagogue, “where [he] discovered the power of the minor key.”
“I could really make them cry in the aisles. I guess there's a bit of the Yiddish cry still to my singing — a purple edge; the goosebumps after the rain has stopped.” Singing in Hebrew—an arduous task, much like playing the bagpipes—taught him to enunciate clearly while making the most of every breath. His performances were truly troubling by his inability to speak Hebrew; he had instead learned the songs with a trained ear and diligent replication. “I memorized it by the syllable and figured out where to grab gasps of air when nobody’s looking. Crescendo takes a lot of breath.”
In a 1973 interview for Rolling Stone magazine, Art said his influences were whoever was on the radio, such as the Hilltoppers, the Crewcuts, and the Four Aces, adding, “I was a singer in the Forties. I guess I identified with whoever was singing… It was always the groups, isn’t that strange? I could hear that my pitch was fairly good. I can remember singing to myself going to school; singing to the rhythm of walking while I was stepping over cracks in the sidewalk; singing and sort of practicing.”
Art's childhood home was a semi-attached brick abode—new, at the time, but nothing flattering—in the semi-affluent Jewish neighborhood known as Kew Gardens Hills. It had been a country club's fairway until 1941, when wartime land prices sunk and development was set to skyrocket. Prior to that, the area had been a vast swamp; portions were drained in 1918 for suburban development and the remainder became an impromptu landfill — a dump for the ashes of coal and incinerated garbage.
The Corona Dump, as it was called, was thirty years in the making. Over fifty million cubic yards of ash were abandoned on these meadows, with one particular hillock of debris reaching an altitude of ninety feet (picture: a ten-story building made of soot). Locals called it “Mount Corona,” and they loathed it. Not only was it ugly, but it smelled like shit and sulfur, and it was a breeding ground for rats and mosquitoes. In his 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald—who had based his story in a mock-Long Island—depicted the Corona Ash Dump as “a valley of ashes” beneath the watchful eyes of an infamous billboard.
Robert Moses, the “master builder” responsible for suburbanizing New York City, converted the Corona Ash Dump into the fairgrounds of the 1939 NY World's Fair. Thousands of German, Irish, and Italian immigrants flocked to the area, which had become linked to Manhattan via subway. The aforementioned wartime land prices leant developers the chance to satisfy the housing need, and they converted the golf course in Queens Valley into an affordable neighborhood.
Kew Gardens Hills rose upon the western hills of Long Island, nestled within the suburban cove formed by the arms of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Somewhat grassy and shaded, the parallel roads were thickly laid like jail bars, incrementally lining rows upon rows—block after block—of identical rectangular brick houses; unremarkable architectural installations likely built with as much enthusiasm as a Ford auto plant worker riveting bumpers onto chassis for the eternity between childhood and retirement.
Every home could be mistaken for another. Such droll brick rowhouses exemplified urban development in the earliest years of the Cold War — particularly in New York City. The same initiatives built schools to service the booming populous. Public education complexes with stark numeral designations popped-up in every neighborhood. The elementary school nearest the Garfunkel household, without crossing a major road, was P.S. 164.
Art didn't strive to make friends in school; not only was he shy and reclusive (preferring thoughts over emotion) but he was considerably picky about his associations. “I was a loner and I was lonesome,” he later admitted. He would steal moments between recess and the classroom, lingering in the stairwells for twenty seconds of quiet solitude. “I started singing in echoing…stairwells when I was five, and I knew I was different from a very young age.”
“Then I met Paul Simon at school, when I was eleven. He was another guy who loved music. Finally, I felt understood.”
During a stage performance in Toledo, circa November 1969, and preceding the medley “Old Friends/Bookends,” songwriter Paul Simon regaled the audience with how he had met his musical partner Art Garfunkel:
It was a sixth grade production of “Alice in Wonderland,” and Art had been cast as the Cheshire Cat. Paul was the White Rabbit, jesting that he had “the leading role, and Art was a supporting role — an important role, but a supporting role.” The audience—well aware of their storied discord—laughed. Paul continued, saying, “We started playing together at age thirteen, and we starting arguing together at age fourteen. Nowadays we don’t argue — he’ll say ‘I disagree,’ and I’ll say ‘I respect that.’”
Paul Frederic Simon was born October 13, 1941, in Newark, New Jersey. It was a Monday, as was the rest of his life; such anxious dissatisfaction associated with the first of five workdays seemed to imbue Paul with its spirit at a very young age. His mother Belle taught elementary school; his father, Louis Simon, was a college professor, but most knew him as “Lee Sims,” the double-bass strumming bandleader of the Hungarian Radio Orchestra.
Both Louis and Belle were Jewish, of Hungarian descent. In 1945, they moved to the more accomodating Kew Gardens Hills neighborhood, in central Queens. The Hills had a favorable and booming Jewish population—stoic Bukharians from the Urals; dutiful Orthodox from the Mediterranean; conservative Haredi from the Holy Land; liberal Ashkenazi from urban Europe—with synagogues enough for every practice. Many Jewish families in the metropolitan area, like the Simons, migrated from other semitic neighborhoods, such as Brooklyn’s Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
As Ginia Bellafante once wrote, “No other American city is more closely associated with Jewish identity than New York.” America’s Third Wave of immigration—from 1880 to 1914—saw thousands of Europeans cross the Atlantic and settle beyond the gates of Ellis Island. Social and political changes in predominantly Anglo/Germanic nations inspired the persecution of the Jewish minority; fiery pogroms across Russia and the Baltic states (known as “the storms in the South”) saw anti-semitic mobs loot, riot, and kill with the encouragement of the monarchy. The only option most Jews had was to leave, and they left for the bastion of America.
The Jewish population in NYC multiplied by a factor of twenty, from 80,000 in 1880 to 1.6 million in 1920; today, Jews constitute 10% of the city’s population. Thanks to the Third Wave, we got luminaries such as Tony Curtis, Stephen Sondheim, Barbra Streisand, Martin Landau, Fran Drescher, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Judd Apatow, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, James L. Brooks, Garry Shandling, Howard Stern, Milton Berle, James Caan, Rodney Dangerfield, Larry David, Andy Kaufman, Judge Judy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Oscar Hammerstein II, George Gershwin, Danny Kaye, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Armand Hammer, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Carl & Rob Reiner, Jerry & Ben Stiller, Mel Brooks, Jonas Salk, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bernie Sanders, Bugsy Siegel, Harvey Milk, Harvey Keitel, Joan Rivers, Buddy Rich, Billy Joel, Roy Lichtenstein, J.D. Salinger, Maurice Sendak, Joseph Heller, Neil Simon, Nora Ephron, Paddy Chayefsky, Stan Lee, Kirk Douglas, Elliott Gould, Stanley Kubrick, Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, Jon Stewart, and Meryl Streep.
Much of midcentury theatre, postmodern art and literature, New Hollywood cinema, theoretical physics, slapstick and stand-up comedy, Tin Pan Alley swing, millennial haberdashery, and our Cold War escalations was the byproduct of Third Wave Jewish immigration to New York City. Oh, I'm sorry—did you WANT polio? No? Then thank the Jewish bungalows of Queens, Brooklyn, and Bergen County.
Kew Gardens Hills wasn't much to look at, but it was pleasant. With a large, cohesive Jewish population, most of the citizenry shared the same values and norms through the Forties and Fifties. In the song “My Little Town,” Paul Simon recounted “flying [his] bike past the gates” of workhouses and cookie-cutter domiciles. The air, polluted; the atmosphere, cold and lonely.
“In my little town,” he sang, “I grew up believing God keeps his eye on us all.” “In my little town I never meant nothing; I was just my father's son. Saving my money. Dreamin’ of glory. Twitching like a finger on a trigger of a gun.” “Everything's the same back in my little town… Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town…”
Kew Gardens Hills was not the best place to cultivate ambition. It was a square mile built with rigid homogeneity, designed with cost valued over quality, and inhabited by people who shared the same ethnic and philosophical background. In 1962, folk singer Malvina Reynolds commented on such housing developments by singing, “Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes made of ticky-tacky / Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes all the same.” A college professor told Time magazine, two years later, “I’ve been lecturing my classes about middle-class conformity for a whole semester. Here’s a song that says it all in 1½ minutes.”
As with the majority of neighborhoods in New York City, Kew Gardens Hills has no permanent border. It’s demarcated as being “above Grand Central Pkwy, below Long Island Expy, and between Kissena/Parsons Blvd and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.” The upper third is dominated by Queens College and the Cedar Grove & Mt. Hebron cemeteries. The lower thirds are sectioned by one-way tributaries flowing to and from Main Street. The seventy-year-old, eighteen-foot-wide, semi-attached, three-bedroom, bland brick rowhouses that bespeckle the banks of these tributaries—on plots sized well below a tenth of an acre—nowadays go for anywhere between $750,000 and $3,500,000. “And they're all made out of ticky-tacky / And they all look just the same.”
One of these houses—at 137-62 70th Road—was purchased in its relative prime by the Simon family, who had left Newark for a neighborhood better-suited for raising their son. Crime was low, as the neighborhood was young, and it seemed every home contained a respectful Jewish family on the up-and-up. Fathers waxed their model-year Buicks and Fords in driveways and alleyways; mothers hung laundry to dry on lines behind the home. Roadside gutters fostered boys on bicycles, and sidewalks bore prams carrying the scions of the next generation. Inside ‘little box’ 137-62 on 70th Road, Paul Simon would soon pen some of history’s finest folk songs—and, three blocks away, Art Garfunkel was singing along to Enrico Caruso records.
The twosome, outside Paul’s childhood home in Kew Gardens Hills; spring 1975.
Donald Fagen, the frontman of Steely Dan (and born in nearby Passaic), described Paul Simon’s childhood as being one of “a certain kind of New York Jew—almost a stereotype, really—to whom music and baseball are very important. I think it has to do with the parents. The parents are either immigrants or first-generation Americans who felt like outsiders, and assimilation was the key thought; they gravitated to black music and baseball, looking for an alternative culture.” Once informed of Fagen’s description, Paul said it “isn't far from the truth,” adding, “I was a ballplayer. I'd go on my bike, and I'd hustle kids in stickball… I used to listen to [Yankees] games with my father. He was a nice guy. Fun. Funny. Smart. He didn't play with me as much as I played with my kids. He was at work until late at night… Sometimes [until] two in the morning.”
Peter Carlin explored, in an inflammatory and unendorsed biography of Paul Simon, the darkest interpretations of the songster's deep truths, saying he “never measured up to his father's hopes and dreams that his son become a lawyer rather than a singer-songwriter—a path he, himself, unsuccessfully tried to follow.” “Adding to his parental disappointment was his stature. Although he was smart, athletic, and personable, Simon was ‘small like a mouse…like the punch line to every short-guy joke the other kids could imagine.’”
Schoolmates goaded him, inquiring as to if he lived in a dollhouse or was carried to school in his mother’s purse. They’d knock the Yankees cap off his head and play keep-away with it, until Paul turned red, with hot tears trickling down his cheeks, throwing punches with abandon. As his classmates grew two-to-three times larger with puberty, Paul Simon aged only in inches. The bullying persisted for years—not for being a Jew, but for having the traits of one: thick eyebrows, hefty nose, chubby cheeks, and lackluster size.
His dreams outweighed his body in factors of tonnage. He heard the crooning and harmonizing of radio starlets and he yearned to become one. He yearned to overcompensate for the bad hand he was dealt at birth; he became obsessed with self-improvement — and when that proved daunting, he became obsessed with self-loathing. He hated his classmates, and he was jealous of them; he envied everyone who had something he didn’t.
In the spring of 1952, P.S. 164 was hosting a talent show. Paul’s bus was late, and a teacher shepherded these thirty-some-odd kids down the hall and into the auditorium. Swinging wide the doors, a chorus of angels hit Paul like a tsunami. A lanky, blue-eyed, curly-haired geek with the voice of a cherub was enrapturing an auditorium of otherwise despondent and disparaging classmates. It was Nat King Cole’s “They Try to Tell Us We're Too Young,” but it sounded like birdsong. Then, it was quiet, and the room erupted with applause.
This boy possessed a superpower, Paul believed, and he was immediately jealous of it—not so much of the voice, but of the approval and acclaim it received. However, his sharp mind—quick to capitalize on opportunity—convinced him to think otherwise: This was no enemy; no jealousy should be felt. This curly-cue was gifted. Perhaps if performing together, Paul thought, he could glean some of that same acceptance for himself…
They both graduated early (skipping their fifth year on account of good grades) onward to Parsons Junior High School—now Robert F. Kennedy Middle School—a monolithic, brick bastion of learning; an “institution” to every letter of the word. Their last days at P.S. 164 were spent in the auditorium, performing a theatrical production of “Alice in Wonderland.” Art later said of the experience, “The teachers picked who they thought were best onstage. Paul got the part of Peter Rabbit [sic] and I was the Cheshire Cat. So, in May and June every day after school, there’d be rehearsal—and there was this very, very funny person named Paul Simon.”
They were eleven years old, and fascinated by music—particularly, “rock ‘n’ roll,” which was coming into infancy at the time. Young Paul and Art bonded over the products of the airwaves, sitting beside a radio set and conversing between songs. Paul was one of few (outside of the Garfunkel family) who was able to get Art to talk, yet Paul generally did enough speaking for both of them. He found a captive audience in Art Garfunkel, who laughed, relished, and agreed with him more often than not.
“As I entered Parsons Junior High,” Art later wrote, “Paul Simon became my one and only friend. We saw each other’s uniqueness. We smoked our first cigarettes. We had retreated from all other kids. And we laughed.” Paul was bringing Art Garfunkel out of his shell—slowly, but surely. “Girls, especially, were aware of me as a singer… That's why Paul wanted to hook-up with me at first, I think — to impress the pretty girls.”
They’d fly as each other’s wingman, flirting-up storms in the halls of Parsons and outside, by the flagpole, during lunchtime, where they’d sing doo-wop songs in charming synchronicity. “Once we started singing together, we looked for outlets to sing in places. We’d sing after school. We used to do a lot of Crewcuts songs. ‘Shaboom’ and ‘Crazy ‘Bout You Baby’ were big hits.” For a brief spell, they united with three classmates as a five-man streetcorner doo-wop group called “the Peptones,” harmonizing on all the popular jukebox tunes.
Finding a left-brain pleasure in it, Art tracked the weekly “Hit Parade” stats, analyzing the various songs and quantifying the qualities that kept them aloft. (Had he found a way to capitalize on this, he could have built the Billboard Hot 100 before Billboard did.) While Art buried himself in graph paper, Paul surrounded himself with sheet music and vinyl from all sorts of genres. He was falling in love with jazz, folk, blues, country, and—to a great degree, as influence will later show—Latin dance. His ears were mesmerized by everything from the quiet, ideological ballads of Woody Guthrie to the hearty, soulful cries of Lead Belly.
The twosome complimented each other well behind the scenes, with Paul acquiring influence and Art dissecting it. They’d practice together, after school, with songs learned by ear and others written by Paul, who had been trying so desperately to bottle his naive emotions and negligible life experience into heartfelt three-minute ditties. Though his youthful efforts ultimately came across as shallow, they succeeded as experiments of trial and error; missteps to improve upon.
In concert, the twosome emulated the Everly Brothers—a pair of peppy, preppy songbirds—and the facade of composure cloaked Paul and Art in confidence, destigmatizing them. In concert, the twosome lost their reputations as geeks and the audience of their peers bathed them in sunlight. To his chagrin, Paul’s greatest abilities were not evident on the stage. Art, with the voice of an angel and the unblemished, slender physique of a prepubescent Gene Wilder, was a magnet for the eyes. Paul, on the other hand, appeared rather gnomish, with a comparatively less-extraordinary voice.
The side-by-side comparison of the duo typically had Art perceived as the frontman. This irked Paul—the mastermind behind their arrangements—but their friendship prevailed. Art even compensated for Paul’s sake, often bending to his eye-level and performing while hunched-over. (This practice would fade with time, as would their friendship.)
“We did two-part harmonies, like my parents used to sing,” Art later said. He and Paul usually “practiced at home; any room with tiles was good. We liked reverberation. From there, it was a direct line to the Everly Brothers… and to Simon & Garfunkel.” They would invoke the ethos of the Brothers Everly—their idols—at various Parsons’ school dances, where they sought the headlining act against fierce competition — namely, the Victrola and the jukebox.
The Everly Brothers were a country-influenced rock ‘n’ roll duo that caught popularity in the mid-Fifties with their steel-string guitars and tight harmonies. Their first record fought rooted-sensation Elvis Presley for the top of the pop charts, and their fame continued with such momentum for a decade more, until they were unseated by a new harmonic pair: a mulberry bard and a linden tenor altino calling themselves “Simon & Garfunkel.”
At his bar mitzvah, in 1954, Art Garfunkel performed solo for the congregation, for over four straight hours. He developed a lung infection soon after and, for a few subsequent months of vocal incapacitation, he took daily to the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park for a one-on-none game of basketball. During this brief hiatus, Paul Simon labored to improve his instrumental craft, practicing chord progressions in his bedroom “even as his fingertips cracked and blood crusted the strings and frets” of his secondhand guitar. “I think Paul…bought his first guitar in the seventh grade or something. So we’d sing in a lot of these shows and they liked us.”
Weeks of uninterrupted practice culminated into Paul’s first full song, called “The Girl for Me.” It became, reportedly, a “neighborhood hit.” Louis Simon—Paul’s father, the former bandleader—transcribed the lyrics and chords onto blank staff paper before submitting a handwritten copy to the Library of Congress for a copyright registration, thereby certifying the first official Simon & Garfunkel song.
Art’s father Jack became an early adopter of home recording equipment, after the wire recorder he bought for his son so many years ago appeared to yield incredible results. He purchased a “Webcor recording device” and furnished his basement into a “vocal laboratory.” Art’s older brother Jules joined the merry twosome for after-school recording sessions. Of these times, Art later said, “I would sit and examine exactly how Paul says his Ts at the end of words—where the tongue would hit the palate exactly—and we would [become] real masters of precision.”
In autumn of 1955, the boys began at Forest Hills High School (“go Rangers”). Built in 1937 and opened in 1941, FHHS was a solution to the city's growing issue of overcrowding. The three local high schools were filling fast in the post-World's Fair neighborhoods of Forest Hills and Kew Gardens. Little did they expect, as soon as the school opened, America got involved in another global altercation and thousands of returning soldiers settled in the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park area, thus leading to the same overcrowding they had hoped to avoid — and it's been burdened ever since.
Opposite Flushing Meadows-Corona Park from Kew Gardens Hills, via 69th Rd/Jewel Ave, Forest Hills H.S. stands at the end of 67th Ave (not to be confused with the adjacent 67th Rd or 67th Dr) with its pillared drum—a two-story cupola—towering over the tree-lined promenade that intersects with 110th St, now known as “The Ramones Way.” In 1974, the oldest of the makeshift “Ramones Brothers” graduated from Forest Hills. They launched themselves into the music world, defining “punk rock” as a genre, with defiant classics such as “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Beat on the Brat,” and “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.” The longest song on their first album was a hair longer than two and a half minutes, yet the album scored a clear 5/5 stars from every major reviewer. Later songs included “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and “Rock 'n' Roll High School,” which was inspired by their time spent here, at Forest Hills.
Throughout his time at FHHS, Paul Simon participated in the annual student-run theatre competition known as “SING!” His abilities as a performer were made manifest at similar school events, such as talent shows. At his first, he performed alongside Art Garfunkel in an “Urban Everly Brothers” act that brought the crowd to their feet.
Paul loved the acclaim and admiration of the audience. They gave him, if ever so briefly, a sense of worth. Art, too, was ensnared in celebrity. He swelled with pride by the adoration his voice had won him, and the proof of his supremacy intoxicated him with dreams of chasing glory.
“Neighborhood famous” means something (if even only a little) in New York City. Paul Simon began dressing for success, polishing his hair and pressing his clothes with a backbeat of the Glamour Hammer. He walked the streets with Art by his side, holding their heads high, performing for—and mingling with—girls.
The boys would often go on double-dates, typically to end with heavy-petting in the Garfunkel family basement. “We were the closest of chums,” Art has said, “making-out with our girls across the basement floor. We showed each other our versions of masturbation; mine used a hand.” (I'm not sure what he meant to say about Paul's earliest masturbation techniques, but it leaves much to the imagination.)
In a 1973 interview with Rolling Stone, Art admitted he had tried writing his own songs alongside and with his partner, Paul Simon. They had penned some half-dozen songs together before he relinquished creative control of their sound to Paul. “My writing skill, I thought, didn't really keep pace with my growing up,” he said. “I wrote some banal…things of a more folky, sensitive nature later on, but I rated myself as weak. I never felt comfortable with it.”
Art Garfunkel was in the singing business for the singing, and nothing else; he surrendered his voice to the whims of his other half. “I started singing [because] my folks would harmonize…and they’d sing in thirds; [it was] pleasing… That really got me into this business more than anything in the world. Singing and being able to record it… And after I started singing to the tape recorder myself I said to my father, ‘I want to harmonize to it; let’s get a second recorder.’ … Paul lived three blocks away, and he would come around the house on a Sunday afternoon; it would be raining and we’d fool around with the recorders… [We were] off and running.”
“We started rehearsing in an amazingly professional way at a very early age. We had this tape recorder and this thing of ‘trying to sound like the real people’… The next thing to do was to get real good in singing, so we’d sing and harmonize and hold very serious, long rehearsals in his basement — and he’d strum, and we’d work on a song. We’d be sitting nose-to-nose, looking right at each other’s mouths to copy diction. I’d want to know exactly where his tongue would hit the top of his palate when he’d say a T, to know exactly how to get that T right. And I could see that you could be almost right or even better than almost right and that all of that really was the difference between whether or not it sounded professional. Then once you had it very precise you cooled it out and made it seem effortless.”
“So we tried writing our own songs and we’d take them into Manhattan; I used to remember those really scary subway rides: Paul’s got his guitar [and] we’re sitting on this dingy subway train going into Manhattan. We had seen the record companies’ addresses right on the label—and we had certain favorite records we liked—so we figured, ‘Well they’ll be receptive to us because they make good records.’” “It turned out that a lot of companies were in the Brill Building, 50th Street and Broadway. You’d go up and knock on the door and there would be this weird freaked-out black guy or this very fat, cigar-smoking Jewish businessman, and they’d be gruff and you knew it was really a hard thing to get into. If it weren’t for Paul… Paul was a lot of the drive in those days… I probably would have never done that myself.”
“Now, rock ‘n’ roll began—to my way of thinking—in around 1954, when Alan Freed came from Cleveland to New York and started playing all these far-out records. One day, in the ninth grade in ’54, I opened my desk and saw a note that one of the kids in the class was passing to a girl. It said, ‘Listen to Alan Freed’s rock ‘n’ roll show tonight. I have a dedication for you.’ That got me very curious, and I listened and was hooked-in right away—and so was Paul. I started listening every night. So, I think from the earliest time we listened, I think we sort of saw ourselves competitively. I did, anyway. I listened and I said, ‘I can do all that stuff, too.’”
“Alan Freed had taken this subversive music from Cleveland to New York City. He read dedications from teenage lovers before playing ‘Earth Angel’ [and] ‘Sincerely.’ When he played Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally,’ he left the studio mic open enough to hear him pounding a stack of telephone books to the backbeat. This was no Martin Block.”
“I [previously] listened to Martin Block’s ‘Make Believe Ballroom,’ but I didn’t really feel like singing along with the McGuire Sisters. In 1954, with Alan Freed and rock ‘n’ roll, hipness began for me. Then you could turn yourself on.” “I liked it all—Little Richard, Fats Domino, records that cooked. I liked the flavor those sounds had. ‘Earth Angel’ had a terrific flavor.”
“I loved to chart the top thirty songs. It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists [such as] when a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with ‘Rags to Riches.’ I watched the record jump from, say, #23 to #14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun. I was commercially aware through the Hit Parade, as well as involved in the music. Johnny Ray… the Crewcuts… Roy Hamilton ballads… Soon the Everly Brothers would take me for 'the Big Ride.’”
“Maybe I was in the land of payola; of ‘back alley enterprise’ and pill-head disc-jockeying, but what I felt was that Alan Freed loved us kids to dance, romance, and fall in love, and the music would send us. It sent me for life. It was rhythm and blues. It was black. It was from New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia. It was dirty music—read: sexual. One night, Alan Freed called it ‘rock ’n’ roll.’ Hip was born for me. Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis; Bobby Freeman asked, ‘Do you wanna dance, squeeze, and hug me all through the night?’ and you knew she did.”
“I was captured. So was Paul. [He] bought a guitar. We used my father’s wire recorder, then Paul’s Webcor tape machine. Holding rehearsals in our basements, we were little perfectionists… With the courage to listen and cringe about how not-right it was yet, we began to record…”
“Rhythm ‘n’ blues [and] rock ‘n’ roll came along… We practiced in the basement so much that we got professional-sounding. We made demos in Manhattan and knocked on all the doors of the record companies with our hearts in our throats.” “About three years of that kind of shit. Getting nowhere. Nobody realizing that we were good. They were businessmen who were a generation away from the kids who were making the hits, so they just didn’t trust [us]. After three years and about six songs and a lot of knocking on doors… We were frustrated, and we were going to give up.”
“We decided to make a demo of this one song we wrote, ‘Hey Schoolgirl in the Second Row,’ to see what happened—and then we’d give up.” Paul's father Louis took his old upright double-bass and backed the boys at a $10-an-hour studio session.
Paul's conception of the lyrics was an accident. He had been trying to recall the Everly Brothers’ song “Hey Doll Baby,” but instead he found himself singing something original. In their bass-backed recording session, Art and Paul were overheard by record promoter Sid Prosen and—after a quick call to Jack Garfunkel—Prosen signed the boys to his label, Big Records.
“A businessman named Sid Prosen was in the waiting room with his act, because he had studio time booked the hour after we had it. Between songs he said, ‘When you’re finished I want to talk to you guys.’ And afterwards he came on real heavy. ‘Greatest thing since the Everly Brothers. I’m going to make stars out of you.’ And at that point we had enough experience to separate the real offer from the phony. We didn’t want to get tied up again and not record. We said, ‘We’ll sign up if you’ll record us and release us within 60 days.’ He said for sure. We signed, did it, recorded, released it, and it was this medium hit.”
That was in 1956, and both boys were only fifteen years old. They were seniors in high school, slated to graduate early, having skipped a grade long ago. (In their first year out of FHHS, future-lawyer-turned-television host Jerry Springer would seat their empty desks.)
Sid Prosen renamed the duo “Tom & Jerry;” informing them required he bite his lip to keep from getting cheeky. Art Garfunkel became “Tom Graph,” due to his pension for tracking (re: graphing) pop hits. Paul Simon became “Jerry Landis,” with his new surname derivative of a former girlfriend. They borrowed not only the melodies but the fashion style of the Everly Brothers, donning red two-button blazers, pressed black slacks, white wingtips, and black seersucker ties—sometimes bowties—under finger-woven Harvard clip crew cuts and baby-faced smiles, blemished neither by acne nor sorrows.
As expected from a man named “Sid Prosen,” their promoter bribed disc-jockey Alan Freed with $200 to have “Hey Schoolgirl” played for one week during peak listening hours. Of course, the teeny-boppers caught the bug and requested it with frequency thereafter. It was on a regular rotation for months, across nationwide AM pop stations. “Hey Schoolgirl” reached #49 on the pop charts and sold 150,000 copies.
Tom & Jerry toured the tri-state area, performing at sock hops, school dances, and small concerts for a teenage crowd. The B-side single “Dancin’ Wild” failed to do much in 1957, but the power of “Hey Schoolgirl” landed Tom & Jerry on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in a headlining spot shared with rockabilly icon Jerry Lee Lewis. “That was big stuff. A record contract, red blazers, guest shots on ‘American Bandstand.’”
Paul and Art each earned $176 for the appearance, but the checks were never cut; the money went to Dick Clark on the eve of the show—an unfavorable aspect of the payola system, wherein promoters like Sid Prosen bribed hosts and venues to get publicity. Art later recalled, “We got a quick education in the record business.”
While Dick Clark never succumbed to the “payola scandal crackdown” of 1960—going on to host an eternity of New Year’s celebrations—dozens of hosts and DJs across the country were canned for accepting and demanding bribes. Among them was Alan Freed, “the father of rock ‘n’ roll.” He bridged a segregated gap with music that children of every color could jive to—but when word leaked that he had been taking payola, he was dropped from his radio and television shows. He pled guilty to commercial bribery and moved to California. No radio station would hire him, so he took to the bottle. He died drunk, from a ruptured liver, at the age of 43.
Art has remembered these “Tom & Jerry years” as “a big rush,” though his nostalgia for the era has faded. “It was a thrill for me. I had been watching [American Bandstand] in high school and…not only was I getting to know the kids, but they were carrying stacks of fan mail in their pockets and they were stars—and here I was, down there, feeling like a nobody with the stars… I went to the john a half-hour before we went on the air, and there were two of the kids I knew from TV in the urinals next to me. One was saying, ‘Who do we have today?’ ‘Oh, somebody named Tom & Jerry?’ The guy says, ‘Who are those jerks?’ It was hard for me to be the ‘star.’”
He and Paul shared 2% royalties on every gig and vinyl press, totaling some $4,000 by the end of the single’s popularity (an amount equal to nearly $36k in today’s dollars). Sid Prosen kept the rest of it (equating to nearly $2 million today) and, through Big Records, Tom & Jerry released four more singles: “Our Song,” “That’s My Story,” “Don’t Say Goodbye,” and a cover of “Baby Talk.” Unfortunately for Sid Prosen, none could replicate the success of their original hit, and within two years his Big Records label would be bankrupt.
Art Garfunkel had relished the limelight, but the emotional requirements of a performer’s lifestyle were too much for him at the time. “It was all over my head… I never would have done it if Paul hadn't pulled me along. I was too fearful of the competitive, adult world of rock ‘n’ roll.” “I never thought I was seriously going to make my living this way. I thought sooner or later I would do something more reputable… I was the kid who was going to go to college and find some way to make a decent living.”
He deposited his “Hey Schoolgirl” royalties in the bank and set his sights on an education at Columbia University. Returning to “relative obscurity” was, as he said, “easy… but,” he paused, meandering through memory, “I sure did always want to be famous.”
Three blocks away, Paul Simon was euphoric. He had acclimated to the “competitive, adult world of rock ‘n’ roll” and it satisfied him; it filled the holes in his sense of identity. The chubby-faced, gnomish boy from Queens had become a neighborhood legend, and his peers were laughing with him now, rather than at him.
He spent his “Hey Schoolgirl” royalties on a new Chevy Impala: scarlet; hardtop convertible; leather seats; purring engine. People could hear when Paul was coming down the block, and they’d go to their windows to wave down at him. He’d wave back. It was the dream.
Artie may have semi-retired, but Paul was just getting started. He signed a contract with Sid Prosen to start a solo career. Sid thought Paul had an “Elvis-like” sound that could be cultivated into something big. Paul was christened “True Taylor” by Prosen and, once again, Louis Simon took his old upright double-bass and composed a single with his son.
Titled “True or False,” this song—a quirky rockabilly anthem—was styled to sound like the singer posing questions to a girl he fancies. Music journalist Jordan Runtagh said it sounded more like “a rock song written by someone's dad,” which it was. Worse yet, the lyrics were “often…unintelligible” by Paul’s attempt at emulating Elvis, which sounded less soulful and more a “hiccupy hee-haw.” After achieving stardom, Paul Simon would unshelve this musical mistake only once: to file a 1967 lawsuit blocking further reproduction of the record.
Back in 1958, Paul and Artie were walking home from school when the first pressing of the 7-inch 45-rpm “True or False” vinyl singles arrived on the Simon family’s doorstep. Art was blindsided; he had not known of Paul’s solo endeavor, nor had he expected it. Paul argued that Art had walked away from Tom & Jerry to focus on his grades. Art said he had not given up on the pairing, even if they were no longer recording, to which Paul agreed — Tom and Jerry had stopped recording, but Paul still wanted to.
Art countered. Paul rebuffed. “True or False” failed to chart.
The storm of hurt feelings subsided, in time, and they reunited as friends. Paul ultimately apologized, but the True Taylor incident had left a stain on their relationship. As Jordan Runtagh wrote, “While it would ultimately blow over in the short term, it would become a sore spot for years to come. More than its musical legacy, ‘True or False’ is notable for sewing the seeds of resentment that would shape the pair's relationship for the rest of their lives.”
Peter Carlin added, in his unauthorized biography of the bard, “The selfishness Paul displayed…had webbed their friendship with cracks… The tenderness between them had faded. You can still love someone who shoves you aside, but you can no longer trust him in quite the same way.”
The boys graduated from FHHS and parted. Paul stayed in the neighborhood, with his Chevy Impala, and he attended Queens College for literature. Art moved uptown to Manhattan's Columbia University, to study architecture, though he ultimately settled for a degree in mathematics. They fell out of contact and didn't speak to one another for the next five years.
In the final weeks of the 1950s, Paul was cruising the neighborhood in his Chevy Impala when the engine jolted. Something misfired—likely, an errant electrical plug—and smoke began to bleed up from under the hood. His engine was overheating and, within minutes, the dashboard had become as red-hot as the exterior paint job.
Paul scrambled out from his car only seconds before the passenger windows blew out. The white interior blackened and the windshield melted, as did the convertible hardtop. Paul watched his “Hey Schoolgirl” royalties soften, fold, and fuse to the asphalt.
As the firefighters arrived—called in by a neighbor—Paul turned his gaze to his surroundings, only to realize he was standing outside of the Garfunkel family home.
On evenings and weekends, in his Ivy League sanctuary, Art wrote and recorded a series of solo efforts under the name “Artie Garr.” His singles presented him as a “folk-styled crooner,” and he tried greatly to be known as such, but the passion wasn't there. By 1960, he was focusing purely on academics.
And when he wasn't focused purely on academics, he was practicing skiing, fencing, tennis, and bowling; he was singing a cappella with the all-male Columbia Kingsmen; and he was throwing nerds-only ragers at the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house.
At Queens College, interestingly enough, Paul had also fallen-in with the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. He worked towards a degree in English literature, sharing the quad with future alumni Jerry Seinfeld and Ron Jeremy. During these four years, Paul continued to write and record his own music. He was prolific as a soloist, but he was not successful.
Upon graduation, Paul enrolled at the Brooklyn Law School—a decision made in a gully of self-doubt, at the unspoken insistence of his father. However, as his first semester dragged on, Paul became evermore convinced that he was not destined for a professional career. He was born to be a rock 'n’ roller.
And that meant getting the band back together.
