When Garfunkel divorced Linda Marie Grossman he started dating Laurie Bird — actress and photographer. Their relationship had a tragic end in 1979 when she took her own life. After the event, Simon approached Garfunkel and offered a reunion.
Almost a decade after “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, the pair reunited to host a free concert in Central Park, New York. It had an incredible turnout – more than half a million people attended the concert, and we really can’t blame them – if they reunited today they would probably draw that many.
An Uneven Balance
While it seems impossible to separate the two when it comes to their music, in fact, their musical work was quite unbalanced. Simon wrote all the music, played guitar for almost all the songs, and sang backup, while Garfunkel just sang lead.
For the most part, this is because Garfunkel was the better singer, but he also did a lot of the work building the vocal arrangements and harmonies. However, it's true that a bulk of the work came from Simon, and it's easy to look back now that Paul Simon became a successful solo artist, and Garfunkel...didn't.
We Move Into the Seventies
With the band now officially broken up – for the time, at least – Simon and Garfunkel parted ways. Garfunkel quit music and worked as a math professor. During the period he also married architect Linda Marie Grossman, though the marriage only lasted three years.
Garfunkel often called this phase a strange one in his life. He recalled his students raising their hands in class and ask what the Beatles were like. It's possible he was happy to talk about his past but just as likely he would have rather focused on the math.
The Concert Recording
There are few concerts more well known than the 1979 reunion. It had one of the largest attendances in concert history. When Warner Bros. Records released a live album of the show, it went double platinum. A ninety-minute recording of the concert was sold to HBO to the tune of one million dollars.
The concert created a renewed interest in Simon and Garfunkel. After talks to smooth out some problems, a world tour began in 1982, but as in the past, the relationship grew contentious. For the majority of the tour, they didn't even speak to each other.
The Famous Walks of Art Garfunkel
We all like to take walks sometimes. But none of us take walks like Garfunkel. Dan Nash, a sound engineer for the duo, claimed that if Simon upset Garfunkel he would disappear for days, and claim he was just on a walk.
Simon's demand for independence over the production frustrated Garfunkel, and they even worked in separate studios. Simon was very aware that having them at the same place would improve the sound of the tracks and satisfy a lot of people, but he also knew the incredible rows that would build out of being in close working contact.