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.
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.
Eleven Years Later
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.
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.
The Walking Man
Art Garfunkel really liked to walk. According to legend, he's walked across much of Japan and a great deal of Europe. He would take long walking trips across America starting in the eighties. By the mid-nineties, he had made forty-one walks, which cumulatively took him across the entire country.
In a 2020 interview with "Mojo", he said that he would go out for a week or two, walk twenty miles or so during the day, and have an assistant take him to a motel when it got dark. He'd walk eight days in a row and have one day off, then return home to his life.