Art Garfunkel

I’ve always felt sorry for Art Gar­funkel because its always felt like he’s got­ten a raw deal from the music world. While Paul Simon has basked in the lime­light for decades, poor Art could prob­a­bly walk down the street and go com­pletely unno­ticed by the major­ity of Amer­i­cans. On fur­ther exam­i­na­tion though you see that he’s lived the typ­i­cal rock star life, with both ups and downs.

He teams up with his friend from child­hood, Paul Simon, and made their first record that went nowhere. So he and Simon broke up, Simon moved to the U.K., and while he was over­seas some sta­tions started play­ing a song, “The Sounds of Silence”, off of their first album, but instead of the way that they’d writ­ten it their pro­ducer took Bob Dylan’s band and over­dubbed it with elec­tric gui­tars. “The Sounds of Silence” went to #1.

So to cap­i­tal­ize on their suc­cess Simon came back to the U.S. and they toured and made a lot of money but it all came crash­ing down when Garfunkel’s solo efforts (Simon also was doing solo mate­r­ial) didn’t chart as high as Simon’s and he started to drop out of the spot­light. That was fol­lowed by more albums that failed to hardly chart and he dropped into fits of depres­sion. Even after team­ing back up with Simon he was mixed out of an album that was sup­posed to be jointly released by the two of them (Simon’s Hearts and Bones) and before long he was scrap­ing for what seemed like Simon’s table scraps.

The worst part about his whole musi­cal career? He never wrote any of the songs he and Paul Simon sang together; he was just a singer, a good one, but not a song­writer. It wasn’t until 2003 that he released his first album of songs that he wrote (Every­thing Waits to Be Noticed).

He’s tried act­ing, poetry and he’s gone through the sui­cides of sev­eral peo­ple close to him. Prob­a­bly in spite of all of what’s hap­pened to him we ought to call him a semi-failed Renais­sance man, albeit a semi-failed Renais­sance man whose made a truck­loads of money.

So Art, after all these years I salute you. You’ve never given up. Keep on truckin’.