Garfunkel makes gift in making most of present

Art Garfunkel sees the present as a gift, something with which to make his best performance ever when he takes the stage.

The taller tenor in the duet with Paul Simon that captivated the world in the 1960s with such hits as “The Sounds of Silence,” “I Am A Rock,” “Homeward Bound” and “Mrs. Robinson” will perform at 6 p.m. Sunday at the Calvin Gilmore Theater in Myrtle Beach. Accompanied by only a guitarist, Garfunkel will reflect on the decades with a mix of music, poetry and stories.

“All that matters is in the present tense,” Garfunkel said last month by phone from home in New York, sounding avuncular and so easily approachable the way a college student might view his or her favorite professor.

Peforming Simon & Garfunkel smashes such as “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” – which he co-wrote with Simon – and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” on which he sang lead – Garfunkel said, “I will look at my shoes, ready to step forward” and deliver the best rendition “I’ve done in my life.”

Asked about hearing fans’ sentiment about memories they associate with songs, Garfunkel said that “in the eye of the hurricane,” he’s not sure how people perceive them, but he’s content as a “workaholic – refining, refining, refining” for that next performance, again returning to “the present – that is the tense.”

Music’s endurance and power in humanity leaves Garfunkel intrigued, or in his own word, “bemused,” all thanks to what must thinks must be “a gentle music god” showing up in so many ways. Garfunkel brought up Glen Campbell’s coping with Alzheimer’s disease, but also the news reports that earlier, when he was shown a certain chord pattern, he’d take the neck of his guitar, and with his fingers, “he knew all the frets” to play.

“The complicated fret work has not left him at all,” Garfunkel said. “That tells me that the circuits in our brain connected to music are the longest lasting. It’s special.”

When fielding a question about singing a suite including “Words from an Old Spanish Carol” and “Carol of the Birds” with a chorus and Amy Grant – his partner on their “An Animals’ Christmas” album from 1986 – in a segment from her “Headin’ Home For The Holidays” TV special later that year – and later renamed “Amy Grant’s Old-Fashioned Christmas” when released on VHS – Garfunkel instantly brought up the multicolor design on the sweater he sported in that taping.

Applauding that “very elaborate oratorio” scored for orchestra by its composer, Jimmy Webb, Garfunkel called that recording project “brilliant,” and he noted its studio recording in London, the West Indies, and Nashville, Tenn.

Garfunkel, who turns 75 in November, will turn a new page in his life with plans in fall 2017 for release of his autobiography,” which he summed up as “30 years in the making.”

The married father of sons ages 25 and 10 calls them “the center of my life.” He said the elder, who “sings better than I do,” has enjoyed living in Europe, also appreciating “the Russian spirit” and that country’s long history. Walking the younger boy to school in the morning remains a perk in life, and Garfunkel’s glad to found “the traditional family thing.”

Walking on a grander scale, Garfunkel has tallied his steps, all the way across continents, such as Europe – from western Ireland, southeast to Istanbul, Turkey, “from the late 1990s to two years ago” – and the United States, “from the mid-’80s to mid-’90s” – from a Manhattan apartment to the mouth of the Columbia River, bordering Oregon and Washington state. He said every excursion spans many segments, always going “back to where you left off,” to get the full “topography, the lay of the land.”

“It makes you feel earthy,” he said. “It makes me feel right. I keep a notebook in my back pocket, for when the inspiration hits. It’s great for the lungs. A singer loves this kind of thing – the air, the emptiness, where nobody’s listening, the puffy clouds, their shapes, the change of latitude, the aloneness.”

On another serious note, the poet in Garfunkel never forgot his reaction after seeing Elizabeth Taylor on the cover of Time magazine after her death in 2011, a reminder to value the present even more: “We give one-sixth their worth to those alive; afterward the other five.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2016 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Garfunkel makes gift in making most of present."