Art still feelin' groovy

By MAGGIE TAIT

Art Garfunkel is like a cow grazing on life's grass and sometimes he is like a tree branching.

Says the famous counter-tenor pop singer about his career: "I don't think that way too much, I suppose I go through life - like my wife says - like a cow grazing. There's grass in front of you, you munch on that. When you're finished you see there's new grass so you munch on that."

However, he says down the line from New York, he always chooses projects that challenge him.

"I go through life sort of stretching out with what I'm doing as if what's guiding me is to do better at what I do and to get a richer, more saturated connection with it - like a tree that's branching."

Garfunkel started singing and recording at age 4 after his father bought him an early tape recorder.

Seven years later he was singing Everly Brothers songs at school talent shows with his friend Paul Simon. The pair were from the same neighbourhood, Forest Hills in Queens, New York.

In 1957 the duo, known as Tom and Jerry, scored a recording contract and their first song, Hey Schoolgirl, was a moderate hit.

In 1963 they started performing as Simon and Garfunkel and achieved international fame with such classics as Sounds of Silence, Bridge over Troubled Water, Hazy Shade of Winter, Scarborough Fair and The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy). They won five Grammy awards.

In the early 1960s Garfunkel was at Columbia University doing an arts degree, after two years of which he elected to study architecture.

"And I sort of wasted 3 1/2 years and then I started singing.

"I kinda reformed singing with Paul and we'd meet up in my apartment on Amsterdam Ave uptown in Manhattan where the roaches were in the kitchen.

"Paul would bring these tunes he was writing, like Sounds of Silence, to the kitchen and I would flip - they were great. We'd start harmonising them and the tiles in this little kitchen made it sound really nice. We got our recording contract right about that time and I dropped out of architecture school."

He briefly branched out from singing into acting and was in several films including Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge and Catch-22.

After Simon and Garfunkel split in 1970, Garfunkel began a solo career which generated some hits but paled compared to Simon's. But Garfunkel prefers not to discuss the downsides.

"I will say it has its problems, the press, and you know to be dragged into negativity that is the down-side. There's very little else that's not quite a nice opportunity to, I dunno, to be real, to have fun."

On his tour here - on which his son James, 11, will sing backing vocals - he has a packed timetable with shows on three consecutive days. He has also just finished an as yet unnamed album to be released later in the year. Where does the 61-year-old find the energy? "The things that look tough are the essence of the job. To be a vocalist with a good voice that's fresh; to put life into Scarborough Fair even though you've sung it many times, but to really truly enjoy it tonight for the umpteenth time, that is what the job is."

Garfunkel is concerned about the effect the internet is having on music. He thinks it is destroying the integrity of music and is turning it into "wallpaper. It's all software and there goes music ...

"You lose the loveliness of the song somehow or the writer's right to get paid for the exploiting of the song that he or she wrote. If you lose that ... then you have music as water. It's too egalitarian."

Garfunkel has visited New Zealand twice before - he performed with Paul Simon here in 1983 - and the keen walker says he would love to go tramping.

"I think it's too hectic, but if it's not I'll break out if I get half a day ... I love New Zealand's beauty."NZPA

* Art Garfunkel plays at the ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre, Friday June 28.