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November 14, 2003/Cheshvan 19 5764, Vol. 56, No. 8
Homeward bound
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
Music and memories.
Any doubt what a potent combination that can be was dispelled the moment two aging folk heroes took the stage at America West Arena last Sunday night.
There was Art Garfunkel, white shirt and skinny black tie outlining his tall, thin torso topped by trademark reddish frizz, and Paul Simon in red T-shirt and jeans, short, pudgy and balding, guitar slung rakishly over his shoulder. From the first riff to the last flourish, they held the crowd in tight sway and didn't let go.
We wouldn't let them.
The music was too good, the memories too powerful.
Both washed over us as we swayed and sang along, clapping our hands and tapping our feet to the resonant beat. The words were intelligible, the lyrics intelligent. They spoke to us - and of us - of truth and love and meaning and purpose, of what we were all searching for when we were young, of what we were recovering now, for a couple of charmed hours, bar by familiar bar. It was the voice of a generation - our generation and theirs - birthed in the shadow of World War II, brought up in the peace and prosperity of the '50s, coming of age in the turbulence of the '60s. So it was their voice - Art Garfunkel's pleasing tenor and Paul Simon's doleful bass - that resonated for us then - and now.
The duo, now both 62, friends since the sixth grade, grew up in each other's kitchens, they say. Their "Old Friends" tour was billed as a reunion, the most recent attempt at patching up past differences and letting a nostalgic public pay top dollar to reminisce with them. And it was old friends who swarmed to see them, old friends whose lives were informed as much by the music as by the memories of those times past.
They were exciting times. We were a generation tuned into "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Father Knows Best," whose mothers were in the kitchen and fathers in the office, who respected authority and hewed to social convention, who then became the generation who upended social order and turned political precept on its head. We were the generation who marched and protested, who burned our bras and flags, who understood that the sounds of silence never changed anything and that if we were going to remake America, we had to be that bridge over troubled water.
Ah, youth, its ebullience, its idealism.
So here we sat, a crush of mesmerized, graying baby boomers. And it felt, well, good, maybe even, I'm embarrassed to say, groovy.
The duo had keyed into the emotional potency of their music.
They understood as well as we did the power of shared recollection, the energy that is released from simultaneous group experience. It validates the connection, validates who we are, what we've done, while at the same time closing the circle between where we've come from and where we've gone.
Homeward bound, crooned the duo. Yup, that was where they were taking us. "Home, where my thought's escaping; home, where my music's playing; home, where my love lies waiting; silently for me."
Contact the writer at vicki_cabot@jewishaz.com.
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