Simon & Garfunkel's Blog
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Simon & Garfunkel Kick Off 2009 Tour In Australia & New Zealand
What was called an early Valentine’s gift for New York fans, today became a love letter penned exclusively for Australia and New Zealand.
Simon & Garfunkel, ranked among the greatest artists of all time, are to tour the Antipodes for eight concerts in June promoter Michael Chugg, Executive Chairman of Chugg Entertainment, announced today.
The world’s first and only confirmed 2009 tour dates for the beloved duo; the news comes just weeks after their surprise three-song performance at New York’s Beacon Theatre on Valentine’s eve.
Having not visited Australia for more than 25 years, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel will kick off their antipodean tour in New Zealand playing Auckland’s Vector Arena on Saturday June 13.
Across the Tasman, the prodigious-pair start their Australian Tour at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on June 17 before two concerts at both Sydney’s Acer Arena on June 20 and 21 and Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena, June 25 and 26. They will play the Adelaide Entertainment Centre on June 30 before finishing at Perth’s Burswood Dome on July 2.
For all shows, a special Visa Entertainment pre-sale starts at 12 noon local time on Monday 6th April and runs until 5pm Wednesday 8th April; Australian tickets go on sale to the general public via Ticketek on Friday 17th April, with New Zealand tickets on sale the same day through Ticketmaster.
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel last toured Australia and New Zealand in 1983 with their Summer Evening Tour. They return with their Old Friends In Concert Tour, which wowed US and European audiences in 2004, the last time the twosome teamed up.
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel have been friends, but more like family, for more than 50 years.
For the six years from 1964 to 1970 Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel changed the world’s musical landscape. They made songs that when you hear them are time immortal. They painted an essential soundscape to an era with stroke after stroke of genius, including The Sound of Silence, Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Boxer, Mrs. Robinson, Homeward Bound, Scarborough Fair/Canticle, I Am a Rock, A Hazy Shade of Winter, and America to name just some in example of their virtuosity.
As a duo, Simon & Garfunkel have sold more than 40 million albums in the U.S. alone; received five Grammy Awards – including the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award – and were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
“We’re the first and only territory in the world that Simon and Garfunkel have confirmed concerts for,” said Michael Chugg.
“It’s been 25 years since they’ve been here and I’d put money on the table this will likely be the last time for us with these two legends together.
“This is probably a twice in a lifetime chance, but the last time you’ll get to take it I’d say.
And finally, to the words of one reviewer who saw them last month at the Beacon, “…the two of them proceed to do something no one else in the world can do. It’s magic.”
The artistry and intelligence of Simon and Garfunkel in concert is not to be missed.
Tickets for all Australian shows go on sale 9am, Friday 17 April through www.ticketek.com.au or 132 849
Tickets for New Zealand go on sale 9am, Friday 17 April through www.ticketmaster.co.nz or (09) 970 9700.
The first pre-sale, for Visa cardholders, starts at 12noon local time on Monday 6th April. Go to www.visaentertainment.com.au for Australia, and www.visaentertainment.co.nz for New Zealand for more information...
SIMON AND GARFUNKEL – AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND TOUR INFORMATION
Saturday 13 June Vector Arena Auckland, NZ
Wednesday 17 June Entertainment Centre Brisbane, QLD
Saturday 20 June Acer Arena Sydney, NSW
Sunday 21 June Acer Arena Sydney, NSW
Thursday 25 June Rod Laver Arena Melbourne, VIC
Friday 26 June Rod Laver Arena Melbourne, VIC
Tuesday 30 June Entertainment Centre Adelaide, SA
Thursday 2 July Burswood Dome Perth, WA
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Simon & Garfunkel Live 1969
In the fall 1969, at the absolute pinnacle of their decade-and-a-half working association – and with two Grammy Awards, four multi-million selling Columbia LPs and nearly a dozen hit singles under their belts, including the #1’s “The Sounds Of Silence” and “Mrs. Robinson,” and their penultimate album masterpiece, Bridge Over Troubled Water, newly recorded (but not yet released) – Simon & Garfunkel undertook a major North American tour, what turned out to be their final tour together for the next 13 years.
Though there were occasional surprise reunions down the years, the litany of Simon & Garfunkel’s powerful work has always resided in the 1960s. Of their work onstage, only a few sanctioned live concert recordings were made by Columbia, but not a note of it was heard on any official album until the Legacy era in 1997 – when the three-CD Old Friends box set unveiled five songs from the Lincoln Center concert in New York of January 1967. In 2002, the entire concert was finally issued as Live From New York City 1967, on Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAIN,,MENT.
Chronologically situated in the aftermath of Woodstock, and just weeks before Altamont, comes SIMON & GARFUNKEL LIVE 1969, a 17-song chronicle of the final tour, raising the curtain for a second time on what the duo felt like and sounded like in their seminal years. Gathering songs that were recorded during October and November in six cities – Detroit, Toledo, Carbon,,dale, Illinois, St. Louis, Long Beach, and New York – reissue producer Bob Irwin (who has overseen every release of Simon & Garfunkel material for Legacy over the past decade) has seamlessly re-created the magic of those concerts. This eagerly anticipated album will arrive at both physical and digital retail outlets on April 14, 2009.
“The performances on LIVE 1969,” writes Bud Scoppa in his liner notes, “were impeccably recorded, and that is a good thing indeed, because Simon & Garfunkel were in absolute peak form at the time, their imminent estrangement notwithstanding.” Scoppa also penned the notes for the five individual original albums that were packaged together as expanded editions in the 2001 box set Simon & Garfunkel: The Columbia Studio Recordings (1964-1970) – namely Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (1964); Sounds Of Silence (early-1966); Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme (late-1966); Bookends (1968); and Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970).
Three major differences set LIVE 1969 apart from its predecessor, the 18-song Live From New York City 1967, beginning with the fact that the latter was a single concert, while the new release is a compilation of definitive performances from different cities on different nights.
Second, in purely chronological terms, the 1967 concert was (for the most part) comprised of songs drawn only from the first three Simon & Garfunkel LPs. (The exceptions were two songs, both singles, that had not yet found their way onto albums, “A Hazy Shade Of Winter” and “You Don’t Know Where Your Interest Lies.”) The lion’s share of seven numbers at the 1967 concert originated on Sounds Of Silence. The duo had rigorously toured in North America and Europe in support of that album for all of 1966 into ’67, during which they landed three LPs and four singles inside the top 30 on the Billboard charts – no mean feat.
In contrast, of course, LIVE 1969 broadens the scope of songs as the timeline moves ahead nearly three full years. Now, the concerts encompassed the release of Bookends and looked forward to the imminent release of Bridge Over Troubled Water in late-January 1970. On tour in 1969, in addition to dropping any songs from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., Scoppa sums up “the 17 songs gathered on this collection, four apiece from Sounds Of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme (both released in 1966), three from Bookends (1968) and five from Bridge. The obvious inspiration for the lone outside selection, the Gene Autry-co-written ‘That Silver-Haired Daddy Of Mine,’ was the Everlys, who’d sung it on their autobiographical 1958 LP, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us.”
Third and perhaps most importantly – and certainly most interestingly – is that 1967 presented an acoustic folk duo onstage. LIVE 1969 begins and ends with the acoustic folk duo, but Simon & Garfunkel play “the meat of their sets” (Scoppa) with four superb and legendary studio musicians who were among the stellar backing cast of the Bridge Over Troubled Water sessions. After reportedly spending more than 800 hours over a two year span recording the album – and after three previous albums that employed full complements of studio musicians – it came as no surprise when fans saw the duo onstage in the company of Hal Blaine (drums), Joe Osborn (bass), and Larry Knechtel (keyboards) – mainstays of Hollywood’s so-called ‘Wrecking Crew’ – and Nashville A-Team guitarist Fred Carter, Jr.
Bridge Over Troubled Water took on a life of its own around the world as one of history’s greatest achievements in recorded music. But by early 1970, not long after its release, the partnership of Simon & Garfunkel had run its course. Through the years, hopes and dreams of reunions have been fulfilled in unexpected ways – among them, their benefit performance at Madison Square Garden for 1972 Presidential candidate George McGovern; an appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live in 1975 to promote a one-off single, “My Little Town” (that both artists included on their solo albums at the time) and a return to SNL in 1977; a collaboration with James Taylor on an update of Sam Cooke’s “(What a) Wonderful World” in ’78, intended for Art’s solo album at the time; their record-setting free concert in New York’s Central Park, September 1981, subsequently issued as a double-LP in ’82, followed by a European tour that year and a U.S. tour in ’83; a performance at their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1990; and their sold-out 21-show run at the Paramount Theatre of Madison Square Garden in 1993.
A full decade passed before they sang together in public again, in recognition of their Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys in 2003. The event inspired a two-month North American tour from October through December that year. In conjunction with the tour, Legacy “inducted” the duo into its prestigious series of double-CD retrospectives with The Essential Simon & Garfunkel. The 33-song collection spanned recordings from 1964 to 1975, including every song to hit the Hot 100 on Columbia, plus 10 album tracks, and eight live performances.
It was a perfect companion to Old Friends, the three-CD box set from 1997, which contained 59 tracks – their entire output of chart singles and a majority of the album tracks from their five original LPs, plus 15 previously unreleased tracks, including unissued demos, Christmas songs, newly-discovered masters (of unissued songs), and ten live performances.
Most recently, in March 2004, The Paul Simon Songbook made its historic reappearance on Columbia/Legacy. The most coveted, impossible-to-find album in the Simon & Garfunkel canon, it was recorded by him during his 1965 sojourn in London, the year after the release of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. The rare Songbook LP contained Simon’s early versions of six songs that would be recorded in new versions in New York in 1966 for Sounds Of Silence (“I Am A Rock,” “Leaves That Are Green,” “April Come She Will,” “The Sound Of Silence,” “A Most Peculiar Man,” and “Kathy’s Song”), as well as three songs that would be recorded later that year for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (“A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission),” “Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall,” “Patterns,” and “The Side Of A Hill,” the counter melody of “Scarborough Fair Canticle”).
The release of SIMON & GARFUNKEL LIVE 1969 fills a monumental gap in the duo’s history. It sheds light not only on their development but on the American cultural and political landscape at the height of the Civil Rights and free speech and Anti-War movements that involved so many of their listeners and concert-goers. It was, “a time of great extremes, a tumultuous era,” Scoppa writes. “In short, it was an era similar in many ways to the one we’re now living through. We needed Simon & Garfunkel then, and we could very much use their equivalent now, 40 years later.”
SIMON & GARFUNKEL LIVE 1969 (Columbia/Legacy 82796 92582 2) Selections: 1. Homeward Bound (E) 2. At The Zoo (F) 3. The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) (C) 4. Song For The Asking (E) 5. For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her (D) 6. Scarbo,,rough Fair/Canticle (F) 7. Mrs. Robinson (From the Motion Picture The Graduate) (C) 8. The Boxer (E) 9. Why Don’t You Write Me (E) 10. So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright (C) 11. That Silver-Haired Daddy Of Mine (E) 12. Bridge Over Troubled Water (F) 13. The Sound Of Silence (C) 14. I Am A Rock (C) 15. Old Friends/Bookends Theme (B) 16. Leaves That Are Green (A) 17. Kathy’s Song (D).
Live recordings:
A) Detroit, Michigan – October 31, 1969
B) Toledo, Ohio – November 1, 1969
C) Carbondale, Illinois – November 8, 1969
D) St. Louis, Missouri –
E) Long Beach Arena, California – November 15, 1969
F) Carnegie Hall, New York – November 27, 1969
Origins:
Tracks 13,14,16,17 – originated on Sounds Of Silence.
Tracks 1,3,5,6 – originated on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme.
Tracks 2,7,15 – originated on Bookends.
Tracks 4,8,9,10,12 – originated on Bridge Over Troubled Water.
Track 11 – originated on Songs Our Daddy Taught Us by the Everly Brothers.
Simon & Garfunkel Live 1969 is available now on Amazon. -
Live 1969 - Starbucks exclusive CD
In November 1969, Simon & Garfunkel embarked on a cross-country tour. The shows were recorded in anticipation of a live album that would follow up the release of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" in January 1970. They performed songs from Bridge on the tour as well as other staples, plus some unexpected chestnuts. A few of the live recordings were used on the original S&G "Greatest Hits" album, issued in 1972, but the rest of have never been heard as the live album never materialized and the band would soon break up afterwards. They are collected here for the first time on Live 1969.
Simon & Garfunkel performed part of the live set as an acoustic duo, and then would bring an all-star band out to accompany them for a portion of the show. The band consisted of Hal Blaine on drums, Joe Osbourne on bass, Larry Knectel ..boards, and Fred Carter, Jr. on guitar. These folks played on Bridge as well. S&G would then finish the show with duo performances This set contains both acoustic and full band performances from the tour, including an incredible version of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" – one of the first performances ever of that song – with the audience going crazy over it.
This astounding album, available exclusively at Starbucks, shows S&G laid back and at the absolute top of their game at this time. It would shortly end afterwards.
Tracklist:
1.Homeward Bound
2.At The Zoo
3.The
4.Song For The Asking
5.Punky's Dilemma
6.
7.Mrs. Robinson
8.The Boxer
9.Why Don't You Write Me
10.So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright
11.That Silver-Haired Daddy Of Mine (this is the only non-controlled comp)
12.Bridge Over Troubled Water
13.The Sound Of Silence
14.I Am A Rock
15.Old Friends / Bookends Theme
16. Leaves That Are Green
All tracks previously unreleased