Art Garfunkel has never fully forgiven Paul Simon for Graceland. That is not the standard narrative about the album — the standard narrative is one of triumph, of creative reinvention, of a middle-aged musician traveling to South Africa and finding in township music a sound that revitalized his career and produced one of the most celebrated albums of the 1980s. The standard narrative is correct. It is also incomplete.
The years leading up to Graceland had been, by Simon’s own account, the worst of his professional life. His 1983 album Hearts and Bones had been a commercial failure so complete that Warner Bros. considered dropping him. The album had been conceived as a Simon and Garfunkel reunion project — the two men had toured together in 1983 to enormous success and the expectation was that a studio album would follow. Instead, Simon removed Garfunkel’s contributions during post-production, replaced them with his own vocals, and released the album as a solo record. Garfunkel, who had spent months recording his parts, discovered what had happened essentially when the public did.
The wound from that decision has never healed. Garfunkel has described it in interviews with a restraint that makes the pain more rather than less visible — the careful words of a man who has decided that public bitterness is undignified but who cannot entirely conceal what is underneath them. Simon has acknowledged the decision was made abruptly and without adequate communication. He has not apologized for the creative choice. He made a record he believed in more without Garfunkel than with him. The friendship never recovered to what it had been.
And then, from the wreckage of Hearts and Bones, came Graceland.
Simon had heard a bootleg cassette of South African township music — Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II — in his car in 1984. He listened to it repeatedly and then flew to Johannesburg, to the consternation of the cultural boycott that had isolated South Africa internationally during apartheid. He recorded with Black South African musicians — Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the Boyoyo Boys, Los Lobos, the a cappella group that opens the album — paying them industry rates, crediting them fully, and creating a collaborative process that many of the musicians involved have described as the most respectful cross-cultural recording experience of their careers.
The album that resulted sold fourteen million copies. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year. It introduced mbaqanga and township jive to a global audience. It is consistently ranked among the greatest albums ever made and it revived Simon’s career so completely that the commercial failure of Hearts and Bones was not merely forgotten but essentially erased from the narrative.
Simon and Garfunkel fans never forgave him. Not because the album was bad — they could hear that it wasn’t — but because it was so emphatically, so successfully not a Simon and Garfunkel album. Because it proved, in the most public way possible, that the thing they had loved most had not been as necessary to Simon as it had been to them. He didn’t need Garfunkel to make a masterpiece. He needed South Africa.
That truth, which Graceland demonstrated simply by existing, is what fans struggle to accept. And Garfunkel most of all.