PAUL SIMON: Songs of A Thinking Man

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It takes some effort on Simon's part to stay in such heady company. His apartment, elegant and ordered, always has a guitar handy, but there are books of poetry (Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin) open all around the living room, within easy reach, like so many cerebral snacks. In case this sounds a little rarefied for a rock guy -- even a rock guy who sang a few tunes to Derek Walcott's poetry class at Boston University -- it should be added that Simon also enjoys listening to music as various as Miles Davis, Prince and Public Enemy. It's not always the sounds of silence up there on Central Park West.

It was those very sounds, of course, that made stars of Simon and his best friend from Forest Hills, Queens, Art Garfunkel. Under the "nom de 45" Tom & Jerry, the boys had a minor hit single in 1957, then followed the folk-music trail into the new decade. Oft-told rock legend 192: how a house producer at Columbia Records without Paul's knowledge added electric guitar, drums and bass to an earnest, intimate, acoustic ballad of Simon's; and how The Sounds of Silence, with its new rock underpinnings, became a No. 1 single in 1966. It was a fluke, but Paul and Artie were smart enough, gifted enough and fast enough to build on it and go for a long, sweet ride.

"My best memories go back to the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme days, when we were beginning to make albums more carefully, that we really liked," Garfunkel says of those post-Silence days. "When we sat back and listened to the playback of that record, it was a high point in my career." The highest came in 1970 with the release of Bridge over Troubled Water, which remains in the top 50 best-selling albums of all time. It was also the last album Simon and Garfunkel would make together.

"We never thought Simon and Garfunkel was going to break up," Garfunkel says. "We just thought we'd take a break from each other." "Going out solo was my decision," Simon says now. "But I was nervous about it." The record company had a case of the corporate faints: Simon was busting up an act whose last record had sold 10 million copies. But the boys were having problems. Garfunkel was getting absorbed in acting, while Paul was taking his first turns down various lightly charted musical byways. "There was stuff I wanted to do anyway that Artie wouldn't have done," says Simon. "He wouldn't have gone to Jamaica to do Mother and Child Reunion. I know that he wouldn't have thought it was interesting." On Bridge, Simon adds, "maybe we sang four ((songs)) together. The rest is his solo or my solo. Artie and I were over by January 1970. We were really over before the '70s began."