Garfunkel ends silence, sets voice on Modesto

Art Garfunkel believes the lobster did it.

Four years ago while having dinner at The Palm restaurant in New York City, the singer swallowed while talking and “a strand of the lobster got caught in my throat.”

“This was a real bad one,” he says. “I panicked. The coughing and the kicking it up might have broken a blood vessel. I don’t know. I just know that in the ensuing couple of weeks, the voice went coarse, and all of my finesse in the midrange got crude.”

It was frightening, especially for a man who has made most of his living for the past 50 years with his gossamer croon. He saw a few doctors but got nothing from the visits except expensive bills. He went to a vocal coach; that, too, did no good.

So Garfunkel shut up for about six months – no singing and little talking. Then tentatively, he started singing to himself and then at wife Kathryn’s Buddhist organization, where the people were supportive though Garfunkel admits he performed poorly.

He soon booked small halls around New York City, just him and a microphone, to hear how his voice sounded through amplification.

It sounded like a mess.

But four years later, after persistent and careful self-directed vocal exercises, his voice has recovered.

“Adrenaline helps you mend. I’ve done shows where it’s not there yet, but I’ve forged ahead, anyway,” says Garfunkel, who turned 73 on Wednesday. “It’s like jumping off a diving board. There may be water in the pool, maybe not, but I’m gonna dive anyway.”

Garfunkel will bring his mended voice to Modesto’s Gallo Center for the Arts for a show Monday.

The six-time Grammy winner is perhaps best known as half of Simon & Garfunkel, the folk-pop duo he formed with his childhood chum, legendary singer-songwriter Paul Simon. Garfunkel also established a solo career, releasing 12 albums and scoring several hits while pursuing acting and writing.

His tour has included singing classics from his Simon & Garfunkel heyday, his solo hits and reading excerpts of some of his writing.

“With all that emptiness around me, it puts a spotlight on Artie Garfunkel and reveals me like never before,” says the artist. “I’m not the person behind Paul Simon. I’m an interesting cat.”

In the years since his split from Simon in 1970 and in between several reunions, including a hugely successful world tour in 2003, Garfunkel has been busy cultivating his mind.

He calls himself a “school-y fellow.” During Simon & Garfunkel’s commercial peak in the 1960s, he completed his master’s degree in mathematical education. While filming “Catch-22” in 1970, Garfunkel started reading incessantly to pass the long hours between takes.

It was then that he began his two-books-a-month habit, one nonfiction, the other a novel. So far the grand total of books read is 1,205, Garfunkel says, and they’re all on the shelves in his New York home.

Away from performing and writing, he loves to walk – a lot. Starting in the early ’80s and wrapping up in the late ’90s, Garfunkel did 40 legs to complete the route from New York City to the Pacific coast in Washington. In the past 15 years, he has walked across Europe, to where Greece meets Turkey.

Why the “Forrest Gump”-like treks?

“Well, I’m a New Yorker, and New Yorkers are tense,” says Garfunkel, who talks in long, winding sentences, his cadence almost melodic and tranquil. “We have all these buildings that make us feel we’re enclosed, with an egotistical life of competing. So you need to blow it off.

“You need to drop the shoulders and pull the plug on modern life. You have to feel being alive and having five senses. You put nothing in your program but trucking along. When you have an empty program you feel your own fullness.”

He walks with his iPod and a notebook so he can jot down inspiration for poems and prose. Also, “you hold on to the American Express card when the sun goes down to stop at a hotel. And when the sun goes up, I’m Huckleberry Finn. I’m really one of life’s innocents.”

Garfunkel says he is rarely recognized on his extra-long walks, which he does at a moderate pace of 2.6 miles an hour.

“If a celebrity carries a nonpersona, then you’re invisible,” he says. “So much of being recognized is what you give off. And I have a way of going invisible.”

Almost half a century has passed since Garfunkel, then a bookish, math-loving singer with a head full of frizzy blond curls, became a pop sensation alongside his shorter, round-faced friend from Queens. Singing all of those songs now – “The Sounds of Silence,” “I Am a Rock,” “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” – still charges him.

“I’m still thrilled to get up there,” Garfunkel says. “I’m so grateful to God that I can sing.”

And no lobster was gonna stop that.

This story was originally published November 6, 2014 at 2:00 AM with the headline "Garfunkel ends silence, sets voice on Modesto."