Art Garfunkel said he recently got lunch with old pal Paul Simon and cried while thinking about how their friendship fell apart.
“I looked at Paul and said, ‘What happened? Why haven’t we seen each other?’” Garfunkel said in an interview with The Sunday Times. “Paul mentioned an old interview where I said some stuff. I cried when he told me how much I had hurt him.”
The Queens schoolyard mates turned globetrotting music stars, now both 83, famously broke up in 1970, though they’ve reunited several times since. In 2015, Garfunkel spoke with The Telegraph in Britain and called Simon an “idiot” and a “jerk.”
“How can you walk away from this lucky place on top of the world, Paul?” he asked rhetorically in the interview. “What’s going on with you, you idiot? How could you let that go, jerk?”
The following year, Simon fired his own shots in an NPR interview.
“Quite honestly, we don’t get along. So it’s not like it’s fun,” he said of a potential reunion. “When it’s not fun, and you’re going to be in a tense situation, well, then I have a lot of musical areas that I like to play in. So that’ll never happen again. That’s that.”
But according to Garfunkel’s newest interview with The Sunday Times, a musical reunion isn’t out of the question just yet. He also called himself “a fool” for his prior comments.
“We’ve made plans to meet again,” he told the outlet. “Will Paul bring his guitar? Who knows. For me, it was about wanting to make amends before it’s too late. It felt like we were back in a wonderful place. As I think about it now, tears are rolling down my cheeks. I can still feel his hug.”
