I remember being 9 years old, already a huge fan of S&G, and watching this amazing gig on the TV at home in London.
And just today I found the CD in my local music store, and so got to listen to it again for the first time in 20 years! One song, ‘A heart in New York’ I haven’t heard once in all that time but I remembered it instantly.
I feel like I’ve rediscovered an old best friend - it’s wonderful!
Curse me for being born at the wrong time… I’d have paddled across the Atlantic in a walnut shell to get to that gig.
Are there any Dopers who were actually there? Could you post your impressions of that amazing night?
Does anyone know who jumped on stage during Johnny Ace (left off the CD, I was miffed to find) and what he wanted?
And had anyone other than me completely forgotten that this gig added an extra verse to The Boxer :
I was there with my brother. I Was 20 at the time, and had been a Simon & Garfunkel fan since 2nd grade, when my hippie-folkie nun teacher used to play their songs in class all the time.
There were about 500,000 people there, and we couldn’t get anywhere close to the stage. In fact, we were probably a good 3/4 of a mile from the stage, even though we got there a good 5 or 6 hours before the show began. Despite the fact that we were packed together like sardines, everybody there was remarkably polite, friendly and cheerful.
The sound system was great, so we could HEAR everything perfectly. But from where we were, trees blocked most of the stage, so we rarely saw anything. Every 15 minutes or so, a breeze would blow some branches aside, and we could vaguely see someone strumming a guitar… but we have no way of knowing whether that was Paul Simon, or somebody in his band.
All in all, we had a great time, and so did everyone else- even though most of the people around me didn’t really SEE the show at all!
Interestingly, when the show was over, half a million people walked calmly and politely out of Central Park. It took forever for most of us to get our buses or subway trains home, but everyone was remarkably mellow (no, it wasn’t a drug-related mellow!).