Old Friends

“Hey mom, did you know there some famous old guys coming to the Saint Jakob’s stadium?” my daughter said, in passing.
“Oh who?” I replied, unable to muster any interest. Her idea of famous seldom jibes with mine.
“Oh, I don’t know, I can never remember his name. Gar, Gar, I can't remember. Anyway, he's an old guy and he's coming to Basel. I know, you like him. His name's Gar-somebody.”
“Garfunkel?”
“Yeah, I think that's him.”
“Simon and Garfunkel?”
“Yeah, both of them.”
“Geez! to Basel?” My enthusiasm level started to sky rocket.
“You see. I told you it was somebody you’d like.”
“You don’t like Paul Simon? Rhythm of the Saints?”
“Diamonds on the Soles of her Feet,” her dad added.
“Daaa-ad, That’s soles of her shoes.”
“Whatever.”
“Yeah mom, you know, lots of old famous people come to Basel.”
“They do?”
“Yeah mom, you don't pay attention.”
“Well maybe not, but Simon and Garfunkel aren't old guys.”
“Sure they are.”
“Whaddaya mean old? When was Sounds of Silence?” I looked at her dad. “1966-67? That's not ol....”
“Mom, that's like more than thirty-five years ago.”
“Yeah so?”
“That's old mom.”
Simon and Garfunkel. That took me back, all the way to 1966 and Toronto. I wanted to see Peter, Paul and Mary in concert. “Waste of money,” my father pronounced.
“It’s my money,” I said, confusing insistence with insolence. Two years later and living on my own, I saw Donovan at the University of Toronto’s Varsity Stadium. Add six more years, and it was Neil Diamond at the Maple Leaf Gardens, packed with women in their twenties and thirties. They held their Bic® lighters aloft and swooned when Diamond crooned Solitary Man, a tune that only ever made it big in Toronto. Next on the venue, Bob Dylan, front row seats but behind a newly erected pillar for lighting (about which my new squeeze was furious).
“I still remember that,” he says, twenty-five years later. “And the performance was god awful. We were going to walk out. Remember?”
I do. One never really forgets the extremes. Dylan was in his neo-Christian era backed by a five-woman line-up of gospel singers. Toronto audiences, notoriously difficult to please, barely clapped before stumbling out of Massey Hall, dumbfounded.
“Did we actually pay to see that?” my husband asks, still ticked off even now.
“I can’t believe we saw the whole thing,” I say, paraphrasing the tag line to a sixties Alka Seltzer commercial.
Thus it was, undaunted, more than two decades after Dylan we girded our loins and set off on our bikes to Basel. There we mixed easily with the other cyclists, pedestrians and tram takers. (No traffic jams for the sensible Swiss.) Unfettered by metal detectors and body searches, the fans, aged anywhere from a bare-midriffed sixteen to a support-hosed sixty-six, staked out a comfortable territory on the plastic mesh-protected playing field with their collapsible chairs, picnic blankets and beach towels. Some munched Bratwurst, others drank beer and a few, a very few it seemed, smoked a joint. If you had the good fortune to find yourself by a pot smoker and inhaled deeply, well who knew? Maybe the experience would be herbally enhanced.
Eight thirty arrived—and left. By 8:35 the punctual Swiss got a trifle testy in a low-key Basel sort of way. Up flashed the photographs of old friends, Simon and his pal Art from childhood to, dare I say it? old age….older age, oldish age? Buddies for more than fifty years, the slightly paunchy duo appeared and sang Old Friends—a gentle nostalgic start. I looked about me. Were there many ‘old guys’ among us? Not really, if I take the starting point of my own age. Every song an anthem, the audience accompanied the performers by singing the still pertinent lyrics. Clearly Simon writes from his heart while Art sings from his soul.
By way of introduction, Simon said he and Garfunkel used to imitate the Everly Brothers and then they appeared, complete with Hollywood hair. Three tunes later, the pace picked up. With trepidation I awaited my daughter’s early warning signs of a body being transported aloft to the area near the stage. “You have to be on the alert for that,” she counselled. “And, if you’re close to the stage you’ve got to be physically fit owing to all the push and shove.
“The people in the mid-section will sway to the music,” she said, “and if the mood is right you’ll go into a trance.” They did, I didn’t.
“Be ready to duck, lift or get smashed in the face,” she cautioned. I began to look more and more forward to the evening. She hadn’t finished There was more fun to come. Apparently, with any luck the hoisted spectator would ultimately be tossed toward a group of youths buff as broncos—always better than into a gaggle of girls, known to step back at the last moment and not carry their load. There was none of that. Perhaps no one trusted his body to the old fogies’ weak wrists and crumbling bones.
Simon was twenty-one when he wrote one song, he’s sixty-two now but he won’t be for long. Had they aged? Of course. Could they still sing? You bet.