The Art of Living Life : A Family Core Fuels Garfunkel as He Tours, Prepares a Solo Album and Makes Peace With Past

Back in 1981, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sang a landmark concert in New York City’s Central Park.

An estimated half-million people saw it live, and it has played to millions more in subsequent TV showings (PBS affiliates seem to have hit upon Simon & Garfunkel’s Central Park reunion as a sure-fire way into the hearts and checkbooks of baby boomers. It’s a staple of public-television pledge drives).

Nowadays, strollers in Central Park might happen upon that new vocal team, Garfunkel & Garfunkel.

Speaking over the phone recently from Lake Tahoe, the opening stop in his first U.S. solo tour in 15 years (a tour that brings him to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa on Saturday), Garfunkel chatted amiably about the walks in the park he takes with his 2 1/2-year-old son, James. If they happen to pass under one of the stone viaducts, where the acoustics are nice and echoing, a song can ensue.

Garfunkel’s conversation is smooth, highly articulate and coolly urbane. But the bubbly excitement of a doting father wells up when he talks about his firstborn, and how heredity seems to have done its job in passing on the sweet family pipes to the next generation.

“There’s no doubt about it. He’s really strong,” Garfunkel said. “I sing a melody, I’ll stop in the middle of the line, and he’ll pick up the next note. He’ll carry on in my key. Most can’t do that. He’s definitely a musical guy.”

James had his first taste of show biz earlier this year while his dad was touring in Japan.

“We brought him on stage in the last show in Tokyo. He wore his kimono during ‘Feeling Groovy.’ He had his usual calm about him, looking and assessing. He looked over my shoulder, studied the drum set. When it got to the ‘feeling groovy’ part, he started grabbing the microphone. His mother came to walk him off the stage, and he didn’t want to leave. He started dancing.”

Garfunkel, 51, doesn’t plan to push the boy to follow in his footsteps.

“I feel amused by it,” he said of James’ precocious musical ability. “I have no ax to grind, no hope he’ll do this or not. It’s his life.”

But touring has become a family affair.

Garfunkel’s wife, Kathryn (Kim) Cermak, who was in a New York rock band before they were married in 1988, sings backups in his touring band. With the family-that-plays-together approach, Garfunkel said, “You make show business a very pleasant experience.”

Garfunkel wasn’t much in the spotlight after that 1981 reunion concert with Simon, and the subsequent tour of stadiums that they did in 1983. In 1986, he sang with Amy Grant on “The Animals’ Christmas,” a cantata composed by one of his favorite songwriters, Jimmy Webb. He also played the lead in “Good to Go,” an unsuccessful mid-’80s film tied to the short-lived “Go-Go” funk-music trend out of Washington, D.C.

Garfunkel’s last solo album, “Lefty,” peaked at No. 138 on the Billboard chart in 1988. His main singing credits in the ‘90s have been “Two Sleepy People,” a song from the film soundtrack to “A League of Their Own,” and the theme to the recently canceled television series “Brooklyn Bridge.”

Through much of the ‘80s, Garfunkel concentrated on writing rather than music. The result was “Still Water,” a collection of prose poems published in a 25,000-copy edition in 1989.

But Garfunkel’s public profile may soon be rising. His next album is half finished and will be out in the fall; it features a duet with James Taylor on the Everly Brothers’ chestnut “Crying in the Rain.”

He has a supporting part as a psychiatrist in the controversial upcoming film “Boxing Helena” (its controversy heightened because of the lawsuit in which actress Kim Basinger lost an arm and a leg for refusing to play a character who loses both arms and both legs). And, oh yes, there’s more harmonizing in the offing with Paul Simon: a 10-date stand booked for New York’s Paramount Theater starting Oct. 1 (Garfunkel says they have no plans to tour).

Garfunkel says his rocky friendship and musical partnership with Simon hit one of its warmer periods after they agreed to play an AIDS benefit in New York last year organized by Mike Nichols and Elaine May.

“(Nichols) stood as a--dare I use the word, ‘bridge’?--and made it work,” Garfunkel said of the reunion. It was the duo’s first performance together since the ’83 tour.

Some troubled water had gone under the bridge since then. Simon had erased Garfunkel’s singing on what was to have been a 1983 Simon & Garfunkel album called “Think Too Much.” Instead Simon put out a solo album, “Hearts and Bones.”

“Yeah, that was tough,” Garfunkel said, when asked whether the tape-erasure episode had been a particularly hard test of friendship. It took, “time . . . some years” to get over that one, he said. Then, in 1991, Garfunkel publicly voiced his displeasure at not being invited to take part in another mega-concert that Simon staged in Central Park.

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‘I t’s not so easy for me to initiate a phone call to Paul,” Garfunkel said of their latest rapprochement. “In life, you really need these devices, Kissinger work,” such as Nichols performed in bringing them back together.

The duo decided to play the series of New York dates this fall after playing the AIDS benefit in New York and a concert for children’s health services in March in Los Angeles.

“We had a nice time working together at the two benefit shows because it was just acoustic, Paul and I and his guitar, like in the very old days,” Garfunkel said. “The two of us had a pain-free, lovely time of it. We walked off the stage and felt, ‘more, more. This works.’

“There is a season for warmth,” he continued. “They do tend to lead to periods of ‘you go your way, I’ll go mine for a while.’ But I feel what we do is attractive and it’s bigger than personality. You plug it in and that current flows. It’s larger than us, and it’s compelling.”

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Garfunkel said he was well-established as a schoolboy singer before he and Simon first teamed up as sixth-graders in Forest Hills, N.Y.

“When I was a third-grader, I would linger in the stairwell (at school), singing ‘Blue Moon,’ and then Nat King Cole’s ‘They Tell Us We’re Too Young.’ And I’d observe I had a lucky thing in my throat. I was 7 or 8, and already pretty seriously into it as a person who was trying to stretch my range.

“I sang in talent shows in school. I was very blond in those days and had a sort of choirboy image and was very popular with the girls. That was my ticket to social acceptability. I would sing in the synagogue, those minor-key Hebrew things, and I would see them crying in the aisles, and I knew I had a gift.

“When we met in the sixth grade, (Simon) had known of me for a couple of years. I was very well known in his mind as ‘that singer.’ When he saw me, ‘the singer,’ he became ‘the singer.’ ”

Garfunkel went on to Columbia University, earning degrees in mathematics and architecture, before he and Simon regrouped in the 1960s and launched the stream of hits that continued until their split in 1970.

In addition to an angelic tenor, Garfunkel says he brought to the group a painstaking, highly systematic way of doing things that proved useful in the recording studio.

“Paul would be very full of inspiration and ideas, and you’d see me collect and corral the ideas,” Garfunkel said. “By 1 a.m., (after a recording session), Paul would go home, and I would methodically go over the tapes with Roy Halee (the duo’s producer), and edit.”

That methodical streak remains quite evident. Two months ago, Garfunkel finished reading the 1,664-page Random House Dictionary of the English Language in its entirety, starting with Z and ending with A. The reading project began about 10 years ago, when he was immersed in the writing that would become the “Still Water” volume.

“I had so many words knocking around me, I began to love words per se , the sound of them. I am that methodical kind of person,” so he continued reading the dictionary until he had finished. “I wonder: Am I in a group of one, a group of nine (who have read the entire dictionary)? It’s a good book.”

That leaves Garfunkel with one more methodical project that some might dismiss as madness: He is walking across the United States.

Garfunkel has been doing it bit by bit since 1985, usually in one-week, 100-mile chunks. He doesn’t do it the way Lewis and Clark did, with tents and sleeping bags and cook pots and kindling and all that.

After a day on the road (he sticks to the smallest blacktops that will carry him westward), Garfunkel has somebody come and pick him up and take him to a motel. The next day he’ll get a ride to the point on his trail where he left off, and repeat the process.

His most recent trek, in late April, took him over a little more than 100 miles of Montana roadway, from Billings to Livingston. Garfunkel has hiked much of the country alone, but this time he had his wife along, as well as a portable tape player he used to listen to songs he was considering for his next album.

“I’m doing it because this is my life and I want to enjoy myself,” Garfunkel said. “I want to live longer, and I’m convinced this is very good physically. I like dropping out of the pace of modern life. I like to take the hype of life and just erase it.”

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Garfunkel said he is seldom recognized along his route, but he is willing to chat with fans as long as they can keep pace. He stops for nothing, making no detours to explore points of interest along the way.

“It’s the same methodical thing in me,” he said. “I have a rule where I keep walking. One needs a certain structure to carry on. I use the must-keep-pace constancy of it all. If I did dally, I have a feeling it would open the thought, ‘Why can’t I go home now?’ ”

If you think back to the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, Garfunkel surely has the ant’s resolve. But it was the grasshopper who sat around making up songs--something Garfunkel so far has been unable to do.

It’s a little surprising that Garfunkel hasn’t been able to write his own songs. His tonal gift is obvious. And he spent much of the 1980s grappling with language and molding it into the condensed expression of his prose poems.

“It was the first time I was not a song interpreter, but a creative artist,” Garfunkel said of his work on “Still Water,” a book of 84 personal pieces, some of which dealt with the 1979 suicide of his girlfriend, Laureen Bird.

“From 1983 to ‘88, I would stop the world if I had a good idea that I thought would lead to a prose poem. For the rest of the day I’d be cooking, getting into the internal rhyme, the meter.”

At one point, Garfunkel recalls, he found himself at a piano, on the verge of turning his verse into a song.

“I started playing chords that move me and gave me goose bumps, and tried to marry it to what I was writing. And within an hour, the whole thing had dried up. They’re very different things, writing a literary piece and writing a song. I swear that somewhere in me are songs, but so far it’s an elusive art for me.”

Garfunkel aims to be less elusive as a solo performer.

“I feel vulnerable,” he said of launching his first American solo tour since 1978.

“I feel like this is a pool I’ve walked around a long time,” he said. “I want to get the first lap behind me so I can enjoy the love of singing.”

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He has some high-class help in his six-member band, which includes such noted session players and touring pros as pianist Craig Doerge, bassist Bob Glaub and Eric Weissberg, the string player of “Dueling Banjos” fame.

After scoring gold- or platinum-selling hits with his 1970s solo releases, “Angel Clare,” “Breakaway” and “Watermark,” Garfunkel’s commercial progress has stalled.

“I think I fit as a question mark, as somebody they don’t have a handle on,” he said of his current standing in the pop world. “That’s why it’s tough work and very vulnerable work right now. My hopes are the word-of-mouth (from the tour) is going to be good.

“I want to do this, and I want to keep doing it,” he said. “If a good singer meets a good song, you’ve got a something there that’s worth an evening’s entertainment. I’ve got to think that’s a timeless thing.”

* Art Garfunkel plays Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $20-$38. (714) 556-2787.