The Concert in Central Park

The Concert in Central Park
HBO
February 21, 1982
Concert
VHS
B+

Sorry this is out of order, but I half forgot I had it.  Let's go back a month, and of course even longer, with time as one of the themes of the concert.  (When Simon & Garfunkel sing "Old Friends," it hits you that they no longer have to imagine what it's like to be seventy.)  This was filmed the previous September, and Paul seems to have been in a better space than he was the previous year, when One Trick Pony, came out (http://reviewingeverymovieiown.blogspot.com/search?q=one+trick+pony), more at peace not only with Art, but with himself, music, and the '60s and '70s.  There's a moment where they're singing "The 59th Street Bridge Song" and they share a chuckle over singing "feelin' groovy," as if struck by the datedness of the word and yet aware that it's part of their history.  And while "American Tune" (one of Simon's solo songs that they duet on, although some he sings alone here) was written in '73, the time of Watergate, its lyrics moved me more than ever, after this rough, kaleidoscopic year.  Watching this concert in middle age is definitely not the experience it was when I was young, but that's not to say that around the age of 20 (when it aired on PBS during a fund drive) I wasn't moved by the beauty and intelligence, the wit and sometimes melancholy, of these songs.  It's just that there are more layers now.

The concert is also very much of its time, with the introduction by Mayor Ed Koch and the disruption by a fan.  Simon wanted to introduce his new song "The Late Great Johnny Ace."  When he got to the line about John Lennon dying, a man rushed onstage, saying (although we can't hear it), "Paul, I need to talk to you."  Simon later claimed that he was mostly annoyed that his song was interrupted and he and Garfunkel were used to fans coming onstage with flowers.  (He talks about this on, for instance, a May '82 interview by David Letterman, currently available on Youtube.)  That may be, but Simon does look shook up on the screen and this is New York, at that time less than a year after Lennon was shot, not far away from Central Park.  Even with the references to pot and the performance of some of their Graduate era songs, this is not the Summer of Love, but a darker time, although one where hope was still possible.

As for the music, the songs are good to great, and I sang or mouthed along with some, danced to others, and got chills with a few.  I will say that the direction by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who directed Let It Be (which I still need to see) and who would go on to direct Simon's Graceland concert, which I also have on VHS, is no-frills.  We see the guys and their back-up band onstage, we see some shots of the crowd (mostly from far away, to show the size, although there are some individuals near the end), but this is not a multimedia extravaganza like, for instance, a contemporary Weird Al concert.  There aren't even any big screens.  The crowd is responding to S & G's voices and what they can see of the onstage figures who must look very tiny to them.  The home viewer is luckier visually, and yet I suspect there's a lot of in-person energy that's lost, especially for me watching on videotape roughly 35 years later.

I noticed little moments when they changed things up, like the "everything looks better in black & white" of "Kodachrome," which I took as a middle-aged observation, although the song was from only eight years earlier.  There was a song late in the concert, I think "Sounds of Silence," when I could hear Simon in particular putting different spins on the way he sang the lines.  And yet, they do the classic rock tunes "Wake Up, Little Suzie" and "Maybellene" with no irony.  Pre-baby-boomers like Art and Paul had a different relationship to the '50s than to the '60s, especially at that point.

Note, at least one version of the DVD apparently doesn't include "Johnny Ace," and it would be omitted from the soundtrack.