Feelin' Groovy

Not quite 25 years ago, an unprecedented 500,000 people flocked to Central Park to hear Paul Simon reunite with his 1960s band mate, Art Garfunkel. 

I wasn't there. 

In the fall of 1981, I was a first-grader, living in a five-room house in northeast Georgia with my post-hippy parents. We watched news coverage of the concert on a black-and-white, 12-inch TV. To this day, I thank the gods that we had cable. 

Even by age six, I was aware of the mystique of New York, though the faraway city could have been the capital of Krypton for all I knew. In a way, New York City was Krypton: a fantasy planet glimpsed only through the sorcery of television. It was a dangerous and breathless netherworld whose super-sized icons (King Kong, Lady Liberty, Ed Koch) cast monstrous shadows over the rest of the country. 

The Simon and Garfunkel concert, though, suggested another side of the city, one in which rock singers weren't gunned-down in the streets (as a guy named John Lennon had been a year before), but where musicians were revered. They were kind of like magicians, able to utter arcane phrases and make the masses cheer. 

I didn't discover this at age six, of course, but years later listening to the album of the Simon and Garfunkel concert my dad had bought at a yard saleon vinyl. It always struck me as odd how the people clapped at the mention of the whores on Seventh Avenue and the brutal New York winters, just as I pondered why the addictive and otherwise straightforward Feelin' Groovy song was curiously named for the 59th Street Bridge. (Come to think of it, I still don't get that one.)

Such foreign landmarks would become a sort of teenage folklore for me, which is something I think jaded New York natives forget. Those of us who move here as adults arrive with a suitcase packed full of a personaland somewhat imaginarymythology of the metropolis. That the reality both refutes and supersedes the myth may be beside the point: Nobody comes to the city tabula rasa, and no one leaves without a fresh set of scars where those naive expectations were once scrawled. 

When I landed in the city, I was determined to catch a concert in Central Park, not realizing that the era of supersized outdoor events in Manhattan has long since ended. I got myself to a SummerStage show as quickly as possible, the oddly paired Shelby Lynne and Alana Davis, which offered a fascinating experiment in anthropology. To my left, a crew of Harajuku Girls and their token faux-hawked fag friend danced too hard to Jesus on a Greyhound. On the other side, a blanket full of sleepy-eyed Jewish mothers, bobbing their heads politely between cell phone calls. 

I recently bought the Simon and Garfunkel Central Park concert on CD, and the liner notes include several tender black and white photographs of the crowda shaggy, wide-eyed lot, with winged haircuts and Adidas hoodies that might feel right at home in today's East Village. Listening to the recording now, I have to concur with Simon's comments to Playboy that the duo worked better in the studio than on stage, though there's still an unmistakable sense of the setting, with Paul cracking jokes about joints in the audience and a certain loose banter that lets me close my eyes and imagine the spectacle I was too young to experience firsthand. 

The cynic in me doubts that any act on the roster of this year's SummerStage will hold the promise of such future folklore (no offense meant to Bonnie Raitt or Fiona Apple, who I'm sure are perfectly fine performers), but who can say? The arrival of the New Pornographers on Aug. 3 will surely be one of those shows the hipster kids dissect for months to come, as will Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, not technically part of the series but performing Sept. 28. 

If Manhattan has moved past the age of mega-concerts, it's certainly arrived at an embarrassment of riches for outdoor music in general, with several concurrent series testing the noise ordinances this summer. The River to River festival, held mainly in lower Manhattan, once again boasts a too-cool-for-school line-up of indie talent; I'm personally eager to see the two Josh'sRitter and Rouseand the arrival of Belle & Sebastian (along with Martha Wainwright) on Independence Day will surely fill Battery Park to the breaking point. 

I suppose that's the beauty of catching a concertoutdoor or otherwisethe fleeting promise that you may be experiencing a snapshot of musical history. It might be magic, but it's a participatory sort of enchantment. The recording, and the legendshould one developwill never compare to actually being there.