Simon and Garfunkel may be touring again soon.

What a team! Together and separately, they’ve made a lot of wonderful music. They’re still making it.

Twenty years ago today, I saw Simon and Garfunkel in concert at the Akron Rubber Bowl. It was a long show, with three encores. Each of the singers had several solo turns, performing songs from their independent careers. As the evening drew on, almost every song was received with a sense of warm familiarity, and a growing astonishment at just how much those two fellas had up their sleeves.

Twenty years ago. It was a nostalgia show, even then. Akron was the first stop in the duo’s first U. S. concert tour since 1970. There was an energy and an innocence to some of the earlier songs that was exhilarating and embarrassing at the same time. Feeling groovy?

Someone threw love beads onto the stage. Art Garfunkel picked them up and said, “What is this, the Sixties?”

There was a tinge of sadness, too, for everything lost in the years since the previous tour. Paul Simon’s solo song, The Late Great Johnny Ace, was all about loss—particularly the death of John Lennon, still sharp in everyone’s memory twenty years ago.

There was a new verse for The Boxer, too:

Now the years are rolling by me,
They are rocking evenly.
I am older than I once was,
Younger than I’ll be,
That’s not unusual.
No, it isn’t strange,
After changes upon changes,
We are more or less the same.

After changes we are more or less the same.

Twenty years ago. Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not.