The Concert in Central Park It Be", and executive produced by Lorne Michaels, who had recently departed the NBC-TV comedy/variety series "Saturday Night Live". Simon himself financed the US$750,000 cost of the staging and the video recording. It is unknown how much HBO paid for the television and video rights of the recording; US$1 million according to some sources, over US$3 million according to others. The film includes the two songs that had not appeared on the album, and at 87-minutes, runs 12 minutes longer. HBO televised the film, "Simon and Garfunkel: The Concert in Central Park", on February 21, 1982, five days after the
The Concert in Central Park the backing band was "one of the finest groups of musicians ever to play together at a New York rock concert", and the rearrangements of Simon's solo material were improvements over the originals. Despite the risks in performing so many acoustic ballads in an open-air concert on a cool night, the songs "were beautifully articulated, in near-perfect harmony." An October 1981 review in "Rolling Stone" called the concert "one of the finest performances of [1981]", one that "vividly recaptured another time, an era when well-crafted, melodic pop bore meanings that stretched beyond the musical sphere and into the realms of