Paul Simon Comes Home to Forest Hills

Sixty years is a long time to keep a return trip on the calendar. Tonight, Paul Simon makes it. The 84-year-old songwriter plays the first of two sold-out nights at Forest Hills Stadium (Wednesday and Thursday, July 8–9) on his "A Quiet Celebration" tour — a stone's throw from the Kew Gardens Hills apartment and the Forest Hills High School hallways that made him.

This is not a man phoning in a hometown lap. Simon grew up at 137-62 70th Road, attended PS 164 and Parsons Junior High, and walked the same Forest Hills High corridors as Art Garfunkel; the two graduated in the class of 1958 before they were "Simon & Garfunkel," back when they were a Queens doo-wop act called Tom & Jerry. The West Side Tennis Club grounds they're returning to aren't an abstraction to him. They're the neighborhood.

"The last time I played here, we were dodging lightning bolts," Simon told the crowd, according to the Forest Hills Times. "The first time that I played here was in August 1966 — sixty years ago."

That arithmetic is the whole story. Six decades ago, a kid from 70th Road stood on this ground with his high-school harmony partner and started a career that would run through "The Sound of Silence," Bridge Over Troubled Water, and Graceland. Now he's back, in the same horseshoe where the Beatles played in 1964, closing a loop that most artists never get the years to close. The West Side Tennis Club has hosted its share of history — U.S. National tennis championships, the Fab Four, and a folk-rock duo who would go on to define a decade — but there's something particular about a man returning to the exact patch of grass where the whole thing began, with most of the intervening century now behind him.

"A Quiet Celebration" has been exactly that — a lower-volume, unusually intimate late-career tour, and it suits the homecoming. Simon has been threading new material through the classics, with his wife Edie Brickell joining for select songs. The result, by reports from the tour, is less greatest-hits victory lap than a songwriter taking stock in the place where it started.

Why does it matter that this is happening in Queens and not, say, across the river? Because Forest Hills has spent decades being the answer to a trivia question — the Beatles played where? — instead of getting credit as a genuine cradle of American songwriting. Simon coming home to a sold-out stadium, twice, is the borough collecting on an old debt. The kid who used to hear the trains from 70th Road turned into one of the most important songwriters this country has produced, and he's spending two July nights insisting, out loud, that this is where he's from.

There are no tickets left, so if you're not inside, do the Queens thing: find a spot near the club grounds, let the sound carry over the walls the way it has since 1964, and know that somewhere on that stage an 84-year-old is standing about a mile from his childhood bedroom. Sixty years. He kept the date.

Sources: Paul Simon's "A Quiet Celebration" Graces Forest Hills Stadium — Forest Hills Times