Homeward Bound: Paul Simon’s Final Show at Corona Park

Paul Simon has finally returned home.

After a musical career spanning decades, the 76-year-old singer said goodbye Saturday night, ending his farewell tour with one final concert in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

At first it seems odd that Simon would insist on playing his last show here, especially with Citi Field, the popular and relatively new stadium, right next door. It’s the first official night of fall, and the park is full of people playing sports and enjoying the last of the Saturday sun, seemingly unaware that a historical musical event is about to take place here. Or maybe they just don’t care.

And then there’s the makeshift venue itself, right in the heart of Corona Park. With no distinct walkways dividing up the grassy seated section from the standing one, even the event staff gives up on directing the traffic of the more than 30,000 attendees. It becomes every man for themselves out there, navigating through a tangled pathway of limbs and plaid blankets, and longtime fans mumbling, “This would have never happened in ‘81!”

Amid this clusterfuck, you find yourself longing for the manicured pathways and assigned seats of Citi Field, but before you can dwell on this for too long, Paul Simon takes the stage and you figure out exactly why you’re here.

After opening with “America” followed by “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” Simon addresses his audience of fans, both old and new, by simply saying, “Hello friends.” Almost immediately, a plane destined for LaGuardia Airport passes by so closely overheard that it looks like you could reach out and touch it. Simon laughs, because of course this isn’t ideal, but he still says, “The people in that plane are getting a glimpse of the sweetest people on earth.” For some reason you just know he really means it.

Simon takes a quick inspection of his audience and the park, and for a moment the slight look of disbelief crosses his face. “You know,” he says, “we’re two miles from where I played varsity baseball at Forest Hills High School.

Without warning, he takes out an old mitt and throws a baseball into the audience, inviting the lucky recipient to a game of catch.

This isn’t some old man’s psychotic break. This is Paul Simon is taking you back where it all began. This show is more than just a cap on Simon’s career; it’s a hero’s return home. Paul Simon started out as just a kid from Queens, and based on this show and this venue, that’s what he intends to be remembered as. After all, according to Simon, we’re just a 20-minute bike ride from his where he grew up.

But above all, this is a concert, and Simon eventually shakes from his nostalgic haze to dive right into favorites like “The Boy in the Bubble,” and “That Was Your Mother.” As he finishes playing “Rewrite” Simon tells the audience it recently occurred to him that “the old guy workin’ at the car wash” he’s singing about is the same one who boards the Greyhound in “America.” It’s certainly not an earth-shattering revelation, but it shows how personal these songs are to Simon--that to him, the characters he’s singing about come alive. It also shows Simon’s desire to have things come full circle, and tonight is no exception. Tonight he will return some of his most cherished songs back home.

When Simon slides into the opening chords of perhaps his most famous song, “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard,” the crowd erupts, because there is truly something magnetic about singing “Goodbye to Rosie, the queen of Corona,” in the actual park where she would have reigned supreme. When he later sings about “all the crap he learned in high school” in “Kodachrome,” Simon can’t help himself from interjecting into the song, “Take that Forest Hills High,” before admitting he “actually had a good time there.”

Later in the set, Simon indulges in some of his African-influenced songs like “Spirit Voices,” which may not be crowd favorite sing-alongs, but after all, it’s his last show too, and Simon will play exactly what he wants.

Throughout the show, Simon makes sure to showcase his immensely talented 14-member band, but one member in particular, Nigerian guitarist Biodun Kuti, touches Simon’s heart. Simon’s longtime guitarist, Cameroonian Vincent Nguini, passed away this December. Drawing a connection between both guitarists’ West African roots, Simon says he’s able to feel the presence of Nguini with him tonight.

Simon’s reckoning with both past and present truly materializes when he announces he’s going to “reclaim his child” by playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a song he says he never felt like he truly owned. He pays credit where credit is due, to the late Aretha Franklin, who helped elevate the song to its’ soulful fame, but the version Simon plays tonight is emotional, deep, and entirely his own.

Simon finishes off his set with the upbeat and impossibly catchy, “You Can Call Me Al,” as the audience is left to mentally shuffle through his immense discography to figure out what the encore will be. Just how will he end it all?

Simon returns to the stage to play songbook essentials like “Graceland” and “Still Crazy After All These Years.” After three songs, he disappears again, and maybe that really was it. Maybe the show is over.

But Paul would never let it end that way.

He emerges again for a second encore, this time without the band--just his acoustic guitar in tow. Simon, never one to get political, introduces “American Tune” by simply, although not cryptically saying, “Strange times, huh? Don’t give up.” He’s met with a roar of approval from the crowd, because this isn’t Central Park in 1991; this is Corona Park in 2018. Here, Simon acknowledges the passage of time--that while his beloved park has stayed the same, the world surely has not.

No song seems more appropriate to end his final show with than “The Sound of Silence,” a masterpiece as equally haunting as it is beautiful. While he plays, you’re struck by how unbelievably small he suddenly looks onstage.

He’s just a guy with a guitar, at the old baseball field where he used to play as a kid.

As “The Sound of Silence” comes to an end, the weight of what he’s just done must start to sink in. He looks out into his audience with the pride of a life well lived, and of a career whose roadmap would inevitably always lead him right back to here--to his home.

No words could really do justice to what he wants to say, so instead he opts for this: “It means more than you can know.”

Right back at you Paul Simon.