A Monterey folk night with Art Garfunkel.

Nearly 50 years after Simon & Garfunkel closed the opening night of the Monterey Pop Festival, Art Garfunkel reflects on the historic gathering with exceptional detail, as if it happened last week.

“We played a six-song set that began with ‘Homeward Bound’ and included ‘Feelin’ Groovy’ [aka ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song’],” Garfunkel says. “It was Monterey and it was magical. The spirit and memory is fantastic – one of the country’s cultural high-points. To be at [Monterey Pop] was to be entranced with the cultural power of seeing a collection of artists and paying virtually nothing.

“And having the roster be made up of musicians that all the ‘cool kids’ knew about. To launch something like that was unprecedented. You had to be there. It’s so challenging for a journalist to capture this stuff.”

Even more challenging is capturing a brand of lightning in a bottle that the two cleancut, unassuming childhood friends churned out seemingly effortlessly as Simon & Garfunkel. The duo’s iconic catalog still captivates listeners who hang onto the imagery of each word in “The Sound of Silence” and every delicate harmony in “Scarborough Fair.”

The New York City natives made a lasting impression on the music world in only five records, which yielded nine Grammys, and disbanded after six years. Every Simon & Garfunkel show after 1970 was billed as a reunion, and 2010 marked their last show together.

Both musicians, however, continue sharing the music they made together despite any lingering bitterness they may have toward one another.

“I never get tired of singing any of [the songs],” Garfunkel, now 74, says. “They’re all alive and well, otherwise I wouldn’t do them.”

When he’s not singing, Garfunkel is writing his autobiography, and after more than three decades of collecting poems, prose and other snippets of writing, Garfunkel says he summoned the courage to get a literary agent and shop it around.

“I’ve gotten lovely responses,” he says.

Garfunkel scored a book contract with prominent publisher Knopf Doubleday. He hasn’t finished the book yet, but stylistically, he knows where it’s going.

“It’s a mix of poetic bits with straight accounts of my life,” Garfunkel explains. “It goes in and out of poetic lyricism and history. I like to think we came into this world with one big statement with a question mark: ‘What?’”

ART GARFUNKEL: IN CLOSE-UP 8pm Thursday, Sept. 15. Golden State Theatre, 417 Alvarado St., Monterey. $49-$97. 649-1070, www.goldenstatetheatre.com.