Paul on Saturday Night Live on Dec 11th. | Page 4 | Fab forum

skye said:

Zig said:

My point was that any small setting such as the ones you mentioned exposes that fact even more. I'd be willing to bet my house that if you saw him in 1990 on TV or any other "close" setting, he would have sounded far worse than he did when you saw him live in DC. That goes for just about anybody, no?

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But why? Is it the lack of crowd noise to cover it up? A failure to adapt to a smaller stage's acoustics? Gremlins? I can accept that he's old (sigh) and can't hit all of the notes he used to. In my mind the difference between this performance and what I heard in March is a world tour.

To answer your questions – yes, yes and gremlins?!?!

I lean more towards the acoustics. We all know he can't hit those high notes – that's a sad-but-true fact of life. In a large concert setting, you can definitely hear that. However, in a smaller setting without all of the crowd noise and without the sound bouncing around the arena, it is exposed even more. I recall Paul joking around at the White House gig something along the lines of wanting to do regular performances there because the acoustics were so good. I thought, "be careful what you ask for big guy".

Joe's point of Paul kinda losing the ability to hit those notes as far back as the late 60's was kinda depressing wasn't it?

Joe said:

The YouTube description says this is taken from the Good Evening NYC DVD, but my copy has this song intercut with footage of The Beatles playing it at Shea. What was the US edition like? Did it have The Beatles on it too?