Another tour, another three-record set. Paul’s world tour was a huge success everywhere it went, and Tripping The Live Fantastic was a natural souvenir for everyone who saw it. Like Wings Over America, it includes nearly every song performed on the tour, including some never performed before onstage, plus bonus soundcheck material of varying interest. The band was basically set up like Wings—Paul plus two guitar players, a drummer and Linda, plus another keyboard player to help her out—so the songs are tight and professional. Surprisingly, few Wings or solo songs were performed, putting the emphasis on Beatle material and Flowers In The Dirt. As some of those Beatle songs were making their live debut, comparisons with the originals were inevitable. “The Fool On The Hill” is a nice surprise, even if the ending goes too long. “Back In The USSR” reminds us that he can rock. “Sgt. Pepper” is extended to include both versions and a three-way guitar solo. “Let It Be”, the final Abbey Road medley and “Hey Jude” grab the crowd by the heartstrings and don’t let go.
There are a few clunkers; “Ebony And Ivory” is torpedoed with Stevie’s part being sung by Hamish Stuart. (Even when he was in the Average White Band he didn’t profess to be funky.) “Coming Up” was done best with Wings. The excitement of hearing “Birthday” in a live setting depends on one’s opinion of the original. Some unique oldies are interspersed, like “Twenty Flight Rock” and the Ray Charles chestnut “Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying”; all the selections are immaculately and lovingly performed to ecstatic audience response.
For those who saw the tour, the fun of actually being in the same room with a Beatle outweighed the music and talent. Much of the patter and “spontaneous” moments were clearly scripted, as all are reproduced here; one’s tolerance of Paul’s charm and cuteness varies from fan to fan. The packaging was especially nice if you bought the vinyl, with the CD photo booklet blown up to full size. (A single-CD distillation subtitled Highlights! was also made available shortly afterwards for those who didn’t want to spring for the double; most likely it only sold to collectors who had to have both.)
Paul McCartney Tripping The Live Fantastic (1990)—3
Paul McCartney Tripping The Live Fantastic: Highlights! (1990)—3
The album is a bit overwhelming in a way that “Wings Over America” was not. That is, in part, because “Venus and Mars” and “At the Speed of Sound” had their share of mediocre tracks, so those were easy to skip. With the inclusion of so many more Beatles songs, and with “Flowers..” being a much better album than either of those Wings albums, skipping is much harder to do.
ReplyDeleteThe “Flowers..” material comes off pretty well. Paul, surprisingly, makes “Put in There”, an intimate song, work in an arena setting. The recording of that Russian album must have made him want to put a few of those oldies in the set. I’d have much rather had more originals included.
As for the rest, I agree that “Ebony and Ivory” is the low point. Without any ebony, that song is useless. The most rocking songs come of the best: “Back in the USSR”, “Jet”, “Get Back”, “Back in the U.S.S.R.”, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “I Wanna Be Your Man” (one of the biggest surprises) and, yes, “Birthday” (don’t be such a stick in the mud!). One problem with the arrangements is that late 80’s synths didn’t always replicate horns that well. “Got to Get You into My Life” works. The solo in “Golden Slumbers”, on the other hand, sounds a bit cheesy. The schlockometer is really turned up to 11 on “The Long and Winding Road”. If Paul hated Spector’s orchestration so much, then why did he have Wix try and replicate it with keys? Yuck.
Being Paul’s first major tour since “WOA”, many Beatles songs would seem like curveballs in the set. I have problems with three of these. “The Fool on the Hill” is OK as far as the actual performance is concerned, but then he makes the astoundingly tone-deaf and gratuitous error of dropping in a sample of Dr. King! (At least it made sense when U2 did it). He was many things, but he was NOT a fool. Maybe I’m being overly sentimental in this next case but turning “Hey Jude” into an obvious (but maybe unavoidable) audience singalong cheapens it some. The worst is what they did to “Things They Said Today”. Those chunky, yet tinny, guitar sounds work with “Pieces of Eight”, but they utterly ruin to subtle, haunting quality of the studio version, and the “rocking” coda is highly unnecessary. Don’t mess with my childhood, Paul!
Nonetheless, I still would have liked to be there. I know I would have been exhausted by the end of the show, if the album is any indication. The tour also produced a concert film called , “Get Back”. The movie was directed by Richard Lester of “A Hard Day’s Night” fame, so one would expect it to be a lot better than it is. For one thing, the cinematography sucks. The concert lighting doesn’t translate to film, so the footage is sometimes hard to see. Worse, he makes the same mistake that the directors of “Genesis: In Concert” and Yes’s “9012Live” made. For some songs, instead of showing the band, he shows old film footage. He made some appalling choices here, like World War II era footage for “Eleanor Rigby” and the Six-Day War (!!) for “Live and Let Die”! Richard must have been watching too much MTV. He really should have known better at his age.