Rating: 4/5
Review:
Good but flawed
This is a pretty good issue, but it does have its problems.
The good bits scarcely need saying: it's Paul Simon live,
and as he's one of the very greatest of songwriters and a very fine performer,
both the material and the performances are very good indeed. I'm not bonkers about some of these
arrangements (including Bridge Over Troubled Water, which I really don’t like
here) but that's just my personal taste and most of them are terrific.
What's not so good is the "Complete" aspect of the
album. These are largely unedited
recordings, so we get a full minute and a half of applause at the start, for
example which, on repeated listening, gets very annoying. I also think that quite a lot else should
have been edited out; do we really need to hear Paul asking the engineer to
sort out the sound for several minutes, or all the abandoned takes – some of
which were abandoned for very good reasons?
It's moderately interesting once, but on an album to be listened to
again and again it won't do.
So…I'd say this is worth getting, especially for long,
long-term Paul Simon fans like me, but you do have to negotiate some very
irritating stuff to get to the good bits.
The old cliché that it would have made a much better single album
definitely applies here and the very poor editing decisions mean that I can
only give this a qualified recommendation.
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