Super Bowl Halftime
 

I guess I must be getting too old for words...I thought that McCartney and his band did a kick ass job on the halftime show, doing live versions instead of that ass-shaking, lip-syncing, bra-busting bullshit, and doing them damn well at that.

Most media reports pronounce his efforts "boring". What say you, Cellarites?

You've clearly mistaken 'good' for 'popular'.

The critic's job is to tell the sheeple what they are supposed to like.

As to an opinion, I can't have one. I don't watch TV.

I'm pretty young still, and I like all that ass-shakin radio pop crap. Still, that show should be mandatory viewing for anyone who signs a recording contract. If you're being paid millions to make music, you should be able to bring it live like that guy.

Also, a good friend of mine is his rhythm guitarist / bass player, so I'm biased. I think the whole band kicks ass.

There was enough of the ass-shaking radio pop crap in the pregame musical extravaganza.

Oh, and Charlie Daniels playing an abbreviated version of The Devil Went Down to Georgia, which is wonderful at any length ...

I thought McCartney did a great job. Like many, I got a bit teary during Hey Jude, and I rocked right along with Live and Let Die (I heard one guy, and I don't even remember who, might have been Glenn Beck, complaining about the appropriateness of that tune for halftime ... I love it, and don't mind when I hear it. It's a Bond tune! It's good anytime!) The fact that McCartney played all those great old Beatles tunes is what made the performance special for me. The only thing that would have improved it, and honestly, I was hoping for a bit of a SuperBowl surprise, would have been Ringo Starr joining him.

I'm almost to the point where I can listen to the Beetles. I know in my head that it's good music but it was so overplayed in my formative years that I'm still not quite ready. I continued my habit, developed during the Up with People years, of doing chores at half-time. I think I was building a fire.

Bring it live... at age 62. The dude remains an inspiration to all of us.

I've never been a fan of either the Beatles or Sir Paul (I like a couple songs, of course). But I have to say, that was a kick-ass little show. I ditto what UT said.

I probably didn't make myself very clear...I have nothing per se against the whole ass-shaking genre. It is the lip-syncing BS to which I object. Either you can perform, or you can't, and if you can, well, you should. Doing a bunch of dance moves along to a recorded, midified soundtrack isn't a musical performance. It is to real musical performance as WWF is to real wrestling. Looks kinda neat, but is there anything really happening? I think not.

Glad to hear I wasn't the only one who was totally impressed with Sir Paul's chops. And hey, SM...just how killer does one have to be to get a gig with the former Mop Top, anyway?

I don't know if his summer tour is coming to KC, but if so, I sure hope I get to see it.

I was a huge Beatles/McCartney fan in my youth. I enjoyed the halftime show a lot, and was impressed with him. But...

It looked to me on several occasions like he was lip-synching. A few times, his mouth would make a "whoo" sound that wasn't picked up by the mic. A few times his lips were moving a little out of synch with the sound. It was a studio quality performance. The close-ups of his face were very rare.

In the paper the next day, Tom Shales, the TV critic for the Washington Post also wrote that he thought McCartney was lip-synching. I'm not saying lip-synching is bad, and McCartney has clearly proven his skill in the past.

I just can't imagine Paul McCartney lip synching. Billy Shears, maybe, but not Paul McCartney. :)

Thanks to her 2nd-grade teacher, who would always play "8 days a week" on Fridays, my daughter is a bit of a Beatles fan. When McCartney started in, I asked her if she recognized the song. She said, "Yeah, I think it's the Backstreet Boys or something." :smashfrea

After a good nap, my 2 year old son wakes up singing "Yellow Submarine." The Beatles really are amazing.

Hmmm...I didn't catch the lip-sync at all, and I was really looking for it. SM? Can your buddy answer this one, do you think, or is it too sensitive these days?

I am certain that the mics were heavily gated, and it is possible that if he pulled back slightly or did not achieve a certain volume threshold, that the gate was simply closed from time to time and didn't pick up a given "whoo" or something.

Well, now that you mention it, he did pull back slightly from the mic when he did that one "Whoo" that wasn't picked up. Wasn't more than a foot or so that he pulled back. The out-of-synch singing that I saw was only for a split second shot. There really were not enough close-ups of him for me to catch anything else. I got the feeling early on that he was out of synch and then I saw the whoo later.

I'd like to believe that he did it all live and that the 60+ year old guy can still do it after all these years. But I've heard a bunch of live stuff by him from the past (Wings Over America, Beatles concert footage, etc.) that I was amazed by the "studio" quality of the sound during this performance. It didn't sound live to me. Maybe it was live. But Tom Shales thought he lip-synched too.

very, very, very good. The guy's name is Matt Bissonnette, and he's played on everything, with everyone, made an amazing career for himself. I'll ask him if it was sync, but everything inside me says no. I would believe that they had a camera going down "live-to-tape" out of sync with the main feed before I'd believe that set was done stunt. The keyboard orchestration sounded very live - certain key parts played on each hand, but alot of stuff left out that they would have put down to tape if it had been available.

Just my $.02

-sm

I love the Cellar. If it weren't for this place, I would have wondered "is it live, or Memorex," and never would have known. But now I have people telling me that it almost certainly was live, and SM is going to check with one of the band members to find out for sure. How cool is that? Thanks SM!

Oooh. Matt Bissonette. I've heard of that guy. Any relation to Gregg? One of them plays with Joe Satriani....maybe both of them have. SM is now officially cooler than me. (he probably was before, come to think of it)

Matt is Gregg's brother.

Left a voicemail, haven't talked with him yet ... still holding ....

I'm an ass. Matt wasn't on the Superbowl gig - he says he hasn't played with McCartney for over a year (shows how I well I keep up with my "good" friends, I guess) but he's heard that the new guy looks alot like him. He also says that there's no way it was tape unless McCartney's voices was completely gone due to illnesss, and he's only seen that happen one time in the several years he worked with him.

It would appear that Macca changes out his tour musicians. He doesn't have the same drummer either. It's only odd because he's the Beatle who always wanted to be in a band, the only Beatle who formed a band after and found other people to write songs with and such.

Thanks for that, SM. I felt pretty strongly that I wasn't watching a lip-sync performance. For one thing, the vocals, while quite good, were not *perfect* by any stretch of the imagination. The backing vocals in particular had that sort of "on the fly" feel about them, usually a certain sign that a guy is working his ass off to rock out.

Frankly, the standard of live sound is now so very, very high, that it is easy to think it must be recorded somehow. My original point in all of this was that it is primarily the dancing, gyrating performers who have synced vocal parts, because it is simply impossible to sing effectively while doing such a strenuous physical performance. Try doing a five minute, vigorous aerobic routine sometime while singing some perky pop tune. Even the best-conditioned individual will be subject to the bumping and jarring of the vocal cords and diaphragm while bouncing around, making a noticable fluctuation in the voice.

With wireless and in-ear monitors and the very best audio professionals anywhere, I guess we really have come to the point where this sort of thing can be pulled off! It still amazes me to think of it: there was a football field there, and then five minutes later, a massive stage... how do you sound-check 50,000 fans anyway?

How it sounded in the stadium was very likely secondary to the broadcast mix...