30 minute excerpt from iTunes Festival 2011 underwhelming

Paul Simon blew his opportunity on iTunes by featuring second rate material.

Paul Simon was complaining recently that Bob Dylan beat him in the music business by being more ironic.  ‘I don’t like being second to Bob Dylan’ told The Guardian.  Think again, the problem is Paul Simon likes to bore his audiences.

The iTunes Festival 2011, a free Apple iTunes podcast should have been a great opportunity for Simon who is 70 to showcase his career.

The best songs from the Festival are fan videos available on YouTube, not iTunes. It appears that Simon stalled the release of the iTunes video and left off the best part of his show.

For the first half of the broadcast, he bored the audience with slow tunes with forgettable melodies.

His set started with The Afterlife which couldn’t be rescued by any amount of band energy.

He followed it Hearts and Bones, a nice song but that’s the best I can say – nice, certainly not one of his hits.

At the mid-way point he sang The Obvious Child, a B-side track kept alive with high energy percussion. At least it was upbeat.

Where were Kodachrome, Sounds of Silence, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, or Still Crazy After All These Years?  Simon kept them off the iTunes show but fans put them up on YouTube.

With 10 minutes to go in the iTunes set, Simon sang Slip Sliding Away and ended with the rousing Late In The Evening.

The iTunes concert is available for free viewing in iTunes, on your computer, iPad or iPhone. You may want to fast shuffle past the first 10 minutes.

The audio from the official iTunes release is better but the songs aren’t the best of Paul Simon.

When Dylan and Simon toured together in 1999, it was painfully obvious that Paul Simon is considerably downscale on musical and emotional energy compared to Dylan. He should probably stop complaining in public to being Dylan’s second banana and rock a bit.

I am a big Paul Simon fan from the beginning with Simon and Garfunkel, but he can disappoint when he decides to deliver his lesser material at a slow pace. Mellow is not a way to spend your whole time.

When he is on the top of his game like the Graceland The African Concert or the superb Simon and Garfunkel – The Concert in Central Park he is awesome.

Simon and Garfunkel – The Concert in Central Park is the best video of the old team brought back together for one transcendent concert. I have it on Laserdisc. The DVD reviews on Amazon.com are almost ecstatic. There were lots of magic moments in that concert that made the hair tingle on the back of my neck.

The almost-as-good, which means excellent, Graceland The African Concert is out of print but used copies are available. Mine is on Laserdisc as well so how out of date is that?