Sirvana, July 20, 2013
Before I move on with the Twickenham happenings on January 7, 1969, I wanted to offer up this bit of context as Paul McCartney circles the globe on his latest world tour.
It’s more than 44 years since Jan. 7, 1969, and Paul McCartney is still playing the four songs he began that day with live: “The Long and Winding Road,” “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight” and “Get Back.”
As in, 60-something hours before I posted this, the same James Paul McCartney that sat before a piano at Twickenham introducing these songs to a room of just a few people, played the very same numbers to 47,000 at Safeco Field in Seattle (playing “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” and “Get Back” with the surviving members of Nirvana). That’s after performing them hundreds and hundreds of times over the decades.
Four songs he introduced over the course of about an hour one morning in 1969 at age 26. He turned 71 in June.
According to setlist.fm, Paul played 39 songs in Seattle — seven that were introduced in January 1969 and a whopping 14 (!) originating from 1968-1969. That’s 36 percent of his show in 2013 spanning less than 24 months, the remainder covering another 50 or so years of his career.
They May Be Parted 
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I’ve wondered the same exact thing. Seems he’s trended in that direction over the years. Starting with Rockshow/Wings over America, he stuck with the horns, but didn’t have the strings/chorus, and then put out similar versions since (Broad Street soundtrack, B-side of This One). And of course full stripped-down versions came out on Anthology 3 and Let It Be … Naked. So he’s constantly trying to get the original version crowded out of memory (obviously impossible).
But going back to live clips of the 1989 tour, you can hear synthesized strings, and they’ve been there since. So now we’re really only down to the chorus being missing from Spector’s version. Obviously, this is something I’ve thought about too — one day, the constant evolution/devolution of Long and Winding Road will be a post on its own!
Thanks for reading!
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If McCartney hated the Phil Spector version of “The Long and Winding Road” with all the overdubs that he did, then why does Paul play the “Let It Be” / Spector version live? Why does he not simply play the “Get Back” version live with just himself on piano and with minimalback?
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