Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Paulie's back
I got to see the San Jose show on the second leg of this tour and it was probably the best show I've ever seen. Paul is singing and playing great! The band is, IMO, his best since the Beatles. I really enjoyed the drumming of Abe Laborial Jr (I don't think I am spelling his last name correctly). Lots of classic Beatles and Wings songs as well as newer songs. I am particularly fond of his Driving Rain CD and the concert includes the songs Driving Rain and Lonely Road.
I find it a bit strange that they choose to rearrange the song order on the DVD and they do not include all the songs. The other REAL pisser is that they decided to reward buyers of the DVD with a secret area on the Macca website which includes a few more songs and interviews. I really wish they would have just put it all on the DVD so I could see it at a bigger than 2x4" size.
Those complaints aside, this is must have for any Paul fan. It's a ton of fun.
Rating:  - Concert or infomercial?
I attended two concerts from the Driving USA tour in 2002. I really hoped this dvd would be an accurate representation of what the complete show was like. Instead, the apparent idea was to make a "documentary" of what it was like backstage and on the road, while also showing us songs from the concerts. The DVD sometimes feels like a 2 hour promotional piece, straining to show what an "event" this tour was. Well, having been there, I can say that it WAS definitely quite an event. But this presentation doesn't really communicate that.First off, what did I like about the DVD? The performances that are included are uniformly very good and sound excellent. Most of the songs from the tour are accounted for, whether in the main program or in the "bonus song" section. As a McCartney fan, I want as much music as possible, and in the best sound quality possible. A nice inclusion was a trio of performances from soundchecks. So... I am left with a lot of negatives. While I liked a lot of the 'backstage' and 'behind the scenes' material, I would've preferred it to be seperate from the concert footage. That would've been perfect: a concert presented in it's entirety, and a separate "documentary" showing how the tour was put together, etc. But interrupting songs for interviews and breaking up the flow of the concert was not a great idea. The picture quality is not very clear, definitely not what we've grown accustomed to for DVD. The recent Eric Clapton concert dvd provides a FAR superior picture, for example (and wisely presents the concert from start to finish with no interruptions). The worst offense by far was the editing of songs and the exclusion of certain songs (all of which can be found on the 2 CD set of the same name). With DVD, it would've been easy to present the entire concert and still be able to organize all the 'behind the scenes' stuff as bonus materials.
Rating:  - Let's Start Over on This One
Note to Paul: you are one of the greatest musicians of all time and your last tour was a masterpiece. Now, please, create a DVD that captures this incredible experience. This DVD is not worthy of you and your contribution to music (poor video quality, mediocre sound, terrible hyper-kinetic editing, too many crowd shots, also needs a separate DVD for the extraneous stuff). Write this initial DVD off as a "TV Special". My suggestion is that you go back to the drawing board and produce a DVD worthy of what you and this concert represent. You, your fans and history deserve so much more. The concert DVD benchmark has been set by many others (Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, The Band, James Taylor to name few). You could easily raise the bar. You have the content - now just repackage it in the format it desrves. You obviously focused on creating a great concert - now simply put that same effort into creating a great DVD.
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