Jon's Teleprompter

With his refusal to drop the acoustic that should provide some amazing juggling capabilities

The teleprompter is fine for me - Like Seb said *theoritically* it opens the whole catalogue on stage
I think Jon (because he is the singer- not singling him out) read the prompter even when the song is not a problem at all .. his eyes get attracted by the magic machine ... and it removes some sort of spontaneous attitude ... his face says I'm reading I'm reading ... sometimes I think forget about it and sing that damn song you know by heart
But I also think he needs that to focus on, too ... it's a blessing and a curse, sort of thing

And i can say by playing about 50 acoustic bar gigs myself, that when you have the lyrics and tabs in front of you, you loose all the trust in yourself. Even though you know the song very well, you suddenly dont trust yourself anymore when you have possibility to see the lyrics. It is just the way it goes.

exactly !

Haven't you wanted to turn of the subtitles on movie or series because you spend your time reading while you perfectly understand ....

On the subjext of forgetting lyrics, check this video out. And it was to promote the Album where the song came from:

MJ - Dirty Diana (New York '88 )
(from 0:32)

He shouldn't be forgetting the lyrics when he's playing 24/25 songs out of the same pocket of 30 songs each night!!! If he uses it to everyone's advantage and uses it for rarities then fair play! As someone has stated he always had lyric pages for 'rare' songs next to his setlist anyway...

I think when a performer forgets the lyrics it's either because the song is not often done OR because the performer is not focused on what he is doing (which is probably most of the case of lyrics mistakes ) the prompter avoid the mistakes but doesn't help the concentration

I think it's no big deal. At the fan club party in 1998 Jon talked about how, when he was younger, he didn't understand Springsteen not knowing some of the lyrics to his own songs. He was like, "You wrote them!" but at that point he totally got it because he'd been writing so much that his head was filled with "words and chords and chords and words." They all run together when there's so much in your head. And that was 15 years ago. Imagine how many "words and chords" he has running through his head today. I don't think has one bit to do with laziness or apathy. There's probably video of him talking about it on youtube if anyone wanted to do a search for it. They filmed the event.

It's not about whether he 'should' be forgetting the lyrics.

It happens. He's a human. We all forget silly things we should know.

Nothing wrong with that. Next step, live autotuning.