Yeah. For me the thing broke with this tour, although the first leg is good.

After that, there are some gusts here and there. The fall leg in the USA had some wonderful performances.

One of my favorites, Only Make Believe.



.

Vegas also had several very good performances in 2014 - I think that could be classified as one of the last decent vocal shows:

https://youtu.be/oYF2OZACqpU

https://youtu.be/fqo1BN7L45M

https://youtu.be/WNp5HGkpyWg

https://youtu.be/BwyCzHe88rI

... and a few other songs I remember were solid there.

Wow, that's a great performance. Jon's tone was still really good in October 2013 to be fair, although his high register was already weakening.

Although the whole show wasn't good by any means, this version of IBTFY was, surprisingly, very enjoyable:


To be honest, I don't like Phil's tone on this song though :( IBTFY is one of those songs that truly miss Richie.

Isn't it really tough to pick a show? Especially as there are so many discussions about Jon being patchy/struggling on and off, all the way back to 1987.

There could potentially be more agreement on a tour or even specific year? Then if there's consensus with that, narrowing it down to a specific show would be interesting. It would be good if a majority could agree on a two year period?

This might be over-simplifying but I think general age-ing/deterioration (as with a number of his contemporaries) kicked in mid to late noughties (around Lost Highway) but he carried that through (just!) to 2019. It was Rod Stewart/Elton John/Paul McCartney/Axl etc level of bad periods/he's old.

Obvs Covid removed a couple of years but I see 2022 as being totally unacceptable - alarming and heartbreaking. I don't want to use the word embarrassing. Whatever happens now - it needs to revert to a 2013 standard to be okay really, to erase what we've all seen and talked about in the last few years (and thankfully it looks like we're gonna see the acknowledgement of it in the doc).