Everybody's excited about Bonaparte at Marengo because it's the long-awaited follow-up to Bonaparte at Torengo.

I saw Tom Petty last night at the Greek Theater in Berkeley (actually on the Berkeley campus). It was REALLY good, up there with some of my other favorite concerts (like the NoFX one where they took requests and cock-teased the audience by playing the first 10 seconds of Death of John Smith). He's one of the few old rockers who still is able to put out good material consistently and he seemed really energized and inventive. He played a lot of classic material, but the band played a lot of the songs in tweaked ways that made them seem fresher... he played a really restrained version of "Free Fallin'" in particular that kept the magic of the song while still sounding completely different.

The theater is cool too, it's fairly small so no matter where you are you have a good view of the stage. A much different beast than something like the Hollywood Bowl for sure. The theater's lighting system has some major problems, and several times all the lights onstage burned out, leaving the band playing in complete darkness with only a couple of flashlights providing illumination. I actually thought this was much cooler than the typical light-show stuff because the simpler lighting and the band's hilarious reponses to the problem made the show seem more unique and personal.

The sad part of the show was that Frank Black opened and nobody seemed to care too much when he was onstage. I guess part of that is his own fault, because so much of his post-Pixies stuff is really generic sounding light country rock, like the Allman brothers or something -- especially after Cult of Ray. But he played a couple of songs from Show Me Your Tears (a recent one, his divorce album and arguably also his comeback album) that were awesome to hear live.